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Prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, oppressive voter registration literacy tests disenfranchised Black voters across the United States. In direct response to these restrictions, community organizers and activists launched an underground Citizenship Schools project that helped tens of thousands of Black citizens not only learn to read and write, but how to navigate Jim Crow literacy tests and demand their right to vote. In this conversation with David M. Rubenstein, Elaine Weiss takes a deep dive into the stories of four organizers at the center of this movement: Septima Clark, Esau Jenkins, Myles Horton, and Bernice Robinson. Recorded on February 27, 2025
What role did education play in the US civil rights movement? What did it look like for anti-racist organizers to build radical schooling and organizing spaces that could evade the harsh surveillance lights of white supremacy and Jim Crow? What lessons can we learn from them today?Our March 2025 episode features journalist Elaine Weiss, who speaks about her new book, Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement, published by Simon and Schuster this month.Spell Freedom traces the educational program that was the underpinning of the civil rights movement and voter registration drives. The Citizenship Schools originated from workshops in the summer of 1954 at the Highlander Center, a labor and social justice training center, located on a mountain in Monteagle, TN, just after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. The heart of the book is Elaine's vivid retelling the stories of the four main leaders of the citizenship school movement, Septima Clark, Bernice Robinson, Esau Jenkins, and one of the founders of the Highlander Center, Myles Horton. She traces the path from this mountain center to Charleston and the sea islands of South Carolina, all framed by the segregated and racist South and the leaders who rose up to organize and resist Jim Crow and create a new South. As is often said in southern movement building (from the World Social Forum in 2006), “another South is possible; another South is necessary,” and Spell Freedom connects the histories and voices of the movements that continue to be necessary today.Episode Credits:Co-hosts and co-producers: Lucia Hulsether and Tina PippinEditing and Production Manager: Aliyah HarrisIntro Music: Lance Haugen and the Flying PenguinsOutro Music: "Plato's Republic" by Akrasis
On episode 232, we welcome Elaine Weiss to discuss the grassroots foundation of the civil rights movement, the origins and aspirations of the Highlander Folk School, how and why Black people educated themselves when schooling was illegal for them, Septima Clark and the activism of ordinary people, Esau Jenkins teaching Black citizens on his bus rides, literacy tests and other ways voting for Black people was thwarted by whites, myths around education in the Black community, Rosa Parks as both a passive and active activist, and lessons from Highlander activists for how to maintain and foster democracy. Elaine Weiss is an award-winning journalist, author, and public speaker. She is the author of Fruits of Victory: The Woman's Land Army of the Great War; and The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote. Her newest book, available on March 4, 2025, is called Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement. | Elaine Weiss | ► Website | https://elaineweiss.com ► Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/ElaineWeissAuthor ► Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/efwauthor ► Twitter | https://x.com/efweiss5 ► Spell Freedom Book | https://bit.ly/3Qt33R7 Where you can find us: | Seize The Moment Podcast | ► Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/SeizeTheMoment ► Twitter | https://twitter.com/seize_podcast ► Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/seizethemoment ► TikTok | https://www.tiktok.com/@seizethemomentpodcast
This week, we share the first installment of Coracle's 2024 "Justice, Mercy & Humility" Soundings Seminar Series. This series explores the continuing relevance of Micah 6:8's exhortation to “act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.” In this conversation, Kristy Wallace-Grant (Repentance Project Director) leads us in a discussion with Jim Emrich (Founder of Servant Leaders Associates). They dip into the lives of a diverse array of Christians who have over the years embodied a Micah 6:8 vision of the Christian life: Mary McLeod Bethune, Howard Thurman, Myles Horton, Rosa Parks, Clarence Jordan, and more. We hope the lives and stories they share will spur you on to love and a deeper walk with God in the world!View Our Full Archive of Soundings Seminarsinthecoracle.org | @inthecoracleSupport the show
Learning to teach better with Noah Amidon, as we discuss one of my favorite books, The Long Haul: an Autobiography by Myles Horton. Myles Horton was the founder of the Highlander Folk School and one of the key players in fueling the Labor Movement and the Civil Rights movement with the goal of loving others by helping them help their communities. Show notes for this episode can be found at amidonplanet.com/episode102 (https://amidonplanet.com/episode102/)
In today's episode, we talk with Dr. Joe Curnow, currently an assistant professor at the University of Manitoba. Joe studies the learning that happens as people participate in social movements. Our conversation begins with Joe recounting her early days as an undergraduate student at Northwestern, as an organizer on Chicago's north side, and working on fair trade policies in Washington, DC. She talks about how she became politicized and started to see that the issues she cared about were really just indicators and outcomes of larger societal issues in our economy and trade policies. We focus a good chunk of our time talking about her most recent work, including the article called Politicization and Process: Developing Political Concepts, Practices, Epistemologies, and Identities Through Activist Engagement. That article, among others, came out of her efforts to describe the learning processes she saw happening. We also talk about the relationship between organizing, learning, and taking action. Much of this is contextualized in a book that's been formative for her career called We Make a Road by Walking. The book is a transcript of a facilitated conversation between Myles Horton and Paulo Freire. Episode transcript. Works discussed: 1. Horton, M., & Freire, P. (1990). We make the road by walking: Conversations on education and social change. Temple University Press. 2. Curnow, J., Fernandes, T., Dunphy, S., & Asher, L. (2020). Pedagogies of Snark: Learning through Righteous, Riotous Anger in the Youth Climate Movement. Gender & Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2020.1786014. 3. Curnow, J., Davis, A., & Asher, L. (2019). Politicization in Process: Developing Political Concepts, Practices, Epistemologies, and Identities Through Activist Engagement. American Educational Research Journal. 56(3) 716-752. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831218804496
In this first episode of Series 4, Peter Westoby and Tina (Athena) Lathouras explore the role of traditions and wisdom's/mantra's in thinking about, and reflecting on community development practice. We focus on the popular education tradition, particularly Myles Horton contribution - and the mantra of 'education first, organising second'.
