In Our Hearts We Won Them All: A Short History of Losing

Momma (revised)

2011-12-28T09:06:00.001-05:00

Everything was covered in white.

The fields that provided food for us to eat and vegetables for us to trade, the trees that provided shade for us to rest under and lumber for us to sell, and even Poppa's hunched shoulders as he trudged his way to the barn to milk the cows were blanketed in snow. 1948 would be a year of surprises for us in Clarendon County, South Carolina, surprises that started on the first day of January when we had the coldest stretch of days and the heaviest and deepest of snows that the midlands had seen in a hundred years.

Momma put her arm around me and we snuggled close together as we watched Poppa disappear into the blinding whiteness of the pouring snow.

"My, my...look at all that snow, Carter...look at all that snow."

"It's turnin' ever'thin' white. It's beautiful."

"Yes, sweetie, it is beautiful."

"It makes ever'thin' look so bright and clean and new."

"Yes, it does...it sure does. But, you know what? I like to think about what's underneath the snow."

"But there's nothin' but frozen ground and bare limbs underneath the snow."

"And don't forget there's a Poppa under it, too!"

"Why do you like to think 'bout things like that, things that're frozen and bare?"

"Well, it's 'cause of som'thin' that happened to me when I was a little girl about your age. Ev'ry Sat'dy afternoon, my Daddy and Momma would take me and your Aunts and Uncles into town. We didn't own our own farm like your Poppa and I do now, so we lived in what was called a 'sharecroppers shack' on Mr. Wilson's farm.

That shack was a dark, bare place that was too small for a family of nine. We all worked so hard on that farm, but on Sat'dy afternoons Mr. Wilson let us outta work to go to town. In town, ev'rythin' looked like it does now under this blanket of snow - white, clean, and new.

The som'thin' that happened that I wanna tell you 'bout is this. We were walkin' down the sidewalk, Daddy in front, Momma behind him, and the seven of us chil'ren all in a row from the tallest to the shortest. My goodness, we did look like ducks in a row, we chil'ren did. A young man and a young woman, a white young man and woman, came a'walkin' toward us arm in arm. As was the custom, we stepped off the sidewalk to let the white folks pass. I looked down at the ground, as I was supposed to do when a white man passed me, and it was then that I saw a sup'risin' thing.

The cement sidewalk had a small crack in it, and out of that broken place grew a flower, a tiny flower. Even though I was a'wearin' my Sat'dy dress, I knelt down on the ground close to the flower so I could cup my hands around it and really see it. It was the most beautiful flower I had ever seen in my life and it is still the most beautiful flower I ever saw. It's petals were red and yellow, its stem was green, and the center a'holdin' it's seeds was black. The yellow was the color of the sun in the early mornin', the red was the color of the sun in the late ev'nin', the green was the color of the april fields at dawn and dusk, and the black was 'zactly the color of black folks like us's skin. And there was that flower, a'growin' through the hard, white concrete that covered the earth!
That's why I like to think 'bout things that are covered up, Carter, 'bout things that're underneath. Oft'times, you cain't see them but they're there and they're beautiful and they're a'waitin' for a crack so they can grow and be seen and make the world a more beautiful place."

Now, I loved to spend time with my Momma and if I had to choose the best times I spent with her then I'd choose times like those, times when she held me close and told me stories. I felt her protective arms around me, felt my future brother or sister move and move in her belly to the rhythm of her words, breathed in the smells of buttermilk and flour from the morning's biscuits, and saw her story as if I were there with her.

Everything' was covered in white. The ground around me was frozen. But everything inside of me was full of color and warm.

Reminding Students of America's Diverse Beauty

2011-09-09T11:14:00.001-04:00

This week as the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, I plan to gather my third-, fourth- and fifth-graders around me. I will tell them, "Our country is a beautiful place."

I’ll keep this in mind as I think of the moments when we were clearly afraid.

My focus will be the beauty of the United States. Like the 24-color box of crayons students see and use every day in their school projects, there are people of many hues with many beliefs who come together to live and work. Its residents are what makes the country beautiful and can be a model for the whole world.

I will show students the Great Seal of the United States and point out the words our country’s founders deemed important, “E Pluribus Unum” (out of many, one). I will pass out a new penny to each one of them and show them that “E Pluribus Unum” is stamped in larger letters on the new design.

I’ll ask, “What do you think this phrase means?" Then we’ll see where their thoughts and feelings take us.

Some of them may want to draw a picture of this guiding Latin motto. Others may want to write a poem. Some may want to write a story or play. And still others may just want to talk about it. That will all be fine with me. I want students to create something beautiful to show the beauty of the ideals of the United States.

Next I will bring them around my rocking chair and read the picture book The Man Who Walked Between the Towers by Mordicai Gerstein. I will read it with a soft voice and tell them that when the tightrope artist Philippe Petit looked up at the Twin Towers in 1974 he saw the space between the buildings instead of the buildings themselves. And when Gerstein wrote the story he thought about the buildings but saw the lives of the people who were memorialized there on Sept. 11, 2011.

It is here that we’ll talk about fear. When we think about 9/11, we are afraid. It was a moment America was violently attacked by a small group of people. Those kinds of attacks caused the deaths of innocent people and buildings to crash to the ground in debris and dust. That is scary.

Despite that memory of fear, I will look at my students and remind them that America is a nation of people of different beliefs, colors and cultures. And our classroom reflects the diversity of the United States. In class, we do not attack or destroy each other. No, we are going to build classrooms and schools and communities where we respect each others’ beliefs, ethnicities and cultures. We will continue to build something beautiful; a place where we respect, accept and appreciate each other and all people around us.

Tubman's Story Still a Reality for Today's Immigrants

2011-09-01T20:13:00.000-04:00

Tubman's Story Still a Reality for Today's Immigrants

2011-09-01T20:12:00.000-04:00

We made a circle for our guided reading time. I sat down in my trusty old Hinkle rocking chair. My students sat down crisscross applesauce on their red carpet squares. My second-graders' stomachs were full and their energy level was low. They were ready to hear a story.

I held up our book, "Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom," by Carole Boston Weatherford, and they looked with wonder at Kadir Nelson's cover illustration.

I use reciprocal teaching in my guided reading lessons, so I move from powerful predicting to careful clarifying to quizzical questioning to super summarizing to help my struggling readers develop the skills they need to become great readers.

I began the powerful predicting part of the lesson by saying, "Let's take a picture walk through this book and predict what we think is going to happen in the story."

When we turned to the fifth picture in the book, we looked at Harriet Tubman sleeping under a full moon among foxes, raccoons and possums in the underbrush of some woods.

One of my students raised her hand and said, "It looks like she's hiding from somebody." Another said, "She looks worried so somebody must be chasing her."

I was guiding my students to know the life and work of Harriet Tubman and to understand the contributions she made to the South and to the North before the Civil War.

I was trying to help them understand how to make, revise and confirm predictions in a story. These understandings are parts of the state academic standards for social studies and reading.

As we took our picture walk, though, something happened that reminded me that I'm not only a teacher in my classroom. I'm a learner, too.

J, a serious and soft-spoken Latino child, raised his hand and said: "That picture reminds me of my dad. He tried to come here from Mexico. The police chased him and made him go away. He was scared like Harriet Tubman."

Wow. I will always remember the sincerity in his eyes as he connected his life to this great children's book.

He helped me understand that the story of Harriet Tubman is still being lived out today in the lives of Latino families in my school and across the country.

The political climate in my state, South Carolina, increases the chances that our state legislature will follow Arizona's lead and pass a strict new illegal immigration law in 2011.

We already have a law that Republican Gov. Mark Sanford touted as one of the strictest in the nation.

People who scapegoat Latinos for our nation's problems foment resentment and hate against them.

My school is susceptible to this disease of resentment because we are surrounded by it on television, radio, the Internet and in the words of some of our neighbors.

Mary Bauer and Sarah Reynolds authored the report Under Siege: Life for Low-Income Latinos in the South for the Southern Poverty Law Center.

They explain that "Latinos in the South – many of whom came here to escape crushing poverty in their home countries – are encountering widespread hostility, discrimination and exploitation."

This report helps us understand the struggle for life that many of our Latino students take on, a clandestine struggle like the one Harriet Tubman made all those years ago.

Learning from my children is a vital part of what I do as a teacher, too. The last picture in the book is of Harriet Tubman sitting with a staff in her hand.

She is looking straight ahead with calm, courageous eyes and a weathered, compassionate face. Below her are the words, "Well Done, Moses, Well Done."

On that day in a guided reading class in a small inner-city elementary school in Greenville, S.C., J was our Moses.

"Well Done, J, Well Done."

Examining Immigration - One Family at a Time

2011-08-24T09:09:00.001-04:00

Examining Immigration - One Family at a Time

2011-08-24T08:58:00.004-04:00

Teaching can be humanizing work.

This is how it happens.

The Rodriguez family walks down the hall and turns the corner to my room.

"Buenos Dias, Mrs. Rodriguez. Buenos Dias, niños! ¿Como esta ustedes? Welcome to my classroom," I greet them.

We sit down in a circle of chairs and smile at each other. I begin by looking at the oldest child, a high school student, who looks timidly back at me. "Will you translate for us?" I ask.

In the beginning, I do most of the talking. I describe her child's progress in math and ask, "Do you have any questions or comments?" She looks at me with a silent, shy smile. I move on to reading and writing, asking again for questions and receiving the same smile.

At the end, she does most of the talking. "Our life is hard. My husband works out of town, wherever he can find work,” she said. “I clean houses. I work many hours. Our house is small and we are many. I want my children to learn so they can have a better life. Please tell me how to help my children learn."

This is how my heart grows.

It grows larger because Mrs. Rodriguez and I sit down with each other. We talk and we listen.

However, I know a heart can shrink, too.

Nikki Haley, the governor of my state, recently signed The South Carolina Illegal Immigration and Reform Act. The law, which is part of a recent wave of state immigration legislation, goes into effect in January[j2] . As she signed the bill she stated:

“What I’m concerned about is the money we’re losing because of illegal immigration in this state. The money that’s lost in education and medical services and workers and employment and all of those things is well beyond millions of dollars …”

It is dehumanizing when you refer to people only in terms of money. Further, the research does not support the governor’s statement.

According to the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, undocumented workers paid $43.6 million in state and local taxes in 2010. Another study outlined the losses to the state if all unauthorized immigrants were removed from South Carolina. The state would lose $1.8 billion in economic activity, $782.9 million in gross state product and approximately 12,059 jobs.

Did I see Mrs. Rodriguez as an undocumented immigrant who is causing our state to lose money for education, healthcare and jobs?

No. Despite the political climate in my state, I resisted seeing her with a small heart.

As a matter of fact, as we were meeting together, I never wondered if she was documented or undocumented.

I simply saw her as a mom who cares deeply for her children, just as I am a dad who cares deeply for mine. I simply saw her as a parent who trusts me to be a teacher for her child and for her.

I simply saw her. I am here for her and for her children.

(This article first appeared on the Teaching Tolerance website of the Southern Poverty Law Center and at the Ethics Daily website)

the art in life

2011-04-20T21:57:00.001-04:00

the art in life

2011-04-20T21:48:00.002-04:00

We were walking up the beach, on the sand as the tide moved out toward the ocean. I was holding Zeke's hand, talking with him about sea things - "I didn't know jelly fish swam this close to the shore during the spring...I bet that drift wood is as old as 'The Old Man and the Sea'...I think a horseshoe crab's blood can be used to treat cancer."

"Look," I said.

"What is it, Dad?" he asked.

I picked up a shell out of the deep, hot sand and held it in my open hand.

It was unlike any shell we had ever seen. There were two shells, one on the top and it's twin on the bottom, connected at the back, and clammed up tightly in the front.

"It's a clam!" I said.

"Is it alive?" he asked.

"I don't know," I answered. "Let's take it and find out."

We returned to our chairs, took our shovel, and made our way to the shore line where the waves come to an end in the sand and run back into the sea. I dug a small hole, Zeke scratched out a little trench, and we placed the clam back into a sandy water habitat.

We sat and watched. Children played around us. Families swam in the surf. People relaxed in the sun.

The clam opened and closed itself, almost imperceptibly, leaving only a small bubble to show us it was still alive.

"Did you see that? It's still living!" I exclaimed.

"We did something nice for that clam," said Zeke. "I wonder what nice thing it's going to do for us? Maybe it'll make a pearl for us!"

In a way, the little clam did give us a pearl. It reminded me of something I learned from the great writer George Bernard Shaw. In a world where the law of evolution is in effect, where there is survival of the fittest, where only the strong survive, there is an art in life where the smallest and most forgotten paint a picture of struggle and survival. Life is in that art.

