Foster Dickson's Blog, page 93

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #69

The interest of an artist is the only limitation placed upon use of material, and this limitation is not restrictive. It but states a trait inherent in the work of the artist, the necessity of sincerity; the necessity that he shall not fake and compromise.

– from the chapter “The Common Substance of the Arts” in Art as Experience by John Dewey.

Filed under: Arts, Education, Literature, Reading, Teaching, Writing and Editing

Apparently this guy didn’t like “Roots” . . .

I found this earlier today when I was scrolling through microfilm at the Alabama Department of Archives & History, working on my Whitehurst Case book. The letters-to-the-editor section of our local newspaper is one focus in searching archives, to get a sense of public opinion. This little letter caught my attention today – it has nothing to do with the Whitehurst Case – and I thought I’d share it. From the Montgomery Advertiser in the mid-1970s:

Filed under: Alabama, Film/Movies, Social Justice

The Community Legacy Project

I received the official word last week that I have been awarded a Community Legacy Project grant by the Center for Arts Education at the Boston Arts Academy. Below is the press release sent out by Montgomery Public Schools:

Booker T. Washington Instructor Awarded

Community Legacy Project Grant  

National Artist Teacher Fellowship Awards Nine Grants for its Community Legacy Project in National Competition

MONTGOMERY, AL – Foster Dickson, a creative writing/English teacher at Booker T. Washington Magnet High School, will receive an $800 grant from the National Artist Teacher Fellowship’s Community Legacy Project.

The National Artist Teacher Fellowship (NATF) program supports the artistic revitalization of arts teachers, offering them the opportunity to immerse themselves in their own creative work, interact with other professional artists and stay current with new practices. For this year only, NATF awarded grants to nine previous Fellows, giving them the opportunity to share their work as engaged community-based artists through the Community Legacy Project. NATF is generously supported by the Surdna Foundation and is a program of the Center for Arts in Education at Boston Arts Academy.

The nine grant recipients represent seven states and seven unique arts schools from around the country including Booker T. Washington Magnet High School; Boston Arts Academy; City Arts and Technology High School; Fordham High School for the Arts; Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts; Media Arts Collaborative Charter School; and Paseo Academy of Fine and Performing Arts. The grantees are performing exemplary community work in the arts and engaging underserved groups with little access to arts instruction. These teachers excel in a broad spectrum of visual, performing, and literary arts.

Dickson will present a workshop at the 15th NATF Convening in October 2015 in Boston. In addition, the selected Fellows’ work will be featured on the NATF website, where it will serve as documentation of the program’s rich history. CLP grantees will become part of a lasting legacy for NATF, celebrating the program’s accomplishments over the past 15 years, and facilitating future collaborations between Fellows, administrators, schools and their communities.

Dickson encourages his students and local urban youth to engage in their community and educate themselves on the history and artistry of Alabama. He works with local community partners to impart on these youth from diverse racial and socio-economic backgrounds the cultural richness that exists in the state of Alabama.

In addition to being BTW’s creative writing teacher since 2003, Dickson is a working writer and editor. He was the operations manager/editor at NewSouth Books from 2001-2003. His poetry, interviews, book reviews, short fiction, and creative nonfiction works have been published in magazines and newspapers and on the web.

Dickson received his original grant from the Surdna Arts Teachers Fellowship in 2009.

For more information on the National Artist Teacher Fellowship program, please visit: http://www.natf-arts.org

Filed under: Alabama, Author Appearances, Education, Forthcoming, Local Issues, Teaching

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #68

. . . unlike typical classroom learning, real-world learning tends to be more cooperative and communal than individualistic, involves using tools rather than pure thought, is accomplished by addressing genuine problems rather than problems in isolation, and involves specific contextualized rather than abstract or generalized knowledge. College learning that more closely approximates the situation in which students will use their knowledge and continue to learn is less likely to be useless or inert.

– from the chapter “Identifying the Learning Outcomes of Service” in Where’s the Learning in Service-Learning? by Janet Eyler and Dwight E. Giles, Jr.

