As a high school student, John Wessel-McCoy witnessed sweeping strikes at three of the four large manufacturing plants in his hometown of Decatur, Illinois. Observing who came out on top, who stood together, and where power came from would later inform John’s own work and life. He engaged in organizing work in places like Chicago, New York and Washington D.C., before settling with his family in Richmond. Now as a career coach at Earlham College, John accompanies students as they try to figure out how they can make their own difference in the world. In this episode of the WWN podcast, John and Kate talk about how to care for those who are struggling or hurting, what forces in our culture keep us divided, and what it means to pursue justice in today’s world. Enjoy!
Transcript
Kate Jetmore: From Civic Spark Media and the Western Wayne News in Wayne County, Indiana, I’m Kate Jetmore. As a native of Richmond, Indiana, I’m excited to be sitting down with some of our neighbors and listening to the stories that define our community. My guest today is John Wessel-McCoy, a career coach at Earlham College, guiding students through their discernment process. Originally from Decatur, Illinois, he has over two decades of experience in grassroots labor and community organizing, focused on uniting the poor and dispossessed across racial and regional lines. He helped establish the Kairos Center for Rights, Religions and Social Justice, and organizes with the Nonviolent Medicaid Army. A student of US mass struggles, his key text is W.E.B Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America. He draws inspiration from the First Poor People’s Campaign of 1968. Welcome, John. Thanks so much for joining me on the show today.
John Wessel-McCoy: It’s great to be here.
Kate Jetmore: As I said in the introduction, you are originally from Decatur, Illinois. I’d love to hear what it was like growing up there, and how your formative years in Illinois led you to the work you do in community organizing, and the defense of the poor and dispossessed.
John Wessel-McCoy: Well, it’s an interesting time for me to be answering that question because I just got back, this weekend, from my 30 year high school reunion. So Decatur is very much on my mind, and those formative years are also in my mind as I’ve reconnected with some of my peers from three decades ago.
Yeah, and I grew up in Central Illinois, so about four hours straight west of Richmond. And I grew up in the rural part of the county, but just north of Decatur, Illinois, which is a small industrial city. It’s about twice the size of Richmond, and it’s known as the soybean capital of the world. So it’s a very industrial city that is tied in with the agriculture, the corn and soybean production, that is really widespread throughout the Midwest. And so it had processing mills there for all things, all products you could make out of corn and soybeans, as well as… And it still does. As well as a Caterpillar plant, which it still has, making heavy mining equipment, earth movers. And a Bridgestone/Firestone plant, which closed down around 2000 I believe, which threw a lot of people out of work.
And when I was in high school, back in the 1990s, there was some really significant things that happened that I think shifted the economy and just what life was like indicator, and all of it centered around some labor struggles that took place. Three of the big four employers in town, the workers were on strike at the same time. In the case of Staley, which does corn processing, the workers were actually locked out for three years. So it was a pretty pitched battle between labor and management. And part of what I think is interesting about those times was that I grew up Catholic. I grew up in a pretty faithful Catholic family. And my extended family was pretty working class, and that was typical back home.
Kate Jetmore: And were any members of your family involved in those strikes?
John Wessel-McCoy: Well, my mom was a postal worker, so none of my… I had extended family that worked at the factories. My mom worked at the post office, and I got a sense of which side I was on, in some ways, from her. But the strikes, our town is not so big, so part of, I would say, more what made a bigger impact on me was, I was an altar boy. We went to mass every week. I received all the sacraments. But I had this good fortune of coming in contact with particularly some nuns and priests who were coming from the very progressive social justice tradition that does exist. It’s not as strong as it used to be in the Catholic Church here in the United States and beyond. And so it had a big impact on me.
There was a priest in town, Father Mangan, Martin Mangan, who was involved. So particularly with the lockout, a lot of the members of his parish were workers that were on the picket line. And he was just being a good shepherd to his flock, in terms of being in solidarity with the people who were impacted by this. And I remember Father Mangan was a very… He started off trying… There were some other faith leaders that were trying to play something of an arbitrating role of trying to get labor and management to work together. But what had happened with the companies in our town, which they were making record profits, they had all been bought out and gotten into the hands of multinational corporations. And it was just clear that the decisions that were ultimately being made about our town were being made by people who really had very little investment in the well-being of the people in our town.
And so Father Mangan ended up engaging in direct action alongside with the workers. And he and Sister Glenda, her name was Sister Glenda Bourgeois, actually, were right there in support with the workers and their families. And, ultimately, in some cases, they got arrested in committing acts of civil disobedience. So that made a big impression on me.
