As a lifelong joiner of social justice organizations, Eric Mann has fought the Jim Crow South in the 1960s, the American invasion of Vietnam in the 1970s, the offshoring of American manufacturing jobs and the decline of workers’ power in the 1980s. He also organized and successfully won a fight against what he calls the racist transit policies of Metro in the 1990s and 2000s.

He mentored Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors, spent 18 months in prison for his Weatherman activities before the group went underground and co-founded the Labor and Community Strategy Center, a left-wing bookstore and activist think tank in Leimert Park.

After a lifetime of struggle, Mann is now fighting one of his toughest battles: writing a book about those struggles so young activists can learn from them and change the world.

But don’t call it a memoir.

“Memoir allows you to say whatever the fuck you wanna say. You can make up stories. Nobody knows if they’re true,” Mann, 83, said this spring at an event announcing a forthcoming book. It’s currently titled “We Make the Revolution With Our Bodies on the Line: The Journey of a CORE, SDS, UAW, and Strategy Center Organizer.” 

Mann said it’s part training manual for activists and part eyewitness history from a guy who was front and center for some of the most important social justice movements of the last 60 years.

He gave The LA Local some insights into that playbook for future activists. 

Step 1: Break the chains

His first piece of advice for people who want to change the world? Break the chains of American rugged individualism and join an organization.

“My main point is if you’re not in an organization, your life has no meaning,” Mann said. “The CIA has an organization, the FBI has an organization. What are you doing? ‘Well, I’m against this, and I’m against that.’ Who cares?”

The first organization Mann joined was the Congress of Racial Equality in New York City in the mid-1960s. There, he organized demonstrations to raise consciousness about anti-Black and anti-Puerto Rican discrimination on the city’s bus lines.

Mann said he was inspired by the civil rights movement, socialist internationalism and the martyrdom of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. The three young civil rights workers were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi in the summer of 1964 for registering Black voters.

Step 2: Put your body on the line

Mann is the son of Eastern European Jews who were socialists, anti-fascists, union supporters and civil rights advocates. At CORE, he was trained by Joyce Ware, a young Black woman who was an organizer, to begin to “think Black,” he said.

To “think Black,” Mann said, is to see institutions of power through a Black, Afrocentric lens — the way people whom they oppress experience them, rather than through the lens of whiteness.

Black organizers at CORE told him that if he was truly committed to the movement for social justice, he had to do more than express sympathy and pity; he had to put his body on the line and fight alongside people of color. That meant risking injury, ridicule and ostracism — or worse, attending lots and lots of meetings to build the organization’s cohesion, camaraderie and community.

Step 3: Be dependable

Showing up to meetings on time and being dependable are also essential traits of a successful organizer, Mann said.

“Great organizing is like brain surgery. It’s that hard to do,” Mann said. “There’s a lot of trial and error. But you have to have a lot of vision. It’s gotta be a very exciting vision, and it’s always building a community. So an organization, at its core, has to be a community.”

Step 4: Slow down and think

LA organizer Channing Martinez told The LA Local that the biggest lesson Mann taught him was “the need for strategy and raising the level of our practice to theory.”

“Sometimes as a movement, we react to what is going on, and sometimes that reaction is needed,” Martinez said, “but most times, it would behoove us to actually slow down and think through what are the real actions that are going to have long-term effects.”

An example of that happened in the 1990s when Mann helped organize the Bus Riders Union in LA.

After years of protests, including urging riders not to pay if they couldn’t find a seat, the riders union sued Metro and won, forcing the agency to improve bus service, switch to natural gas-powered buses and cut fares, especially for students.

Step 5: Build a social hub

Now, Mann and the Strategy Center are focusing less on training organizers and more on becoming a place where people in the social justice movement can learn from movement history, Martinez said.

Above all, Mann said, he hopes the Strategy Center becomes a hub of community resistance against what he considers fascism, including “ICE kidnappings, police murders and political repression.”

He also envisions the Strategy Center becoming a permanent home for Black art and culture, political education, lectures, music performances and film screenings. All that will have to wait until he finishes his book, though. He hopes to hand it to his editor by the end of the year.

“I don’t want to die before the book comes out,” Mann said. “This is my life’s work. There’ll be 100 vibrant Black and Latino characters in it.” 

Then he joked, “There’ll be 15, maybe two, white people. I’m just giving a ballpark. Some of my best friends are white.”