Rev. Dr. Randy Woodley, PhD is an activist/scholar, distinguished teacher and wisdom keeper who addresses a variety of issues concerning American culture, faith/spirituality, justice, race/diversity, regenerative farming, our relationship with the earth and Indigenous realities. His expertise has been sought in national venues such as Time Magazine, The Huffington Post and Christianity Today. Dr. Woodley currently serves as Distinguished Professor of Faith and Culture at Portland Seminary. He served for several years on the Oregon Dept. of Education, American Indian/Alaska Native Advisory Council. Randy was raised near Detroit, Michigan and is a Cherokee descendent recognized by the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma. Randy co-hosts the Peacing it all Together podcast with Bo Sanders. Author of several books include "Decolonizing Evangelicalism" which we discuss in this episode. Connect and support the work that Randy is doing: www.randywoodley.comwww.eloheh.org www.elohehseeds.comRandy lives south of Portland in Yam Hill, Oregon where he and his wife have a 10-acre farm where they house the Eloheh Center for Earth Justice. He said it is on the illegally and unethically seated land the Kalapuya People, particularly the Yamhill and Tualatin bands. The Woodleys have been in the area since 2008 and are just “enjoying climate change in Oregon” which is teaching them how to do regenerative farming under stressful conditions. “We're learning all the time.”Maggie asked Randy how he has seen the major cultural shift and what he thinks is happening and we're seeing the response to Breonna Taylor's murder, the many other lynchings [of men and women of color], and all that is going with people battling against Critical Race Theory. The book he wrote “Decolonizing Evangelicalism” with his podcast partner Bo Sanders and it came out during COVID so it hasn't really been publicized or promoted. It's written in like a conversation, and they've been taking theology and social issues ever since Bo was a seminary student of his back in 2008. They wrote the book this way both because that is how their relationship is (conversation) and in the style of one of his favorite books; “We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change” by Myles Horton and Paulo Freire. We talk about Critical Race Theory in the book; Randy says “I do it” and Bo explains it. Our book would now be banned from a number of seminaries and institutions around the country, it will not be allowed to use the book as a reference [because it uses Critical Race Theory to examine theology].Randy says Critical Race Theory is the current “bugaboo” and it is endemic of all the other right wing, white supremacist reactions to People of Color coming into their own and the popularization of the unjust deaths of members of the BIPOC community. Social media has done a lot to inform people but in our [BIPOC] communities, people have been dying unjustly for hundreds of years. “There's nothing different it's just people are finding out about it now.” It's important, Randy believes, that as we are learning [about the unjust deaths], that what we are finding is that all the systems and our country were founded in white supremacy. Randy acknowledges that there are other things behind that, including the Western worldview and patriarchy, but he says the white supremacy that founded the systems in our country—education, economic and social systems—are all bent towards the benefit and privilege of white males. “So the system itself has not really changed a lot; it looks a little more kinder than it used to under enslavement or genocide but the idea is still the same: People of color, and oftentimes women and others—the cultural or racial or gender other—are [seen as] a subcategory of humanity as opposed to white folks, especially white males of prominence.” Randy says Critical Race Theory gets at the heart of that; it says, there is a systemic problem that we have to deal with. “And a systemic problem means that all of us have to deal with it together. It's not just up to white folks or People of Color, it's like we all have to do this together in order change this system.” Randy believes that what the Right has done is taken away the ability for us to talk about that in a systemic way. “America by the way is, and we could go into the history of this as well, is one of the most individualistic nations that has probably ever existed in the history of humanity.”Randy says everyone wants to talk about whether this one person is a racist or not. “I don't even deal with that... I'm more interested in dismantling the systems that are corrupt with racism.” Randy believes that this Right reaction to everything that is going on is actually a way to stop us from talking about systemic racism. It's very akin, Randy says, to the 1840 Gag Rules when they wouldn't allow congress to talk about slavery. “It's that: you're not going to fix the problem if you can't talk about it.” It keeps the homeostasis, security and benefits for those in power. Danielle finds herself in the system. She is a licensed Mental Health therapist in the state of Washington, and she believes it's a system that is created for someone unlike her. When she is caring for a person of color and she expands her care to include the culture and community, because she is located in community, it is a threat to her profession. The psychological structure of the system…. is not created to deal with more than just the individual. She asks, “what do you do when the individual presents symptomology and harm that is happening from the system? How do I move in the world and not address the system