If you want to know more about the backstory on the Center continue reading. If you want to skip to the proposed plans for the McElroy House scroll down.

For a long time it has been a dream of mine to do something like this. My time in graduate school, and especially my time spent working with Michael Morrow and the West Kentucky African American Heritage Center as well as the Kentucky Remembers! Project, shaped my ideas and further pushed me toward this dream (If you want to know more about these projects please visit my portfolio. Their work is amazing, and I highly recommend checking it out). Through their example I saw how oral history and folklife research projects have the capacity to encourage dialog; I witnessed firsthand how youth oral history projects can truly build bridges between generations and members of a community.

I recently inherited my grandparents’ home, the small 1940s house I practically grew up in. It is located one street from my hometown’s historic Front Street. With its proximity to the Arkansas River and the historic district, the location for a folklife center is ideal. Wanting to honor my wonderful grandparents and uncle who once lived there, and my amazing mother who left me the house, I can think of nothing more appropriate then to dedicate the house to researching, and teaching others to research, the history and the folkways of the region they all loved so much. My grandparents’ last name, and my mother’s maiden name and uncle’s name, was McElroy, hence the name of the Center: The McElroy House: Center for Regional Oral History and Folklife Research.

The house is located in a residential area, which means the first step in the process is to apply for a special use permit to open a non-profit in the neighborhood. I have applied for the permit, and the the hearing will be held August 24th at 7:00 pm at Dardanelle City Hall. I will give a presentation detailing my proposed plans and will answer any questions the City Planning Commission and citizens of the community may have. The hearing is open to the public. If you are in the area already or happen to be passing through, I would love for you to come to the meeting and bring any questions, concerns, and/or suggestions you might have. If you are interested in the Center’s work, I would especially love for you to come by. On a lighter note, please be advised that I am having twins—they are due sometime between August 25th (the day after the meeting) and September 15th— so I may be quite a spectacle to behold by the time the meeting rolls around. haha!

It is possible that the City Planning Commission may deny my request for a special use permit. Should this occur, I won’t give up on the dream. I will just regroup and begin looking for a more suitable location.

Below are the proposed plans for the McElroy House. I welcome any comments and/or suggestions.
If you are interested in learning more or would like to support our work, please contact me. We greatly need volunteers who are willing to give time and lots of elbow grease (as my mom used to say) to our efforts–especially people who like garden work. If you are interested in helping out in any way, please let me know!

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McElroy House: Center for Local Oral History Research and Folklife Research.

What I plan to do with the property should the special use permit be granted:

• The Center will focus on the documentation of local history and living traditions. It will be named in honor of my grandparents, Lloyd and Golda Taylor McElroy, and uncle, Bobby McElroy. As noted above, the Center will be called The McElroy House: Center for Regional Oral History and Folklife Research.

• Our main goals will be educational in nature and include cross-generational outreach programs between our community’s young people and elders. We will teach young people how to document oral history and living community traditions and preserve this information for decades to come.

• I will write grants to fund this work and partner with state and national historical agencies to make these things happen. I will work toward becoming a non-profit organization. What follows are some of the services we plan to offer.

A Few Specific Examples of What the Center Will Do:

• We will offer audio and video recording equipment and classes to teach interested community members and youth in our public schools how to use this equipment so they can interview their relatives or friends about their life history and the history of their community. Recording equipment will be available for checkout for events such as family reunions, city gatherings and the like.

• We will have scanners on hand so that community members can bring their old photos to the Center to be scanned into the computer allowing these invaluable photos to be saved for generations to come. We will offer “Photo Sharing Days,” wherein community members can get together to share and discuss their historic photos pertaining to our community.

• All these interviews and photos will be housed in the Center in our database so that they will be available for others to view and hear. A few topics we have already began researching are the cotton industry and its history in the community and the tradition of Decoration Days throughout Yell County. We plan to add many more topics to this list.

