The Winning Point of View
From an early age, Mark Ridley-Thomas understood the distinction between politics and activism. There was, he discerned, a time and place for both.
There were the politics of the grand stage: the elected office and the figures one saw on the stump in newspapers or television. But too, there were the in-the-trenches folks pressing for change — the ministers, the community organizers. Here, he saw close-up the influence of interaction, the handshake, the day-to-day conversation. It was close-to-the-ground interaction that put one in touch with the most urgent needs of a community at a block-by-block level.
The Los Angeles in which Ridley-Thomas came of age was a tinderbox. The Watts uprisings of 1965, the largest, most devastating urban unrest of the time, revealed Los Angeles for what it was — a city deeply divided racially and socioeconomically. It also shed harsh light on the disparate cities that existed within one region: one that was cordoned off by politics and the other in desperate need of advocacy. Those seven smoky days in August 1965 — symbolically a community’s raised voice — recalls Ridley-Thomas, “had an undeniably profound effect.”
In a long season of unrest, another tragedy seized his attention: the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. A leader and activist who had figured prominently in Ridley-Thomas’ consciousness, King both preached and organized out of the church Ridley-Thomas’ family attended.
“Upon his assassination, he became so large,” Ridley-Thomas remembers. He recalls hearing that unmistakable intonation on every radio and television station. And in that echo, he recognized the power in both the day-to-day presence and the impact of a platform.
“I was transfixed,” said Ridley-Thomas. “Ultimately, those speeches were transformative. They began my journey in terms of understanding the philosophy and methodology of nonviolent direct action.” Ridley-Thomas saw a legacy to uphold.
Transforming the conditions of place and enhancing the lives of those who live in it can be an incremental process, he would come to learn. Currently a supervisor in Los Angeles County’s 2nd District, he has served 25 years in public office. “I’ve been in four different seats over that period of time — city council, state Assembly, the state Senate, the board of supervisors.” In his current post, he represents 2 million residents, including the USC campus, which he has always represented as an elected official.
Initially, electoral politics had not been his plan. “I had been working in civil and human rights [in the ’80s] at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Los Angeles, an organization founded by Dr. King.” In his post as executive director, he framed the organization’s agenda, focusing on a range of public policy and advocacy issues including school desegregation, child welfare, police misconduct and dispute resolution. But in the early ’90s, when a city council seat opened up on his home turf, taking it felt like a natural step. “I saw a need for leadership. So I stepped forward.”
His depth of knowledge about vulnerable neighborhoods was rooted in firsthand experience. Ridley-Thomas had grown up in the heart of Los Angeles, in what was then called the Eastside, those neighborhoods “east of Main Street.” The youngest of five children, he attended Ascot Avenue Elementary and George Washington Carver Junior High, a predominantly black campus at that time. While enrolled there, he would be selected to take part in a summer program offered at the Claremont Colleges. The experience opened his world academically and launched a tradition of summer-program participation that put him in conversation with diverse students from across the region. This experience became a window onto what it meant to connect through common interests, as well as to find common ground.
After graduating from Manual Arts High School, he began his undergraduate work at Immaculate Heart College, majoring in social relations. He earned a master’s degree in religious studies and completed his Ph.D. in social ethics with an emphasis on policy analysis from USC Dornsife’s School of Religion in 1989.
USC served as a rich proving ground. “I’m formally trained as an ethicist,” he explained, “and for the last 25 years, the range of issues that I’ve worked on — economic justice, issues related to criminal justice, health-care reform — we were studying [back then]. Not from a political perspective, but from an academic perspective. That academic preparation gave me the ability to think about those issues from a variety of vantage points.”
His USC experience helped to both clarify the depth of his political engagement and shape the arc of his professional path. “One has to be able to make the distinction between the academy and the laboratory. I function now, and have for the last quarter of a century, in the laboratory — the political [world]. I put a lot of emphasis on both thinking and doing. I allow my training to inform how I think and act, and ultimately, the policy perspectives that I seek to advance are informed by my training.”
In all, he said, “I’ve had many more good days than bad.” He can count among his successes construction of the Metro Crenshaw/LAX light rail line on L.A.’s west side, due to open in 2019, the reopened and reimagined Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital, which attends to a historically underserved community, and the Empowerment Congress, a citizen-involved, civic engagement forum that holds its annual summit at USC. But he does not like to spend a lot of time cataloging wins or losses: What gets passed or stalled, dismantled or transformed is an exercise of endurance and grit. When things do not work, he has learned, there is usually another opportunity, as in the current fight to reduce homelessness in the county and statewide.
“Dust yourself off and be ready to go tomorrow. That’s the nature of this business. You don’t get it done in one shot. You have to try again, learn how to craft the argument differently, await new colleagues to join you who share your vision. Allow your colleagues to appreciate what is not simply your own point of view. In other words, their views matter and their votes count. In the end, it always has to be the winning point of view.”
Read more stories from USC Dornsife Magazine’s Fall 2016-Spring 2017 issue >>