and yet say I am caring for my client? And yet to address the system from my position its often say that you've stepped out the bounds of therapy.” She feels the bind and it's excoriating to find paths forward and to know who is safe to talk to and engage. “Being present with my clients is also, I believe for me and my location, is fighting the system that is also harming them.”Randy adds, “It's not set up to deal with intergenerational trauma.” He says, some estimate that 100% of Native folks have intergenerational trauma or post-colonial stress syndrome. African American folks have intergenerational trauma from enslavement. “It's not like these are one-time things; It is the residual from them keeps coming at us time after time after time.” Randy said it's through people like Danielle, People of Color, who are getting into places of influence and be innovative and can begin to change the system. Maggie asks what does it look like to bridge the gap between working with individuals and working with systems? She mentions she thought one interesting and thought-provoking part of his book (Decolonizing Evangelicalism) was about the idea that we have to start with “re-verbaging” some of the terms that we think we are sharing a mutual definition or understanding about, when in fact are not. She was surprised at some of the words on his list. When we thinking about the word Evangelicalism, it encompasses a long history of shifting beliefs. She asks Randy to explore and explain what he means by deconstructing and reconstructing, which he has as almost two sides to the same coin. Randy says, “I'm not going to assume anyone's age here. I wouldn't do that out of fear. But I will tell you where I'm at: I'm a baby boomer. And my generation has a lot of culpability in some of the things that are going wrong right now. But one of the things that was different in my generations, I'm on one of the younger baby boomers, is that we said we don't want our parent's paradigm. That's a bad paradigm … We were good at critiquing it but we just were very good at fixing it.” He believes one exciting thing we are seeing right now, and one of the other influences in this reaction and why we are seeing so much happen, is how the millennials are giving him a lot of hope. He said they are the first ones to come along and say, “We want a different paradigm! We don't want what was handed to us by our parents and grandparents! We don't want racism! We don't want homophobia! We don't want women to have 73 cents on the dollar and men to be paid a dollar for their wages. We don't want a dirty nasty climate changing earth.” He believes that Millennials have the communication tools to actually communicate and critique, they are great at critiquing—maybe sometimes are too cynical but I guess if that's what it takes to get there that's okay—but question is; “Are they going be able to fix it?” He does see a lot of activism coming out of millennials and it excites him because he believes that is one of the reasons we are seeing the wide-spread reaction and it's pulling those Gen Xers and Baby Boomers back in to have hope again. “Our future is depending on that. The government is not going to fix this unless we make the government fix it. And the generation that is the impetus behind this, the catalyst, is the Millennials. Maggie says it is easy to sit on one side and criticize but then not offer anything to replace it and grow it. It is the reconstructing after deconstructing then how helpful is that going to be. Randy says, “So basically we have to deconstruct everything. We have to look at every system that was created basically by—and I'm simplifying to its simplest terms—white males who sat at the table and said here's the way it's going to be for everybody. And now we need to basically over turn the table, build a new table together, and have everybody represented at that table and decide what these systems are going to be.” That reconstruction comes after the critique (deconstruction) and we see resistance to the critique in the like the resistance to critical race theory. Until we can really critique and understand it, listen to the those who have been oppressed etc., we can't move forward. “It's not something we can start from the same DNA and end up with a different child. That's not going to happen. It has to start from a new DNA.” There's no formula, and this is the scary part. Structures want formulas. They want to know what are the steps. Every step, every community, every law and every system has to become what Randy calls “organizing chaos.” He sees that chaos as a way of moving things that are out there, all the moving parts back together, and it will look different in different places with different people involved. One of the pitfalls, Randy says, is people's demand to have a basis for reconstruction. That is the scariest part and the part you have to take by faith and say, “If we're all moving together in the right direction, we're going to end up with the right thing.” But, Randy says, it's going to take everyone: insiders and outsiders, lots of diversity, so that we end up with something that is good for all of us, the common good. Danielle has been thinking from a psychological perspective about whiteness and what it takes to create the bent towards the “standard,” speaking very generally about the system that is bent towards white male privilege. She recalls a training/immersion program that she attended in the South on the subject of race. She heard a story of a lynching that was after church where entire families were in attendance. She saw a picture of a father with a hat on holding his young child, maybe 2 years