SUNDAY JANUARY 23 at 7pm
FOCUS ON VOTING RIGHTS AND EDUCATION
THEY SAY I AM YOUR TEACHER
FREEDOM SCHOOLS
LET THE PEOPLE DECIDE
EXCERPT FROM CALCULATING CHANGE
DISCUSSANTS
Fannie Rushing, Bill Ayers, Ash-Lee Henderson and Rev. Allyn Maxfield-Steele
Host Adam Bush
Freedom Schools 6 min. a work in progress by Catherine Murphy
An exploration of the SNCC and CORE movement schools that were part of the Freedom Movement of the 1960s in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi.
THEY SAY I’M YOUR TEACHER 9 minutes Directed by Lucy Massie Phenix and Catherine Murphy.
They Say I’m Your Teacher is a documentary short about the Citizen Education Schools, created from the 16mm archives of the groundbreaking 1985 film, You Got to Move
LET THE PEOPLE DECIDE Directed by Gavin Guerra 1 hr. 48 mn. 2019
‘Let the People Decide’ traces the history of voting rights struggles in the United States from 1960 through the present day. The film draws parallels between the Mississippi voter registration drive of the early 1960’s and North Carolina’s ‘Moral Monday’ movement in the present day. A key goal of the film is connecting the dots between the generations to contextualize the current political environment surrounding race and voting. In 3 acts the film will travel across nearly 60 years to show how the current battles over voting are not a new front in the struggle over who gets to vote, but part of a continuing conflict that goes back many decades. Now as then, both sides claim the moral high ground. In the 1960’s, race was the clear driving force of the conflict, today the fight is couched in claims of fraud and suppression. Political parties have drawn lines in the sand and this project will present arguments from all sides in order that the film can live up to it’s name and ‘Let the People Decide’.
https://www.letthepeopledecidedoc.com/
CALCULATING CHANGE 52 minutes directed by Joel Sucher –
PBS special on the efforts to overhaul math and science education in the US Hosted by Al Roker. Produced for the Urban League and Thirteen/WNET.
We will be screening the excerpted clip with Bob Moses
INTERLOCUTORS
FANNIE RUSHING, ASH-LEE WOODARD HENDERSON AND REV. ALLYN MAXFIELD-STEELE, AND BILL AYERS AND HOST ADAM BUSH
FANNIE THERESA RUSHING is currently a professor of history and global studies at Benedictine University in Lisle Illinois. She publishes articles, organized symposia, and lectures on the African Diaspora in Latin America and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. In addition, for the last ten years, Rushing has been the co-chair of the Chicago Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) History Project. She has spent her life investing in and uplifting Brown and Black Communities.
BILL AYERS
William Ayers, Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (retired), founder of both the Small Schools Workshop and the Center for Youth and Society, taught courses in interpretive and qualitative research, oral history, creative non-fiction, urban school change, and teaching and the modern predicament. Ayers has written extensively about social justice, democracy and education, the cultural contexts of schooling, and teaching as an essentially intellectual, ethical, and political enterprise.
Ayers’ articles have appeared in many journals including the Harvard Educational Review, the Journal of Teacher Education, Teachers College Record, Rethinking Schools, The Nation, Educational Leadership, the New York Times and the Cambridge Journal of Education.
His books include with Crystal Laura and Rick Ayers “You Can’t Fire the Bad Ones!” And 18 Other Myths About Teachers, Teachers’ Unions, and Public Education (Beacon Press, 2018), Demand the Impossible! A Radical Manifesto (Haymarket Books, 2016), Teaching with Conscience in an Imperfect World: An Invitation (Teachers College Press, 2016), Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident (Beacon Press, 2013), with Ryan Alexander-Tanner To Teach: The Journey in Comics (Teachers College Press, 2010), with Bernardine Dohrn Race Course: Against White Supremacy (Third World Press 2008), with Rick Ayers
REV. ALLYN MAXFIELD-STEELE has been Co-Executive Director of the Highlander Research and Education Center since 2017. Raised in Texas, Germany, and North Carolina, he was born into a family of educators, farmers, secretaries, salesmen, veterans, hotel night-shift managers, social workers, and small-town Protestant church folk of the southern Piedmont and southern Atlantic coast. Between 2002-2004, he had the opportunity to live with and learn alongside organizers and leaders from the people’s movements of Northeast Thailand. That experience transformed Allyn’s understanding of the power and purpose of education. Since then, his movement work has focused on connecting people and grassroots communities to one another through high school and college education, faith and spiritual leadership, and organizing on a range of front- lines throughout the US South and Appalachia. He is committed to figuring out how people and organizations transform together and, in particular, how rural people can work together to teach everyone else how to build powerful movements. Allyn lives in the mountains of Western North Carolina with his spouse, Erin, and their child, Ursa.
ASH-LEE WOODARD HENDERSON
Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson is an Affrilachian (Black Appalachian) woman from the working class, born and raised in Southeast Tennessee. She is the first Black woman to serve as Co-Executive Director of the Highlander Research & Education Center in New Market, TN. As a member of multiple leadership teams in the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), Ash-Lee has thrown down on the Vision for Black Lives and the BREATHE Act. Ash-Lee has served on the governance council of the Southern Movement Assembly, the advisory committee of the National Bailout Collective, and is an active leader of The Frontline. She is a long-time activist who has done work in movements fighting for workers, for reproductive justice, for LGBTQUIA+ folks, for environmental justice, and more.
ADAM BUSH
Adam is the co-founder and Provost of College Unbound; a degree completion college working both inside and outside carceral spaces of Rhode Island to ensure all adult learners are valued as scholar-practitioners, and have access to a Bachelor’s degree pathway. Adam received his PhD from USC’s Department of American Studies and Ethnicity for his dissertation “Passing Notes in Class” which examined the origins of early jazz programs and the student and teacher-activist musicians that led to that institutionalization. He is the 2011 recipient of the K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award for Commitment to Academic and Civic Responsibility from the AAC&U, and the 2015 recipient of the John Saltmarsh Award for Emerging Leaders in Civic Engagement from the AASCU’s American Democracy Project. For more information about College Unbound please see the Chronicle of Higher Ed.
