It was 1982, and Reverend Mike Harper was presenting Scott Douglas to the board of the Greater Birmingham Ministries (GBM), an interfaith social justice organization in the Deep South. Forty-seven Alabama church people, mostly white, sat assembled around the wooden tables. "I’d like to recommend Scott Douglas," Harper told the assembled group. "He’s a subversive and a revolutionary."

Thinking quickly, he explained to the group, "I try to be as revolutionary as justice and as subversive as love."

"Whew!" Douglas remembers, laughing. The board members’ faces relaxed. Eleven years later Douglas became the Ministries’ first African American executive director, in charge of the whole operation. And while he hardly fits the stereotype of an underground radical, there was some truth to Harper’s assessment. In fact, Douglas [is] a member of the Communist Party and had developed his social justice know-how as a district organizer in Birmingham, working on economic justice, equal rights, and peace issues. He admired and learned from both Gus Hall, the Party’s general secretary, and chairman Henry Winston, a legendary strategist, movement builder, and social analyst.

Editorial Comment:
Scott says he takes his cues from the Communist Party - anything wrong with this picture?

The Communist Party helped Douglas see the separation between people in the South as not only the inheritance of slavery but also the tool long kept sharp by wealthy landowners and corporations in order to divide workers and maximize profits. U.S. Steel, for instance, tolerated Ku Klux Klan rallies behind its gates. "A lot of folks don’t even know it, but we’re living with the residue of that history," Douglas explains. "Black people and white people in the South are the most intimate strangers. We know so much and hide so much about our relationships together. The legacy of slavery has been this duality of memory, duality of history, duality of reality."

The day before, he had attended a conference for the progressive New South Coalition in nearby Huntsville, where participants discussed strategies for achieving voter rights for former prison inmates and responding to attacks against black and other progressive leaders. Douglas had lugged around a faded orange cloth cooler full of brochures declaring the need for a new Alabama constitution shaped by citizen delegates.

"It would be the first constitutional convention of people who look like Alabama in the state’s history," Douglas reminded the assembly. Among other things, proposed changes would undo taxes that unequally burden the poor, and free up monies for sorely needed public infrastructure. The campaign is central to Greater Birmingham Ministries’ organizing arm, which targets the inequities built into social institutions such as housing and transportation.

Conversations with the Birmingham Islamic Society are under way, and next Douglas hopes to reach out to the African-American Pentecostal Church of God in Christ. Eventually participants hope to create an Alabama Faith Council that can respond loudly  and clearly to activist Christian conservatives, countering what Douglas calls "right-wing denial faith" with a message of faith-based social justice. "We consider ourselves like the church mouse, we just run around and do our stuff, but next year we’ve got to become bolder," Douglas says. "Our job is to be the Jeremiahs and Ezekiels, to become the prophetic voices who speak truth to power."

Editorial Comment:
Beware of people who use broad labels to marginalize entire groups of citizens - Its a well worn political tactic to silence opposing views

...Douglas says. "All of the oppressed become part of a competitive mix and struggle over meager civil, economic, and social crumbs," he explains, "rather than rising together to claim the cake of human rights for all and even speak to the stewardship of all creation—all Earth."

Scott Douglas hadn’t intended to become a revolutionary. In the sixth grade he and his friends decided to test their talents. Angry at the abrupt dismissal of a young, pretty substitute teacher, the boys attempted to get back at the principal.

They built a rocket and aimed it at their school. "Based on my chemical calculations I think it would have worked, but it went ‘splat’ instead of ‘boom,’ " Douglas recalls, acknowledging that the collaborators could have caused serious damage. The children covered their tracks - and the big black hole in the ground - with a story involving hot dogs and knocking over the grill. One grew up to become a NASA engineer.

Editorial Comment:
Sounds like Scott had terrorist leanings and learned to lie convincingly in his younger days

After finishing school Douglas got work at an aircraft factory, but he hated the racism he encountered in the union. By then he had joined the Communist Party and often would distribute the Daily Worker around the plant. When the defense plant won its next big contract, he wasn’t called back.

Douglas had married his college sweetheart, Lynn, and when she got a scholarship to the University of Alabama’s master’s program in early childhood education, they decided to go. Douglas went from one job to another in Birmingham until he landed some work with the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice. Organizing turned out to be a good fit and soon he joined the Communist Party staff. His job included selling the Daily Worker to employees driving through the gates into the U.S. Steel plant. While many would buy it, others tried to break his outstretched arm by pinning it against their moving truck. Later he did a stint as a Sierra Club organizer on environmental justice, developing alliances between blacks, poor whites, and wealthy members.

When the opening for executive director at Greater Birmingham Ministries came up, Douglas had been a volunteer there for eleven years. "I said, how great to be paid for that," he recalls. In the Communist Party, he had been a member of the religious caucus. For him and other religious members, socialism was a means of serving their faith. "To recognize the connections between justice, compassion, and humility and to be able to sustain yourself working on that is very important to me," he says.