old, and then with his other hand attached to another small child on the ground. Knowing from the way we are created, the way that the Creator created us, that those children would know that they were witnessing horror. And in the moment of witnessing horror, to have a caregiver who is celebrating there would be a deep sense of fragmentation and create a legacy that would be enforced in the schools with teaching around race and segregation. Or to have the horror reenforced at church. That fragmentation is then passed down.With this fragmentation in mind, Danielle wonders about deconstruction. When everything is already so fragmented, what has actually been constructed? Danielle feels like she witnesses lights come on and she sees the fragmentation and asks “how do we welcome those fragments back home? How do we rebuild something that's so fragmented?” She says it's the ability to hold things in the air while not knowing how they will land and to wait and see how they will land. It's that faith component that Randy is talking about. Randy says as a nation we have myths about our identity, who we are. Those myths need to be taken apart and deconstructed. He says truth must be interjected into them. Sometimes these myths are partially true, and sometimes they aren't true at all. But they all fit into our national mythos. When we allow those things to be taught and spread, it does something to our souls. “If you are not in the myth as the winning character, it grinds on your soul.” He believes it will also grind on the winners because it dehumanizes them: It creates in them the sense that others are less than human, and that dehumanizes the person who sees others that way as well. We all need to be freed from those myths. In the midst of all this, Randy says he holds on to his faith. “I believe there is a Creator who is ultimately wanting the best for everyone. And while we may disagree about all the theologies and who that is and everything else, I'm still looking at the Creator in faith to say, ‘There is a force beyond humanity that is rooting, if nothing else, for use to treat each as equals and kindly.'” This he says is helpful to him personally.Maggie says what he is saying harkens back to an idea from his book about hospitality. She was struck by a part in the book where he says hate isn't the opposite of love; the opposite of love is more like indifference or apathy or disconnection. The Creator that he just talked about wants us to belong to each other, to have a sense of togetherness, and Maggie asked Randy to talk more about the idea of hospitality and what that looks like.Randy says the Northwest is an interesting place to think about hospitality. He's heard of “Seattle nice” or “Portland nice.” The saying goes, “People will give you directions to anywhere except for their own home.” Randy believes that it is in our own homes where we reveal ourselves to others and allow them the comfort to reveal themselves to us. Homes are the places where we can build those kinds of relationships that are necessary for us to treat each other as humans. Hospitality, he talks about the Indigenous “Harmony Way,” in the Biblical way it would be called “Shalom.” It is the ethos among Indigenous people all over the world is this sense of hospitality. Randy says there are many cultures in the world [geographically and historically] where you have to feed your enemy: You have to give them a day's ration and help them on their way. This is the case with Native America as well. The strangers were taken in and feed, given a night's sleep and sent on their way so they could live another day. Randy thinks it is a really bad sign when we start to see hospitality disappearing out of a culture. He says we really need to get back in each other's homes again. We all live inside each other's home. Randy mentions one of the crazy theologies that came out of the passage where Jesus said [in Matthew 19:29], Anyone who leaves their father and mother for my sake, will inherit 100-fold mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers and houses and homes. The faith people in the 80s turned that into a “name it and claim it.” But he says all that is talking about is hospitality: we become family when we come into each other's homes. “The whole New Testament is based on that Shalom principle of hospitality and being there for another and loving one another.” Randy mentions 1 Peter 4:8-9 as one of the best places that talks about this: It says above all love because love covers a multitude of sins. But it's the next line after this shotgun blast of love is: and don't neglect to be hospitable to one another. And when you invite people in your home, don't complain. Everyone has gifts they were given from Creator, share them with one another. He says we see this over and over again in various passage throughout the New Testament. Certainly, he says, followers of Jesus should be practicing this kind of hospitality, but really this is what all human beings should be doing as well. Danielle says her husband is Mexican and if you show up, you're going to get food. They are going to cook if you show up; you will not leave without food. If you say no, that's not going to be good for you. Randy says there's no such thing as Indians gathering without food. That's s unheard of. He says, “I know the same is true for many cultures. And we always laugh when we go to a White people's event because there will be some sort of small hors d'oeuvre or a bunch of desserts.” He laughs and says “You know, people actually get along better when you eat with each other, and actually eat good food. That's known all over the world except for some