Kate Jetmore: I’ll bet, I’ll bet it did. When you brought up these more progressive members of the Catholic Church, or members of a more progressive branch of the Catholic Church, I immediately thought about questioning, about how a figure like that in the life of a young person, a high schooler in your case, is so impactful because they teach you that it’s okay to question. And then, when you started talking about these multinationals, the word that popped out for me was power. Who has the power? Who has the power to speak? And who has a voice in each of these contexts?
John Wessel-McCoy: Well, I think an important thing that I would add to… All of what you said is correct. And the other thing that I think it sparked or planted a seed in me, throughout that, of witnessing that, was connected to this question of power is also organization. And my hometown was an industrial town with at least two or three generations of people who went through a period of time where they, back during the start of the New Deal and the CIO, Congress of Industrial Organizations, which some of the older unions that represented the workers, their oldest unions came out of that history.
If you grow up in a place, like I was in the ’70s and ’80s and into the ’90s, the status quo of the relationship between workers and bosses, you just took for granted. It never occurred to me where unions came from, they were just a part of life, as if they had fallen out of the sky fully formed. And so it’s only through the crisis, which just to get to the punchline of all that labor struggle, in almost all of those cases, the workers did not come out on top, right?
Kate Jetmore: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
John Wessel-McCoy: And the transformation of how production, and what kind of jobs are available, there’s still unionized workforce, there in Decatur, but it’s much smaller. It’s been impacted-
Kate Jetmore: Looks a lot different.
John Wessel-McCoy: Looks a lot different. It’s been a lot of… Due to automation, and then companies figuring out how to contract out lots and lots of what they do to non-unionized labor. And so, even I saw that those unions, which were just typical, and in some cases even complacent unions, it was only when the crisis that came with management saying, “No, we’re not playing by these old rules anymore,” came about, did that set people into motion. And I actually saw some very inspiring actions on the side of working class people inside the union. And even the other element of Decatur, which is true of a lot of Midwestern cities, is Decatur is probably about 20% African American. So it’s a town that is down below 70,000 now, but it’s a significant minority, but still a significant part of the population were Black folks, who had come up out of the south looking for opportunities, as did a lot of poor Southern whites actually came up. That’s a thing that’s similar, actually, to Richmond, a lot of folks that came up from Kentucky and Appalachia.
Kate Jetmore: Looking for those factory jobs, mm-hmm.
John Wessel-McCoy: Yeah, yeah. And so, the other thing that I was very conscious of in that time was this relationship of race and class in my town. And there were Black and white workers on the picket line, but there was also a discrepancy, in terms of even the opportunities to have those decent paying jobs for the Black community in Decatur. And so it was complicated.
Kate Jetmore: So say more about that. Are you saying that the door wasn’t as open for Black people as it was for white people?
John Wessel-McCoy: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, and I think, again, you have a situation where I came to understand, I think, on one hand, everybody was starting to lose ground, and they had been losing ground. And yet, there’s also folks on the bottom, oftentimes, they’re not exploited or excluded evenly. And that actually makes it very hard then, or that presents some real challenges when it comes to these questions of how do you build organization, and find some basis of commonality? When, on one hand, I have a friend that I’ve done organizing with, Ted, down in New Orleans, who talks about the experience of being Black and American often is to get twice of what’s bad and half of what’s good. And that’s a conservative estimate when you look at some metrics. But at the same time, generally, working people, across color lines, are also feeling a lot of uncertainty.
Kate Jetmore: Mm-hmm. And on that same note, what can you say about… And I don’t have these experiences, so this is me asking from a place of curiosity. When you say that people aren’t discriminated against in the same way exactly, right?
John Wessel-McCoy: Right.
Kate Jetmore: That’s from the outside looking in, but I also have this sense that from the inside looking out, everyone is desperate not to be the one who’s at the very bottom.
John Wessel-McCoy: Well, I think I would… Let’s start with just what I saw in terms of that struggle indicator. On one hand, that was a section of a workforce of what you would call working class people, who experienced, in certain ways, a relative degree of certainty for a while. That with a high school diploma, you could get a job at one of those plants. And mostly it was men, and it mostly was white men that got it, but not exclusively. There were Black folks and there were women in the workforce. But it did tend to go more towards white working class men to get those jobs.
