Friday Video: Preview of Anne Braden: Southern Patriot

Earlier this week, on May 1st, International Worker’s Day,  Appashop released the film,  Anne Braden: Southern Patriot.  Produced by Anne Lewis and Mimi Pickering, Appalshop describes the film as a ”feature length documentary exploring the remarkable legacy of this grassroots organizer, committed journalist, civil rights leader, movement strategist, social chronicler, public intellectual, teacher and mentor to three generations of social justice activists.”

Braden made her home in Kentucky and was branded a communist and seditionist for buying a house in Louisville for an African American family during the Cold War 1954.  Throughout her life she worked toward, as Media Database says, “awakening the consciousness of whites to the legacy of racial injustice, and demonstrated that racism is a social construct that can be deconstructed.”

In this short clip Braden says, “I never knew anybody who really got active because of guilt.  Everybody I know that’s white that’s got involved in this struggle got into it because they glimpsed a different world to live in.  . . Human beings have always been able to envision something better…All through history they’re have been people who have envisioned something better in the most dire situations.  That’s what you want to be a part of.” 

Here’s a three minute sample from the producers.  Follow their facebook page to keep up with all the showings.  If anyone is interested in providing a space to view the film in Little Rock, please contact us! We’ll provide the organizing if you can provide the space! 

Anne Braden: Southern Patriot (1924-2006) — 3 minute sample from Anne Lewis on Vimeo.

Friday Video: Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story.

From PBS.

While in Memphis for the Folklorists in the South retreat we visited the amazing Stax Museum and heard a little bit about working behind the scenes at the museum from Levon Williams, curator of collections.  The visit to Stax was inspiring, and an excellent example of the power of music to work toward change.  So this week’s Friday Video is a trailer from PBS’s 2007 Great Performances presentation, Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story. 

Stax was amazing for many reasons, especially its integrated approach to music in the same town where sanitation workers were paid less-than-human wages, leading to the Sanitation Worker’s Strike which was linked to MLK’s Poor People’s Campaign.   In addition to the genre-altering and community-building music, they also produced documentaries like the Wattstax concert and documentary in Los Angeles,  a film, according to PBS POV, that “captures a heady moment in mid-1970s, “black-is-beautiful” African-American culture, when Los Angeles’s black community came together just seven years after the Watts riots to celebrate its survival and a renewed hope in its future.” To enable everyone a chance to attend, tickets were sold for only a dollar each.  On many levels Stax was a movement a gave birth to a new form of music, soul music,  a raw and transcendent blend of gospel, blues, country, and jazz.

Here’s what PBS says about Stax and this film:

The legacy of Stax Records is a unique one that spans more than half a century. Stax Records is critical in American music history as it’s one of the most popular soul music record labels of all time – second only to Motown in sales and influence, but first in gritty, raw, stripped-down soul music. In 15 years, Stax placed more than 167 hit songs in the Top 100 on the pop charts, and a staggering 243 hits in the Top 100 R&B charts. It launched the careers of such legendary artists as Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, Sam & Dave, Rufus & Carla Thomas, Booker T, & the MGs, and numerous others. Among the many artists who recorded on the various Stax Records labels were the Staple Singers, Luther Ingram, Wilson Pickett, Albert King, Big Star, Jesse Jackson, Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, the Rance Allen Group, and Moms Mabley.

But Stax Records was more than just a label. It was a culture. While segregation was fervently supported in the South during Stax’s formative years in the 1960s, Stax was one of the most successfully integrated companies in the country – from top management and administration to its artists. With more than 200 employees, it was the fifth-largest African-American owned business in the United States during its time.

Teachers should take note that this film comes with a lesson plan including assignments that help students to both identify genres of music and the role Stax played in the community.  Check out the lesson plans by clicking here. 

For more information on the film and viewing options click here.  

The Seed and the Story: Paths of Tradition Bearing

Delegates from the Kentucky Remembers! camps. 2007. Photo by author.

The Seed and the Story is a weekly column exploring folklife, sustainability, oral history, human rights,and community in Yell County, Arkansas.   The column is published in the Post Dispatch and is syndicated in the Courier.  Please remember to support your local paper and independent media!  The Seed and the Story column is just of many features you can find on the Boiled Down Juice.  Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.  If you enjoy our posts, please tell a friend. And thanks for reading.