cultures in America that's not the case.” He expands to say that is not true of all ethnic cultures that are white cultures—he has some Italian friends where that is not true. Food and hospitality, Randy believes, are a part of loving one another and building relationships. Danielle says there is so much hope in the idea of coming together around a meal. Her family has lived in a lot of tension around identity and she says, “so being familiar with the tension, from ethnicities that hold a lot of tension, we have a lot to offer in leading forward because we have lived a long time in that chaos.” Randy said there was a meme going around Native America a year or two ago that said, if we have intergenerational trauma, and we do, then we also hold within our DNA intergenerational hope and survival. We've survived and there are reasons we have survived. Randy believes that any persecuted or oppressed minority that has survived has things to teach everyone else and some of those are about hospitality.Maggie adds there is a vulnerability to having someone in your home, or being in someone else's home. She recalls in Randy's book that he mentions that hospitality is not about just having the same people in your homes, the people you like to have meals with. There's an additional piece—are we going to take in the strangers and feed them so they can live another day? And are we going to have conversations with people that are different than us, that think differently and look differently? Hospitality then is engaging people that are different than us and are we willing to do it in our homes?Randy says because we are all colonized to one degree or another, there are plenty of people who look differently than us but think exactly like us. And that's always the challenge and Randy names higher education as one of the major culprits of hiring brown people who think white because it looks like diversity. “That's not people who think differently than us. Again, if you start with the same DNA you end up with the same kids.”Danielle says we need to keep having the conversations, keep doing the work, and keep having people in our homes. She says it has to be practical in her own life, it has to be an embodied place that we can pass down. It can't be paper activism or screen activism. Besides all the death and sickness, Randy says the worse part about COVID is that we can't really be in each other's homes the way we want to be. For all his married life, and he's been married for 31 years, he and his wife Edith have had an open home. He said it was always unusual if a month goes by and they've not had people in their home eating with them. When people ask him what they do at Eloheh, he replies we just provide hospitality to people. It's been difficult during COVID but for the first time they gathered people, with masks and distancing, and he and his wife remarked at how nice it was to have people there to visit. He says he can't wait until COVID is over and there can be a return to some form of normality, though he acknowledges it seems like it won't ever go back to the way things always have been. Maggie adds that while we have the desire to do these things—have people over again—but we need to reimagine what they look like under our current circumstance. And right now that looks like gathering outside or with masks on. We must still be activity seeking to be people, places and homes that are open and hospitable in this season. Randy says, I miss that. Danielle does too; “I felt that acutely.”Randy says it was horrible that in the beginning they went months without seeing their own grandkids. Danielle adds, yes that is horrible. There's a sense of not know whether your body or their bodies are a source of danger. And knowing that you need one another. As we wrap up, Danielle asked about Randy's new books and how can people get in touch with him:To find out more about what Randy and his wife Edith are doing at the Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice you can visit: www.eloheh.org If you would like to order seeds from them, all organic, open pollinated seeds, you can visit:www.elohehseeds.comIf you want to book Randy to speak at your event you can go to: www.randywoodley.comOr connect via email: eloheh@gmail.com If you haven't read his most recent book that came out: Decolonizing EvangelicalismNew books coming out:January 4th, 2022: Becoming Rooted: One Hundred Days of Reconnecting with Sacred EarthApril 19th, 2022: Indigenous Theology and the Western Worldview: A Decolonized Approach to Christian DoctrineNo date: Mission and the Cultural Other: A Closer View“Peaching It All Together” Podcast with Randy Woodley and Bo SandersRandy is reading: "Jesus and Non-Violence" by Walter Wink, "Open and Relational Theology" by Thomas Jay Oord, "Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents" by Margaret Kimberley, "Mycelium Running: How mushrooms can save the world" by Paul StametsRandy is listening to: All My Relations Podcast hosted by Matika Wilbur (Swinomish and Tulalip) and Adrienne Keene (Cherokee Nation), "Medicine for the Resistance" Podcast hosted by an Anishnaabe kwe and an Afro mysticRandy is inspired by: Millennials who are giving him hope and his Elders who are passing down shared wisdom.
First broadcast on June 08, 1973. Rosa Parks and Myles Horton discuss the importance of the Highlander Folk School, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the American Civil Rights Movement. The story of these two prominent figures of the Civil Rights Movement have intervened in their fight for social equality. Includes a fragment of an interview with E. D. Nixon well known civil rights leader.
