An Interview with Local Organizer Sonja Wilde-de Vries
The Louisville Workers Brigade
1/24/2025
Could you tell us how you got involved in organizing? What were the first causes you organized around? How did these causes shape your view of organizing and your future work?
On my mother's side I was born into a Dutch, working class and communist family deeply involved in resistance against the nazi's. On the other side was my dad's family: southern landowners in Kentucky. After my father met my mother, he became radicalized, and they were both involved in the civil rights movement and anti-war movements.
My Dutch grandfather was held in a concentration camp for over a year for being a member of the communist party, my uncle Herbert who was Jewish, lost his parents and little sister in Auschwitz. My grandmother, with four young children, hid people fleeing the nazi's in the crawl space in her tiny apartment on the first floor. I was raised by my grandma, in that same apartment building and met some of the people who had survived the war because of my grandmother; trade unionists, Russian POW's, Jewish family's, some of them stopped by when I was a child, and told their stories. While I wanted to glorify what my grandmother did, she taught me, that we must always fight for and alongside anyone who is oppressed, in whatever way that we are able.
Its hard to pinpoint when I became active. I spoke out as a child, even though I was terribly shy. My first act of resistance was when I was a first grader, briefly in the United States during the Vietnam War, and my teacher came to gently tell the "little foreign girl" about the pledge of allegiance. I will never forget the horrified look on her face when I responded that I would not stand for those "fascists and murderers".
As a young teenager, I learned about the Palestinian struggle from my stepfather who painstakingly showed me maps of Palestine and all the villages that had been erased by Israel's settler colonial project. This was back in the 80's. At that time i was living in Amsterdam with my family and I joined an organization fighting US imperialism in Central America, where our government was funding and training death squads to keep their very lucrative domination in place and to thwart efforts towards workers rights, literacy and other basic human rights. I remember going into what was then the red-light district in Amsterdam, to do my first canvass! I felt a solidarity with the women there and although I didn't understand it completely, I felt the issues were connected. Self Determination. Oppression. In the red-light district, the women working as prostitutes were the ones the most willing to engage and also donate to the liberations struggles in El Salvador.
Soon after, I graduated high school and moved back to Kentucky and was mentored by civil rights leaders, Anne Braden and Mattie Jones. My first campaign participation was the effort to free Imani Harris and Ben Chavis. Anti-racism and anti-imperialism as well as a strong awareness of every oppressed people's right to self-determination was deeply rooted in me at an early age, intertwined with an awareness that we could never be free under capitalism.
You've been organizing around numerous causes in Louisville for many years, from Black liberation to Palestinian liberation and so forth. How are these struggles, as well as other struggles, connected to one another? Why is it important for organizers to operate with a big-picture view when organizing for the interest of working and oppressed people?
Understanding that the systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as their integral partners patriarchy, heterosexism, and white supremacy are all connected is key to our work. No matter where our focus is- the connections are there. It is up to us, as organizers to bring that context into everything we do.
Just looking at Kentucky, and our $29 million per year budget for Israel and juxtaposing it against the fact that our houseless population is up by 18% across the state and that we are in the top 5 for poverty, child abuse and children with incarcerated parents, in the nation makes those connections starkly. Our police forces collaborate and train with the Israeli Defense forces on how best to suppress urban uprisings. When we study the ethnic cleansing that happened in this country with indigenous nations, we see the blueprint for what is happening in Palestine.
The people in power KNOW it's all connected. If we were half as unified as the people in power we would be powerful beyond measure!
The 21st century has been a blight on working and oppressed people, from cuts to desperately needed social services to ongoing genocides the world over to imperialist wars to the march of climate change. Why is it important now more than ever for people to get organized? What do you say to those who espouse defeatist/doomerist statements like “What’s the point? Nothing is going to change”?
One of the most beautiful and hopeful things I am seeing in this last year is folks from all over making the connections between climate disaster, genocide, poverty, attacks on trans people- all of it- and doing their work in such a way that reflects that awareness. And much of that shift has been led by BIPOC, queer, working class and poor organizers. Angela Davis said (and I am paraphrasing) " We have to fight climate disaster, or we will not have a world to win" I look at the places where indigenous people are uniting with farmers and locals affected by pipelines and fracking and that gives me hope.
We are facing a reactionary and repressive government that is turning toward being openly fascistic because the empire is failing. It is going to take all of us, moving together to not just fight it, but to create something new and just. Anne Braden always said, "The most challenging times in history are also the best times to organize"
When you study history, it is full of struggle. Slavery and Jim Crow were once legal- (because those in power make the laws) and it was organizing and resistance that brought them down. History has always been filled with the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressors.
Grassroots organizing and resistance is the only thing that has ever made a real difference. If we re-directed the resources and energy that go into the elections every four years, to use in more radical grassroots organizing imagine what we could do! And educating people as to the nature of this system that CANNOT be reformed is our work. We will have to be creative, we will have to go beyond our comfort zones, we will have to work with people we don't agree with on everything, and we will need to be in the streets, in the places of power, in the courts- but we can build something very powerful and beautiful in this way- we can build the world we want to see in our organizing.
What work are you currently involved in right now? What groups do you volunteer with and which ones are you organized with?
Right now I am involved in cultural organizing- there is a reason that repressive powers have often gone after poets and other artists first. We need to connect to struggles across all lines of identity and across the world and one way we can do that powerfully is through poetry. It also gives us sustenance. Direction. Information. Inspiration. We also need to organize concretely for the defense and survival of our most vulnerable populations and look for guidance from those who are most affected by the oppression and violence of our system. This is the work I am part of now. What I always tell people is find the work you resonate with most- if you are religious, work within your places of worship, if you are a student, organize in your high school or university etc. We do not all need to be doing the same things- but we do need to have an understanding about the system that we are fighting. About the nature of racial capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy etc. so that we bring that into whatever work we are doing, whether it is leading a strike, defending trans and immigrant rights, protecting water rights or gathering poets. We need to think in terms of liberation. We need to allow our comrades to have moments of despair and doubt and sorrow- it's what makes us human. We also need to bring more joy and camaraderie and mutual aid into our movements.
Is there anything else you'd like to share with our readers? Any wisdom to share from your many years involved in the myriad of struggles for the liberation of working and oppressed peoples?
When I feel down, I often think of something Anne Braden said
"In every age, no matter how cruel the oppression carried on by those in power, there have been those who struggled for a different world. I believe this is the genius of humankind, the thing that makes us half divine: the fact that some human beings can envision a world that has never existed."
We must envision and fight for that world now more than ever.