I recently mentioned the online folklife and oral history class I’ve been teaching and that I’m a big believer that learning should always be multi-directional. Teachers come to class with knowledge and years of study, but engaged students come with open minds, questions, and curiosity, a form of wisdom that is truly under-recognized in our society. This willingness to ask questions and to seek out a greater understanding not only helps students think more deeply about the world around them, but it also encourages the teacher to view their work in new ways. Everyone learns together.

I first noticed this when working with the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights back in 2007. I was the staff oral historian for the Kentucky Remembers! Camps where I helped students prepare to interview community members about the civil rights movement in Kentucky. Our goal was to document some of the lesser-known figures in the movement, the every day people who fought, and are still fighting, for equality. I was there to helps the student do research, conduct interviews, and formulate in-depth questions. I soon discovered, however, that the students were teaching me. Their willingness to be inquisitive, their desire to understand more about their communities, and their willingness to connect the stories of the past with the realities of today helped me to rethink my role as a teacher. And at the end of the camps when I sat down and listened to their interviews with community elders, I began to realize that there’s nothing quite as powerful as the young and the old speaking together.

This is all to say, I’m deeply appreciative of what my students bring to the table. So I want to share one example from my current class. The students have been reading texts and watching videos about various cultural traditions including Laotian weaving, African American gospel, and Ozark Balladry. I’ve asked them to think about the concept of tradition bearers, of being someone in their community who carries traditions from one generation to the next. In the film A Singing Stream, a film by Tom Davenport about African American gospel singing traditions in a North Carolina family, the matriarch of the family, Mrs. Landis, isn’t one of the main singers. But she sees to it that her sons learn to sing, providing them encouragement, surrounding them with singers, and giving them time and space to soak it all in. As one of my students, Jeffrey noted, “It’s her tradition to maintain the tradition.”

His phrase stuck with me. So often people tell me they have nothing to pass down. They can’t cook; they don’t garden; they can’t sew. They’re not tradition bearers, they conclude. Of course, that’s never true. We all have skills worth passing down. That aside, the important point here is that Mrs. Landis didn’t have to be a singer to be a tradition bearer. She opened up her home and assured her sons access to the tradition. We may not all be excellent quilters or know how to speak the language of our foremothers and fathers. But that doesn’t mean we can’t support those who do, partially by making sure the young people in our society gain exposure. The tradition bearers can only carry it on if we help them and the young people won’t know if we don’t tell them. That’s something we can all do.

Please don’t forget about the garden book we’re working on! More information here and here. 

Michael Vinson Williams and Gale Zucker at the Arkansas Literary Festival

The Arkansas Literary Festival is in full swing now, and if you’ve had a chance to look at the schedule you know that’s it jammed packed with options.  We won’t even begin to touch on all the offerings, but make sure you check out the Arkansas Times this week and read, “Arkansas Liteary Festival slate piles it on,” by Leslie Newell Peacock.  She helps break down the dizzying array of options.

We’re super excited about the opportunity to interview two of this years participants whose work touches on many of the themes covered in this blog.  Stay tuned for upcoming posts and radio interviews with these two great authors.  Better yet, check them out in person tomorrow.  Do you have a question you’d like to ask Dr. Williams or Gale Zucker?  Leave a comment below or send an email and I’ll try and include it!

From the Arkansas Literary Festival.

According to the Arkansas Literary Festival, “Michael Vinson Williams earned his PhD in history from the University of Mississippi. His research focuses on sociopolitical resistance movements, black intellectual radicalism, and Civil Rights struggles. He is currently an Assistant Professor of History and African American studies at Mississippi State University and the author of Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr.”  He’ll be speaking at 1:00 at Mosaic Templars Cultural Center at 1:00.

Gale Zucker, a photographer and co-author of the book  Craft Activism: People, Ideas, and Projects from the New Community of Handmade and How you Can Join In, will be speaking tomorrow at 11:00 in the Main Library, third floor.  After that she’ll be hosting a yarnbombing in downtown Little Rock at noon. Regardless of your skill level, this should be an amazing event!

According the the Festival’s information, “Zucker is also the photographer/co-author of Shear Spirit: Ten Farms, Twenty Projects and a dozen other books, including a series of children’s picture books about manufacturing in America,Made in the USA.”  You can visit the Craft Activism blog here.  

Happy MLK Day. From the “Riverside” Speech and Nina Simone’s Why? (“The King of Love is Dead.”)

From Americans Who Tell the Truth . Click on photo to visit site.