A common piece of career advice is to bring your whole self to work. But what if your whole self includes a deep concern for the climate? Can you bring that part of yourself to work, even if it makes your workplace uncomfortable? This week we talked to a couple of people, Emily Cunningham and Eliza Pan, who had that same question. They were deeply concerned about the climate crisis and they felt that their workplace, Amazon - yes that one - was part of the problem. So they, along with some of their coworkers, decided to bring their concerns about climate change into the office. This week we learn how Amazon workers pushed the company to act on climate change, how effective it was, and what lessons the rest of us can learn from them. Guests: Emily Cunningham and Eliza Pan Take Action Find out what your company is already doing to address climate change. How does what they are doing compare to other organizations in their space? Could they be doing more? Start talking to your coworkers about climate change. Find the people in your organization who are interested in finding ways to help your company lower its carbon footprint. Connect with groups in your area that are organizing about climate change. Some places to start looking might be your local chapter of 350.org, and check out this list for more suggestions. Learn More Read the open that Amazon Employees for Climate Justice wrote to Jeff Bezos Eliza recommends the book The Long Haul by Myles Horton (who we also mentioned in our episode, Where's our Climate Anthem) Check out Amazon Employee's for Climate Justice's efforts on their website Read the full letter that former Amazon VP Tim Bray wrote about why he resigned in the wake of Amazon terminating some of its employees Read Amazon's climate pledge If you take an action we recommend in one of our episodes, do us a favor and tell us about it! We’d love to hear how it went and what it felt like. Record a short voice memo on your phone and send it to us via our Listener Mail Form. We might use it in an upcoming episode. Check out our Calls to Action archive for all of the actions we've recommended on the show. Sign up for our newsletter here. And follow us on Twitter and Instagram. Credits: This episode of How to Save a Planet was produced by Kendra Pierre-Louis. The rest of our reporting and producing team includes Rachel Waldholz and Anna Ladd. Our intern is Ayo Oti. Our senior producer is Lauren Silverman. Our editor is Caitlin Kenney. Sound design and mixing by Peter Leonard with original music from Emma Munger. Super special thanks to Rachel Strom for helping with this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
This episode focuses on popular education, discussing what it is and why it's key to good democratic organizing with Ernesto Cortes, Jr. Alongside organized money, organized people, and organized action, building power to effect change requires organized knowledge. Organized knowledge generates the frameworks of analysis and understanding through which to re-narrate and reimagine the world, destabilizing the dominant scripts and ideas that legitimate oppression. But rather than be driven by ideological concerns, popular education as an approach to organizing knowledge begins with addressing and seeking to solve real problems people face where they live and work. This entails informal, self-organized forms of learning. Another way to frame popular education is as a grounded approach to addressing the epistemic or knowledge-based dimensions of injustice and creating policies that put people before top-down programs of social engineering (whether of the left or the right).GuestErnesto Cortes, Jr. is currently National Co-Director of the Industrial Areas Foundation and executive director of its West / Southwest regional network. Beginning in the United Farmworker Movement, he has been organizing in one form or another for nearly half a century, helping to organize or initiate innumerable organizing efforts and campaigns. The organizing work he did in San Antonia in the 1970s in many ways set the template for community organizing coalitions in the IAF thereafter. The fruits of his work have been much studied and he has been recognized with numerous awards and academic fellowships, including a MacArther Fellowship in 1984, a Heinz Award in public policy in 1999, and an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Princeton University in 2009.Resources for Going DeeperSaul Alinsky, “Popular Education,” Reveille for Radicals (various editions), Ch. 9; Charles Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: the Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle(University of California Press, 1995), Ch. 3. Details the organizing and popular educational work of Septima Clark, Ella Baker, and Myles Horton in the formation of the civil rights movement; Myles Horton and Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change (Temple University Press, 1990); Stephen Brookfield and Stephen Presskill, Learning as a Way of Leading: Lessons from the Struggle for Social Justice (Jossey-Bass, 2008), see especially Chapters 4 & 5;Michael Oakshott, “Political Education,” The Voice of Liberal Learning (Yale University Press, 1989), 159-188.
The Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia, a collective of independent podcasts from PRX. A note on notes: We’d much rather you just went into each episode of The Memory Palace cold. And just let the story take you where it well. So, we don’t suggest looking into the show notes first. Music Them by Nils Frahm Feathers by Poppy Ackroyd Notes You can read Myles Horton’s book. I found The Birth of Citizen Schools: Entwining the Struggles for Literacy and Freedom by David P. Levine particularly useful. And especially Clare Russell’s “A Beautician Without Teacher Training: Bernice Robinson, Citizen Schools and women in the Civil Rights Movement.”