We saw that art and life today. We were colors in it.

1954 Milan State Champions | Milan Museum | Milan, Indiana

2011-04-03T18:03:00.000-04:00

http://www.milan54.org/

Sent from my iPad

Celebrant

2011-02-16T20:05:00.001-05:00

St. Valentine prayer

2011-02-14T17:30:00.001-05:00

St. Valentine

2011-02-14T17:29:00.001-05:00

Joy

2011-01-29T23:11:00.000-05:00

Poor People's Campaign

2011-01-23T22:29:00.000-05:00

Brilliant Corners

2011-01-21T17:19:00.000-05:00

Brilliant Corners

2011-01-21T17:01:00.000-05:00

B loves bugs. I met him during the first week of school as I assessed how many words he could read per minute from a second grade story. After the assessment, I gave him a caterpillar sticker to put on his shirt to show everyone that he was going to emerge as a great reader during his second grade year. You'd have thought that I'd had given him a piece of gold. "Oooh, I love bugs," he marveled as I handed him the sticker. "I have seen caterpillars around the trees at my apartment. They spin a chrysalis and turn into butterflies. Do you love bugs? Have you ever seen a roly poly bug?" And so a friendship began around the pyrrharctia isabella, the armadillidum vulgar, and other bugs that make up the most diverse group of animals on the planet.

B is a first generation immigrant student from Mexico, a student like the ones Carola Suarez-Orozco, Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco, and Irina Todorova have so authoritatively and eloquently written about in their book "Learning A New Land: Immigrant students in American Society," a book that won the 2007 Virginia and Warren Stone Prize that is awarded annually by Harvard University Press for an outstanding book on education and society. According to two academic assessments, his reading is deficient and he needs help. On his Measure of Academic Progress test for reading that he took in the fall, he scored almost 30 points below our school district's average of 175 for second graders. On his AIMSweb assessment of words read correctly per minute from a second grade story, he read 4 words. The target for second graders in the fall is 49. So he became one of the students in my reading intervention program and is a daily participant in the excellent English as a second language class at our school.

One day during class, our school social worker walked into my room with B's Mom. B had been hiding his homeroom teacher's assignments and telling his parents that he didn't have any homework. I shared this small moment with one of his ESL teachers and she explained that if his Mom says, "Do your homework so you'll become a better student," he answers, "No," and does what he wants to do.

The state motto of North Carolina is engraved on the side of my college ring. "Esse Quam Viderii," it says, "To be is more important than to appear." It appears that B is on a path to become what the demagogues in my state predict he will become - another Mexican immigrant who is a drain on the tax payers of South Carolina. But I am thankful to have the heart, mind, and hands of a teacher who is trained to see beyond appearances to the essence of my students. And I see the essence of B, of all things, in his love for bugs.

Paul Wellstone wrote an insightful section about high stakes standardized testing in his book "The Conscience of a Liberal: Reclaiming the Compassionate Agenda." He reminds us that we cannot blame students and parents on low test scores if the student hasn't had the chance to master the information on the tests. If we blame the student, then we fail to live up to our responsibility to help every child become all that he or she can become. My school social worker and my ESL teacher friend remind us that a student is a part of a family - a family that needs nurturing so the child can grow to feel, think, and find meaningful work. As I look at B through my teacher eyes, I see the brilliant corners in B's mind, the corner that holds an amazing amount of knowledge about caterpillars and roly poly bugs.

At the end of class one day, I walked beside B on the way back to his homeroom. "B," I said, "Have you ever heard of an entomologist?" He shook his head no. "Well, an entomologist is a scientist who studies bugs. I think you could become a great bug scientist." The expression on his face reminded me of the expression he showed on that first day we met when I gave him the caterpillar sticker. You'd have thought I'd given him a piece of gold. And, you know, I think I did. B, I see your brilliant corner and I promise to do everything in my power to help you become a great reader and the Albert Einstein of bugs.

MLK Day 2011

2011-01-17T19:01:00.000-05:00

Message to the 112th Congress: This Is Why You're There

2011-01-04T22:55:00.001-05:00

Saying 'Thank You' to All the Ms. Sandras

2010-12-29T11:29:00.000-05:00

Saying 'Thank You' to All the Ms. Sandras

2010-12-29T11:28:00.002-05:00

Every school day just after 2 p.m., Sandra pushes her cart into my classroom to clean the bathroom and empty the trash cans. She is the school custodian and my students love her. When students hear her squeaky wheels in the hallway outside our door, they listen for her kind giggle as she enters the room. "Ms. Sandra! Ms. Sandra! Can I help you empty the trash? Can I help you?" they yell out with their hands waving in the air.

She responds, "Jennifer, you look so cute today! How you doin' VicTOR? Francisco, baby, you look like you're doing a good job for Mr. Barton. You come on over and help me today. Anna, honey, that's okay, you can help me tomorrow." She knows all of my students by name.

So I asked Sandra what I had been wondering for a while. “What do you like best about working at our school?" She put her hands on her hips and said, "It's the kids! I only take home about $20,000 a year, so it's not the money. I have to work second shift, so I don't like the hours. And people see me as just a janitor, so I don't like the way I'm treated sometimes. But I love the kids."

She does love our students. Last Friday, one of our second-graders was having a tough day. He hated teachers, he said. At lunch when a teacher asked him to pick up trash he’d left at the table, he threw his tray onto the floor, stomped over to the corner and refused to budge. It was Sandra who helped put him back together again. "Now, you know you can't act that way. I know your momma,” she said in her precise, slow, southern drawl. “I'm gonna put her number in my cell phone and call her and tell her you're not actin' right." Soon, she had him cleaning up his tray and washing the table where his class had been sitting.

One day, I saw her give an extra milk to a student. "Sometimes, I buy my lunch and sit beside a child I know is hungry," she told me. "Then I can say, 'You can have some of this if you want it, or, ‘You can have some of that.' Children can't learn if they're hungry."

When she leaves my classroom, she walks across the hall. "Hello A," I hear her say. "Look at those new glasses on you. They make you look so handsome." She knows all of the names and stories of the students in that class, too.

"Mr. Barton," she said to me during a quiet moment after school, "I know 'bout these children because I come from where they come… Are you feelin' me? Sometimes, they need somebody to talk to them who understands them."

I see the way Sandra loves our students, the way she knows their names. How she talks to them and helps them. I just want Sandra to know that someone noticed. I told her, “I'm glad you're at our school and I'm thankful for you."

Here’s to all the Sandras in our schools!

Platero And I

2010-12-24T14:11:00.001-05:00

Listening for the Civil War's True Legacy

2010-12-16T20:56:00.002-05:00

Listening for the Civil War's True Legacy

2010-12-16T20:55:00.002-05:00

I walked down the newly plowed row with my grandpa, feeling the warm, red clay on the soles of my bare feet and listened to his stories and words of advice. I held a tomato plant in my hands, the rich, black potting soil falling off of the small, vulnerable roots, as he knelt and dug a place for it in the garden. “Hey,” he’d often start, “here's something my daddy told me when I was little. ‘God gave you two ears and one mouth because He wants you to listen twice as much as you speak. If you do that, you'll learn something. If you don't, you won't.’”

The memory of walking with my grandpa in his garden came back to me after I read Maureen Costello's Teaching Tolerance blog post, “What To Do About the Civil War?” I especially remember grandpa’s stories about his childhood on the family dairy farm in Greenville, S.C. in the 1920s. I liked to hear stories about the black folks who came and worked with him and his family. I heard hard work in his voice and saw struggle in his face when he talked about those times.

Remember, my grandpa was a son of the South Carolina soil, a soil that had produced slavery and Jim Crow. And his stories reflected his philosophical shift from the idea of white supremacy to the idea of equality. He described the black folks he’d grown up with in words both simple and stark.

“I guess I looked around our farm and saw them as tools,” he told me once. But “there was a teenager, about my age, who worked on our place. His name was Billy, and he helped me with my work. One day we were in the barn together, cleaning up the milking area, when he cut his hand on a piece of metal. Daddy wrapped it up in a rag soaked in kerosene, as was the remedy for most farm accidents at that time, and asked me to drive him home. As we headed toward the black folks part of our town, I thought to myself, ‘Billy must get up very early in the morning, earlier than me, to make it to our house on time.’ As we drove up to his house, which was what we called a shack, I thought, ‘I wonder if Billy can stay warm in there.’ As I saw him holding his injured hand and watched his momma hold him up and lead him up the creaking steps and through the rickety door, well, it seemed to be one of the first times I knew that black folks had hands and feet and needs just like me. They weren't tools. They were people.”

My grandpa didn't fill my mind with the idea of white supremacy. He filled my heart with the stories of humanity. For that, I am thankful.

So now we are walking down the row of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. Unlike in my grandpa's garden, this row is not newly plowed. It has been gone over year after year, decade after decade, with the same rhetoric. A group just met here in South Carolina to remember the 1860 convention where the first Secession Ordinance was signed, creating the Confederate States of America. A group will meet next week in Charleston for a Secession Ball to remember, as the organizer of the event said, that "the secession movement in South Carolina was a demonstration of freedom."

I think about my students—who are 7-, 8-, and 9-year-olds—listening to the stories around them. What will they hear? Will they hear hard work in the voices and see struggle in the faces of the storytellers as they explain what happened 150 years ago? Will they hear that white supremacy was a blight on everyone it touched and undermined the notion that all people are created equal?

I hope they will. I'm listening. So are the children.

My favorite word

2010-12-14T20:21:00.000-05:00

Teaching As Human Rights Work

2010-12-08T20:08:00.000-05:00

Teaching As Human Rights Work

2010-12-08T19:59:00.002-05:00

Abel Barrera Hernández has worked tirelessly to bring justice to some of Mexico’s most marginalized communities. For his work as founder and director of the Tlachinollan Center in southern Mexico, Hernández received an award from the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights last month.

That, coupled with the fact that Friday is Human Rights Day, got me thinking how I, as a teacher, must also fight for human rights.

Human Rights Day is a good time for educators and students to commit to The Universal Declaration of Human Rights that was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly 62 years ago. It is also a good time to think creatively about ways we can build a better world for all people.

Article 26 of the declaration states, “Everyone has the right to education" and goes on to define education in a human rights context. One of our responsibilities as teachers is to turn the words of this declaration into deeds, to help our students embrace and embody its ideals.

I have a third-grader named T in my reading group who struggles to read. He is an African-American male, so he is one of the most vulnerable people in America’s public school system. T is small in stature but big in heart. So far this year, his greatest accomplishment (according to him) is the moment in P.E. when he became the first third-grader to climb to the top of the conditioning rope.

T can be silly and easily gets off task, two things that make him a tough student for any teacher. However, he is also highly motivated to learn. One day he asked, "Mr. Barton, can you give me some homework tonight?" How many times is a teacher asked that question? Just months before, I found that he could only read four words per minute from a story written for second graders.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently wrote that nearly a million students leave our schools for the streets each year. He reminds us that teachers are nation builders, and that the future of our country and the world will be built up or torn down by the students making their way through our classrooms. But for students like T, there is a still a great deal of work to be done before he can think critically, problem-solve, collaborate and communicate well.

On a personal level, I understand that my work is similar to the work of Abel Barerra Hernández. I borrow from his courage and commitment and dedicate myself to protect the human right to education for all of my students. This is vital for my school, where more than 90 percent of our students rely on free and reduced lunch and Medicaid.

On an academic level, I have to have high standards—especially for my tough students who get distracted. As Thomas Friedman said, we teachers are builders. The building is under construction. We all have a big stake in its completion.

International Day of Persons with Disabilities

2010-12-03T20:03:00.000-05:00

International Day of Persons with Disabilities

2010-12-03T19:58:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite places in the world is the classroom across the hall from me. This room full of wonderful children and teachers is affectionately known throughout our school as 'Mr. David's class.' Each morning, as I pass by their door on my way to pick up my second grade reading group, I hear music.

Today, I heard the sound of that music and stopped to listen. I looked through the window in the door and saw the students and teachers sitting in their chairs in a circle. They saw my bespectacled face smiling at them. Mr. David called out, "Come on in, Mr. Barton! We like to have visitors!" I'm shy by nature but their music and their hospitality drew me out of my proverbial shell and into their circle.

They were singing The World Is A Rainbow by Greg and Steve. Mr. David and Mrs. Fuller were signing the signs that go along with the song and the kids were singing and signing along. The classroom is a mixture of students who have Down's Syndrome and Autism and they were out of key, off rhythm, and loud. But the finest of choirs and the masters of art couldn't have created a more beautiful sound or a more splendiferous picture than they did together.