• We will partner with local schools, after school programs, and state historical societies to accomplish this work. While we will not be a museum or archival institution, we will work closely with other agencies throughout the state and region that can appropriately house historic documents and artifacts people may wish to denote.

• The small garden space that my grandfather once used to grow tomatoes and peppers will be converted back into a small vegetable garden where we will grow local foods. We will offer workshops, led by community members, on how to grow vegetables, save seeds, and can for the winter. Our goals for the garden will be to preserve and pass on these important gardening skills for generations to come. Any food produced in the garden will be donated to the community.

• A small memorial butterfly garden will be created and named after my mother, former City Clerk, Mary Sue Martin. She was the daughter of Lloyd and Golda McElroy who once owned the house. It will be called the Mary Sue Martin Cancer Memorial Butterfly Garden. Both my grandmother and mother loved butterflies. The garden will bear my mother’s name, but will also serve to honor the many people in our community who pass away from cancer each year. Before cancer took her life, my mother expressed her desire to use her life to help cancer patients in our community. I hope the creation of this garden will be just the first step in raising awareness regarding cancer in our community. Community members will be invited to add plants to the garden in honor of their relatives who passed away from this horrible disease.

This is just a small outline of some of our plans. At the core of our work is a desire to document and preserve the countless living traditions in our community and learn more about our local history. We want to help build bridges between the old and young and help young people know more about their community’s past and present while also looking toward the future.

The Rural Assembly

According to their webpage, “The National Rural Assembly is a movement of people and organizations devoted to building a stronger, more vibrant rural America.” At the core of their work is the Rural Compact: “The National Rural Assembly encourages individuals and organizations to endorse the Rural Compact, a basic statement of principles for building a stronger rural America that improves opportunity for all of us.”

The great thing is, the Compact is as specific as it is open-ended. The compact supports specifics such as making sure broadband is available in all rural schools, assuring preventive health care is available to all rural Americans, and supporting financial and structural investments in rural communities that can help keep youth from having to choose between leaving their homes and finding a job and/or make a decent living. The Compact also focuses on greater environmental protection while also supporting job creation, understanding that the two need not be mutually exclusive.

One of the things that really stands out to me is that in the context of the Rural Assembly’s Compact the term “rural” or “small town” is not defined in that devise way Sarah Palin revived during her Republican National Assembly speech (Although it was certainly around long before her speech). Rural is, instead, a diverse collection of places across this nation where we have rich cultural heritages but also poor incomes. Where we have beautiful mountains or valleys or prairies but we also have large companies who do a great deal of damage to this land, and we often find ourselves forced to work for these companies if we want to remain here. In a lot of rural communities there are just no jobs at all, even though rural areas are full of creative thinkers, inventors, artisans, writers, etc. We have the resources. We just have to put those resources to work.

Rural, this diverse collection of places, is not homogenous and it’s for sure no Utopia. But it is a beautifully diverse place just as important to this nation’s success as any other.

So, what I really like about the Compact is it does away with any mention of rural as being some sort of pastoral, racist, or time-warped collections of places—a stereotype that is so counterproductive to doing anything to address the beauty and problems in rural America— but instead embraces “rural” this way:
“Rural America is more than the land. It is a way we are connected in culture, heritage, and national enterprise. While it may be vast, it is far from empty. Sixty million of us live in the American countryside, and far more grew up there. Rural Americans reflect the full diversity of the country in who we are, what we do, and what we want to achieve.”

To read the contract in full and to add your name go here:Read and Sign the Compact.

You can also see who else has signed it, which is a great way to find out people in your area to work with.

At this past year’s Assembly meeting, videos created by rural youth were screened. The videos address areas of concern such as “Education,” “Environment,” “Heath”, and “Investment.” These videos are great because in our media world we hear so little from rural youth about how they perceive their lives and their futures and opportunities and lack thereof. Somehow in much of popular culture rural is almost synonymous with elderly people. But that’s so far from true. To see the videos go here and scroll down near the end of the page.