And the wages for several decades that you earned from doing… And not to glorify anything, working in those plants, I have relatives that have been injured on the job. It’s not fun. But it did, for a while, secure a certain reasonable expectation that you could buy a house. You could actually provide an education for your kids. You could achieve what people call the American Dream to a certain extent. You could get a truck. You could get a bass boat and go fishing on the weekends and all of that kind of stuff. Maybe go up to Wisconsin and catch some walleye, all that kind of stuff. That was a way of life that, I think…
So that’s one section of folks in my town, but I also saw another section of folks, which some of it was you could look along the segregation in our town. And even that, that was out of reach for a lot of folks in the Black side of town. And also, I’ve got my own family members who didn’t achieve even that. So it’s an interesting thing. But at any rate, just this question of the differences of what people are going through. On one hand, everybody knows their pain best, right?
Kate Jetmore: Right.
John Wessel-McCoy: And they’re concerned about the things that they… They wake up every day thinking about how to pay those bills, how to have a decent life, all of that. And how do you build connections with people across these lines in a way that’s not just about Oppression Olympics, where you get together and say, “Who’s got it worse?”, right?
Kate Jetmore: Right, right.
John Wessel-McCoy: But how do you start to build some sort of connection and commonality that both recognizes and sees those differences do exist, but also how can we work together to secure the things that we all want?
Kate Jetmore: And how do you?
John Wessel-McCoy: Well, that might move a little bit into this question of what I did beyond, after leaving Decatur, right?
Kate Jetmore: Yeah, yeah, I’d love to know. Obviously, you went off and studied and began to work and began to volunteer and organize. So yeah, tell us a little bit about what that chapter of your life was like, and how it brought you to Wayne County a few years ago.
John Wessel-McCoy: Yeah, so I left Decatur after college. I went to college in my hometown, to Millikin University, go Big Blue. And then I moved up to Chicago, and there was a few things that I did that I think were important lessons there. Inspired by what I had seen in my hometown, in terms of the militant labor struggle, the unions, I did some union organizing, and I started to do that. There was a period of time that that took me to some different places. Even though I was based in Chicago, I did some time out in Washington, D.C., working with parking attendants. And a little bit later on, I worked with home healthcare workers in Chicago. And then, later, after that, I also did an organizing campaign with home childcare providers later, when I moved to New York.
The other thing I did when I was in Chicago, not too long after I graduated from college, was I went to work as a case manager. So that’s a different approach, right?
Kate Jetmore: Mm-hmm.
John Wessel-McCoy: On one hand, I had this idea that I wanted to engage politically with people to think about how people could build, who are in positions of being marginalized, and maybe considered not having a very strong voice or a whole lot of power, how they could work together to build that power. But at the same time, another way you can go about these… For some reason, I had some empathy. I had some concern for my fellow. And maybe that was what I learned in Sunday school or from my parents or whatever.
Kate Jetmore: Yeah, it could be. And I actually wanted to just jump in and ask you, what was driving you? Because that is really, really demanding and intense work. And you said the word politics. I was thinking of the word legality. Were you looking to make sure that things were legal? But it sounds like it was really your gut that was driving you.
John Wessel-McCoy: Right, I think it’s more when I talk about people coming together and organizing, it’s not just about laws or policies. It’s about building community and solidarity with each other, even when that’s hard, even when you’re coming across lines of division. And so there’s elements, I felt like I had some good examples in my life, growing up, of people who were concerned about the conditions of their fellow sisters and brothers out there. And whether that was the example that Father Mangan showed in the work he did with the workers when I was in high school, or my mom, my mom always was checking on people. And particularly, I always appreciated my mom’s… The way that she never forgot about, and she always would stay in touch with, whether they were blood relation or they were just people she knew in the community, with elderly folks who were going through that part of their life. And so we’d go to nursing homes a lot and see people and that kind of thing.
But, yeah, so that empathy, in part, led me to… So I took a job as a case manager in Chicago, and I did that for several years at a supportive housing program. And I was working with adult women and men. The common denominator is that everybody had been homeless, or they had been in some kind of precarious situation, and they got into this supportive housing program. And so I worked in the building where people resided, and had a very large caseload of folks. And there was a real diversity of where people were coming from, how they got to where they were at. Some folks were struggling with chronic mental health issues, and other folks were struggling with addiction, and a lot of folks were struggling with both. And some folks were just… A big thing I saw was people ended up on the streets because of the impact of having some sort of healthcare crisis of their own. And that’s one of the leading causes, that I learned, of homelessness in this country is through those kinds of circumstances, of medical debt and everything.
