The struggle to establish a community-based African-American Heritage Museum (AAHM) at the old Colman School entered a new phase last Thursday morning as police shut down and evicted grassroots activists who, in defiance of the AAHM Board and the city, had been operating community programs from two double-wide trailers on museum property.

The schism at AAHM is between city-backed, "professional" staff and radical community members who for months have been demanding both fiscal accountability and resources for badly needed community programs. (See "Making History [Museum Dept.]," ETS!, March 24, 1998.) Board head Bob Flowers, who has wielded near-total power over AAHM finances (drawing lucrative grants while--after 13 years of planning--AAHM is still officially only a dream), has been a particular focus of protest. When legal challenges to the museum's hierarchy failed, the activists started operating actual programs--youth sports, meals, a library--out of the trailers. The long-threatened evictions were carried out by cops, reportedly reluctantly, at the request of Flowers and his associates, after weeks of a tense standoff.

The AAHM debacle highlights a particularly insidious drain on community activism and resources: the professional nonprofit culture. Existing from grant to grant and slick brochure to annual report, it plagues virtually every civic arena--from environmental struggles to shelter management to "public" broadcasting to, yes, community centers--with a parasitic class of managers who were, perhaps, once idealistic. In the name of "pragmatism" (and a comfortable salary), many become only too willing to adopt the agenda and pursue the needs of their largest donors, coopting the movements that give birth to and nurture them.

We frequently learn in alternative media (including ETS!) of the scandals of the enormous public wealth in this country, and how so little of it is appropriated to meeting basic, common needs when even those bits would make life-saving differences. Less-often reported is the scandal of this country's philanthropic industry--and it has become an industry--in which the wealthy, looking for tax advantages, fund only the cultural and political institutions least likely to threaten their interests. Or most likely to advance them.

The net result, in day-to-day terms, is that nonprofits looking for funding are far more likely to get it if their programs do not empower the people they serve. Both the welfare industry and the "new volunteerism" that is to replace our lost social services rest on a fundamental, grotesque premise: that the people helped are not, cannot, and must not be self-sufficient. Constituents become "clients." The corollary is that communities that put their money into these institutions must not control them.

In the case of the African-American Heritage Museum, it took activists fed up with missing money and 13 years of bureaucratic bullshit before the community got programs, and a sense of self-determination, from its own "community center." Those programs, and that sense, must continue.

AAHM activists are asking that the mayor, city council members, and other city and county public officials be called and e-mailed with demands for community control of AAHM, full financial accounting, and a place from which activists' programs can be run; for a boycott of Washington Mutual Savings Bank, where Flowers is a Senior Vice-President; and for support for upcoming demonstrations and direct actions to keep the Museum issue visible and alive. To get involved, call 206-320-9321 or 206-324-4289.