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.

“Crossing Borders: From Mexico to U.S.” on Hearing Voices radio program

I was driving last weekend when I came across this Hearing Voices radio program on KABF.  ”Crossing Borders: From Mexico to U.S,” originally aired in 2008.  A tale of what immigrants face attempting to cross the border, the program is still just as relevant today in 2012.  This program, like all of the productions by Hearing Voices, is a mixture of so-called “driveway moments” gathered from various broadcasts and recordings and then interwoven to tell a somewhat parallel story.  Luis Alberto Urrea’s readings are particularly disarming and vivid, especially the endless repetition of “Vatos,” which becomes hypnotic with rhythm and stories of loss.

From the Hearing Voices synopsis:

In “Sasabe,” a Sonora, Mexico border town, Scott Carrier talks to immigrants on their hazardous, illegal desert crossing, and to the border patrol waiting for them in Sasabe, Arizona.

Luis Alberto Urrea reads from his books Vatos and The Devil’s Highway, about death in the desert.

Guillermo Gómez-Peña imagines “Maquiladoras of the Future,” fantasy border factories.

“And I walked…”, by Ann Heppermann and Kara Oehler, is a sound-portrait of Mexicans who risk their lives to find better-paying jobs in the United States.

And sounds from the Quiet American’s one-minute vacation.

Click here to visit the page and listen to the piece.  

“Hand of Man” Video About Mountain Top Removal

Music for the Mountains cd. Released 2011.

The band Magnolia Mountain recently released a video for their song “Hand of Man” about the horrors of Appalachian mountaintop removal.  The song appears on the Music for the Mountains compilation cd, which was released last year (to read about that project go here).

According to the band’s web page, the video took about a year to make. It’s filled with footage detailing the destruction that comes from this form of coal mining, including reference to high cancer rates and polluted waterways.  The video takes its cues from a long history of Appalachian organizing.

From Jeff Bigger’s post in the Huffington Post:

The Hand of Man” takes the listener to White Star Holler in Kentucky, where seven generations of mountain families have struggled to defend their lives and livelihoods from the toxic fallout from coal company destruction:

White Star Holler was my home
Shared the crops that we had grown
Shared the water from our well
Shared the life we loved so well
Coal men brought the mountain down
Leaked their poison underground
Mother, neighbor, friend, and son
Cancer took them, every one  (to read the whole post go here)

The band is asking that this video be shared far and wide to spread the word about mountaintop removal.  Want to know and/or get involved?  Visit I Love Mountains.org and be sure and check out the work of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth.

Yes! Magazine’s Breakthrough Fifteen: The Power of Storytelling, Vulnerability, and Community Action.

Henry Red Cloud, Yes! Magazine. Photo by Dan Bihn.

If you’re a frequent reader of the Boiled Down Juice, you know that Yes! Magazine is one of our favorite publications.  With the tag line  “powerful ideas, practical actions,” Yes! showcases and explores the concepts and people on the front lines of democracy, social innovation, and community action.  Back in November they issued their winter publication, The Breakthrough 15: The justice warriors, eco-innovators, happiness architects, and change artists who are shattering our sense of powerlessness.  

I recently picked up a copy (a little late, I know) of this special issue dedicated “to the power of the 99 percent—and to a group of people who aren’t looking for leadership from those with entrenched wealth and influence.”  The main goal of this special publication, Yes! claims, is to profile “a group of people who are shattering our sense of powerlessness.”

I especially love that the introductory essay, written by Madeline Ostrander, highlights the power of storytelling, noting that “personal stories remind us that others face the same difficulties and vulnerabilities we do. We discover our own power when we realize we aren’t alone.”  It’s this focus on difficulties and vulnerabilities I find particularly important.  Too often the media portrays activists as larger than life, endless whirlwinds of ideas and energy, when in reality they’re fragile humans who experience frustration and confusion just like anyone else.  Most importantly, their ideas and strategies have been forged within these frustrations and confusions.  We need more stories that illuminate this gray area between observation and action.

Ranging from the stories of Henry Red Cloud, the director of Lakota Solar Enterprises which provides renewable energy to poor Native American communities, to Lily Yeh, the founder of Barefoot Artists, an organization using the power of art to transform neighborhoods, the magazine is diverse collection of portraits of people recognizing and utilizing their skills in their own communities.

For the rest of the week we’ll be taking a closer look at some of the people featured and the work they’re doing.  Some of the people we’ve discussed before, such as the amazing work of Grace Lee Boggs, but some were new to us.

You can read all the profiles here on Yes!   Tell us if you’ve read this issue and what you enjoyed.  I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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

Occupy Northwest Arkansas Webpage and Local Business List

From the Occupy Northwest Arkansas Webpage

As the energy of the Occupy movement shifts to other larger cities such as Oakland, the movement continues to grow in smaller towns throughout the southern and midwestern U.S.

