brother to a fight—and the bigger kid got the living tar knocked out of him. “What sums up Martin,” Marshall Eakes said, “is a refusal to give up, a refusal to give in, a refusal to lose.”
Eakes was around eleven years old when his parents moved into a white brick mansion with a two-acre farm on the southwestern edge of the Greensboro metro area. His father wanted to teach his sons a love for working on the land but the move seemed to have had the opposite effect. “All that experience taught us is that none of us would ever want to be farmers,” Eakes said. The senior Eakes miscalculated on a second front as well. “What he didn’t realize,” Eakes said, “is that the community he moved us to, like many rural communities in the south, was ninety-five percent black.” And so this red-haired son of the Old South with a love for basketball spent much of his time running with a largely African-American crowd, and a housing activist was born. He saw how hard the mothers and fathers of his friends worked and how modestly they lived. “The people I grew up with would do anything they could to pay back their loans if ever anyone gave them a chance to borrow money,” Eakes said. “I know that on a gut level.”
Over lunch Eakes chose to tell me three stories from his childhood, all relating to race relations in Greensboro in the second half of the 1960s and early ’70s. These three events shaped his life, Eakes told me. The first took place when he was eleven or twelve, in the office of the preacher of his church. Eakes had a good friend from the neighborhood and he was there to ask to let his friend join the congregation so they could both play football in the church league. His friend, an African-American, had accompanied him. Eakes remembers the preacher being kind about letting them know the friend couldn’t join their whites-only church, but he also remembers the tears that welled up in his friend’s eyes. “He says, ‘I don’t understand,’” Eakes said. Neither did Eakes. “Little kids don’t understand why we have to tolerate inequity—which is a pretty good trait,” he said.
The second event happened during the integration of the Greensboro public schools in the late 1960s. Eakes was fifteen at the time and in the ninth grade. There was one black student on their bus and it bothered Eakes to watch the way the other kids taunted and abused him. After several weeks Eakes stood up next to the kid and declared, “I’m not going to let you pick on this person again.” That prompted a bigger boy at the front of the bus to walk straight at him and, without a word, smack Eakes to the ground. Yet what sticks most with him, Eakes said, was the reaction of the kid he was standing up to protect. “He pulls me up to the seat beside him and says to me, ‘You can’t fight hate with anger, you can only show people who you are by how you live your life.’”
The third event occurred a couple of years after that when a kid named John Rogers proposed the idea that the two of them run on a black-white student government ticket. Only around 10 percent of the student body was black in a school that had been 100 percent white only three years earlier, but Rogers had practically dared Eakes to run. “You’re a big shot here,” Rogers had said to him—and if you run with me, I might be elected school president. Eakes couldn’t say no. “He was so charismatic I used to think this was someone who could be the first black president someday,” Eakes said. “He would speak and send chills up and down your spine.” If nothing else, he was struck by Rogers’s boldness. “I realized it took so much more courage to ask me to be an ally than it took me to say yes,” Eakes said.
Somehow the pair won. Eakes claims to have no idea how Rogers had been elected president and him treasurer but Gordon Widenhouse said a lot of it had to have been Eakes, a top student (Eakes was his school’s valedictorian) from a well-off family who was nonetheless liked by pretty much everyone. “Martin always had this charm about him,” said Widenhouse, now a death penalty defense attorney living in Chapel Hill. “Male or female, everyone liked Martin. He got along with everyone.”
Tragically, Rogers died shortly after graduating from high school. He had volunteered to coach at an area playground and was shot and killed when he called out someone for bringing a gun to a place where children play. “When I get really tired, I try to remember that my friend would not stop fighting for what he thought was right, so I don’t feel like I have the choice to do that, either,” Eakes said.