Here are two videos in honor of MLK day. This first video is one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s lesser known speeches speaking out against war and poverty.  Although MLK is talking specifically about the Vietnam War, the message that war is an enemy of the poor, of community, of democracy is just as timely, radical, and relevant today.

From the speech:

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years, especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

And the second video—this song was recorded by Nina Simone three days after Martin Luther King’s death.   Happy Martin Luther King Day.  May we all keep working toward the dream.  Thanks to Americans Who Tell the Truth for reminding us of this video.

Friday Video: Daisy Bates: First Lady of Little Rock.

From the U of A page. Daisy Bates with six of the Little Rock Nine. Daisy Bates: First Lady of Little Rock. Courtesy of Independent Television Service, 2012.

I’m super excited about this week’s Friday Video, a trailer for the upcoming film, Daisy Bates: First Lady of Little Rock.

Produced by Sharon La Cruise, this film will makes its debut on February 2, 2012 on PBS’s Independent Lens.

If you live in Fayetteville, however, you can catch a pre-screening of the film Thursday January 19 at 2:oo PM at the Donald W. Reynolds Center.  The event is hosted in connection with Martin Luther King Jr. week and organized by the University Libraries and Diversity Affairs.  After the screening, producer and director Sharon La Cruise, “will discuss the documentary filmmaking process as well as the social and historical issues the film brings to focus.”  If you live in the northwest Arkansas area this is a great opportunity.  If you get a chance to attend the event please let us know because we’d love to perhaps do a follow up post about the event.

Here’s more on the film.  Continuing from the University of Arkansas press release:

Daisy Bates: First Lady of Little Rock tells the story of a seven-year journey by La Cruise to unravel the life of the Arkansas civil rights activist Daisy Bates. Beautiful, glamorous and articulate, Bates was fearless in her quest for justice, stepping into the spotlight to bring national attention to civil rights issues. Unconventional and  strong-willed, she became a household name in 1957 when she fought for the right of nine black students to attend the all-white Central High School in Little Rock. Her public support divided the Little Rock community and the state itself – culminating in a constitutional crisis that pitted President Dwight D. Eisenhower against Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus. 

To read the press release in its entirety click here.  

Daisy Bates: First Lady of Little Rock premieres on the Emmy Award-winning PBS series Independent Lens on Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 9 p.m.http://newswire.uark.edu/article.aspx?id=17459

Friday Video for September 16, 2011: Preview of The People Speak

From the film's webpage.

This week’s Friday Video is another film preview.

Although we don’t typically feature films that have been produced by more mainstream filmmakers, this video has been getting a lot of discussion this week in the grassroots organizing and social justice circles and is relevant because it does contain a great deal of information about the history of many lesser-known social justice movements led by everyday people.  Most of these stories or movements are not taught in U.S. high school, or even college, history classes.  Regardless of how you feel about these movements, or the people who participated in them, to grain a greater understanding of U.S. history, our education needs to include this information.  One of the key ideas in the film quoted by Howard Zinn is that “democracy comes from the bottom, not the top.”

Continue reading »

Civil Rights History Project Database Available Online.

From the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture

As of this month, the Civil Rights History Project survey of collections and repositories is now up online via a web-based portal at the Library of Congress American Folklife Center!  The survey project, an outgrowth of the Civil Rights History Project Act of 2009, provides an overview of all oral histories and information conducted about the civil rights movement throughout the U.S.

While the individual collections reside all over the country, this database brings together information about these collections so that researchers can easily know what’s available and exactly where to find it.

From the portal’s webpage:

“The repositories include local historical societies, university special collections, and public libraries. The database will allow users to search for and locate information about collections in the following ways: by broad topic listings, by Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), by the name of the collection or the repository, and by the geographic location of the repository. In some instances one can locate interviews by searching on the names of individual CRM participants, if the repositories have made such information available through their websites and/or finding aids. “

The Civil Rights History Project is a collaborative initiative of Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Library of Congress American Folklife Center.

You can begin searching the database by clicking here.

When we typed “Arkansas” in the keyword search we found an extensive list of collections, ranging from the Southern Tenant Farmer’s Union Collection  to records of SNCC in Arkansas to videotape from Hoxie, Arkansas and the making of the documentary, Hoxie: The First Stand (2003) by David Appleby.  The rural town of Hoxie, was one of the first schools in Arkansas to be desegregated.

It’s also very exciting to see that some of the work from the Kentucky Remembers Youth Oral History Camps is listed in the Kentucky section.

