People For President Svante Myrick remembers People For Founder Norman Lear and describes his passion for fighting for justice.
I grew up with Norman Lear. If you were a child of the ’60s, whose family life revolved around the prime-time network television schedule, so did you.
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Lear was proud of all he’d done, where he’d been, and where he was going. He was especially proud of founding People for the American Way, the liberal avatar of American freedom he stood up in 1981, the year American politics undeniably became dominated by the religious right. “All these years later, 30 some years later, I don’t wake up many mornings, read the newspaper and not thank God there’s a People for the American Way there,” he told us. Not long after we spoke in Los Angeles, he handed the leadership to Svante Myrick, the former mayor of Ithaca, N.Y., a Black millennial warmed by Lear’s humor, kindness, and political passion.
“I saw him three weeks ago,” Myrick told me. “Just after the elections. He wanted to know: How did we do in Ohio? In Virginia?,” where progressives notched big wins. Oh, he already knew that, the PFAW president told me. “He wanted to know, did we have staff out there? How did they do?
“He never stopped caring about the future. It was a remarkable thing to see a man of 101 care more about the future than the past.” Lear always asked about Myrick’s toddler son, Miles, he recalled. “Norman would say we needed to be thinking about 2124, not just 2024, in case Miles lives as long as he did.”