Filed under: Arts, Education, Teaching, Writing and Editing

AHF’s SUPER Teacher program: Slave Narratives

I got word first of last month that I was accepted to the Alabama Humanities Foundation’s SUPER program on “American Slave Narratives: Their Impact on Fiction and Film.” The SUPER Teacher Program, which is short for School and University Partners for Education Renewal, provides in-depth professional development for K-12 teachers during the summer by offering themed courses taught by university professors and scholars. I attended the program on Alabama’s Black Belt back in 2007, and out of that came the Treasuring Alabama’s Black Belt: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Place curriculum guide, for which I acted as general editor.

So this summer, it’s slave narratives. I and a handful of other teachers will be spending a week in Tuscaloosa learning more about how to teach these culturally sensitive documents as well as the more modern fictional depictions that have arisen from them.

I feel lucky that, back in 2002 and 2003, I assisted Randall Williams in compiling and editing the Alabama-centered slave narrative collection, Weren’t No Good Times. That experience more than ten years ago has grounded me in a healthy respect for nature of slave narratives. Reading through hundreds of narratives to cull the Alabama-based stories gave me a tour de force education in these difficult documents, though I’ve not studied them much in scholarly settings before.

For the next month, I will be reading . . . a lot! In the package full of books that came recently were two I had already read – Beloved by Toni Morrison and Jubilee by Margaret Walker – and four I had not, and one I’m only barely familiar with: Kindred by Octavia Butler. I’ve begun with The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron, and will likely move next to the collection, The Classic Slave Narratives, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. And of course, what rounds the assigned readings: The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest Gaines, which I remember reading back in school . . . twenty or twenty-five years ago. Might be wise to re-read that one! Going back over Beloved and Jubilee will probably be equally wise.

What prompted me to jump on this offering though is something I mentioned in one of my recent “A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week” posts; this week’s quote, from poet Andrew Hudgins, excerpts his remarks on Southern literature— really, on Southern culture . . . in which one feature is “a sense of the living presence of the past.” Slavery is an inherent and undeniable part of the South’s past, and as such is very much with us still, even one-hundred-fifty years after Emancipation. The ongoing legacy is here, in our society, in our economy, in our culture. If you ask me, no Southerner can know enough about the realities of slavery, and also about its mythology, the latter of which prompted me to sign up for all this work. I’m interested in what really happened, in what we may believe to have happened, and the gaps between the two, because we carry all of that – both truth and un-truth – forward with us.

Filed under: Alabama, Education, Literature, Reading, Social Justice, Teaching, The Deep South

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #66

“The shadow of caste falls over the school in Southerntown no less than over the courthouse and the church. Control of the schools and school opportunities is a crucial matter to American citizens and has long been viewed as such. Mass education is in the American mores and it is the door which has  traditionally been open to those seeking to better their social status. It is this fact that has made the education of the young one of our major occupations and has led to the high value we place on schools and schooling. The symbol of the schoolhouse is the public guarantee that American society is actually offering the equality of opportunity which is the pivotal conception in our social order.”

– from the chapter, “Caste Patterning of Education,” in Caste and Class in a Southern Town by John Dollard. This passage comes from the 1949 third edition; the book was originally published in 1937.

Filed under: Reading, Social Justice, Teaching, The Deep South, Writing and Editing

May’s Southern Movie of the Month

What do I say about 2006’s “Black Snake Moan”? I don’t know. When Hollywood gets hold of the Deep South, the results are always questionable. (I cite the comedy “Sweet Home Alabama” and the 2001 remake of the suspense-thriller “Straw Dogs” as the worst offenders.) The strange premise of the story – a sexual abuse victim being forcibly “saved” by a disaffected old bluesman – caused me to avoid it for a long time. But I watched it recently, even though I was positive that it was going to be awful and hokey and chock-full of stereotypes.

This film, which is set in rural Mississippi, opens with naked Christina Ricci and Justin Timberlake rollin’ in the hay right before Timberlake’s character Ronnie will head off to military duty, leaving his sex-starved girlfriend Rae to fight the urge to masturbate in the field next to their trash-strewn trailer. She moans and groans and writhes around, as the long-bed two-tone pickup carries him off down a dusty road.

