Transcript of Video Interview of Gus Newport, Conducted by John Emmeus Davis Center for Community Land Trust Innovation (9/21/2020) John Emmeus Davis: Good morning, Gus. Since I am sitting here in Burlington, Vermont, I want to start by asking you about your long-time friendship with our U.S. Senator, Bernie Sanders. You were elected Mayor of Berkeley, California in 1979 and served until 1986. On the other side of the country, Bernie was elected Mayor of Burlington in 1981, serving until 1987. So your terms overlapped. Your politics were similar. In fact, you were two of the only progressive mayors in the U.S. during a period when a reactionary, conservative President, Ronald Reagan, was dismantling every social program he could get his hands on. (Of course, Thatcher was doing something similar in England at the time.) Is that when you and Bernie first got to know each other? Gus Newport: Well, we actually got to know each other right after Bernie was elected in 1981. Bernie, as you know, was the co-chair of CORE [Congress on Racial Equality] when he was doing graduate work at the University of Chicago. Berkeley was the first city to divest when I became Mayor. We had it on our ballot. So Bernie called me to inquire about that, and we sort of started exploring each other's politics and we became very good friends. And then we would go to the Conference of Mayors meetings twice a year. And a small group of us, Bernie, Harold Washington, and Dennis Kucinich, we’d pull ourselves aside. We didn’t pay attention to the general meeting. We’d compare notes on public policy, community planning, and organizing. So we became very good friends. And during that time also, Bernie, Dennis Kucinich and I were invited to be on panels at eastern universities like MIT, Harvard, UMass-Boston, and other places to talk about our policies. Because, as you said, we were considered the most -- and the only -- progressive mayors in the country. So Bernie and I, we became close friends. John Emmeus Davis: When Bernie later ran for governor, he asked you to come out here to Vermont to campaign for him. So why in the world did he think a black mayor from Berkeley, California could win votes for him in Vermont? Gus Newport: That's really interesting. I flew in the night before we were going to go campaigning, stayed at the hotel. Then they picked me up and took me to his office the following morning. And there were two reporters, one from the UPI and one from the AP there. And the woman from the AP, as 1 we started talking, pulled out a long sheet of paper, the old data print-out stuff you had to have for the old computers. And Bernie said, “what the hell is that?” And she said, “Well, you know, we can put a public figure’s name in a computer. Put Gus Newport’s name in and we've got 90 stories.” She said, “Bernie, we want to know why you, a Jew from Brooklyn, who's a socialist, invites, Gus Newport, a former black nationalist and a socialist, on a campaign in a state that's 97% white.” And Bernie just sat back and said, “because we want talk about the issues.” They had no more questions from that perspective. We went on through, generally, what those issues were. And, of course, you know, as well as anybody, having been head of housing for Burlington when Bernie was Mayor. And I first learned about land trusts by visiting Burlington and visiting you guys. John Emmeus Davis: Did you also get involved, later on, in Bernie's national campaigns, when he's running for the nomination for President in 2016, 2020? Gus Newport: Yeah, in 2016 my good friend, Danny Glover, wrote an Op Ed piece for Huffington Post. And right after that was published, he called me, he said, “Gus, I wrote this piece about Bernie Sanders. ‘Cause I'm really impressed. You know him personally. You think we could get in touch with them and maybe do some work?” I was actually in Kansas City, Kansas doing some community engagement and organizing. A friend from Stanford University had invited me to Kansas City to inform a nonprofit organization of how to set up a health care organization with Federal Funds. I said, “Sure.” So he said, “Well, how soon can you contact him?” So I said, “Well, let me try today.” So I called Bernie and got him and said, “Look, my friend Danny Glover wants to meet you and campaign for you. And, can I give him your contacts and such for whatever?” So I did. Before the day was up, Danny Glover called me back, said, “Look, I know you're in Kansas. I know you're planning to go back to Oakland, but let me reroute your plane ticket. We're going to South Carolina and meet up with Bernie.” And we went to South Carolina. We started campaigning. He, James Early, Danny, and I went down there -- and Cornell West. We started campaigning in South Carolina for Bernie in 2016. John Emmeus Davis: And you continued in 2020, the next time. Gus Newport: 2020. Matter of fact, Danny and I were campaigning again in South Carolina, North Carolina, Oklahoma, right up until March when this pandemic moment grounded it all. But yeah. And at that time, remember just before South Carolina, Bernie was still ahead. John Emmeus Davis: So, let's go back before Bernie. He's not the only national figure you've known. He's not even the most famous. In fact, I am pretty sure that you are the only person I know who once heard Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson sing when you were a child. And you met both Malcolm X and Nelson Mandela when you were an adult. 2 I believe it was your grandmother who took you to concerts featuring Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson? Tell me about your grandmother. Gus Newport: Well, my grandmother, she was unbelievable. My grandmother grew up in a place called Horse Pasture, Virginia. When she was in the fourth grade, she went to school late one day after picking cotton. She walks into the classroom. White teacher didn't even ask her a question. She just slapped her. And my grandmother just walked out of school. Never went back. She was an avid reader. In those days, they got married real young. She got married at the age of 16 and her husband was injured in a mine accident. West Virginia at the time. They had one child, my mother. And so my grandma, when they went on their honeymoon, to show you how bad things were in the South then, they got stopped by the Ku Klux Klan. The police put them in jail for two days and took all their little wedding presents. My grandmother, after her husband was injured, decided to pick up and move to Pittsburgh, where she had cousins. My mother and her mother, they moved to Pittsburgh. And then she moved from Pittsburgh to Rochester, New York, where I was born and where she had a sister. She was so attuned to community development and stuff. Rochester was well known for Eastman School of Music. Paul Robeson and Marian used to come there to perform often. And whenever they’d come to Rochester, Eastman School of Music -- or within 500 miles of Rochester -- my grandmother would take me to see them. But the other thing that was interesting about her was my grandmother took me to all kinds of church events and various organizations she belonged to. And although we were living in the North, the community was still segregated. A lot of single white female teachers started moving into our neighborhood because it was more affordable. And every time one moved in, my grandmother would host a reception for them to introduce them to the community. And from a Southern perspective, she'd have us kids speak, call these teachers Aunt Jones and Aunt Jenny and things like that. It created that sense of the love of community, the commonwealth, the kind of thing that Martin Luther King talked about. That was part of my early development. John Emmeus Davis: So she was very socially aware, politically conscious. Right? I mean, she introduced you to that? Gus Newport: Well, yeah, but that's what happens. I think that you have to understand what Blacks were going through, the kinds of situations that she went through and whatever else. Years later, I was head of the biggest civil rights group in Rochester, the Monroe County Nonpartisan Political League, and the police brutality was going on, as it is now. I was in charge of a case, the Rufus Fairwell case, which was the first police brutality case in a federal court in the United States. The second time the police invaded was the Black Muslim mosque. Daisy Bates from Little Rock, Arkansas, who integrated schools in Little Rock Arkansas when Eisenhower was 3 President, was in Rochester organizing for the NAACP. And Malcolm X called Daisy and says, “Daisy, I got to come to Rochester to find out about this police invasion of the mosque. Who should I be talking to?” She gave him my name without letting me know -- and my phone number. So Malcolm X called me. And you can imagine I was taken back when he called me.