These videos reminded me how important media production opportunities are for young people. I am so excited to think about the possibilities of getting documentation opportunities available in our own rural area of central Arkansas.

Maybe you have already heard about the Rural Assembly or have worked with them. I would love to hear about it.

Please consider joining the contract! And if you live in the central Arkansas area, I am waiting on a response from them as to how we can get our area more involved in the Assembly. I will keep you posted!

New Tactics in Human Rights Education online discussion to be held Nov 19th- 25th (only one day left)

New Tactics in Human Rights Education

And Decemeber 5th-7th Highlander will be hosting a workshop on popular education and organizing as part of their Social Change Workshop series. There is limited space still available. Highlander is located in New Market, TN, near Knoxville:

Popular Education and Organizing Workshop

According to the publisher’s website, the project was sponsored by an anonymous donor who had attended some of Zinn’s lectures at Boston University in the 1970s and recently watched You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, a movie about Zinn’s life. He found Zinn’s work so compelling and important, he wanted to make sure it was available to students of all ages.

In response to the failings of most middle and high school history books he notes that are written in such a way that students do not recognize our our human potential in history making. He writes: “Everything in history once is happens looks as if it had to happen exactly that way. We can’t imagine any other. But I am convinced of the uncertainty of history, of the possibility of surprise, of the importance of human action in changing what looks unchangeable.”

I will post more when I finish the book.

Has anyone else read the teaching packet or know of any teachers using it in the classroom?

For more information about Howard Zinn, you can visit his personal website.

Up the Ridge is a one-hour television documentary produced by Nick Szuberla and Amelia Kirby. In 1999 Szuberla and Kirby were volunteer DJ’s for the Appalachian region’s only hip-hop radio program in Whitesburg, KY when they received hundreds of letters from inmates transferred into nearby Wallens Ridge, the region’s newest prison built to prop up the shrinking coal economy. The letters described human rights violations and racial tension between staff and inmates. Filming began that year and, though the lens of Wallens Ridge State Prison, the program offers viewers an in-depth look at the United States prison industry and the social impact of moving hundreds of thousands of inner-city minority offenders to distant rural outposts. The film explores competing political agendas that align government policy with human rights violations, and political expediencies that bring communities into racial and cultural conflict with tragic consequences. Connections exist, in both practice and ideology, between human rights violations in Abu Ghraib and physical and sexual abuse recorded in American prisons.

For more information and to watch the trailer go here.

Appalshop is looking for volunteers willing to show the film in their homes or communities. If you are interested in doing this go here and scroll down to the bottom of the page.

I just read about this textbook from Rethinking Schools. It was published in 2002. This resource textbook teaches students 4th-12th grades social justice issues as an interconnected web. As the authors say in the introduction (which can be found online as well),

“For example, in the Huaorani Indian struggle in eastern Ecuador (depicted in the role play, “Oil, Rainforests, and Indigenous Cultures,” p. 268), the debt crisis forces the government to aggressively seek sources of cash – like oil – to make interest payments to international banks. Transnational oil companies take advantage of widespread poverty to pay starvation wages to workers in terribly unsafe conditions. And like a bull in a china shop, they maraud through fragile rainforest ecosystems. In the quest for profits, oil companies treat people and the environment simply as resources to exploit. But not only are rainforests being ravaged, the indigenous cultures that depend on those rainforests are also in danger of being wiped out.

If oil companies successfully sucked all the oil out of the Huaorani’s territory in Ecuador – perhaps as much as $2 billion worth – it would power cars in the United States for only 13 days. Thus, the more we taught about issues in the Third World, the more it brought us home – home to an epidemic of consumption that links us to the poverty of others around the world, and links us to the growing ecological crisis that threatens the very existence of life on earth.”

The book includes exercises that address math, science, reading comprehension and problem solving skills. I have not read this textbook (other than the example essays and lesson plans online), but plan on interlibrary loaning it. Is anyone else familiar with it?