There is also a wonderfully extensive published resource list, listing books, films, and articles which examine the movement’s history and impact.

Have you had a chance to check out the database?  What are some things you’ve found there?

Friday Video for July 22, 2011: A Book About Zilphia Horton.

Taken from NYfolklore.org

Thanks to a friend who works for Highlander Research and Education Center, I found out that writer and roots music scholar Kim Ruehl is writing a book about organizer, activist,  folksong collector, and Paris, Arkansas native,  Zilphea Horton.   Using the grassroots fundraising method of KickStarter, Ruehl has already reached her financial goal needed to research and write the book and is now in the research phase of her work.  As part of her Kickstarter campaign she created this video, which provides an overview of Zilphia’s work and Ruehl’s research goals.

I can not wait to get my hands on the published copy of this book.  For years I’ve been fascinated with Zilphia Horton, the wife of Highlander Folk School founder Myles Horton.   Reading about Myles Horton and the founding of the Highlander Folk School was a turning point in my life as a folklorist. His writings, along with the current work of the school, have greatly influenced our vision for the McElroy House: Center for Folklife, Oral History and Community Action.

Reading Myle’s Horton’s autobiography, The Long Haul, I was surprised to learn Zilphia Horton was raised not too far from where the McElroy House is located.  I began to wonder, what led her to organize workers in the Paris, Arkansas mines?  What fostered her drive to resist injustice?  How did she come to love folk music?  In short, how did her upbringing in Paris, Arkansas influence the woman she became?   According to this video by Kim Ruehl, pretty soon the aswers to these questions will be available, and I am beyond excited.

If you’d like to read more about Zilphia Horton, Julia Schmidt-Pirro and Karen M. McCurdy wrote an excellent article about both Horton and Ruth Crawford Seeger entitled, “Employing Music in the Cause of Social Justice,” published in the 2005 edition of Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore.

Below is a snippt of the article, but you can read the entire piece by clicking here.

Horton was a pioneer at Highlander in the use of folk music as a tool of political mobilization. She adapted songs to serve in the political struggles—both labor and civil rights—of the mid—twentieth century. Of the many examples of her adaptations of the folk music heritage, one stands out as a powerful demonstration of her success: the transformation of the song “We Shall Overcome.” Originally an old Baptist hymn, “I Will Be All Right,” the song came to Highlander from the picket lines of the 1945 American Tobacco Company strike by the South Carolina CIO Food and Tobacco Workers Union in Charleston (Glen 1996, 177).

The lyrics of the song had already undergone many changes. In the era of slavery, the line of text was “The Lord will see us through.” This was altered by southern workers after World War II to “The union will see us through,” “We will win this fight,” and “We’re on to victory.” Horton saw a broader potential for the music, and in discussion with the Charleston strikers, planned new verses for the song to appeal to people other than unionized workers fighting for their rights (Austin 1991, 51). Horton continued to adapt the song’s text to suit the occasion. In 1947 she taught the song to Pete Seeger, who changed “will” (the original verb) to “shall” and added some new verses, including, “We shall end Jim Crow/ We shall live in peace/ All the world around” (Glen 1996, 177). Martin Luther King, Jr., first heard the song when Pete Seeger performed it at Highlander’s 25th anniversary celebration. In the 1960s Guy Carawan, who succeeded Horton as music director of the Highlander Folk School after her untimely death in April 1956, added other verses and further adapted the lyrics (Austin 1991, 51).

In her work at the Highlander Folk School, Horton made it a point not only to transform the songs she encountered, but also to preserve them…She was exposed to a variety of song traditions, including mountain folk music, American labor songs, international songs of political struggle, and Southern spirituals. She notated and published songs in a Highlander Songbook (Austin 1991, 49) and in a songbook entitledLabor Songs published in 1939 (Cohen 2002, 60)….

Myles Horton’s Definition of Participatory Research

Myles Horton is one of my biggest heroes. The founder of the Highlander Folk School, now called the Highlander Research and Education Center, Myles Horton believed in people’s power to change their lives and communities for the better. A true activist and constant learner, Horton put this belief into action when he created Highlander in rural Tennessee. I can’t do justice to Highlander’s work in this short post, so if you are unfamiliar with their work I urge you to spend some time on their webpage and read about both their history and current work. Highlander was instrumental in the Civil Rights Movement, farm workers’ movements, and organizing for miners in Appalachia.
Continue reading »