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MEET ERIC MANN
by Bonnie O'Brian

What books influenced you most when you were growing up?

Eric Mann

AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY by Theodore Dreiser, about the tragedy of trying to escape from class, INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison, the first time I understood that white people did not see or understand Black people—I loved both Dreiser’s “socialist realism” and Ellison’s allegorical anti-racism.

When you were a child did you ever have moments when you decided that you were going to be a writer when you grew up?

No, I always saw myself as an activist, then an organizer, then as a revolutionary. I saw writing as a way to advance my ideas and expand the cause. Today, after 40 years of writing, 3 editors, including my wife and partner, Lian Hurst Mann, are working on a book of my selected writings, MAKING HISTORY IN REAL TIME. The point of the title is that I wrote to change history, to intervene in actual struggles, I have rarely had the time to just think about “writing” which I really love to do. My latest book, KATRINA’S LEGACY: White racism and Black reconstruction in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast was again, written to intervene in history. I am working on my life’s book, REVOLUTIONARY ORGANIZING IN THE AGE OF REACTION on which I have actually made a lot of progress, but each time delayed for another effort at intervention. When I saw Black people trapped in the superdome, Black Grandmothers trapped on the 2 nd floor of their homes hoping the tide would not engulf them, I felt a compulsion to intervene, and folks in New Orleans asked me to write this book. Katrina’s Legacy is my most poetic prose, I prefer non-fiction but I want to keep experimenting with the most compelling and experimental way to explain complex ideas, to reach larger audiences, but still to stay true or even truer on message.

What was your first job when you graduated from college?

I was lucky as hell. My first job, as a white Jewish kid from Cornell, was as a field secretary for the Congress of Racial Equality, a militant civil rights organization. I worked out of New York and worked the entire Northeast, from Harlem to D.C., and participated in the boycott of Trailways buses to integrate that company and allow Black and Puerto Rican porters to get jobs selling tickets and driving buses. I did not write my first book until 1972, COMRADE GEORGE: An Investigation into the Life, Political Thought, and Assassination of George Jackson, the Black prisoner who wrote SOLDEDAD BROTHER, published by Harper and Row. I have not stopped writing ever since.

What are the topics are some of your books?

COMRADE GEORGE: Taking on General Motors (about my work trying to keep the GM Van Nuys plant open against GM’s threats to close it). L.A.’S LETHAL AIR—my first environmental book, DISPATCHES FROM DURBAN: First-hand commentaries on the World Conference Against Racism and Post September 11 Movement Strategies, and now KATRINA’S LEGACY: Making History in Real Time will contain my articles and speeches since 1965. I have had 250 articles published, LA Times, New York Times, Boston Globe, Nation magazine, Z magazine, my latest is FIGHT TRANSIT RACISM: New Environmental Coalitions on the Buses of Los Angeles at www.grist.org I am the director of the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles—a center for Civil Rights and the environment. We have the Bus Riders Union, the largest mass transit group in the US, and a National School for Strategic Organizing, where we have trained and graduated 85 young people since 1991. So, I wake up in the morning concerned about, and increasingly worried about the world. I work with young organizers who I have worked with when they were 21 and some are now 40, others 35, others 17. I work to change the world, to fight real battles, and then write about actual events and try to change history. If I could now I would write full time—go through about 5 books I want to write. But I have a job, I have an organization to run, I have real history to engage and real people being put in jail unfairly and global warming breathing down our necks. So my dialectic is to organize, write, spend time with my family, swim, go the gym, read, write, go to work, see my kids who are now grown and have kids of their own, and make sure I still have time to write a lot, which is my one of my greatest joys.

What gave you the idea for Katrina’s Legacy?

 The first day of Katrina I knew I had something to say that was different and important. My work is very synthetic but it is based on many other people’s work, in this case W.E.B. DuBois BLACK RECONSTRUCTION IN AMERICA. I just came back from seeing the film HAIRSPRAY, a light, frothy musical that tries to fight for acceptance, racial integration and acceptance of people who are what, heavy, overweight? A strange combination of prejudices to confront at one time. I cried a lot, for I was there when we fought for racial integration, how beautiful and hopeful things felt. And now an entire city of Black people is almost driven off the face of the earth, 250,000 Black people are driven away from their homeland, and the country doesn’t give a damn. Most whites have turned their back as Black people went from asking for “integration” to demanding Black power, and many Black people have moved to cynicism and materialism. My book begins with an entire section “History Can Guide Us” and ends with very concrete and strategic proposals about the future of the Black nation in the U.S. It is being used in college and high school classes and fortunately is having a good run. As we approach the second anniversary of Katrina in September 2008 I feel the book is more important than ever—-to keep the subject alive and the debate going into the presidential elections.

How did your life change when you got married? and had children? Did it make it easier or harder to find time to write?

I am very fortunate. My wife, Lian Hurst Mann is a revolutionary, an author, an editor, a teacher (including teaching me) and edits all of my work (as I do for her.) She co-edited a book, RECONSTRUCTING ARCHITECTURE ( Univ. of Minnesota Press) and I worked on her chapters and all of her writing. We have three girls. I was late getting this interview done because my youngest daughter was married yesterday and I had two weeks straight of wedding preparations and the wedding was at our house. My wife Lian and I work ferocious hours but have always found time, and a lot of time, for our kids even when we forgot to find time for each other—-a condition I’m happy to say we were smart enough to identify and change.