Kate Jetmore: Wow.
John Wessel-McCoy: Yeah, yeah. And so I went to work with folks in Chicago. And one thing I’d underline there too is that I came from downstate Illinois, and I ended up in Chicago. And I learned, very quickly, something that has been true every state that I’ve ever lived in, is that there is a divide-and-conquer politics that prevails among… And it’s a geographic thing. So in Illinois, it’s Chicago versus downstate. Here in Indiana, there’s Indianapolis, and you might throw Gary in there, and other larger cities, with the smaller towns and suburbs. It has a geographic side to it. It’s racially coded too, and it’s where folks are distributed. And so I thought that was really interesting to be working in Chicago and seeing some of the things, the commonalities, that exist between what I saw in Chicago and downstate. But, also, breaking some of the myths that people have about how they perceive who lives in the big, bad city. I grew up in the country, and I think that persuaded me that, actually, every place I’ve lived, there’s good people. And everybody’s a child of God anyway.
Kate Jetmore: Mm-hmm. And when you say that you broke those myths, do you mean for yourself?
John Wessel-McCoy: Yeah, we’re all, I think, I’m part of this culture. Everybody’s educated in my mind. They get certain messages that point towards who are the good people, and where to go and where not to go, and all of that kind of stuff. And I think that there’s a narrative out there that keeps folks divided.
Kate Jetmore: Oh, for sure. And it’s interesting that we’re having this conversation now in 2024, in the context of very polarized politics. Lots of people are suspicious of the agenda held by the other guys, fractured communities. So from where you’re sitting in your office, here in Wayne County, what does it mean now, in this context, to be an activist, and to pursue justice in today’s world?
John Wessel-McCoy: Mm-hmm. Well, one of the things that I brought with me to Wayne County was an experience of working for several years, coming out of the work I did at Union Theological Seminary in the Kairos Center. I was deeply involved for several years with the Poor People’s Campaign National Call for Moral Revival. And one of the key leaders for that campaign, which has been taking place all over the country and trying to build coordinating committees in different states. But Bishop William Barber, out in North Carolina, is a key figure in leadership of this work. And I agree with Bishop Barber when he says, “It’s not about right or left, it’s about what’s right or wrong.” It’s about carrying on the work that Dr. Martin Luther King, the example he shared, or he’s laid out for us, in the last years of his life, as he was moving towards human rights and these economic questions. Dr. King talked about the triple evils of racism, poverty, and militarism, and how you can’t deal with one without the other.
So what does that mean here in Wayne County? Well, you have, as I sit here and I get paid to work at and I pay my bills, and I love working at Earlham College, I’d love to talk more about that, but-
Kate Jetmore: Me too.
John Wessel-McCoy: But I also think that it’s an important thing to try to develop independent organizations of folks who are impacted by those triple evils. And let me be clear, I think sometimes when people talk about racism, racism is a thing… Bishop Barber just came out with a book called White Poverty, and that’s all based off of his leadership, all the way back to when he was the head of NAACP in North Carolina, as a Black leader in North Carolina, organizing with low-income, poor white folks as part of his coalition. And, actually, racism hurts everybody. It hurts everybody on the bottom in particular, in terms of setting up this justification of who deserves to be thrown in prison? Who deserves to be criminalized? Who deserves to be unhoused? Who deserves to go hungry? And that mentality is everywhere.
And it’s one of these things where… I’ve only been here in Richmond for a couple of years, and mostly just trying to… Our family’s just been trying to get settled and find our way. But, more recently, I’ve come in contact with some really great folks here in town, including folks that are impacted by issues of… There’s some real housing issues here in Richmond. There’s some real issues, particularly my work that I do, I’ve been very focused on the strategic issue of healthcare, which is a mess for most people, right?
Kate Jetmore: Right, yeah.
John Wessel-McCoy: Healthcare stinks. But particularly over the past couple of years, there’s been a mass kicking off of people on Medicaid. Here in the state of Indiana alone, about half a million people have been kicked off Medicaid over the past two years. And that’s been bipartisan, by the way, that’s been both a Democrat and on a federal level. That’s an agreed upon way to treat folks.
Kate Jetmore: Oh my gosh.
