What "Work" Does Vera's Founding Narrative Perform? 

Scribbled first in my “Vera Visit” notes are the words “the narrative.” I wrote them while listening to Michael Jacobson talk about Vera’s founding, which we’ve all read about in Roberts' biography of Sturz’s life. For a moment, I couldn’t help thinking about Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man while listening to Vera’s founding myth. (I ask that everyone suspend judgment about the use of the term “myth” for a moment.) Ellison has a comical scene in the novel describing the Homeric trials and tribulations of “The Founder” as he escapes from slavery and embarks upon a dramatic odyssey across the South before finally founding the historic black college, based loosely on Tuskegee University, that the main character attends at one point in the book. Part parody of Tuskegee founder Booker T. Washington’s autobiography Up from Slavery, the founding myth is trotted out and re-enacted yearly for an audience of the college’s rich white benefactors, for whom the dramatized struggle for individual freedom, culminating in the triumphant founding of the college, facilitates their blindness to the continuing racism and racial injustice that surrounds them. What I want to take away from Ellison here is the idea that a narrative performs some kind of work. I’d like to focus this week’s blog on thinking about what kind of work Vera’s founding narrative might perform for Vera.

First, a quick word about narrative and myth: I don’t use the term “myth” to suggest that the story of Vera’s founding is somehow untrue. I use it to highlight the fact that all narrative, perhaps particularly historical narrative, is 1) necessarily incomplete—distorted by and circumscribed within language; 2) deliberately dramatized to make not only a particular point but also an interesting story based on the conventions of storytelling; and 3) subject to revision and reinterpretation across time and through retellings and rehearings.

            Jacobson naturally started out his talk (“In 1961…”) by retelling the story Vera tells about its founding, but Evan Elkin also used elements of the story to illustrate points he wanted to make in his talk. For example, in explaining to us that all demonstration projects contain within them a “theory of change,” he used an example from the founding myth: “If you let poor people go home while awaiting trial, they’ll come back to court.” The use of this example exhibits elements of pure practicality; it’s a ready-made, familiar example that makes explanation easier. But there is also drama and pathos built into the story of how Sturz and Schweitzer noticed a particular injustice—poor people who were presumed innocent lingering in squalid jails only because they could not afford bail—and did something about it—The Manhattan Bail Project. It’s a good example because it smuggles the ideals behind Vera’s work into the explanation, making their articulation unnecessary. It’s also interesting to think here about how this element, the theory of change, which someone came up with at some point after the occurrence of the events described in the founding myth, has been retrospectively inserted into the myth as a characteristic feature of what Vera does and has always done. Thus, in addition to its practical and emotional uses, Vera’s founding narrative serves to maintain a sense of continuity—even if this means slight, almost unconscious revisions to the narrative as time passes—that helps to institutionalize both Vera’s ideals and the organization itself.

            In addition to this institutionalizing work, the founding myth seems to serve as a sort of touchstone, an idealized site into which the vagaries of day-to-day operations and pressures can no longer intrude. I was somewhat astonished to hear Elkin's candid discussion of the “quick turnaround projects” that Vera does. He gave the example of “a mayor who has a year left and says he wants to do something significant and asks, ‘Can you help me cook something up?’” A project cooked up with a politician concerned about his legacy seems somewhat disjointed from ideas such as “all demonstration projects have a theory of change” and “all demonstrations projects are a piece of science.” While the demands placed upon Vera in reality by politicians and other people in government “sometimes inhibit the ability to fully develop a project and give it time to grow and then test it,” the founding myth represents a pristine place in which everything works perfectly: the injustice is noticed; the project is designed; the project has time to grow; the project is tested; the project is funded; the system becomes more just. In some way, the founding narrative must operate as a bulwark against the erosion of Vera’s ideal self and a source of inspiration, even a reminder, about what people there are doing and why.