The Transdev strike is now entering its third week with no end in sight. Today’s labor history: general strike by building trades workers in eastern Massachusetts. Today’s labor quote by Myles Horton.
This week on Nice Games Club we talk all about the labor of love that is making games for a living: how it can be great, how it can be not-so-great and how it could get better. Mark reports back from a conference, Martha gets on her soap box and Stephen realizes this podcast has been about documenting his career journey this entire time.Joggernauts by local developer Space Mace is on Steam and Switch!Joggernauts soundtrack by Robert Frost IIIAdobe MAX Game Dev as a Day Job 0:11:44 Stephen McGregorIRLStephen works at Gamesmart!Glitch Jobs BoardGamasutra Jobs Board - Game Developer Unions 0:38:53 Martha MegarryIRLTwin Cities Labor ChorusTelltale hit with class-action lawsuit for breaking labor laws - Samit Sarkar, PolygonInside Rockstar Games' Culture Of Crunch - Jason Schreier, KotakuVox UnionGame Workers UniteIt's Time For Game Developers To Unionize - Jason Schreier, KotakuOpinion: Now is the time to unionize the game industry - Katherine Cross, Game DeveloperMyles Horton - 20th Century Union Organizer - WikipediaUnions Must Address Racism - Ian Haney Lopez, AFL-CIO Blog
This week on StoryWeb: Helen Matthews Lewis’s book Living Social Justice in Appalachia. In honor of International Women’s Day, coming up this Wednesday, I want to pay tribute to one of the great teachers of my life, Helen Matthews Lewis. Known fondly as the mother or grandmother of Appalachian studies by the many people whose personal and professional lives she has touched, Helen – as always – modestly denies this title, saying instead that other leaders gave birth to and shaped the interdisciplinary movement. But as her colleague Stephen L. Fisher points out, “there is little question that her program at Clinch Valley College [in Virginia] served as the major catalyst for the current Appalachian studies movement and that no one has done more over the years to shape its direction than Helen.” For me, as for so many others, Helen set the standard for engaged scholarship, activist teaching, and pure regional enjoyment – whether that region is Appalachia or Wales or southern Africa. Helen weaves it all together: she revels in learning, delights in talking with and listening to everyone she meets, energetically taps her foot at bluegrass and sings gospel songs with unbridled glee. It’s perfect, then, that her 2012 book, Living Social Justice in Appalachia, is a quilt of her writings (essays, articles, and poems), her reflections given through numerous interviews, pieces others wrote about her influence on them, photographs of Helen at key times in her life, and even her famous recipes (including instructions for making chowchow, one of my grandmother’s favorite foods). Longtime friends and colleagues Patricia D. Beaver and Judith Jennings edited the volume, working with Helen to bring to life the many facets of her career and her personal journey. How do you separate the lived self from the professional self? In Helen’s mind, you don’t – and Living Social Justice in Appalachia in its form and in its very title makes clear that the personal, professional, and political are tightly fused. I’ve spoken before on StoryWeb of the special and powerful way I met Helen – in a series of visits to the Highlander Research and Education Center, founded by Myles Horton and located in New Market, Tennessee. In Appalachian studies circles, it is not at all uncommon to hear of the way Helen has touched someone’s life. In my case, she actively encouraged me to embrace participatory, liberatory teaching and offered a much-needed critical and supportive eye to my memoir, Power in the Blood, when it was just starting to form in my mind. I thought I was writing a novel. Helen gently disagreed, telling me she thought I was writing “cultural and family history told in a narrative form.” We had that conversation one afternoon at her home in Highlander. Her comment crystallized the entire project for me and remains one of the most important discussions of my life. The time I spent with Helen at Highlander was always special, whether we were tending to her garden, watching videotapes of Bill Moyers interviewing Myles Horton on the back porch of what was now Helen’s home, or chatting with friend after friend and colleague after colleague who stopped by to say hello. Helen can whip up a mean cocktail, and she was always at the ready to welcome her frequent visitors. One of my favorite stories about Helen involves a leadership award she won in the 1990s. The organization giving her the award commissioned an artist to create a small sculpture in Helen’s honor. Rather than giving her a standard trophy, the organization wanted to capture the spirit of Helen’s example. The sculpture depicted a figure leading a line of figures behind her. Looking back over her shoulder at those following her, the figure’s face is a mirror: she understands that real leadership is about reflecting back to each “follower” her own image, her own potential. This small sculpture – which Helen displayed proudly in her home at Highlander – perfectly summed up Helen’s way of leading. Helen has lived a lot of life in her ninety-plus years. She was born in rural Georgia and raised in Cumming (notorious for its extremely racist views and brutal treatment of African Americans), attended the Georgia State College for Women (along with her classmate and fellow yearbook editor, Mary Flannery O’Connor, who drew the