Larry Cox's lifelong passion for social justice has guided him through many incarnations in activism, from the antiwar movement and AIUSA's early years to the vanguard of the movement for economic, social and cultural rights. As AIUSA's new executive director, he has a fresh vision and a world of experience to share.
By Laura Jamison
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© Nina Subin |
When Larry Cox took a job in 1976 with a small human rights organization called Amnesty International, his expectations were — to put it mildly — low. As a longtime anti-war activist and dedicated '60s radical, he viewed Amnesty International as a "silly, reformist, Band-Aid organization. But I needed a job, so I thought, 'I'll just do this until I figure out what other radical, revolutionary thing I'm going to do with my life.'
"But what I discovered was that this was the most revolutionary organization I'd ever seen," says Cox, who became AIUSA's new executive director in May. "Unlike all my friends, who were very big on rhetoric about freedom and liberation, Amnesty actually did it: they got people out of prison who were put there by the worst dictators one can imagine. Once you meet one human being who is free and alive because of this organization — and you're a part of it — what the hell else are you going to do?" He adds with a laugh: "I stayed for 14 years."
Cox eventually did leave AI to pursue other professional opportunities. During his 16 years away from AI, Cox worked on the forefront of the emerging movement for economic, social and cultural rights (ESCR), first as executive director of the Rainforest Foundation and then as senior program officer for human rights at the Ford Foundation.
Cox has considerably higher expectations for AIUSA this time around and has been traveling extensively to discuss them with activists, donors and members. "I've been extraordinarily inspired by the people I've met," he says. While AI supporters include many celebrities and other public figures who have helped draw attention to the plight of political prisoners, he says it has always been "the so-called ordinary folk who had other jobs and who in their spare time would write these letters and make phone calls" that give Amnesty its strength. Cox believes this grassroots base makes the organization powerfully equipped to fulfill its mission, which in 2001 was expanded to include ESCR.
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"Protestor Larry Cox refuses to shake hand of Florida Gov. Bob Graham, saying 'your hands are stained with blood.'" |
Cox's confidence in AIUSA is in part due to his firsthand experience during the organization's formative years. When he joined AIUSA in 1976 as its first press officer, he says, "no journalist had ever heard of Amnesty International," which had officially opened its U.S. branch in 1966. But that soon began to change when AI received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977. "I always told everyone that my press strategy was to win the Nobel Prize," he jokes.
When, in January 1977, Gary Gilmore became the first man executed in the United States after a long moratorium, AIUSA moved quickly to try to stop the practice. Cox volunteered to take the lead, launching the Program to Abolish the Death Penalty. In 1979, when Florida prepared to carry out the first non-consensual execution in the United States (Gilmore had demanded to be killed), Cox chained himself to the fence of the governor's mansion in Florida — although he stresses this was not an AI-approved method. The governor at the time, Bob Graham, eventually came out to speak with him. "I had a chance to argue with the governor," he recalls. But Cox failed to convince him, and the prisoner, John Spenkelink, was executed. "I always felt a sense of responsibility," he says. Today AIUSA's anti-death penalty work is still a major priority of the organization and will continue to be "until this barbarous practice is gone forever," says Cox.
After working as AIUSA's deputy director, Cox took a post in 1985 as deputy secretary general at the International Secretariat in London, where he stayed for what he calls "the hardest five years of my life." AI had expanded so rapidly that "the pressures on the place were enormous — you had the whole world looking to Amnesty as the reporter on human rights everywhere."
At that time AI was focused solely on civil and political rights, particularly on freeing people who were jailed and/or tortured for their political views. Cox grew restless. He wanted to work on broader issues and "see what life was like outside Amnesty," he says. It was then that the rock star Sting, who had participated in AIUSA's Human Rights Now concert tours in the 1980s, turned to Cox for help with his fledgling organization, the Rainforest Foundation, which he founded to aid the indigenous peoples of the Brazilian Amazon in protecting their land rights. Cox became executive director in 1990 and explains, "That was when, not theoretically, but in experience, the importance of economic, social and cultural rights became clear to me. You could not do any meaningful work with the indigenous peoples of Latin America if you only talked about their civil and political rights. Their main issues were resources — keeping their land, and keeping it from being destroyed."
His experience there reflected stirrings of a larger movement in the human rights field. The international AIDS crisis, the increase in poverty created by globalization and the disproportionate impact of both these problems on women and people of color made many feel that working for civil and political rights was simply not enough. "At the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, all that came to a head," he recalls. "You had groups from all over the world insisting that all human rights be respected, not just civil and political."