My favorite moment was when L, a little boy with autism who has never spoken to me, looked over from Mrs. Fuller's lap and stirred his arm around and around to the words, "Now you be you, And I'll be me. That's the way we were meant to be. But the world is a mixing cup. Just look what happens when you stir it up!"

Paul Farmer is one of my heroes. He is a medical doctor and an anthropologist who has spent most of his life and work between Harvard University and Haiti. He has written an insightful book titled Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. In Chapter 5, "Health, Healing, and Social Justice: Insights from Liberation Theology," he works out the idea that doctors are called upon to make 'a preferential option for the poor,' to take best practices in medicine to the smallest and most forgotten people in our world. He inspires me to work out the similar idea that teachers are called upon to make this same preferential option for the poor, so I ask myself each day, "Where are the smallest and most forgotten children and teachers in my school?” I find them tucked away on our 2^nd, 3^rd, and 5^th grade hallways, working in their special education worlds.

Even though I am a regular education teacher, I try to meet every special education student in my school and become friends with their teachers. We eat breakfast and lunch together and try to do special projects together during the school year. One of the greatest compliments I have received as a teacher was when one of our TMD teachers told me, "Mr. Barton, the Mom of one of my students asked, 'Who is that nice teacher who speaks to us every morning and who knows our kids by name?' and I told her it was you!" Knowing the names of all of our special education students and hearing them call, "Hey Mr. Barton!" is my badge of honor as a teacher.

In the preface to the original edition of Awakenings, the great neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks wrote, "My aim is not to make a system, or to see patients as systems, but to picture a world, a variety of worlds - the landscapes of being in which these patients reside." I believe our special education children aren't nameless asteres planetai (wandering stars), moving in seemingly aimless ways, with no gravity to keep them in orbit. They are worlds in our system waiting to be explored, wanting to be known by name, hoping to be friends with other people who will visit the landscapes of their being and say ‘hello.’ As Greg and Steve say in their song, “the world is a rainbow with many kinds of people and a place that takes all kinds of people to make it go around.” I’m thankful for the special education students and teachers at my inner-city elementary school and the colors they add to my world.

Rosa Parks

2010-12-01T16:58:00.001-05:00

55 years ago today, Rosa Parks was on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. The next day, there was a small headline on page 9 of the Montgomery Advertiser that read, "Negro jailed here for overlooking bus segregation." I hope there will always be committed, courageous, creative people who overlook unjust laws. Here's to the overlookers!

Rosa Parks

2010-12-01T16:47:00.001-05:00

Hoosiers - Jimmy Chitwood_Final Shot

2010-11-15T22:05:00.000-05:00

Minuet in G (JS Bach) on classical guitar, Da Vynci

2010-11-11T21:10:00.000-05:00

Check out this video on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqWuziqIiqU&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Sent from my iPad

Helping All Kinds Of Families

2010-10-29T21:13:00.000-04:00

Helping All Kinds Of Families

2010-10-29T21:12:00.000-04:00

I wrote this piece for the Southern Poverty Law Center and they posted it on the Teaching Tolerance website. I love to write and writing for the SPLC is my "political impulse" motive for writing, my desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people's idea of the kind of society they should strive for.

The small essays I write for the SPLC often deal with controversial topics, as political writing often does. They are confrontational by nature and are bound to meet resistance from people with different thoughts and feeling on the subject matter. I welcome this confrontation and resistance because it is through them that we grow. I always welcome your opinions and feedback - both for and against my ideas - and value your friendship!

Helping All Kinds Of Families

It was meet-the-teacher night at my elementary school. The room was ready for a new class of second-graders. The rubric for grading paragraphs and stories was on the wall around the writing center. A scientific method poster hung on the wall in the science corner. Essential questions for numbers and operations were on the chalkboard in the math area. And a picture commemorating the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education was on the social studies wall. I was ready to help my children become successful students.

Seven-year-olds can be gregarious when they get to know you, but they are typically shy when being introduced to people. I smiled as my new students hid behind their parents and grandparents upon entering my room. I looked into their eyes, shook their hands and told them how happy I was to be their teacher. “Who are you?” I asked myself about them, “And who will you become this year in my classroom?”

I was surprised when a little boy named D walked into the room, looked up at me, and said, “Hey!” He started talking as if we had known each other our whole lives. He was a living definition of the word “gregarious.” Soon, his mom caught up with him. “I can already tell I'm going to have a good year with your son,” I told her. She looked down at the floor, and I saw that she was the shy one in their family. “Um, can I talk with you?” she asked.

We sat down at the writing table. “D's dad doesn't live with us,” she began. “He has two moms. I have a partner. We've been together for two years. I wonder, what do you think about that?”

I remembered reading an article a few years ago about the way we feel the world. The author pointed out that the thoughts and emotions we develop about economics, culture, religion and politics are formed by what we see out our back screen doors. I was born and raised in the Upstate of South Carolina, so the world around me has formed me to see D's mom as—what?

One of the U.S. senators from my state, Jim DeMint lives in my town. Recently, he reaffirmed his belief that gay people should not be public school teachers. I wonder what he would have said to D's mom. I wonder how he would see lesbian and gay parents and students if he were a teacher. Can you treat people with dignity and respect, can you treat people as human beings, if you cannot accept their sexual orientation as a part of who they are?

“I am here to help D become the very best student he can be,” I answered. “And I am here to support you, I am here to support your partner, I am here to support your family. I am here. Let's work and see what good things we can build together.” I hope for the day we can work and build good things together—all of us.

United Farm Workers

2010-10-19T17:18:00.000-04:00

brother juniper

2010-10-15T03:17:00.000-04:00

Heroes to Me

2010-09-26T13:14:00.000-04:00

United Farm Workers

2010-09-25T20:54:00.000-04:00

Library on a Donkey

2010-09-25T11:34:00.001-04:00

I came across this story about a teacher in La Gloria, Colombia named Luis Soriano Bohorque. He puts a library on a donkey and takes the books to children in the countryside around his village. He saw that many of the students at his school didn't have books in their homes so they didn't have stories to take them to new places or information to help them do research on topics of interest to them. He didn't turn a blind eye to the problem. Instead, with compassion and creativity, he set up a library in his house and made a portable book shelf/table to use to take up to 100 books up to four hours away from his village. He lets children read those books while he helps them with his homework. He is a saint in our world today.

I hope for the same kind of compassion and creativity that comes from Luis' heart for all of us!

Gotta Keep Reading - Ocoee Middle School

2010-09-25T11:33:00.000-04:00

Passin' By

2010-09-20T20:07:00.002-04:00

Passin' By

2010-09-20T20:05:00.000-04:00

There is a wonderful scene in Harper Lee's monumental novel To Kill A Mockingbird where the all white jury has returned an unjust verdict against Tom Robinson. Atticus begins to wearily walk out of the courthouse. Jem, Dill, and Scout are in the balcony with the black folks of the town.

Someone was punching me, but I was reluctant to take my eyes from the people below us, and from the image of Atticus’s lonely walk down the aisle.
“Miss Jean Louise?”
I looked around. They were standing. All around us and in the balcony on the opposite wall, the Negroes were getting to their feet. Reverend Sykes’s voice was as distant as Judge Taylors’s:
“Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passin’.”

During the first weeks of school, Scout's story came back to me as I was benchmarking the reading levels of our 1st and 2nd Grade students. One of our 1st Graders named M sat down and looked across at me with clear, brown eyes. She is one of our many English as a second language students. Her parents speak only Spanish in the home. Canola and Marcelo Suarez-Orozco have written brilliantly and eloquently about children like her in their book Learning A New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society where they remind us how valuable and vulnerable our immigrant students are in the first years they are in America. M is indeed learning a new land.

"M, do you speak Spanish at home? Do your Mommy and Daddy speak Spanish at home?

"Yes."

"And you speak English at school."

"Yes, I'm bilingual!"

"You are bilingual. You have to be so smart to be able to speak two languages and to help your Mommy and Daddy understand your teachers."

You do have to be smart to live in one land and learn another. After M finished her benchmark test, after she translated my English into Spanish and the Spanish back into English for me, and stood up and walked with me to her classroom, I felt like saying, "Teachers and administrators, stand up. M's passin'."

how i feel

2010-09-14T18:43:00.000-04:00

New Moses

2010-09-13T20:00:00.000-04:00

New Moses

2010-09-13T19:59:00.002-04:00

We made a circle for our guided reading time. I sat down in my trusty old Hinkle rocking chair, and my students sat down crisscross applesauce on their red carpet squares. My second-graders’ stomachs were full and their energy level was low. They were ready to hear a story.

I held up our book, Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom, by Carole Boston Weatherford,and they looked with wonder at Kadir Nelson’s cover illustration. I use reciprocal teaching in my guided reading lessons, so I move from powerful predicting to careful clarifying to quizzical questioning to super summarizing to help my struggling readers develop the skills they need to become great readers. I began the powerful predicting part of the lesson by saying, "Let's take a picture walk through this book and predict what we think is going to happen in the story."

When we turned to the fifth picture in the book, we looked at Harriet Tubman sleeping under a full moon among foxes, raccoons, and possums in the underbrush of some woods. One of my students raised her hand and said, "It looks like she's hiding from somebody." Another said, "She looks worried so somebody must be chasing her." I was guiding my students to know the life and work of Harriet Tubman and to understand the contributions she made to the South and to the North before the Civil War. I was trying to help them understand how to make, revise, and confirm predictions in a story. These understandings are parts of the state academic standards for social studies and reading.

As we took our picture walk, though, something happened that reminded me that I'm not only a teacher in my classroom. I'm a learner, too. J, a serious and soft-spoken Latino child, raised his hand and said, "That picture reminds me of my dad. He tried to come here from Mexico. The police chased him and made him go away. He was scared like Harriet Tubman." Wow. I will always remember the sincerity in his eyes as he connected his life to this great children’s book. He helped me understand that the story of Harriet Tubman is still being lived out today in the lives of Latino families in my school and across the country.

The political climate in my state, South Carolina, increases the chances that our state legislature will follow Arizona's lead and pass a strict new illegal immigration law in 2011. We already have a law that Republican Gov. Mark Sanford touts as one of the strictest in the nation. People who scapegoat Latinos for our nation’s problems foment resentment and hate against them. My school is susceptible to this disease of resentment because we are surrounded by it on television, radio, the Internet and in the words of some of our neighbors.

Mary Bauer and Sarah Reynolds authored the report Under Siege: Life for Low-Income Latinos in the South for the Southern Poverty Law Center. They explain that "Latinos in the South—many of whom came here to escape crushing poverty in their home countries—are encountering wide-spread hostility, discrimination and exploitation." This report helps us understand the struggle for life that many of our Latino students take on, a clandestine struggle like the one Harriet Tubman made all those years ago.

Learning from my children is a vital part of what I do as a teacher, too. The last picture in the book is of Harriet Tubman sitting with a staff in her hand. She is looking straight ahead with calm, courageous eyes and a weathered, compassionate face. Below her are the words, "Well Done, Moses, Well Done."

On that day in a guided reading class in a small inner-city elementary school in Greenville, South Carolina, J was our Moses. "Well Done, J, Well Done."

tennis

2010-09-11T11:28:00.000-04:00

Letters

2010-09-06T12:21:00.000-04:00

Letters

2010-09-06T12:19:00.002-04:00

I like to receive letters. When I was a little boy, I lived on a straight street and could see the mail truck coming from way down the road. After the mailman stopped in front of our house, I ran with hope in my heart down our front walkway, through the two maple trees Dad planted when I was born, across the street to our mailbox. Would there be a letter for me? Was someone in the big, wide world thinking of me?

One day last year on the school playground, a second grader handed a note to me. She said, “One of your students asked me to give this to you.” I unfolded the letter.

Dear Mr. Barton, hi it Odeth from 2th grade I miss you a lot I wanted to know about you so much I am being good I am in 4th grade Do you miss me. I live in __________ I go to school in __________ I hope you will come to my school…can you come visit me in school ask for my name…I am 10 year old I want you to come to my school.

Your best student,
Odeth

Odeth was a student in my very first class as an elementary school teacher. I still remember her big dimples and her inquiring mind. I teach in a school where about 1/3 of my students are from Mexico, Central America, and Latin America. Odeth and her family are from Guatemala.

Michael W. Savage wrote an article for the Washington Post titled “Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah may follow Arizona's lead on immigration law.” He noted that the political climate in South Carolina improves the chances that our state legislature will follow Arizona’s lead and pass a strict new illegal immigration law in 2011. In 2008, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford (R) signed an illegal immigration bill into law and touted it as the strictest in the nation. Some state lawmakers are seeking to build on it and introduced an Arizona type bill less than a week after Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed her states bill into law.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “politicians and media figures have only encouraged this environment by spreading false propaganda that scapegoats immigrants for our nation’s problems and foments resentment and hate against them. This discrimination against immigrants – primarily those from Latin America – constitutes a civil rights crisis.”

