WATERLOO, Iowa -- Disadvantaged students in one of Iowa's largest cities will get the chance to build reading skills through a more robust telling of Black American history.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, received acclaim for her initiative with The New York Times called the 1619 Project. The 2019 essay was inspired by the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved Africans sold into English colonies.

A separate effort called 1619 Freedom School is now coming to Hannah-Jones' hometown of Waterloo.

She said the free after-school program is a way to give back to the community, especially for students who haven't been given opportunities to thrive.

"I think this intervention is necessary because we can just look at the test scores of Black students, particularly low-income Black students in Waterloo, as compared to white students, and see there's a failure happening somewhere," Hannah-Jones contended.

State data showed the graduation rate for Black high school students in Waterloo is 76%, below the statewide average of 91%.

Freedom School does not use government funding and combines local educators with community leaders in identifying younger, marginalized students for the program. It follows Iowa's adoption of a law that bans curriculum deemed controversial, such as Critical Race Theory, even though many observers note that theory isn't taught in most K-12 schools.

Hannah-Jones pointed out there is a lot of intentional misinformation surrounding the debate over Critical Race Theory and the pushback against expanding the teaching of Black history. She stressed her initiative has nothing to do with race theory found in college classrooms. She's focused on inspiring younger Black students.

"The research actually is pretty clear on this, that Black students who are exposed to Black history do better academically," Hannah-Jones explained.

She added while they aim to reach Black students who are struggling with reading, the program is available to all students. There are no current plans for Freedom Schools elsewhere in Iowa, but Hannah-Jones stated she hopes leaders in other communities replicate the program.

SIMSBURY, Conn. - A northern Connecticut town now owns a former tobacco farm where Martin Luther King Jr. spent some of his teenage years.

More than 75 years ago, the 288 acre Meadowood property in Simsbury partnered with Atlanta's Morehouse College to send students to work on the farm to pay tuition. MLK later described it as an early moment where he had "an inescapable urge to serve society."

Through a ballot measure in May, Simsbury residents overwhelmingly voted to purchase and preserve the land. Already partially lost to subdivision, Simsbury First Selectman Eric Wellman said the town hopes to tell the whole history of Meadowood.

"His time in Simsbury helped inform some of the modern civil rights movement," said Wellman. "And this project makes sense whether you're interested in historic preservation or the environment, or even preserving agriculture in Connecticut."

Through grant funding and support from The Trust for Public Land and Connecticut's Historic Preservation Office, Simsbury was able to purchase the land for $2.5 million. One hundred and forty acres will be preserved as recreational open space, with 116 acres for agriculture.

Simsbury has also received a $400,000 grant to preserve and rehabilitate some of the large tobacco barns on the property. Catherine Labadia, staff archaeologist at the State Historic Preservation Office, said it's critical to preserve spaces like Meadowood that are rich with African American history.

"When you have a place like this, where you can touch the past, I think it makes you have a different sense of how the past touches us, how we connect to it," said Labadia. "Who we were, where we've been, how we've come along."

Only 2% of sites on the National Register of Historic Places focus on Black Americans. Simsbury leaders say they'll work with residents on what they'd like to see for Meadowood's future.

They also want to apply for the property to become part of the Connecticut Freedom Trail, which celebrates the state's African American legacy.

RIVERTON, Wyo. - Community and economic-development leaders are gathering in Riverton this week for the 2021 Wyoming Working Together Conference, and advocates for historic preservation will make the case that saving the state's older storefronts, mansions and other structures can help Wyoming recover from the pandemic's economic fallout.

Thomas Tisthammer, president and founder of Wattle & Daub Contractors, has been renovating older buildings since 1978 and said investments in restoration go directly into local economies.

"Most of the money that goes into a restoration project is for labor, and the building materials are already there," he said. "So you're keeping stuff from going into the landfill as well. You're not tearing something down, scraping it off, and building something new."

Tisthammer said restoring historic structures generates $7 in economic activity for every $1 invested. He added that the cost of rehabbing most older buildings is about half the cost of a new building because you start out with at least a foundation, four walls and a roof already in place.

Casper-based architect Lyle Murtha said it's impossible to match the character of a 100-year-old building with new construction, and pointed to Old Stoney, a 100-year-old school in Sundance that sat empty for 40 years before he helped convert it into a museum and cultural center. After the town added an adjacent city park, Murtha said, Old Stoney now is both a community center and tourist destination.

"Once you tear a building down, it's gone forever," he said. "Even if you're rehabilitating it into some other use, at least some of that history, some of the fabric is still there. And I think people appreciate it."

Tisthammer said most people visiting Wyoming come to see the Old West, not a new mall. He noted that key restoration projects in Cheyenne have helped restore the city's historically vibrant downtown core.

"Buildings like the Union Pacific Depot and the Plains Hotel, they're really monumental sorts of buildings," he said. "They were anchors for the local economy, and then they were also places where people got together, they were a social center."

By Sonali Kolhatkar for Yes! Media.
Broadcast version by Lily Bohlke for Commonwealth News Service reporting for the YES! Media-Public News Service Collaboration

Longtime activist and academic Loretta J. Ross is on a mission to "build a culture that invites people in, instead of pushing them out." As she explains in a TED talk she gave earlier this year, she does this by teaching a course she's named, "Calling In the Calling Out Culture in the Age of Trump."