When Cox moved on in 1995 to work as senior program officer for the Ford Foundation, the largest and most influential foundation in the human rights arena, he was able to "put someone else's money where my mouth was." He was instrumental in the funding of a worldwide coalition that pushed successfully for the International Criminal Court. He also funded groups that worked on economic, social and cultural rights all over the world. These included groups on the vanguard of the domestic human rights movement, such as the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, a Philadelphia-based anti-poverty group, and the Border Network for Human Rights in El Paso, Texas.
Ian Gary, a former colleague of Cox from the Ford Foundation who is now a policy advisor for Oxfam America, says, "Larry took risks with grants to smaller and newer groups working on economic and social rights, which had a catalytic effect that helped breathe new life into the human rights movement." He adds, "Larry has an infectious enthusiasm for human rights, not as some ghettoized profession, but as a popular movement that has relevance for people's lives both overseas and in the United States."
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Larry Cox and Sting at an event for the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York City, 2002. © RJ Capak |
Cox's passion for human rights springs from his childhood in Ohio, where he grew up with a single mother and two older brothers in a small town near local steel mills. "All of my sense of social justice came from the realization that my mom worked enormously hard and yet barely had enough to live on; she was always one step away from disaster. I knew that wasn't right," he says. "At a very early age, I decided I wanted to change the world," he says, and chuckles, calling it "a modest ambition." He attended Mount Union College, a Methodist school in Alliance, Ohio, with the intention of becoming a minister. "If you grow up in a little town in Ohio it's pretty hard to imagine doing that [changing the world] because you don't have a lot of allies," he says, explaining why he considered joining the ministry. "It was me and my brothers, and that was it. So God seemed very useful."
Entering college in 1963, however, he found plenty of like-minded peers in the nascent anti-Vietnam War movement, which he quickly joined. After graduating, Cox spent two and a half years in Paris (where he met his Swiss-born wife, Nicole, who was also an activist) working with a church program to provide support to draft resisters and American deserters who were fleeing their posts in Germany; he then returned to the United States and allowed himself to be drafted. "It was a deliberate strategy; a number of us did it," he says. After what he ruefully calls "thirteen wonderful months in Fort Campbell, Kentucky," organizing against the war from within the Army, he applied for a conscientious objector discharge, and got it "in record time. I was more trouble than I was worth, for sure." Cox and his wife, Nicole, went to Geneva for a year "to recover" from the rigors of Army life.
The couple recently celebrated 36 years of marriage and have a 26-year-old son, Justin, who is a hip-hop emcee in a group called Nuclear Family. If Cox's life seems to be circling back, it is not only to AI, but also to his early interest in faith: he is now finishing up a master's in religion and human rights at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.
Cox recognizes — and respects — the concern of some within Amnesty that taking on ESCR could weaken the organization's effectiveness on civil and political rights. But he points out that "when we started working on the death penalty in 1977, groups threatened to leave en masse. People said, 'This is going to destroy the organization,'" he recalls. "Obviously, it didn't."
He is also deeply committed to the organization's longstanding and critical work on freeing political prisoners. AIUSA has celebrated many successes on that front — for example, 16 of the 22 prisoners of conscience designated as AI Special Focus Cases (the program began in 1998) have been freed — and Cox feels it's important to "raise the visibility of that work so people can see how effective it is, and join in."
Cox says, "One of the things that has kept Amnesty strong is it doesn't deal with abstractions: it deals with human suffering." In the case of pervasive problems like inadequate health care or poverty, AI "has to identify individuals and communities where there is suffering caused by government decisions, and come up with a particular campaign that will force the government to address those issues — just like any other campaign Amnesty has ever done."
Among the governments on Cox's radar is that of the United States. Domestic human rights, he says, are "a mild obsession" of his. "The United States operates with a double standard in promoting human rights all over the globe, but it has a long history of violating them here — it just doesn't call them 'human rights,'" he says, mentioning the kind of entrenched poverty witnessed on televisions around the world when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. And, in the last few years, the kinds of violations that AI has historically battled so successfully in other countries — such as torture, "disappearances" and indefinite detention without charges — have been carried out by the United States in the name of the war on terror, something that he says was "unthinkable 15 years ago."
While AIUSA has mounted a high-intensity campaign against U.S. practices in the war on terror, Cox emphasizes that work on other domestic human rights violations has not stopped. "We're also doing important work on violence against women in the United States, prison conditions, the death penalty.
"To do all of this we need a lot more people involved. We can't just rest on our reputation, or even rest on the number of people we have now. We intend to raise our visibility so that people can see they can do something to stop the violations here and abroad. Our membership is much, much larger than other human rights organizations, but compared to the size of the country it's much too small. We have to make an all-out effort to get people involved if we're going to succeed.
"Which leads me to why I've come back to Amnesty. I had a chance over the years to look at a wide range of organizations, and I kept coming back to the fact that Amnesty still has the notion of being a movement, of getting people from all walks of life to take action," he says. "I think that's what is needed right now." 