In his Foreword to Three Screenplays, Horton Foote wrote about creating a screenplay from Harper Lees monumental novel To Kill A Mockingbird and discovering “the evil and hypocrisy in this small southern pastoral town along with and through the eyes of the children.”

I hope you will join me in remembering that behind demagoguery, political rhetoric, and laws there are children like Odeth, children with big dimples and inquiring minds, children who send letters hoping to be remembered, children who see.

Imagination

2010-09-03T21:55:00.000-04:00

Think Different

2010-08-30T22:01:00.001-04:00

Think Different

2010-08-30T21:59:00.002-04:00

I came across an article titled "In Praise of Dissent" in the July/August issue of Ode Magazine. Have you heard of Ode? It's the magazine for 'intelligent optimists.' Isn't that a wonderful way for a magazine to describe itself? I found it in the periodicals section of the Greenville County Public Library and I'm glad I did. It has become one of my favorites.

The article by Jeremy Mercer is a look into the lives of people who 'think different.' They're the ones Apple founder Steve Jobs wrote about in his poem "Here's to the Crazy Ones."

Here's to the crazy ones.
The misfits. The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.

They're not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them,
disbelieve them, glorify them or vilify them.
About the only thing you can't do is ignore them.

Because they change things.
They invent. They imagine. They heal.
They explore. They create. They inspire.

They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.
How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?
Or sit in silence and hear a song that's never been written?
Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

We make tools for these kinds of people.
While some see them as crazy ones, we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they
can change the world, are the ones who do.

Think Different

Mercers article reminds us that people who 'Think Different' are persecuted by people who think alike, are crushed in heart, soul, mind, and body by those who yell, "We hate what you think, feel, and say...we hate who you are!"

It reflects on the truth that those persecuted, hated ones are the very people who bring the compassion, commitment, and creativity to the world that change it into a more human place for everyone to live.

Along with this article, I also recommend a book by Gregory Burns, a professor at Emory University, called "Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How To Think Differently."

Let's do things that others say can't be done, especially for the smallest and most forgotten people in our world.

"Say You're One of Them" by Uwem Akpan - Official Website

2010-08-05T19:16:00.001-04:00

"Say You're One of Them" by Uwem Akpan - Official Website

Edwidge Danticat on Writing

2010-08-04T13:00:00.000-04:00

The federal courthouse in Charleston, S.C. - July 19, 2010

2010-07-19T18:22:00.001-04:00

Charleston

2010-07-19T18:19:00.002-04:00

Tonight my family and I walked along Queen Street into the middle of downtown Charleston to the waterfront park at the harbor. As we ambled along the cobbled street past Poogan's Porch, historic churches, and Meeting Street I thought about the Civil Rights Movement history of Charleston. I saw tourists huddled around tour guides hearing stories about the places and people of the old city, patrons of pubs and restaurants wobbling along with their arms around each others shoulders enjoying their pints of beer, glasses of wine, and plates of shrimp and grits, and a young black man sitting in solitude on top of a table on the harbor walkway weaving flowers and crosses out of sweet grass in the way of the Gullah tradition and I wondered if they knew that fifty-some-odd years ago Thurgood Marshall began arguing the case of Briggs v. Elliott in the federal courthouse in Charleston before Judge J. Waties Waring, a case that would evolve into Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas and a judge who was despised by the high society folks of the city and who was offered a one way train ticket out of the state by the South Carolina legislature. Do we still ask the old questions - What does it mean to be human? How can we weave a more human world for everyone? I wonder. I hope.

2010-07-13T22:20:00.001-04:00

2010-07-13T22:19:00.001-04:00

character sketch - Carver

2010-07-13T22:18:00.002-04:00

Just tonight, he stood quietly beside his desk with a magnifying glass in his hand. I looked at him from the splintered pine frame of our kitchen door where I was standing. He turned around slowly, like a person who is in deep thought, and looked at me through the lens of the glass. His magnified eye was astonishingly big and brown – as big as the globe in my second grade classroom and as brown as the turned soil of our farm.

- Carver, why you up? It’s the middle of the night.

- I cain’t sleep.

- What you doin’?

- I’m studyin’ a tomato.

I walked to him and knelt beside him. I turned his magnifying glass around and looked into his eye. I saw clearly the parts of his eye that my teacher taught to me at school – the colored part that is the iris and the black part that is the pupil. But it was Carver, my five-year-old brother, who taught me how these parts work together to give us our sense of sight. It was Carver who helped me understand how we see. His lessons always began and ended with questions and were filled with an amazing assortment of facts that came from God only knows where. Our talk about seeing went something like this –

- Carter, you know the five senses?

- Yeah. Let me think…seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching.

-Did’ya know if we divided our brains into three parts, two of the parts would be filled up by seeing?

- Naw, I didn’t know that. Seein’ is that important, huh?

- Yeah. You know what a person who studies the inside parts of the body is called?

- Naw, I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout that.

- Well, that person is called an anatomist. An anatomist is kind of like an artist whose art he’ps us know
where those parts are and what they do. Did you know there were artists like that?

- Naw, I didn’t.

- Yeah, there was this anatomist in Africa a long time ago named Rufus. He he’pd us understand the parts of the eye. Do you want me to teach you about the eye?

- Sure

- There’s a thin layer on the inside of the eyeball. It’s the retina. No one could see into the retina until microscopes were invented. When people looked inside the retina for the first time they found millions of rod and cone cells. The rods and cones find rays of light and turn them into signals for the optic nerves. The optic nerves send signals to the brain and it turns them into pictures. ‘Cause of the way lenses work, the picture is upside down. The brain turns it right side up. Idn’ that amazing?

- Yeah, it's amazing. And, you know what? So are you.

He taught me the parts of the eye that helped him see the world as everyone sees it. In that moment, though, deep in the dark of night, I tried to see the parts that I didn’t understand, the parts that woke my brother in the middle of the night to study a tomato while our corner of the world slept, the parts that helped him see the world as only Carver could see it. But those parts remained hidden to me. I gently put my arm around his shoulders and held him close to me.

character sketch - Momma

2010-07-13T22:17:00.001-04:00

Everything was covered in white. The fields that provided food for us to eat and vegetables for us to trade, the trees that provided shade for us to rest under and lumber for us to sell, and even my Poppa's hunched shoulders as he trudged his way to the barn to milk the cows were blanketed in snow. 1948 would be a year of surprises for us in Clarendon County, South Carolina and for all of the people in all of the places in the United States of America where the Jim Crow laws were enforced by law or by practice, the Jim Crow laws that gave us black folks our place and them white folks their place and no place for us all to be together. Yes, it would be a year of surprises, the first of which was the coldest stretch of days and the heaviest and deepest of snows that the midlands had seen in a hundred years. Momma had her arm around me as we snuggled close together and watched Poppa disappear in the blinding whiteness of the pouring snow.

- My, my...look at all that snow, Carter...look at all that snow.

- It's turnin' ever'thin' white. It's beautiful.

- Yes, sweetheart, it is beautiful.

- It makes ever'thin' look so bright and clean and new.

- Yes, it does...it does. But, you know what? I like to think about what's underneath the snow.

- But there's nothin' but frozen ground and bare limbs underneath the snow.

- And don't forget there's a Poppa under it, too!

- Hee hee hee. So why do you like to think 'bout things like that, things that're frozen and bare?

- Well, it's 'cause of som'thin' that happened to me when I was a little girl about your age. Ev'ry Sat'dy afternoon, my Daddy and Momma would take me and your Aunts and Uncles into town. We didn't own our own farm like your Daddy and I do now, so we lived in what was called a 'sharecroppers shack' on Mr. Wilson's farm. That shack was a dark, bare place that was too small for a family of nine. We all worked so hard on that farm, but on Sat'dy afternoons Mr. Wilson let us outta work to go to town. In town, ev'rythin' looked like it does now under this blanket of snow - white, clean, and new.

The cement sidewalk had a small crack in it, and out of that broken place grew a flower, a tiny flower. Even though I was a'wearin' my Sat'dy dress, I knelt down on the ground close to the flower so I could cup my hands around it and really see it. It was the most beautiful flower I had ever seen in my life and it is still the most beautiful flower I ever saw. Its petals were red and yella, its stem was green, and the center a'holdin' it's seeds was black. The yella was the color of the sun in the early mornin', the red was the color of the sun in the late ev'nin', the green was the color of the april fields at dawn and dusk, and the black was 'zactly the color of black folks like us's skin. And there was that flower, a'growin' through the hard, white concrete that covered the earth!

That's why I like to think 'bout things that are covered up, Carter, 'bout things that're underneath. Oft'times, you cain't see them but they're there and they're beautiful and they're a'waitin' for a crack so they can grow and be seen and make the world a better place.

Now, I like to spend time with my Momma and if I have to choose the best times I spend with her then I'd choose times like this, times when she holds me close and tells me stories. Just now I felt her protective arms around me, felt my future brother or sister move and move in her belly to the rhythm of her words, breathed in the smells of buttermilk and flour from this mornings biscuits, and saw her story as if I were there with her in her mind and in her heart. Everything' was covered in white. The ground around me was frozen. But everything inside of me was full of color and warm.

character sketch - Poppa

2010-07-13T22:14:00.002-04:00

“You always ‘a askin’ questions,” said my Poppa early to me one morning as I walked my shoeless feet through the freshly turned soil. His hands were on the plow and he was following our old mule Charlie and I was following him.

“That’s a good thing, askin’ questions. Did you know questions drive the world forward, like I’m drivin’ ol’ Charlie down the row? Did you know questions can turn the world upside down, like the plow turns the hard, rocky ground into soft, helpful soil? Did you know questions are like the seeds we’re gonna plant in these rows? It takes a long time to get from seeds to fruits and vegetables and it takes a long time to get from questions to answers that can make a difference in the world. But seeds change to food that feeds people and questions change to answers that can make the world a better place. You keep ‘a askin’ questions always, Carter. Always keep ‘a askin’ questions.”

I’ve always tried to do just that, to ask as many questions as I can ask.

fireflies and soil

2010-07-12T12:54:00.000-04:00

fireflies and soil

2010-07-12T12:33:00.001-04:00

- Hey fireflies.

At the sound of Carver's voice the fireflies in the mason jar on the table beside our beds began flashing their lights until a warm glow surrounded us.

A surprising thing happened on the day he was born. My little baby brother was wrapped in a blanket, snuggled by Momma’s side with his wide brown eyes open. He was as still as the water in our farm pond on a mid July afternoon. A firefly came into the room with the breeze and lit gently on his nose. I watched in wonder as he blinked his eyes four short blinks and the lightning bug blinked it’s light four short times. He blinked his eyes three long blinks and it blinked its light three long blinks. Was my brother communicating with the lightning bug? Was such a thing possible? The firefly took flight and went out the window through which it came.

When he was two he was laying on his back underneath the afternoon shade of the old apple tree in the back corner of our yard. I was laying beside him, looking up into the branches heavy with green apples, a color of green that we can't rightly make with our tools and substances but that God seems to be able to create with a stroke from a divine brush and palate. I was sharing my thoughts about this with Carver, talking quietly and circling the pad of my thumb around and around his cubby cheek, when a firefly lit on his nose and flashed its soft yellow light three times. His eyes turned inward toward the firefly and blinked three times, as if he was sharing a soft light of his own that was yet unknown to human heart and mind but could only be perceived by the natural world around him. I knew then that he was special, the kind of special person who comes into the world to help it and make it a better place.

On that same summer evening, when he was two years old, with waddling walk and toddling talk, when we were holding hands under the same apple tree.

- Carver, be very quiet, look very clos’ly, and listen very care’fly, okay?

- ‘Kay!

- What color is the grass?

- Gween!

- Yeah, that's right. The color is green. Good. Do you know what's special about the color green?

- Gween is special?

- Yeah, it is special. Look under you. Look out over Poppa's fields. Look up in the trees. Green is under our feet. Green is all around us. Green is over us. Green is everywhere.

- Gween is evweewheyah.

- Uh huh.

I put my hands on the ground, pushed my fingers into the soil, and pulled away a patch of grass.

- What is this?

- It's duwt.

- Well, it's soil. Poppa taught me the difference between dirt and soil and now I want to teach it to you, okay?

- 'kay.

- The word “dirt” comes from the old, old word “drit”, which means “excrement”. “Excrement” is just a big word for “poop”.

