Chuck Collins at Yes! Magazine writes—How to Go the Resistance Distance: Pop-Up Schools for Novice Activists:
More than 200 people crammed into a meeting room at Smith College to listen to Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum speak at the May 4 opening ceremony of the Sojourner Truth School for Social Change Leadership. The new school provides in-person training opportunities in activism in five cities throughout Western Massachusetts.
“We need the Sojourner Truth School to lift us out of the deep funk that many of us have felt since the election of 2016,” said Tatum, president emerita of Spelman College and author of several bestselling books on the psychology of racism. “Ordinary people can get this started and make an impact.”
Since the Trump election, there has been an outpouring of interest in engaging with politics and social movements—and a hunger to learn new skills. The Truth School is one of a number of schools cropping up recently to train people to become activists in social change movements.
The Rev. Andrea Ayvazian co-founded the school and said the idea was to create a “school that teaches movement building skills—a ‘pop-up’ school that teaches useful skills to those seeking to resist Trump’s authoritarianism.” She said she hopes the school will “help us cling to democracy during the Trump years.” [...]
This outpouring of energy is reminiscent of similar activist schools that formed during the Civil Rights movement. In the late 1950s and into the 1960s, Citizenship Schools were established in a number of states throughout the south to overcome barriers to voter registration. And in 1964, more than 40 Freedom Schools popped up throughout Mississippi to provide youth with basic education courses in literacy and math, for example, but also in Black history, civic engagement, and leadership.
According to an article by Marian Wright Edelman, “… volunteers were trained to teach in these [Freedom Schools] held in church basements, on back porches, in parks, and even under trees.” Edelman worked as an attorney in 1964 in Mississippi. “I remember visiting a Freedom School under a tall old oak tree in Greenwood, Mississippi, and hearing Pete Seeger sing,” she wrote. [...]
TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES
QUOTATION
“Let us put aside resolutely that great fright, tenderly and without malice, daring to be wrong in something important rather than right in some meticulous banality, fearing no evil while the mind is free to search, imagine, and conclude, inviting our countrymen to try other instruments than coercion and suppression in the effort to meet destiny with triumph, genially suspecting that no creed yet calendared in the annals of politics mirrors the doomful possibilities of infinity.”
~Charles A. Beard, 1931
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2003—McKiernan’s dilemma:
Lt. Gen David McKiernan faces a problem as old as Iraq: how to keep the tribes and various factions under control.
His methods have involved sweeps and nightly patrols in a war which may go on as long as Americans are in Iraq.
The White House and Defense Department are using loaded words like terrorists and Baathists, which may sound nice on Fox News, but does little to explain how complex the politics of Iraq are.
One must keep in mind Saddam used a complex series of bribes and a secret police establishment to work his magic. He rarely acted overtly, except when needed. But even he couldn't prevent a full-scale Shia uprising and many of the secret dead come from that period.
The US faces a grim series of realities and some military choices.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, it was a helluva morning not to be on live, but we did catch up on some critical stories: That Alex Jones interview. Those Trump bots. The secret AHCA bill and who gets screwed by it and how. And the Kansas tax miracle: lessons learned, or excuses not yet made?
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