Ms. Viola Washington: from Dr. King to Welfare Rights & Beyond

“Rest if you must, but don’t quit,” Ms. Viola Washington says, underscoring the importance of staying in the movement. And she is living what she speaks – her organizing in the movement began when she was a teenager marching with Martin Luther King, Jr. and has persisted to this day, as a leader for the Welfare Rights Organization. She is part of PISAB’s founding story. Her organizing for national welfare rights includes making sure that people understand that poverty and racism are intertwined, and folks need more than a class analysis. 

Now, as a leader for the Welfare Rights Organization, she spoke about the importance of organizing and learning from history. In her work, she emphasizes the necessity of raising consciousness among poor people so they can understand that they are poor, and why. Ms. Viola organizes national leaders to come to New Orleans to spend time coming together to ensure that their clarity on class includes clarity on race and racism. 

She also began Operation CCC (Community Conversations Coffee), which shifted due to the pandemic. This community organizing honors the relationship building and consciousness raising we’ve all experienced to become anti-racist organizing. 

It also builds on her powerful history of decades in the movement.

“My first connection to the movement…was watching the way racism played into my upbringing with my parents… I remember Stokely Carmichael and all them were marching for justice and peace, but I didn’t understand it as a child. 

As a teen, I met Martin Luther King and I had a reason to be part of the organizing, because I had uncles and friends and relatives who were sanitation workers. After listening to Dr. King, and listening to what he was trying to do with and for us… I understood it better. 

Being at the temple the night before his assassination is stoned in my heart…. I continue my life in that way. Looking for the root cause of the problem, so I can work towards making the changes.”

Ms. Washington spoke of the anger and unrest around the country after Dr. King’s assassination, how it felt to be a young person and to feel that there was a leader with so much promise, and for him to be killed. 

When she moved to Louisiana, she found folks were in the struggle to save housing for poor people. As she says, “It was always fights, but we couldn’t see the root causes to all those fights.”

Ms. Viola became connected to PISAB co-founder, Mr. Ronald Chi part of tenant organizing in a housing development named Crescent Arms. As she went to the elders to learn more about the history of the housing development, she was told about two powerful tenant organizers named Jim Hayes and Ronald Chisom, organizing with the Treme Improvement Association. 

In addition to a successful tenant strike, they kept coming together and talking with their community, about why people are poor, and connecting with others across the country. Ms. Viola helped bring Dr. Jim Dunn and Diana Dunn back to New Orleans to start The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. 

Ms. Viola credits PISAB with helping her and other organizers to understand the root cause – beyond policy, beyond the fight and the struggle. 

She spoke with clarity about the need for the movement to be Black led. She named the importance of white people in the movement, to organize white people, and to support – and not to lead. To support with understanding that the privileges that come with whiteness means that white people’s perspective will be off. 

She noted that beyond understanding racism and caring about people, white people needed to come to the movement knowing that they needed to be ready to lose privileges, and to face the ramifications of organizing to undo racism. In her herstory, she says, “I have wasted a lot of time building and organizing with people, only for it to fall apart because white people were in leadership, and they didn’t have to stay with it.”

Ms. Viola spoke of watching her father have to refer to small white children as “Mr.” while they called him by his first name, and how she understood as a child something needed to change. In sitting at the feet of elders and movement leaders for many years, she learned that to be a good leader, you need to be a good follower. And to be a good organizer, she says, “You have to be a shoulder to cry on, a pillar in the community.” 

“If we want justice and a just society, we need to be willing to get against the wall.”