Dirt is the ground. It is earth used to make a surface for a road, floor, or other area of ground. It ingrains and blackens people and things.

The word “soil” comes from the old, old words “solium” and “solum”, which mean “seat” and “ground”.

Soil is the upper layer of the earth. It helps plants grow. It is a black or dark brown material made up of a mixture of organic remains, clay, and rock particles.

Are you lis’nin’?

- Yeah!

- Well, I want you to remember that ev’rybody in the world is like the green grass. We’re all the same. We all have hearts and minds and souls and bodies. No person is better than another. We’re all good and we’re all green on the inside.

- ‘Kay! We’ew aw good and aw gween on th’ inside!

- Yeah, but if it’s hot ev’ry day and it don’t rain for weeks and weeks, the grass gets brittle and ugly. Some people are like that on the outside. Life just dries them up and they do ugly things. You gonna’ see them and hear them when we go to town with Momma and Poppa. They gonna’ tell us that we’re dirt, that we’re only good for being used, that we’re no better’n “poop.” Ev’ry time that happ’ns I want you to remember that we’re not dirt. I want you to reach out and hold my hand, and when you feel my hand I want you to remember that we’re soil, that we he’p the earth grow, that we’re good in the world. Can you do that? Can you hold my hand? Can you remember that? Can you remember that we’re soil?

Carver reached out his toddling hand to me. I took it gently into my own little hand. We were light. We were green. We were soil. We were brothers.

Watching in Wonder

2010-06-28T13:47:00.000-04:00

Watching in Wonder

2010-06-28T13:43:00.004-04:00

“Hey li’l brothers,” Corky slurred as we stepped off the sidewalk to let him pass by on his bicycle. A broken headlight dangled from two frayed wires, the once fiery red frame was faded by rain and sun and tarnished by rust and seasons, and spokes were missing from the wobbly wheels. He smelled of old liquor, new sweat, and days without bath or change of clothes. A lens on his glasses was cracked but he didn’t seem to notice.

“What’s happ’nin brother?” He stopped and leaned unsteadily on one leg to greet the minister of the little Baptist mission for white folks across the railroad tracks. He leaned too far and crashed to the ground with a thud and a moan. The bemused minister untangled him from the thicket of arms, legs and metal, lifted him onto his feet, and brushed the red chalky dust and tiny jagged rocks from his shirt, pants, and skin.

“Corky, are you okay? What in the world…?”

“No…nope…yep…yes, I’m okay. Hey, where’re you off to?

“I’m goin’ to the noon Holy Week Service in town. It’s at the First Baptist Church today. Let’s park your bike. You can come with me.“

“Well hell. You Baptists go to church all the time. Even on a Thursday. You all must need it more than other folks do!”

“The services are for ev’rybody…Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians…ev’rybody. I reckon we all need it! Come on. It’ll do us both good.

Hello there, boys. I almost didn’t see you. Come here. Close your eyes. Hold out your hands.”

We said hello to the minister, careful not to look him in the eyes as Momma and Poppa taught us to do with white folks. He wore a blue shirt, ‘Dickies’ pants like the ones Poppa wore in the fields, and tattered black shoes. This must have been his uniform because it was what he was wearing every time we saw him. His bespectacled eyes were circled by perfectly round lenses in wire frames that hooked around his ears and made him look more like a college professor than a new minister just out of minister training school and just starting ministering in our town. We came to him, closed our eyes, held out our hands and felt the small, barrel shapes of the chewing gum they sold in big barrels at the counter of the S & H Green Stamp store on Main Street. It was a store we couldn’t enter but that we knew well from the detailed stories of all the things inside by our white friends whose families were welcome to shop there.
“Thank you, sir!”

“You’re welcome. Now you boys run on to where you’re going and do what you need to be doing. Blow some bubbles along the way!”

The minister put his arm around Corky’s shoulders and they started up the road toward Main Street. As they lumbered along side by side the midday sun sat high in the sky and cast their shadows straight down behind them. A minister and the town drunk going to church together! It was a sight to see. We were finished with the chore Poppa gave us to do so there was time before we had to be home for lunch.

“Carver, I’ve never seen a drunk person go into a church before. What ‘cha ‘spect’ll happ’n? You reckon he’ll get struck by light’nin’?”

“I don’t know but I figure som’pin’ll happ’n.”

Carver was only five years old but he knew the scientific method like a seasoned scientist. At home on the farm he was always leading me through the steps of his way of thinking. We found that it helped us to think this way about people and events because it helped us work our way through our place and position in the world and ways of white folks.

“Well, we did the first step in the method. We asked a question.”

“Let’s follow behind ‘em and see what happens.”

We’ve never been inside of the white folks churches downtown before. We’ve only seen the outside of them. The church we go to is plain and simple. It’s a one-story building with a steeple on top. It’s made with pine boards painted white. There’s an iron bell in the steeple, a bell that rings us awake and calls us to church on Sundays.

The white folks churches, on the other hand, are beautiful and stately. They’re the tallest buildings in town. They’re made with bricks, stones, and oak wood and look like castles on each corner of the town square. There are copper bells in their towering steeples, bells that ring in each hour of the day and play hymns at noontime.

The First Baptist Church is the biggest church of all. The town doctors, lawyers, bankers, and planters go there, the men and their families who run our town, who cast long shadows over us black folks that stretch from Jim Crow to the Civil War all the way back to the slavery days. We hid behind the grand old magnolia tree on the front lawn to watch the minister and corky climb the steps to the heavy oaken doors that opened in toward the entrance hall.

Two men in their Sunday suits stood at the doors to welcome them to the service. We could see around them inside of the wide doors. On the wall there was a picture of Jesus with long brown hair and a long beard with light around his face looking up to heaven. Under the picture there was a long table with the words “This Do In Remembrance Of Me” carved into the front of it. There were colorful spring flowers and gold offering plates on top of it.

The men reached out to shake hands with the minister and Corky. The minister took his hand from Corky’s shoulder to offer a handshake in return. Corky wobbled at the sudden freedom and fell into the arms of one of the shocked men. You should have seen that usher’s face! He looked like he had just eaten a plain radish chased by a spoonful of castor oil! He pushed Corky back onto the embarrassed minister and into the other usher. He must have breathed in Corky’s smell because he turned his face away wretching and gagging.

The discombobulated group held onto each other and sort of jitterbugged their way into the church. They stopped in stunned surprise in front of the table. Corky raised his arms. A bottle of liquor he was hiding in the waist of his wrinkled, baggy pants fell out and crashed onto the marble floor. Streams of whisky flowed everywhere. Pieces of glass gleamed in the flood of light.

“What the …?!”

“Get him out of here right now!”

The poor minister looked frantically around for a broom or a cloth to clean up the mess. The smell of the whisky wafted over the lawn and burned our noses. What were the folks in the sanctuary thinking?

“Go on. Get him outta here! We’ll clean it up.”

The bewildered minister took Corky into his arms and limped him down the steps and onto the sidewalk. They hobbled away.

The men came out onto the steps. Nervous chuckles gave way to relieved belly laughs.

“He oughtta’ve known not to bring him here. Especially when he’s drunk. Somebody needs to sit down with that boy and let him know what’s what.”

“Yeah, the next thing you know he’ll be tryin’ to bring nig..."

We moved on around the tree and started home.

writing

2010-06-21T16:03:00.003-04:00

writing

2010-06-21T15:59:00.003-04:00

On the last day of school before summer break begins, I turn over my classroom keys to the elementary school where I am a teacher. I also turn over my 'teacher voice,' that part of me that helps me be committed, compassionate, and creative for my students for the 180 days they are with me. I take up my pen and my sketchbook where I am a writer. I take up my 'writers voice,' that part of me that helps me be committed, compassionate, and creative for my characters in my stories.

Through the summer I am a full time writer. I am researching and writing about the early Civil Rights Movement in South Carolina. The setting of my story is a small farm in Clarendon County, S.C. from 1947 until 1954. The narrator is Carter, a nine-year-old African American boy who lives on that farm with his brother Carver, a five-year-old genius with an inquiring mind and a photographic memory. The action centers on a lawsuit filed by an old farmer in Clarendon County, Levi Pearson, against the county board of education on behalf of African American children for a school bus to help them get to school. That lawsuit became Briggs v. Elliott which became Brown v. Board of Education which became a cornerstone of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. In my story you will meet Carter, Carver, their Momma and Daddy, Corky (the thirty-something year old town drunk who is brilliant and articulate when sober and stupid and unintelligible when drunk and whose Mother was secretary to Governor Strom Thurmond), Junior (the sixty-something year old giant of a man who has the mind and heart of a little child), and Lillian (based on the person Lillian Smith who was arguably the clearest voice from the white folks during that moment in time. You will also find guest appearances from Larry Doby, Septima Clark, Mojeska Simkins, Strom Thurmond, J. Waties Waring, Thurgood Marshall, and Flannery O'Connor, people you may or may not know from that time and place.

Writing is solitary work that requires early mornings and late nights with books and ideas. It is also community work that requires listening ears and honest hearts of friends. I am thankful to be in the Brother Juniper community with you. As a writer, I hope my work is a counterpoint to the demagoguery that comes around with each generation, a building up of what makes our world and us more human. You can follow my story at http://iwatchedinwonder.blogspot.com Thanks for being in community with me!

Pepsi Ad (Bob Dylan & Will I Am) - New Superbowl Ad

2010-06-16T21:17:00.000-04:00

War/No More Trouble | Playing for Change | Song Around The World

2010-06-16T21:13:00.000-04:00

MC Yogi - GIVE LOVE (giving4living mix)

2010-06-16T21:03:00.000-04:00

Larry Doby - A Picture of Beauty, Genius and Wonder

2010-06-14T14:59:00.004-04:00

Larry Doby - A Picture of Beauty, Genius and Wonder

2010-06-14T14:30:00.002-04:00

October 9, 1948. 81,897 people filled Cleveland Municipal Stadium to watch game 4 of Major League Baseball's World Series between the Cleveland Indians of the American League and the Boston Braves of the National League. More people were at that game than at any other game in the history of the World Series up to that time. The Indians held a tenuous 2-1 lead in the best of seven series.

In the bottom of the 4th inning there were 2 outs and the Indians were clinging to a 1-0 lead. 24-year-old Larry Doby of the Indians dug into the batter's box at home plate and faced pitcher Johnny Sain of the Braves. Doby threw right and batted left. His arcing swing was a beautiful thing that helped him hit .301 with 14 home runs in 121 games during the season. He hit .396 over the last 20 games and that helped his team beat out the Boston Red Sox and make it to the championship series.

On the second pitch, Sain wound up and threw the ball toward home plate. Doby swung his and, "Crack!" the ball took off toward right center field. The crowd held its collective breath and let out a mighty roar as the ball sailed 420 feet into the stands for a home run. It was the decisive run in a 2-1 win for the Indians, a victory that put them ahead 3 games to 1 in the World Series they would win in game 6 in Boston.

In the Cleveland clubhouse after the game a photographer took a picture of Doby and winning pitcher Steve Gromek hugging tightly and grinning broadly tenderly cheek to cheek. That picture was broadcast over NBC, CBS, and ABC that night and published in all of the major newspapers the next day.

I think in pictures and this picture helps me write about the Civil Rights Movement in my home State of South Carolina. You see, Larry Doby was black and Steve Gromek was white. Gromek was from Hamtramck, Michigan and Doby from the Jim Crow South of Camden, South Carolina. One year earlier, on July 5, 1947 at Cominsky Park in Chicago, Illinois, Doby had become the second African American behind the great Jackie Robinson of the immortal Brooklyn Dodgers to play for a Major League Baseball team and the first African American to play in the American League. The year the picture was taken was arguably the defining year of the proverbial 'hard row to hoe' of early Civil Rights Movement. John Egerton poignantly and persuasively helps us see this in his opus that won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, "Speak Now Against The Day: The Generation Before The Civil Rights Movement In The South." It was a picture of beauty, genius, and wonder. It was a revolutionary picture because it showed the world that white supremacy and racism was being overcome.

In "Pride Against Prejudice: The Biography of Larry Doby," Joseph Thomas Moore's insightful and wonderful book about Doby's life and times, Doby says, "The picture was more rewarding and happy for me than actually hitting the home run. It was such a scuffle for me, after being involved in all that segregation, going through all I had to go through, until that picture. The picture finally showed a moment of a man showing his feelings for me. But the picture is not just about me. It shows what feelings should be, regardless of differences among people. And it shows what feelings should be in all of life, not just in sports. I think enlightenment can come from such a picture."