illustrations to accompany Helen’s text), and became radicalized through the church and through state political activities. Attending graduate school at Duke University, she met her future husband, Judd Lewis, and then moved with him to Virginia. After a teaching stint at East Tennessee State University and a PhD in sociology from the University of Kentucky, Helen was divorced from Judd. From there, she traveled the world, exploring the connection between working people and participatory education in Appalachia, Wales, Nicaragua, Cuba, Holland, Belgium, France, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa. She’s been let go from more than one teaching position, no doubt due to the empowering, engaged pedagogy she practiced. She’s directed Highlander and the Appalachian Center at Berea College. She’s worked at AppalShop in Whitesburg, Kentucky, and co-led community-based, participatory research in Ivanhoe, Virginia. She’s received a commendation from the Kentucky state legislature and been the recipient of honorary degrees. She’s had awards, study experiences, and lecture series named in her honor. And along the way, more than anything else, she has lifted up those she has met, provided that empowering mirror so that everyone in her field of vision sees all the potential they have inside. If you know Helen or her work, reading Living Social Justice in Appalachia will be a real treat. It brings our colleague and friend to life in such vivid ways. If you don’t know Helen or her work, reading Living Social Justice in Appalachia will give you the chance to “meet” one of the great thinkers, teachers, and leaders of our time. The book is a fantastic read from beginning to end, whether you’re jotting down her notes for growing a great garden or mixing up an old fashioned from her recipe (which specifies that you should make just one glass at a time!), whether you’re learning about how she developed anti-racist consciousness or reading first-hand accounts of those whose lives she’s touched. In the end, Helen understands that it all comes back to story. She believes strongly in telling the story of Appalachia, her region, and she believes in hearing and celebrating the stories of other folks in other regions. With StoryWeb, I celebrate stories of all kinds – and I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Helen Matthews Lewis for helping me see the value of stories. “Why am I here?” she asks near the end of the book. What is my story? Which story do I tell? Everybody and every community, place, and region needs stories, narratives, tales, and theories to serve as moral and intellectual frameworks. Without a “story,” we don’t know what things mean…. We are swamped by the volume of our own experience, adrift in a sea of facts. A story gives us a direction, a kind of theory of how the world works and how it needs to work if we are to survive. . . . We need to take back our stories. Visit thestoryweb.com/lewis to view “Keep Your Eye Upon the Scale,” a short documentary film about Helen’s exploration of the connections between coal miners in Appalachia and those in Wales. A recent interview with Helen is woven throughout the film, and you’ll also see her collaborators on the project, John Gaventa (an American political sociologist) and Richard Greatex (a British filmmaker). Those who follow old-time and bluegrass music will be especially interested to see the appearance of the Strange Creek Singers: Hazel Dickens, Alice Gerrard, Mike Seeger, and Tracy Schwarz. They came from Appalachia to Wales to share American coal mining music with the Welsh miners. Helen Matthews Lewis’s Living Social Justice in Appalachia is one good story. I highly recommend it.
We make no claim to know everything. But what we do know is there is change happening in the education system, both good and bad, and the options are limited but simple: You can either fight it or you can figure out a way to positively affect that change. Adam and Patrick sit down to discuss not just some of the changes that are currently happening and why, but also to discuss how and why we here at MakingComics.com plan on being part of that change. To some our goals may seem lofty. To us, it's an opportunity to assist in making a difference and learning in an artistic and creative manner. Click play or download this week's Gutter Talk episode to understand why we feel that is so important and worth the effort. Interesting Links: Patrick Yurick's Portfolio (Follow him @patrickyurick) Broken Airplane A Nation at Risk, article Patrick mentioned Adam Greenfield (@SDGreeny) Also Interesting Links: The artist Chikle Tabula Rasa "Beautiful Brain" an article on updates to neuroscience on the evolution of the teenage brain put out by National Geographic Magazine Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs: Further Readings: "We Make the Road By Walking: Conversations On Education And Social Change" by Myles Horton & Paulo Friere "Pedagogy Of The Oppressed" by Paulo Friere "No More Secondhand Art: Awakening The Artist Within" by Peter London "Deschooling Society" Ivan Illich Videos to check out: "The Tribes We Lead" by Seth Godin "Did You Know?" by Karl Fisch & Scott McCloud Intro & Outro Song: "RetroFuture Clean" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Outro Song Behind Vocals: "Backed Vibes (clean)" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Transitions: InceptionBrassHitMedium.wav: Herbert Boland / www.freesound.org Old Fashion Radio Jingle 2.wav: club sound / www.freesound.org
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