Ross has a long history of social-justice activism that includes fighting against the Ku Klux Klan in the 1990s, co-founding the reproductive justice group SisterSong, writing three books on reproductive rights, and most recently, teaching at Smith College as a visiting associate professor.

In a 2019 op-ed titled, "I'm a Black Feminist. I Think Call-Out Culture Is Toxic," Ross began by admitting, "Today's call-out culture is so seductive, I often have to resist the overwhelming temptation to clap back at people on social media who get on my nerves."

Ross's op-ed was published in the midst of a raging debate over the manner in which public figures are held accountable-usually via social media-for offensive comments or positions. Conservatives in particular complained that "cancel culture" is antithetical to free speech.

The notion that cancel culture is dangerous has gained so much traction in mainstream discourse that the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan denounced it as "a Leftist Offensive." British actor John Cleese recently announced a documentary series called "Cancel Me," based on interviews with people who have been "canceled." And a new Netflix series starring Sandra Oh called "The Chair" examines the pitfalls of a student-led cancellation of a white professor who casually used a Nazi salute in a classroom to illustrate fascism.

The current conservative fixation on cancel culture is part of an ongoing decades-long right-wing push back against "political correctness." During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump said in 2015 that "the big problem this country has is being politically correct." Trump's followers have gone on to rail against political correctness and cancel culture as an assertion of their right to free speech.

Pew Research Center's latest poll on the issue of cancel culture highlighted a partisan split on the issue with conservatives tending to see it as punishment and liberals generally viewing it as a means of accountability. "Calling out," or cancel culture, has been around for millennia. "The original cancellation was Alexander Hamilton getting killed in a duel," Ross said in an interview about her course.

She asserted, "The right cynically uses the concept of being canceled in a very hypocritical way, because they're the originators of the cancel culture." But, according to Ross, "the problem that they have with it now is that the people who were formerly powerless can punch back."

Ross sees power dynamics between the perpetrators and targets of cancel culture as a crucial part of the equation. Those power dynamics determine whether or not targeting people for offensive behavior or language amounts to a just take-down or dangerous mob mentality. Stand-up comedians like Dick Gregory, George Carlin and Chris Rock, who have been unafraid to engage in mockery, have known the difference between "punching up" toward power, versus "punching down" against the powerless.

Unlike the conservative argument against cancel culture that sees any infringement of the right to offend as an attack on free speech, Ross is more concerned about the tendency among some on the left to alienate one another rather than work together for justice. She worries that "cancel culture is toxic when the left overuses it and chooses it as the tool of first resort."

She also worries about the related practice of using "trigger warnings" to alert people about material that might be traumatizing. "I can't tell people what their traumas and triggers are, as I don't have their lived experiences," said Ross, who is a survivor of rape and incest. She addeds, "We can't go around punishing people in the present for the trauma that was inflicted on us in the past."

The practice of calling out people within social-justice movements predates contemporary social media-based public shaming. In white-dominated spaces in particular, people of color have often called out their ostensible allies for actions or words that feel dehumanizing. Sometimes this can lead to fractured movements and infighting between people who have a common goal. "In our pursuit of political purity, we're alienating a lot of our allies, and we're criticizing them for not being 'woke' enough," said Ross.

To help teach her course, Ross recruited movement organizer Loan Tran, who became known for writing "Calling In: A Less Disposable Way of Holding Each Other Accountable", which went viral in 2013. Tran's article ignited a critical conversation about handling internal conflict within social justice spaces.

Rather than calling out people for their offenses, Ross said, "I prefer 'calling in' which is achieving accountability with grace, love and respect as opposed to anger, shame and humiliation." She maintained that, "the human rights movement is not a public therapy space. Its job is to end oppression." Indeed, organizations and institutions are now offering guidance on internal accountability using calling in techniques.

Ross also teaches a six-week online course that mirrors the college-level course she teaches at Smith College but costs a fraction of the amount-part of an effort to make it as widely accessible as possible. Her goal, as per the class description, is "building solidarity to take on white supremacy across different experiences in race, class, and gender."

Any friction within social-justice movements-whether for women, people of color, LGBTQIA+ communities, or immigrants-stands in the way of a unified response to the myriad injustices we face. Ross sees the creation of a calling in culture as critical to the work of building an effective human rights movement, "so that we don't do work against racism in a homophobic way," for example.

In addition to delving into ancient philosophies of conflict resolution such as Confucianism and Ubuntu, Ross' course explores the idea of "democratic speech environments" on college campuses, which were first envisioned by two scholars at Hampshire College. Christopher M. Tinson, associate professor of Africana Studies and History, and Javiera Benavente, program director of the Ethics and the Common Good Project, wrote an article explaining DSEs as "sites of justice-seeking conversation and discourse," which they hope "could be instrumental in shaping healthy, and vital, rather than toxic and indifferent, campus climates."

The course gives students the chance to practice the skills they learn in what Ross calls "Calling In Learning Labs." So far, the six-week course has been so successful that it's in its sixth session within just one year.

Ross also offered specific techniques for calling in allies. As an illustration of how people who have a common goal of social justice can talk to one another when someone makes an offensive statement, Ross suggested asking questions like, "Can we practice when we're together, you not saying those kinds of things?"

In using such an approach, she said, "you lead with love instead of anger."

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This story was produced with original reporting from Sonali Kolhatkar for YES! Media.


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