This blog is "a short history of losing." American culture defines a 2nd place finish as a loss. Larry Doby was the second African American player to integrate Major League Baseball. He followed Frank Robinson as the second African American manager in the major leagues. Because he was second he is often overlooked and forgotten. When he laced up his well-worn cleats and stepped into that batter's box in Cominsky Park in 1947 he also stepped into a people's history of baseball, a history that is a broader part of a people's history of the United States that shares the stories of women, factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, and immigrant laborers, a history and stories that show losing can be transformed into winning through courage, commitment, compassion, and creativity. Lately, bad news has been coming out of South Carolina. I am thankful for the good news of South Carolinian Larry Doby's life and work. I hope to continue that good news through my writing and teaching.

Larry Doby Tribute

2010-06-11T17:52:00.000-04:00

Alone in the Shadows: The Triumph of Larry Doby

2010-06-11T17:51:00.000-04:00

True Pioneers in Sports History: Larry Doby

2010-06-11T17:36:00.000-04:00

the boy who harnessed the wind

2010-05-31T22:20:00.002-04:00

oliver sacks

2010-05-31T19:48:00.002-04:00

oliver sacks

2010-05-31T19:44:00.001-04:00

I remember the first time I saw the movie 'Awakenings'. I was living at Jeff Street Baptist Center and working with a community of inner-city teenagers from the Clarksdale housing projects in Louisville, Kentucky. Monday nights were 'Dollar Movie Nights' for us and we would load up in our orange van (affectionately called 'The Great Pumpkin') and head out to the theater. On that Monday night I chose 'Awakenings' as our movie of the week, hoping that my kids would identify with the 'helping each other overcome' theme in the story. My dream was deferred. They hated it! Within 15 minutes of the start of the movie they were throwing popcorn at the screen! We got up and changed theaters to something faster paced and action oriented. I had to promise to check my movie choices with them before they agreed to go with me again.

I loved the first fifteen minutes of Awakenings, though, and went back to the theater to see the whole movie by myself on the next night. I identified with Dr. Oliver Sacks (played by Robin Williams) and the compassion, commitment and creativity he had toward his patients suffering with post-encephalitic disease, a 'sleepy sickness' that broke out in the world just after the First World War and left the sick in varying states of suspended animation unable to realize that years were going by, unknowing that they were 40 years older than when their bodies succumbed to the disease. I saw myself in the way he came home from the chronic hospital where he served and poured himself into the study of the little known plants he tended in his sparse apartment. I felt the community of dedicated friends around him in the asylum. I understood why the movie received 3 Oscar nominations, one for best actor (Robert DeNiro for his role as Leonard), one for best picture, and one for best writing of a screenplay adapted from a book.

The movie led me to the book 'Awakenings' by Oliver Sacks and into the literary and neurological worlds of one of the finest writers and doctors of our time. He taught me to picture people (and the characters in my stories) as worlds, a variety of worlds - the landscapes of being in which they reside. And the picturing of worlds requires an active exploration of images and views, a continual jumping-about and imaginative movement instead of a static and systematic formulation. I like the image 'landscape of being' and it helps me see the world with insight and grace. I hope it helps you, too.

teaching haikus

2010-05-19T16:28:00.003-04:00

teaching haikus

2010-05-19T16:19:00.000-04:00

farmer's weathered hands,

planting in the broken ground

working, hoping hope

an empty classroom

early on an August day

hopes and dreams grow there

number 2 pencil,

a story to be written

on a bright new page

immigrant children

walk into the classroom and

sit down quietly

at the school window,

a child stands alone outside

under a shade tree

little bonsai tree,

growing slowly, unnoticed

in the morning sun

yellow

2010-05-18T17:05:00.001-04:00

yellow

2010-05-18T16:59:00.002-04:00

Once I opened a new box of Crayola Crayons. I looked inside of the box and saw all of the beautiful colors, all of the colors of the rainbow, all of the colors of the people of the world, all of those colors and more! There were 64 colors in the crayon box!

As I was gazing at all of those amazing colors, a surprising and wonderful thing happened. The box of crayons spoke to me!

"Excuse me," it asked, "What is your favorite color?"

"My favorite color is yellow," I answered and smiled in wonder at the friendly box of crayons. "Thank you for asking."

The box of crayons smiled back at me and asked simply and profoundly, "Why is yellow your favorite color?"

"That is a great question," I said to my inquisitive friend. "You are the first one to ever inquire why my favorite color is my favorite color."

"Colors are my life," remarked my humble friend.

"Well," I began, "Yellow is my favorite color because it is the color of the early morning sun as it rises over the horizons and hills of Africa where I lived. It warms me. Yellow is the color that moves me in Vincent Van Gogh's paintings. It inspires me. And yellow is the color of my grandpa's freshly shucked corn. It comforts me. When I hold my baby Zeke and kiss him softly on the cheek, I feel yellow. When I read with my 9-year-old Bakary, I feel yellow. As I share life with my wife Robin, I feel yellow. This is why yellow is my favorite color," I reflected.

"Please take my yellow," said my wise, colorful friend, "And hold hands with people who like red and blue and green and orange and purple and all of the other colors inside of me and go out together with them and color the world."

I gladly accepted the yellow crayon, gently closed the lid of my newfound friend, and went out hopefully with color in my heart.

the last shot: city streets, basketball dreams

2010-05-17T20:23:00.002-04:00

the last shot: city streets, basketball dreams

2010-05-17T20:22:00.000-04:00

Have you ever read a book you wish you'd written? I'm reading one now. It's "The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams" by Darcy Frey. Basketball is and always has been my favorite sport. When I was a kid, I spent the last hours of sunlight each day shooting freethrows at the trusty iron rim Dad put up for me in our back yard. The best games in the history of the sport were won or lost in the final seconds with me at the charity stripe, my heart pounding harder than the sound of the dribble of the ball on concrete. I was the point guard for the North Carolina Tarheels or the Philadelphia 76ers and I could hear the cheers from Chapel Hill and Philly and the jeers from Durham and Boston as the ball left my fingertips. I shoot freethrows still. The best games I played in were games on the courts of the Clarksdale Housing Projects in Louisville, Kentucky, a place where I lived and served. I think of those games still.

In "The Last Shot", Frey has written a compassionate book. It is truly a compass that guides us into the sneakers and the hearts of children growing up in the housing projects of Coney Island, New York, inner-city kids defying the law of nature by growing in a tough place like flowers growing through concrete. It is truly passionate about basketball and life, basketball as it is loved by children, coaches, and communities...life as it is felt through the hearts of people who know human beings are human beings and not commodities.

"There's something I'd like to ask. If you'll do it, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds. You see, you never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view," says Atticus to Scout, Jem, and Dill in "To Kill A Mockingbird." "Until you climb into his skin and walk around in it." This book helps you do just that...climb into the sneakers and skins of inner-city children and play the game of basketball and feel the struggle and triumph of life.

the housekeeper and the professor

2010-05-10T17:45:00.002-04:00

the housekeeper and the professor

2010-05-10T17:44:00.000-04:00

"The Housekeeper and the Professor" by Yoko Ogawa is a truly wonderful book. Ogawa is one of my favorite authors. I learned about her in the literary journal "A Public Space," a journal out of Brooklyn, NY that contains many themes (seeing and feeling the world through someone's eyes and heart, especially a someone who is small and forgotten, someone who is an underdog; finding wisdom in the seemingly foolish and strength in the seemingly weak) that are meaningful to me. Here is a synopsis of the story from Powell's Books website -

He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem--ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory.

She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him.

And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor's mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities--like the Housekeeper's shoe size--and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.

The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family.

Here is a review I wrote about the story for Powell's Books -

This book is a serendipity, like a flower growing through the cracks of a cement sidewalk. Ogawa's lowly housekeeper, broken math professor, and latchkey kid show the essence of being human - building community in the midst of loneliness, finding hope in the midst of despair, being human in the midst of inhumanity. It also introduces the wonderful worlds of math and baseball. A simply profound book that is profoundly simple!

I'm looking to vanquish the cruelties of the real world and I'm always hoping to find authors like Ogawa to who are signs who point the way.

Watching with Wonder

2010-05-06T17:08:00.003-04:00

Watching with Wonder

2010-05-06T17:07:00.001-04:00

My county is a farm county and so I’m the son of a farmer and a child of the deep, rich soil of Clarendon County. Most mornings, just before sunrise, I stand sleepily outside our back screen door and see the world brighten around me to a maizy yellow, the color of corn before it fully ripens underneath the husk of a cob growing on a stalk. In the evening, just before sunset, I wonder wearily outside that same door and watch the tomato-y sun hang on the horizon, the color of a “goliath” the day we pick it off the vine. The long day in between is filled with cow milking, egg gathering, school going, weed hoeing, lesson learning, and cow milking again. The days are good, though, because I have a younger brother named Carver, who, as Momma and Daddy say, is my pea in the pod. He's my best friend.

A surprising thing happened on the morning he was born, a thing that turned life on our small farm in Clarendon County, South Carolina upside down. It was March 16, 1948. The window was open in my Momma and Daddy’s bedroom because spring had come early and Momma appreciated the cool morning breeze blowing through the cotton curtains after her long night of labor. With the breeze came a lightning bug. Did it stay up all night, flashing its light to the sleeping world? Or did it sleep all night, taking flight at dawn, shining its light on the waking world? “You always ‘a askin’ questions,” said my Daddy early to me one morning as I walked my shoeless feet through the freshly turned soil. His hands were on the plow and he was following our old mule Charlie and I was following him. “That’s a good thing, askin’ questions. Did you know questions drive the world forward, like I’m drivin’ ol’ Charlie down the row? Did you know questions can turn the world upside down, like the plow turns the hard, rocky ground into soft, helpful soil? Did you know questions are like the seeds we’re gonna plant in these rows? It takes a long time to get from seeds to fruits and vegetables and it takes a long time to get from questions to answers that can make a difference in the world. But seeds change to food that feeds people and questions change to answers that can make the world a better place. You keep ‘a askin’ questions always, Carter. Always keep ‘a askin’ questions.” I’ve always tried to do just that, to ask as many questions as I can ask.

There are two questions I haven’t had to ask, though, since that morning Carver was born. Here was the surprising thing that happened. My little baby brother was wrapped in a blanket, snuggled by Momma’s side with his wide brown eyes open. He was as still as the water in our farm pond on a mid May afternoon. The lightning bug that came into the room with the breeze lit gently on his nose. I watched in wonder as my brother blinked his eyes four short blinks and the lightning bug blinked its light four short times. He blinked his eyes three long blinks and it blinked its light three long blinks. Was my brother communicating with the lightning bug? Was such a thing possible? To help me see that I could believe my eyes, he blinked one short, two long, and one short blinks and the lightning bug blinked the same. He finished with one short blink and it gave a final short blink before it took flight and went out the window through which it came. It was at that moment I knew the answers to the two questions we all ask deep in our hearts – How can we be useful, of what service can we be? There is something inside of us, what can it be? I was meant to live life with my special brother and write down what was inside of us.

- Carver, why you up? It’s the middle of the night.

- I cain’t sleep.

- What you doin’?

- I’m studyin’ a tomato.

I walked to him and knelt beside him. I turned his magnifying glass around and looked into his eye. I saw clearly the parts of his eye that my teacher taught to me at school – the colored part that is the iris and the black part that is the pupil. But it was Carver, my five-year-old brother, who taught me how these parts work together to give us our sense of sight. It was Carver who helped me understand how we see. His lessons always began and ended with questions and were filled with an amazing assortment of facts that came from God only knows where. Our talk about seeing went something like this –

- Carter, you know the five senses?

- Yeah. Let me think…seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching.

-Did’ya know if we divided our brains into three parts, two of the parts would be filled up by seeing?

- Naw, I didn’t know that. Seein’ is that important, huh?

- Yeah. You know what a person who studies the inside parts of the body is called?

- Naw, I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout that.

- Well, that person is called an anatomist. An anatomist is kind of like an artist whose art he’ps us know where those parts are and what they do. Did you know there were artists like that?

- Naw, I didn’t.

- Yeah, there was this anatomist in Africa a long time ago named Rufus. He he’pd us understand the parts of the eye. Do you want me to teach you about the eye?

- Sure

- There’s a thin layer on the inside of the eyeball. It’s the retina. No one could see into the retina until microscopes were invented. When people looked inside the retina for the first time they found millions of rod and cone cells. The rods and cones find rays of light and turn them into signals for the optic nerves. The optic nerves send signals to the brain and it turns them into pictures. ‘Cause of the way lenses work, the picture is upside down. The brain turns it right side up. Idn’ that amazing?

- Yeah, it's amazing. And, you know what? So are you.

