Good Trouble UMW

With only a few weeks remaining until Election Day, a group of Mary Washington students and alumni have been working at making it easier for students to vote. In this episode, we speak with the organizers of the Day on Democracy about what they're planning, and why it's crucial for college students to vote.

With only a few weeks remaining until Election Day, a group of Mary Washington students and alumni have been working at making it easier for students to vote. In this episode, we speak with the organizers of the Day on Democracy about what they're planning, and why it's crucial for college students to vote.

In 1993, Donald Rallis was an assistant professor of Geography at Mary Washington College. Untenured and unafraid, he outed himself as a gay man in a column for The Bullet, the college's newspaper. That led to a debate between Rallis and another professor on the morality of homosexuality. They were expecting a few dozen audience members. They ended up with over a thousand.

The University of Mary Washington has a reputation as an LGBTQ+ friendly school, but that reputation was earned through the work of student activists, including Charlie Girard, the first openly trans student, who helped pushed the school forward on issues like pronouns and housing, with a little help from Tumblr.

College is a temporary place where students live for four or five years, but activism often takes decades to achieve results--if at all. In this episode, members of the early 2000s Human Rights Club at Mary Washington discuss the lessons they learned about the long game while campaigning for a living wage for staff.

Twenty years ago, a group of Mary Washington College students formed the Human Rights Club, which took on a wide variety of causes, from international issues like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to local issues like the wages paid to Mary Washington staff. Ten members, via Zoom, discuss what they were able to do, what they couldn't, and what it still means to them almost two decades later.

As the City of Fredericksburg responds to Black Lives Matter protests of May and June 2020 with teargas, pepper spray, and curfews, University of Mary Washington students activists and leaders determine what to do next.

In the summer of 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, protests broke out all over the United States in response to the death of George Floyd. Protests took place in the biggest cities in America...and also in Fredericksburg, Virginia. In this episode, Mary Washington students and staff tell their stories of marching through the streets, standing up for a cause, and getting teargassed.

Nine years ago, Congressman John Lewis delivered the commencement address to the graduating class of the University of Mary Washington, exhorting them to get into Good Trouble, but UMW has a long history of doing that work already. Did you know that in 1998, students kept the university from changing its name to Washington and Monroe University? Or that the school had its own Occupy movement in 2011? Or that an organization that had its first office in a Mary Wash dorm closet has now had over 7,000 volunteers? As part of this year’s first-year experience, Good Trouble: UMW, a podcast, will launch its first episode on Tuesday, August 4. The podcast looks at the history of student activism at UMW, with interviews from students, alumni, and faculty who worked to change the university, the state, and the world.