John Wessel-McCoy: And so what that points to me is that somebody could just spend an afternoon here, and they’d look around, and they’d see the polarization that is reflected in the national politics. And you’ll see the Trump signs in some yards, and you’ll see the Harris signs in other yards. And what I’m interested in, though, is where do you find… Who’s answering the question of where people are hurting, actually hurting? And there’s folks here in this community, as renters, who are dealing with, I’m sad to say, some pretty unscrupulous landlords, who are happy to take their money, but they don’t fix the problems of substandard housing. And so there’s folks that are profiting off of people living in some pretty rough housing situations, not to mention those who are on the streets.
Kate Jetmore: Well, and you, yourself, said, just a couple sentences ago, no one deserves that. No human being deserves that kind of treatment. And I’m afraid I can’t tell you what book it was, but I remember reading a quote from a book that I read last year that said, “No one has it coming.” And it’s true. No human being has that kind of treatment coming. Well, you mentioned Earlham, John, I’d love to shift our sights to Earlham. Let’s talk a little bit as your work as a career coach there. What’s the current approach and focus at Earlham when it comes to helping students find their calling?
John Wessel-McCoy: Yeah, yeah. Well, I’m glad, first of all, that you said find their calling. And that’s more my approach than a typical career. When we talk about career, career is a word that I think the Latin root is about running a race. It’s very individualistic, it’s very competitive, it’s all of those things, and even there. So right from the outset, I’ve taken a job, I’m working in a position where my title, I have some criticisms of even that. But I want to say that I love the Earlham community. I love the students here and the experience. This is where I’ll make a plug. If there’s anybody listening, and you’ve got a young person in your life, you should consider Earlham College. Because it’s a beautiful place for a young person to develop and explore, really, what they’re passionate about. And to have that good connection with the teaching and administrative and faculty and the staff here.
And our approach, in terms of this vocational approach, or the vocational discernment as maybe I would put it, really places a high value on students testing out what they’re learning in the classroom through getting out there in the world. And doing, whether it’s in the form of internships, or field studies, if they’re in STEM, research experiences for undergrads. And to really get that hands-on experience, whether it’s here in Wayne County, or it’s somewhere abroad, or somewhere here in the United States. And so we do a great job of, I think, working… And coaching is a funny relationship. I think, at its best, it’s where you’re accompanying students through their own process of reflection. And not with all the answers, but just really listening deeply to what it is of the why. Like why do you want to be a doctor?
Kate Jetmore: Right, asking those questions and providing feedback, I’m guessing. Yeah.
John Wessel-McCoy: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
Kate Jetmore: What are some of the challenges that you find in your role at Earlham?
John Wessel-McCoy: Right, well, I think anybody that would be in this position should care deeply about the outcomes of what is the world that your students are going into? And I will say that maybe I don’t lead with this with every conversation I have with my students, but it’s my contention. I have a high school-aged son, and then a middle school-aged daughter, and a five-year-old. And so I think about this as a parent, as well as somebody who’s working with young, emerging, what I see as emerging leaders in whatever field and community they end up in.
But they’re going to graduate into a crisis. They’re graduating in a crisis. Work has changed. Things have become much more precarious. There’s just constantly an ever-changing landscape, in terms of the world of work. And so you want to support students as they’re seeking something that’s meaningful, where they can contribute in the world. And the fact remains, the system we have is you got to go out there and you got to sell your labor to pay the bills. And I’m always really… I like to have those very practical conversations with students. And I love being in a liberal arts context. And you got to be able to develop… Your theory has to be connected to some kind of practice, right?
Kate Jetmore: Exactly.
John Wessel-McCoy: Yeah, you have to find a way to ground yourself, including these questions that are really, really the brass-tack questions that everybody has to deal with of how they provide for themselves and their families.
Kate Jetmore: That’s right.
John Wessel-McCoy: Yeah. The other thing, too, is that I think… So this isn’t peculiar to Earlham, but Earlham is part of a larger culture around how people just really can get isolated, and think that what they’re going through that they’re the only ones going through it. And you’re going out into a larger structural set of arrangement. And so you have to figure out how to navigate that. But I think it helps give you perspective when you understand the bigger picture. Because, otherwise, you might set yourself up for feeling really isolated, or you’re really sure that this is the thing you want to do, and then you meet adversity, and you think it’s just you or it’s just your fault. You think that you weren’t good enough or whatever.
Kate Jetmore: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, these students are so lucky to have the kind of support that you and you and Earlham are providing them with. John, I want to thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been so full. And I wish we had time to explore some other topics. But just thank you so much for joining me. I loved learning more about you and your work. And I want to wish you and your family all the best.
John Wessel-McCoy: Thank you, Kate. It’s been a pleasure talking with you today.