He taught me the parts of the eye that helped him see the world as everyone sees it. In that moment, though, deep in the dark of night, I tried to see the parts that I didn’t understand, the parts that woke my brother in the middle of the night to study a tomato while our corner of the world slept, the parts that helped him see the world as only Carver could see it. But those parts remained hidden to me. I gently put my arm around his shoulders and held him close to me.

in our hearts we won them all

2010-05-03T20:27:00.002-04:00

in our hearts we won them all

2010-05-03T20:24:00.005-04:00

I attended a basketball banquet and a girls team gathered together on the stage. Their coach gave a small speech before she introduced each player. "We didn't win any games this season," she lamented, "but in our hearts we won them all." Wow! What a quote! "In our hearts we won them all." I'll always remember it and hold it in my heart.

Not long after that banquet I heard a story on National Public Radio about a high school girls basketball team in Texas that lost a game 100-0. I found an article about the game written by Barry Horn for the Dallas Morning News. Horn wrote "Later on the 100-0 night, Civello (the losing coach) told his girls the life lesson they could take from their loss: 'I told them someday they will be on top in a similar situation and they should remember how they felt when some people were cheering for a team to score a hundred points and shut us out. Hopefully, my girls all learned a lesson in sportsmanship that will last a lifetime.'"

In her wonderful book, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, E.L. Konigsburg made this observation about becoming a team, a family.

Something happened at precisely that moment. Both Claudia and Jamie tried to explain to me about it, but they couldn't quite. I know what happened but I never told them. Having words and explanations for everything is too modern...

What happened was: they became a team, a family of two. There had been times before they ran away when they had acted like a team, but those were very different from feeling like a team. Becoming a team didn't mean the end of their arguments. But it did mean that the arguments became a part of the adventure, became discussions not threats. To an outsider the arguments would appear to be the same because feeling like part of a team is something that happens invisibly. You might call it caring. You could even call it love. And it is very rarely, indeed, that it happens to two people at the same time - especially a brother and a sister who had always spent more time with activities than they had with each other.

There are winners and losers in all parts of our world - the social parts, the economic parts, the political parts, the religious parts - all parts. I am hoping and working for a time when we become a team/family/community, when we can cheer for cooperation over conquest, when we can 'give under' instead of 'take over', and when we can say, "In our hearts and in our life together we won them all."

the lost boys

2010-04-26T21:12:00.004-04:00

the lost boys

2010-04-26T21:12:00.001-04:00

I was perusing the 'current events' magazines at Barnes and Noble and came across a wonderful one called NEED. Its mission statement on its cover hooked me - "We are not out to save the world but to tell the stories of those who are." Its stories are indeed moving and its photographs are striking. Sadly, its publisher fell on hard times during the recession and stopped publication. (Why are my favorite t.v. shows and magazines always discontinued - does this happen to you, too?) Thankfully, you can still read its articles on its website - needmagazine.com

One of the articles especially touched me, an article about one of the 'lost boys' of Africa. Do you know their story? They were displaced by the civil war in Sudan and made their way across many, many treacherous miles fleeing the horrors of war, taking care of each other along the way. If you don't know their story then I recommend "God Grew Tired of Us: A Memoir" by John Bul Dau and Michael S. Seednet, "What Is The What" by Dave Eggers, and "Brothers in Hope: The Story of the Lost Boys of Sudan by Mary Williams and Gregory Christie (a picture book that won a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor Book award). Their story reminds me that God seems to be concerned with the thriving of the weakest instead of the survival of the fittest.

The article is in Issue 6 of the magazine. It is titled "Lost Boys Return" and is about one of the children who became a doctor and who is now serving in the hellish Darfur region of Sudan and two of his comrades who are also doctors who come for 2 weeks to help him. His name is Tut Pur and I want to share a word picture of him with you to help us remember that there is hope around us in the most surprising places and that we can build hope together in our world -

"Tut Pur is accustomed to questions from people who wonder why he - or anyone - would return to such a broken place. 'People didn't expect that a medical doctor would come here because there was a lot of hostility in the area when I came in December 2007. People were asking, Why aren't you in Juma, Malakal, or Bor? But I told them that someone had to come here and help you so that we could make a difference. So it is a commitment from my heart to be with this community, to help them as long as God provides. I have a heart for this place where I was born.' He has been the only full-time doctor at the hospital since the wars started."

Enough said :-)

favorite farmer

2010-04-24T18:57:00.000-04:00

favorite farmer

2010-04-24T18:47:00.005-04:00

Grandpa, you are my Pepa. Before me, you were

Robert Elias Cunningham: son, brother, husband and father

God, through my birth, made you Grandpa

I, in my smallness, through toddling talk and wondering words, made you Pepa

Just now, deep in my life, I feel you kneeling in your garden,

Planting your plants,

Your skin the color of newly plowed rows, your smell the humble smell of dirt

Sweat drips off your forehead and mixes with rain and soil

Nourishing plants so they can grow

Your heart, faithful and soft, is a red, big, beautiful

Better Boy Tomato

Swaying softly in whispering winds of

Southern summer skies

Your soul, bright and gentle, is a yellow ear of

Sweet corn

Wrapping itself gently in tender husks,

Protecting itself from searing sun, wooly worms and harsh hours

Your mind, persistent and broad, is an experienced

Briggs and Stratton motor

Running a plow, working through problems, fixing anything

Accepting me, allowing me to grow as the

Land accepts the seed and allows it to grow

Your strength, helping and enduring, is a trusty

Farmall tractor

Helping keep the farmer from struggling behind a mule and a plow,

Enduring almost eighty years,

Puttering, held together with baling wire and Duck tape, down one more row

Pepa, you are our favorite farmer

Just as you sowed your seed and gathered your garden

So you sow

Faith, hope and love into your family's

Hearts, souls, minds and strengths and

Gather us to you

We love you my Grandpa, my Pepa, my friend

women in the civil rights movement

2010-04-19T19:03:00.003-04:00

women in the civil rights movement

2010-04-19T18:56:00.001-04:00

As I read this book I found myself being full of thanks for the black women whose life stories fill its pages. I was thankful because the lives of these women help me work my way through a conundrum that has risen in my heart and mind over the years that I have lived with black people and poor people in America and in Africa. The conundrum is – I am white and of the middle class. The people around me are black and poor. I plant myself in places where it is possible to live a life of shared faith, hope, and love with them, a life that builds a better, more human world for all people, a life that becomes the “beloved community.” Will the life that I have planted produce fruit? Will possibilities become realities? Of all the words Malcolm X spoke, the ones with which I struggled most mightily were not the ones about white people or Christianity. The words with which I struggled most mightily were the ones about the impossibility of the “beloved community,” the ones that stated the case (and a very good case it was) that white people and black people cannot live a life of shared faith, hope, and love but can only live lives in competition as socio-economic, cultural, and political equals. His words, along with my life experiences in the area of black/white relations, leave me with a feeling of being “stuck,” as if the ideas from the Civil Rights Movement are a morass and my own thoughts, feelings, and actions concerning civil rights are trapped, confused, and impeded. The lives of the women in this book, however, make a way for me out of the morass. These women show me that if I use my life to serve the lives of others, especially the lives of the poor, then I will become a seed in a fallow ground that is bringing life to those who believe that all people, regardless of color, nationality, socio-economic status, sex, ability, or sexual orientation, are human beings and of inestimable worth. Women like Fannie Lou Hamer, who was one of the seeds that grew into the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Septima Poinsette Clark, who was one of the seeds which created the Citizenship Schools upon which the Civil Rights Movement was built, Modjeska Simkins, who was one of the seeds that grew into the Brown v. Board of Education case before the Supreme Court, Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, who was one of the seeds that grew into the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and Ella Baker, who was one of the seeds that grew into the SNCC, are people who planted themselves in places of white supremacy, despair, and hate and gave their lives in seemingly small ways to bring faith, hope, and love to the poor people around them. To use biblical language, they were like the tiny mustard seed that grows into the trees so tall they have room many birds. Look what they did!

I think we live in a “celebrity culture” today, a culture that looks for a charismatic leader to help us know what to think and know what to do in all of the areas of our lives. I think this is dangerous, so I especially appreciate the thoughts on “group-centered leadership” in the chapter by Carol Mueller titled “Ella Baker and the Origins of ‘Participatory Democracy.’” Baker has become one of my heroes because she worked toward the idea that the Civil Rights Movement was about people struggling together in a democratic society to make American society a more human place for all people (and democratic work is indeed a struggle) rather than about Mosaic type leaders leading an oppressed people to a promised land. I found these words by Baker to be profound –

The inclination toward group-centered leadership, rather than toward a leader centered group pattern of organization, was refreshing indeed to those of the older group who bear the scars of battle, the frustrations and the disillusionment that come when the prophetic leader turns out to have heavy feet of clay.

I have always had a deep respect for the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr., and I know the pain inflicted by the obstinate people on the Greenville County Council who refused to recognize the MLK holiday, but it is precisely because of Baker’s reasoning that I wanted there to be a “Civil Rights Day” to celebrate the Civil Rights Movement instead of a “Martin Luther King Jr. holiday to celebrate the life of one leader in the movement.

This book helped me see again what an important role South Carolina and South Carolinians played in the Civil Rights Movement. I am training to be a teacher and have learned that 3rd graders in South Carolina Public Schools learn about South Carolina history. If I teach 3rd grade then I am planning on helping my students learn about the great South Carolinians Septima Poinsette Clark and Modjeska Simkins. I am from South Carolina and I only learned about them now as a graduate student reading this book. I suppose that some South Carolinians are proud of South Carolina because of its Civil War history but I am proud to share my birth state with Clark, who created the Citizenship Schools that became the base upon which the Civil Rights Movement was built, and Simkins, whose work with the S.C. NAACP helped bring the school desegration cases to the U.S. Supreme Court. I am proud of South Carolina because of its Civil Rights history.

As I read about the Highlander Folk School I was amazed that pro-union, pro-civil rights thinking of this kind was percolating in the Appalacian Mountains of Tennessee in the ‘30’s, ‘40’s, ‘50’s, and ‘60’s. As read the chapter by Donna Langston on “The Women of Highlander” I was reminded again of the precarious time in history in which the Civil Rights Movement occurred. I remembered that America’s struggle with Communism was at its peak during this time period and that anyone or any movement that challenged the socio-economic, cultural, or political powers of that day were likely to be brandished “communist sympathizers.” This remembrance helps me stand in wonder before the work of the Higlander Folk School and think humbly at the important ways that school helped shape the thought and actions of people who went out and stood up against the injustice perpetuated by the powerful of the day.

I found that Bernice Johnson Reagon’s chapter in the book, “Women as Culture Carriers in the Civil Rights Movement: Fannie Lou Hamer, is a good example of what I meant in my reflections on The Autobiography of Malcolm X when I wrote about “people being guided by religion” as opposed to “people guiding religion.” Reagon presents Hamer as a woman whose life was guided by religion, as a person who found a hunger and thirst for justice and the strength to stand up to injustice in her religion. I have been influenced by the life and work of the Latin American liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, and in this chapter I see that Hamer was a living example of that type of understanding of God, a type calls people to preach the good news to the poor, heal the broken-hearted, preach deliverance to the captives, recover sight to the blind, set at liberty those who are bruised, preach the acceptable day of the Lord, and carry the cross.

Class Discussion:

I am the only male student in our class. I reflected on this fact as we discussed this book. This book and our discussion help me realize that that there are two kinds of power. One kind of power is a power that dominates. It is the power that a leader has in Ella Baker’s idea of the “leader centered group.” This power still seems to be the kind of power that is most important in our society. The other kind of power is a power that serves. It is the power that a group has in Baker’s idea of “group centered leadership.” This power still seems to be the kind of power that is growing in small places around our country. The book helps me see that power that serves is the kind of power that can change society. This is the kind of power seen in the words and actions of Fannie Lou Hamer and all of the women in our book. Our discussion helps me know that this kind of power is appreciated and understood by the women around me. I think that Grace’s discussion about Eleanor Roosevelt and Fannie Lou Hamer was poignant. Sometimes I forget that social change can come from people like Eleanor Roosevelt. Grace made the observation that Roosevelt and Hamer were polar opposites on the outside. Roosevelt was elite in her education, socio-economic position, and cultural position. She was white in a society dominated by white people. Hamer was Roosevelt’s polar opposite. She was uneducated and at the bottom of the socio-economic and cultural world. Grace made the observation that Roosevelt and Hamer were of the same spirit on the inside. They both used their words and lives to serve others, especially those who were poor and oppressed. I am hopeful that our reading and our discussion of these issues will encourage all of us to use our education and our lives to help build a more human world around us.

