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KU: So if you can maybe talk about your tenure there, and yeah, how you felt about working at the office and what you felt you were able to contribute?

MM: Yeah. So I started working for the congresswoman in 1992. And that was like, maybe her first term in Congress. She had just been elected maybe a year or two before that. I think the first term might have been 1990, so it's going into the second term. I started working for her because the project that I spoke of, the job training program, lost its funding. And I think we, Congresswoman Waters and I had built up a relationship by then, and she hired me, not as district director in the beginning, but as sort of a special projects staff. And then maybe a year or two later, the existing incumbent district director left the office. So then I became district director for the last, maybe fourteen, fifteen years of the time that I was with her. So in that, I think most people think of working in a congressional office, if you're in D.C., it was mostly legislative and lobbying and kind of maneuvering in Washington, D.C. In the district offices, a lot of it is based on what's called constituent services. So on the federal level, it might be answering questions about social security or immigration or HUD and housing issues, things like that. Whereas at the state level, you deal with state issues, and county, you deal with, most of the time, most of the social services come out of the county level, so you do that. But in the case of Congresswoman Waters, we did all of that. We provided constituent services. But I think what was good about the congresswoman is that she is herself an activist and has a, very much an activist orientation, and she believes not only in getting things through the halls of Congress, but out on the street, and she was very effective at that. So it was a perfect fit for me because I don't know if I could have worked for any other congressperson.

But in her case, she took a, legislatively, the issue of looking into the crack cocaine epidemic in the 1980s in South Central. And particularly after a book came out (called) The Dark Alliance by a guy named Gary Webb, who was a reporter, but he wrote a book about what happens, how is it that there's so much crack cocaine in South Central L.A.? Cocaine comes mostly from outside the country. And we were thinking, okay, these street gangs in South Central, they don't have airplanes, they don't have jets, they don't have ties, they don't have seed money to buy cocaine. Yet, cocaine, particularly crack cocaine, was flooding South Central L.A. And what Gary Webb did was looked at the connections between that going on in the streets, and the CIA, the U.S. CIA being involved in the cocaine industry. And I think the expose, basically, said that it's not just about Black gang members selling coke on the streets. But looking into the whole apparatus where somebody else is making a lot of money. And so... and it became clear that, for example, the cocaine there came from Nicaragua or Central America, southern Mexico, other places. They all had the fingerprints of the U.S. CIA because in the case of Nicaragua, the CIA had provided a lot of resources to people, basically in exchange for fighting off Communist influence in Central America. And so out of that experience, I think the CIA provided a lot of money, a lot of technical training and all these things. And it actually empowered and emboldened a lot of drug dealers because there was a lot of corruption at the time in Nicaragua, and there's a lot of internal strife.

And so for us, the way it was connected to working in a congressional office was that while it's a legislative agenda item to address the drug issue, drug abuse issue, it's also happening in real life, in the streets. And so we tried to find out as much as we could from primary sources, the gang members themselves and others who talked to us about what they think the connections might be. And so we pursued a lot of that, because we wanted to make, the goal is to get rid of the cocaine and drug abuse. The goal wasn't to expose the CIA but that's where it took us, so we did a lot of work around that. In fact, it was a, I think, a major factor in being able to organize a lot of young Black men. So to make the point about having that freedom to engage in things like that, and part of that is movement building, empowering community members and all of that, that we were able to do that. And then internationally, Congresswoman Waters took on issues about, you know, at that time, there was things going on with Haiti, and Papa Doc and Baby Doc and these, basically tyrants, despots in Haiti who ousted Aristide, the democratically elected president of Haiti. So we studied about Haiti and gave support to Haiti. And I mentioned earlier about South Africa, that's a big one. But other issues like that that came up, we would take up.

And in 2003, when George Bush decided to wage war on Iraq, the story was that Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction," that they had nuclear power, they had all these things. And so George Bush declared a war on Iraq. I think sort of the common misperception or understanding, even among activists, is that Black people, they care about bread and butter issues, but they don't care about international issues unless it's about Africa. Well, that's not true. In 2003, the group of us in South Central L.A. were the first to hold an anti-Iraq war rally at Leimert Park, and at that park, there was two or three thousand people there. This was way before any of the so-called mainstream peace movements took up that as a struggle. So, you know, to have the freedom to do that in a congressional office is very rare, too.

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