Eakes was attending Davidson College, a small, elite liberal arts school just north of Charlotte, when he learned that his friend had been murdered. At Davidson, an oasis for idealists and big thinkers, Eakes fell in with a brainy, eclectic crowd that included Tony Snow, who would go on to be a conservative commentator and regular on Fox News and served briefly as press secretary to President George W. Bush. Eakes drove a beat-up bread van that he had fixed up after buying it for next to nothing, and, said his friend Gordon Widenhouse, who went to Davidson and roomed with Eakes, the two spent the bulk of their free time either trying to meet co-eds or debating solutions to the big social ills of the day. “Martin and his friends were different than anyone else I had ever met,” said Bonnie Wright, who was a freshman when Eakes was a senior at Davidson. “They could be a lot of fun but they were already interested in poverty and housing and all these other big issues.” Wright met Eakes while he was wrapped in a blanket and tied to a flagpole in the center of campus, retaliation for the elaborate pranks he had been pulling on his friends. The pair started dating shortly thereafter. Eakes would move to New Haven, Connecticut, to attend Yale Law School and then Prince ton, where he earned a master’s in public policy studying economics at the Woodrow Wilson School, before the couple settled, after much debate, in Durham in 1980.
Eakes was still in law school when he, Wright, Widenhouse, and several others rented a house in Washington, D.C., so they could spend a summer trying to figure out how they were going to save the world. The goal was to pick a single locale where they would all live after graduation, so they could collectively have an impact on the life of the dispossessed and downtrodden of that community. “The idea was that it’d be unanimous, whatever we decided, and so basically you had to beat everyone into consensus,” Bonnie Wright said. That served as this small band’s first big lesson in the limits of idealism. “By the end of the summer,” Eakes said, “we were spending less time talking about revolution and more time arguing over the schedule for washing the dishes.” Eakes and Wright ended up choosing Durham because it was only an hour’s drive away from Greensboro and his parents but “far enough away so that if I fell flat on my face,” Eakes said, “I wouldn’t embarrass them.” They would move there alone.
In 1980, Eakes and Wright created an organization they earnestly, if not redundantly, named the Self-Help Center for Community Self-Help. The idea, at least initially, was to foster the spread of worker-owned cooperatives around the state. Cheap imports, automation, and corporate takeovers were causing plant closures at textile mills and furniture factories around North Carolina. Self-Help, the pair hoped, would provide legal and technical advice, along with moral support, to workers seeking to retain their jobs by buying threatened factories from departing owners, hiring a manager, and running it themselves. There was one year, Eakes recalled, when his fledgling organization had a staff of four and a budget of only $4,000. The first Self-Help employee to receive anything resembling a living wage was Thad Moore, a local activist who shared Eakes and Wright’s faith in the potential of worker-owned cooperatives (when he met Eakes, Moore was toiling away at an employee-run scrap metal yard despite a degree from Wake Forest)—and he remembered being paid a salary of maybe $10,000.
“I don’t think Martin paid himself a penny until 1985 or 1986,” Moore recalled. In time, Moore said, he came to realize he was in the presence of a virtuoso workaholic—a man who approaches the job as if it were an extreme sport. To save money and keep Self-Help going, Eakes and Wright lived in a wreck of a home that was so cold in the winter that ice would form in the toilet. His office was the backseat and trunk of whatever car he had bought at a salvage yard and fixed up so he could crisscross North Carolina looking for potential worker cooperative sites. “I’ve worked with some crazy, crazy committed activists in my time,” said Moore, who was still working for Self-Help more than twenty years later when I visited Durham. “But Martin took it to a maniacal degree, beyond normal even for people who were abnormal in their commitment. He brought an intensity and devotion to his mission that I don’t think I have ever observed even in the activist world.”
Eakes and Wright initially lived off Eakes’s savings. When that money was gone he opened up a small legal office in downtown Durham, but then, as if seeking to undermine his goal of bringing in extra money while building Self-Help, he announced that his hourly rate for his services would be whatever a client earned for an hour of his or her time. Why should an hour of his time, the former philosophy student posited, be worth any more than that of another human being? The problem with that logic was that he was spending most of his time with unemployed textile workers. “It turned out my first four or five clients were out of work,” Eakes chuckled. Adding to their financial pressures, Wright had returned to school to earn a graduate degree at the Yale School of Management.
Eakes added a law partner a year or so later: Wib Gulley, a tall, blue-eyed man with sandy hair and a Dudley Do-Right chin. Gulley was another committed soul, a man who had taught at a school for the mentally disabled and then ran the North Carolina chapter of the Public Interest Research Group before going to law school, but even he had to roll his eyes over the novel sliding scale Eakes had devised. “It was wonderful what Martin was doing,” he