“Standing On My Sisters Shoulders” reflection:

I was deeply touched as I listened to Mae Bertha Carter from Sunflower County, Mississippi talk about her 13 children and hear about her family’s decision to be the first black family in her county to try to integrate the public schools. She and her husband wanted to see that their children did not become sharecroppers. I was impressed that they risked their livelihood, and even their lives, to register their children in the all white elementary school and that they courageously confronted the white power structure in their county to do it. I am the father of two boys and as she talked about waiting for the school bus to bring her children home and standing at the window to count each one to make sure they returned home safely I knew in my heart how she must have felt and wondered if I would have had the courage to do as she did. I was overjoyed to learn that seven of her children graduated from Ole Miss.

I was impressed with Joan Trumpauer Mulholland as she talked about her integration of Tougaloo College. Her action asked the question, “In integration , why do we assume that black people must be brought into white culture instead of white people being brought into black culture? What makes us think white culture is better than black culture?”

I wondered at the heart of Constance Slaughter, how she integrated Ole Miss law school and had to stand on her tiptoes and lean into the picture of her graduating class because her white, male classmates tried to block her from view. She must have been made of stone but I know she had a brilliant mind and a heart of flesh.

One of the first women elected to the House of Representatives in Mississippi was asked, “How can you legislate morality?” She answered, “You can’t legislate morality but you can create an atmosphere where change can come outside of the realm of fear.” What a wise answer.

I was touched by Winifred Green, who said that as a white women her family disowned her when she joined the civil rights movement but that she found family in the civil rights movement.

I was touched by these words of Fannie Lou Hamer when she was asked about bitterness and hatred toward segregationists, “You can’t have that kind of hate inside of you. It will destroy you. They are sick…we have to kind a way to love them and get rid of them through the vote.” Amen.

All of these women, and all people like them, are the foundation on which “the beloved community” can be built.

warriors don't cry

2010-04-19T18:29:00.001-04:00

warriors don't cry

2010-04-19T18:25:00.001-04:00

As a “warrior” in the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957, Melba Pattillo Beals and eight other black students tried not to cry because of the hatred spewed at them by segregationists, the indifference (except on a few occasions – 101st Airborne, Danny, Mrs. Pickwick, Link) shown to them by the white power structure, and the suspicion and fear of them by many people in the black community. They tried not to cry during that year of struggle and suffering but I found myself crying for them as I lived their year with them through Ms. Pattillo Beals memoir.

I am at Converse College because I am training to be an elementary school teacher. As I read this book I watched with keen interest the actions of the teachers at Central High School that Ms. Pattillo Beals mentions. From my own experiences as a student and as a teacher I know that teachers can change the lives of their students. I remember that Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, decided to become a teacher because she believed that children do not come into the world with hatred in their hearts. No, hatred was something that was taught by families and societies. She believed as a teacher that she could teach children to love. I believe that, too. In Ms. Pattillo Beals’s memoir, though, I saw only one teacher who tried to be fair. That teacher was Mrs. Pickwick, the shorthand instructor. She tried to be fair by using discipline to provide a safe place for learning to take place. I did not see any teacher who tried to teach love into the lives of students whose hearts were filled with learned hatred. Perhaps this was because of the ostracism and danger a white teacher would have faced at that time in that place if they had reached out to the nine black students in their school. But if all of the teachers in the school had been united in reaching out to the black students would the lives of all of people there have been changed? As a teacher am I willing to face ostracism and danger to reach out to all of my students and their families, am I willing to confront hate with love?

As I read the book I remembered again the importance of words and how we can use words to help people or to hurt people. At the most basic level in this story, words like “nigger” were used to hurt Ms. Pattillo Beals and the other eight students at Central High School. They were words of hatred and bigotry. They were words that not only hurt the hearts of the black students but they were words that incited violence against them. They were words that said, “You are less than human so I can treat you any way I want.” They were words that said, “Your life is worth less than the ‘Southern way of life’”. I am also reminded that words like “states rights” were used by the governor of Arkansas and other white people within the white power structure and that their use of words like these incited violence against the nine black students, too. I wonder if they knew that the words they used, that the ideals of which they spoke, were devastating to the lives of black people. Do I use words that hurt and devastate?

Ms. Patillo Beals’ grandmother, however, used words to help. She used the words of the Bible and the words of Ghandi to strengthen her granddaughter’s spirit, a strengthening that helped her granddaughter make it through a living hell. She used her own words to guide and to nurture her granddaughter. Do I use words to help, guide, and nurture?

The book helped me think again about how dehumanizing segregation was to black people. I was touched during the moments when Ms. Pattillo Beal’s thought that if white people would only make the effort to get to know her then they would know that she was a human being. In one of her journal entries she wrote

This is the day I hope to meet Governor Faubus face to face. I can’t decide what to say to him. If only he will listen to me one minute. I know I can make him understand there is nothing so bad about me that he shouldn’t allow white children to go to school with me.

The weatherman says it’s going to be 85 and up this afternoon. I’ll regret wearing my cotton blouse and quilted skirt, but they’re new and pretty. I want to look just right so the governor will know who I really am.

If we will just listen, if we will just spend time with each other, then we will know who we really are. This is my hope.

Toward the end of the book there is a headline from the Arkansas Gazette dated Tuesday, April 1, 1957 that read “NAACP ASKS STERNER ACTION BY CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL TROOPS.” The headline was followed by these words:

The NAACP renewed today its demand for more militant action by troops at Central High School. Otherwise we are confronted with the incredible spectacle of the government of the United States placing the burden of enforcing the order of its courts upon the slender shoulders and young hearts of eight teenage Negro students.

It is interesting to note that this headline appeared on April Fools Day. Was it not obvious that the burden of enforcing integration was “upon the slender shoulders and young hearts of eight teenage negro students”? This raises important questions that I have been asking myself as I have read the books for this class – Why did the burden of desegregation have to be carried by black children? Why did the burden of integration have to be carried mostly by black people? (I realize that there were “law-abiding whites who risked their lives” to help, as Ms. Patillo Beals wrote) As a white Southern liberal I still believe that integration makes a way for whites to begin to become more understanding of blacks and for blacks to begin to become more understanding of whites. I wonder, though, if it is right to expect black people (or any person of color) to integrate into white culture. Does this expectation say that white culture is somehow superior to black culture?

As I finished the book I was filled with wonder again that experiences like the ones of Ms. Pattillo Beals, Ms. Till Mobley, and Ms. Gibson Robinson did not leave their hearts and their lives filled with cynicism, despair, and hatred. The fact that they were not turned to hating white people is a testament to faith, hope and love.

Class Discussion:

In our class discussion, we reflected on the economic issue involved in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The black boycotters used their economic power to confront the white power structure and make changes to inhumane laws. I also reflected on the legal issue involved in the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The pro-integrationists used the power of the federal courts to confront the white power structure in Southern states and make changes to inhumane laws. As I reflect on this discussion I can hear the voices of the people behind closed doors in the White House, in Congress, in the Supreme Court, in Governor’s mansions, in white owned businesses, and in other places of power say, “We must end segregation or money and jobs will be lost,” or, “We must end segregation because it is the law.” I wonder, though, how many people said, “We must end segregation because it is the right thing to do.” As a parent and as a teacher I try to teach my children to “do the right thing because it is the right thing to do.” I hope all of our decisions regarding the dehumanization of a group of people will be made because it is the right thing to do.

the shadow of the panther

2010-04-19T18:17:00.002-04:00

the shadow of the panther

2010-04-19T18:15:00.001-04:00

The Shadow of the Panther by Hugh Pearson is one of my favorite books that we read in our civil rights class. It gives a concise overview of the civil rights movement and was a helpful review of the people, places and events that we studied from the beginning of the class. It also gives an in-depth look into the life of the Black Panther Party and helped me work through the enduring questions - “How should we as human beings confront evil?” – “Does the end ever justify the means?” – “Does power corrupt?” I think Pearson tried to give readers an objective look at Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party so we will be able to think clearly as we try to answer these questions.

As we have learned in our study of the civil rights movement, the dehumanization and oppression of black people particularly in the American south but generally in all of America was/is evil. The dehumanization Melba Patillo Beals and the other eight children who integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas experienced by the words and actions of rabid, white segregationists; the oppression so many black people experienced from the hearts and hands of white people; and the complicity of local governments, state governments, and the federal government (especially through the FBI) was morally reprehensible. After reading about and discussing this dehumanization and oppression, I understand why Huey Newton desired to build an organization like the Black Panther Party for Self Defense for the purpose of preserving the black race.

I remember when I began serving children and youth in the Clarksdale Housing Project in Louisville, Kentucky in the early 1990’s. I was from the white, middle class of upstate South Carolina and piedmont North Carolina and thought of policemen as helps to my community and even as friends. I was shocked when I learned that many black, poor people thought of policemen as threats to their communities and even as enemies. A mother of one of the teenagers I served in Clarksdale told me one evening, “If you are standing on the corner with a group of your white friends and see police officers approaching then you say hello and take no thought as they pass. But if my son is standing on the corner with a group of his black friends and they see police officers approaching they keep their heads down and hope they don’t hurt them. You see and experience the police in a different way than we see and experience them.” After learning how black people see and experience the police through my time in Louisville and through my reading for our class I understand why Newton wanted to arm the Black Panthers with guns and law books and send them out on the streets to “police” the police.

I was touched by the social services that the Black Panthers provided for poor children in their communities. The breakfast program and the school were noble endeavors that could provide hope to children – a hope that could open windows for them to reach their full potentials. I know there are poor children all over the world who could help the world in many ways if only someone cared for their basic needs. I can understand why there were so many people who were ready to support these social services with finances and with hands–on work. (What an interesting story about the children, hot chocolate, “reds”, and vitamins – sometimes it takes hard work to put our best intentions to work)

I was amazed by the community organizing efforts of the Black Panthers. It would take deep commitment and sacrifice to do all of the things necessary to mobilize people to work for a better life through boycotts and through the political process. The organization seemed to be able to touch that kind of commitment and sacrifice within people.

As I worked through this book I wondered if my fellow students had some of the same thoughts I did about Newton and the Black Panther Party. Newton and the Black Panthers were the antithesis of some of the white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan that we have encountered in our reading, but I could see some similarities between them. They both used harsh rhetoric and violence to bend people to their wills. They both escaped judgment from the criminal justice system even though they were guilty of the offenses with which they were charged. They both relied on powerful people (politicians, actors, wealthy patrons) for financial support. They both acted as if their respective ends – the preservation of black people and the preservation of the white race should be accomplished by any means necessary. (I see a difference in these two ends – preservation of the black race was an attempt to stop a perceived genocide while the preservation of white society was an attempt to preserve racial purity – to stop genocide is a moral necessity while to preserve racial purity is not.)

I was interested in the story about Elaine Brown. I often wonder if women would be better leaders than men – if their understanding and use of power would be more about service and building up than about being served and tearing down. It appears that Brown eventually used her power as the leader of the Black Panther Party in the “being served”, “tearing down” way – especially in the implication of her involvement in the death of Betty Van Patter – though at times she seemed more conscious of using her power for “serving” and “building up” – especially in her political organizing.

As I learned about Huey Newton himself – his genius (his communication skills, his academic achievement) balanced with stupidity (his destructive lifestyle, both toward himself and others) – I was reminded of something James Meredith said when he was criticized for making a poor grade in one of his classes at Ole Miss – that people should realize that just because he was a black person involved in the civil rights movement did not mean that he was somehow super human. It seems that many white radicals on the left saw Newton as super human – above the foibles and failures of human beings. I think Newton was certainly a product of his times.

I see that the civil rights movement turned from a “turn the other cheek” – touch the humanity of your oppressor – movement toward an “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” – punish the inhumanity of your oppressor – movement and am understanding why this turning took place. People hope for the life found in the platform of the Black Panther Party – a life of land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace. And people realize that they must work to fulfill this hope and realize this life. The civil rights movement teaches us that life was in the hands of one group of people, a group that was unwilling to share life with another group of people. It teaches us the different ways dehumanized, oppressed people struggle for life against their oppressors – through non-violent direct action, through political organization, through violent struggle. After thinking through this hope for life and this struggle for life as we have read and discussed the civil rights movement in America I believe that we can work together – black and white, rich and poor, male and female, heterosexual and homosexual – to build a more human world for all people. The work will be hard. As a teacher and a writer, I will be in a good place to work mind to mind and heart to heart with my students, their families, and our community to build a more human world. As I teach and as I write I will always hope for and always struggle for the beloved community.

the river of no return

2010-04-19T13:54:00.001-04:00