This past week Occupy Northwest Arkansas Movement released their webpage with information about the NWA occupation beginning Novemeber 12th. Although it’s still somewhat under construction, the site contains valuable pieces of information and provides a snapshot of one smaller city’s response to the Occupy movement.   As a quick aside, if you’re interested in reading more about the Occupy movement in rural areas be sure and follow the posts from our good friends at the Art of the Rural. 

Much has been written about the Occupy movement in cities, and a handful of writers are tackling concepts of the Occupy movement in more rural areas.  But what does it look like in the small cities and larger towns that walk fine lines between rural and urban? Fayetteville provides one example.

Here’s their answer to the question “Why Do We Occupy?”

Everyone knows that our system is broken. Everyone knows that our politicians are bought and paid for by lobbyists. Everyone knows that Wall Street, the big banks and the major corporations are making money hand over fist while the average folks are getting squeezed harder and harder. Everyone knows that people are losing their jobs, their homes, their medical coverage, their retirement savings, without any sign of the economy getting any better. We all know these things. At its core, the Occupy movement is simple. People know these things and they are fed up. They have had enough. The real question right now is: What do we do about all of this?

The first thing we have to do is start coming together as ordinary people and start talking to each other as people. The second thing we have to do is to learn how to talk to each other and work with each other, even when we disagree with each other. Modern pop culture teaches us that if someone disagrees with us, we should scream at them, call them names, attack them, fight them, and ultimately try to destroy them. We need to find better ways. We need to find the places where we can agree and work together. When we disagree, we need to learn how to disagree without trying to tear each other apart.

Why is all this important? If we can come together and start talking to each other, if we can learn to work together even if we disagree in some places, then we can, as a unified and strong people, begin to make the changes necessary to start healing our poor, broken country. That’s why we Occupy. That’s what we are doing during our Occupation. That’s why we ask you to join us. Let us stand together, work together, to heal our country.

What I found particulary interesting and helpful about this Occupy Northwest Arkansas  site is the link entitled “Support Local.”   The drop down menu has a link for everything from “grocery” to “transportation.”  Once you choose a link on the drop down menu, the site provides a list of local businesses serving those needs.  More local businesses are being added daily.

The northwest Arkansas area is a community known for its thriving local business economy, a place where people work hard to make it possible to shop locally.

This calls to mind one of the more prevalent local-economy images that have been floating around online.  I’m sure you’ve seen it.

And here’s another example of an infographic tha has also been going around from Occupy Long Island:

From Occupy Oakland

The Occupy movement is raising awareness of the role of local economies, whether they be rural, urban, or somewhere inbetween.  And the Occupy Northwest Arkansas webpage provides a great source not only of information, but opportunities for everyday action for all those looking to support a more local economy.

Do you know of other useful websites affiliated with the Occupy movement?  Others that have a local economy focus like Occupy NWA?

Friday Video: Granny Peace Brigade Knit-In for Peace

From the Granny Peace Brigade webpage.

Here in Arkansas it’s getting cooler, and I know many of us are breaking out the yarn and knitting needles.  Knitting, and other needles arts, have long been associated with concepts of community, healing, mending, and persevering.

So this week’s Friday video features an example of women knitting not only for warmth, but also to honor soldiers and call for peace.  To learn more about the The Granny Peace Brigade click on the link and check out their webpage.

The organization is also active at Occupy Wall Street.  The camera angle is a bit off at times, but it’s a decent interview:

Something You Should See: The Natural State of America

From the film's webpage

Last week at the annual conference of the Arkansas Anthropological and Sociology Association, Dr. Bryan C. Campbell, professor of visual anthropology at the University of Central Arkansas, played a short clip from his upcoming documentary about the Newton County Wildlife Association and their ongoing fight to keep their forests free of toxic herbicides. The tiny bit of the film that we got to see was incredibly compelling. Beginning with the history of the organization’s founding in 1970, the film focuses on this highly effective and active resistance movement in the Ozarks, detailing how every day people are able to organize and fight to keep their forest safe.  Unfortunately today they face a new host of challenges.

The preview of the film is now available online, and you should really check it out. To watch the preview click here.

The film will be shown at all major film festivals in Arkansas and throughout the nation. To keep up with developments related to the film and to find a viewing location, be sure and become a fan of the film on facebook.  To do that go here.

Dr. Campbell runs Conserving Arkansas’s Agricultural Heritage (think I have posted about this before. If not, I should have!). They preserve agricultural folkways and engage in seed conversation and seed swaps across the state. Check out all the information by clicking here. If you are a seed saver you would love to attend these gatherings.

And, for a little extra info, Here’s a nice article about Dr. Brian Campbell and his work with the Seed Bank at UCA.

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.
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