So how does our main character satiate her immediate loneliness? By getting bent over the half-bath sink in a cheap motel room by the local black crack dealer. Needing to relieve the tension of her departed lover, our lascivious main character Rae then goes to a drug-addled, booze-soaked shindig, where she and others play naked football in a muddy field, and where she gets mounted again by some unnamed dude who gets right back up and starts playing ball again. If we hadn’t expected a blues-tinged story called “Black Snake Moan” to be about sex, the point gets made immediately and repeatedly.

We also get to meet Lazarus – played by Samuel L. Jackson – an aging former bluesman whose wife is leaving him for another man. Though we first meet him in a bitter and resentful scene of public humiliation, we quickly get to know him as a well-liked community member with highly respected butter beans. Astute music fans will gather from his character that this is the hill country of Mississippi; early on, Lazarus sits down with an acoustic six-string to play RL Burnside’s “Bird Without A Feather,” and later, a tune from Otha Turner makes a brief appearance.

The two unlikely participants meet when Lazarus finds Rae, half-naked and unconscious, in the middle of the rural road by his house. Rae has been beaten and bloodied by her boyfriend’s shit-heel buddy Gill— the film’s Iago. Lazarus decides to take in the delirious stray, clean her up and buy her medicine, feed her some good grub . . . and chain her to the radiator until she’s well enough to suit him. The movie’s plot continues from there, as the settled-down old black man tries to reform this wild young white woman, who he learns has been severely molested by her father.

Soon, when Ronnie returns from duty, discharged for severe anxiety, Gill is there to make him aware of Rae’s shenanigans. Disconsolate from the mixture of his shame and his unfaithful lover, Ronnie goes looking for Rae. He finds her in Lazarus’ house, and in the climactic scene, we see the elder man face down his gun-toting accuser who hasn’t got the guts to pull the trigger. As “Black Snake Moan” ends, Ronnie and Rae get married in an impromptu ceremony and drive off to attempt marital bliss, just the two of them . . . and their numerous neuroses.

“Black Snake Moan” actually does a better job of portraying the rural Deep South than most Hollywood movies that try. However, the flaws are very real. Justin Timberlake’s accent disappears almost immediately, and despite working out in his fields, Lazarus’ work clothes are always clean. I was also put off by the utter clichés in Rae’s costuming: shabby Daisy Dukes and a cut-off t-shirt that had a Confederate flag on it. (C’mon, guys, you couldn’t be more imaginative than that?) With highly tempered quasi-exuberance, the compliments I am willing to offer “Black Snake Moan” are: it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be, and I’m not completely ashamed of having watched it.

Filed under: Film/Movies, Literature, Mississippi, The Deep South

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #65

“Meanwhile, the more established editors liked what they saw on the editorial pages of the [Charlotte] News and reached out to young [Harry] Ashmore. At the time, there were about a dozen liberal newspapers in the South, and their editors formed a tight-knit fraternity that was always on the lookout for kindred spirits. At his first meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors in spring of 1946, Ashmore got to know Virginius Dabney and established an immediate kinship that they quickly reinforced with correspondence that would continue for years. Another close relationship, with Mark Ethridge, also developed from an editors’ meeting. Skillful raconteurs, they charmed each other with stories from the South’s political wars. The old lions of progressive thought in journalism delighted in knowing that their lineage would remain strong with Ashmore.”

– from the chapter “Southern Editors in a Time of Ferment” in The Race Beat: The Press, The Civil Rights Struggle, and The Awakening of a Nation by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff

Filed under: Civil Rights, Published Books, Reading, Social Justice, Teaching, The Deep South, Writing and Editing

Some Other News from Around the Deep South #12

Welcome to “Some Other News from Around the Deep South,” my quarterly look at news stories from the region that may not have gotten so much attention.

We’ll start off an admittedly Mississippi-heavy installment with an always reliable source of prime comedy: state government. In early February, Jackson’s Clarion Ledger ran a quippy little story on things that a few state leaders have said recently. It’s not a terribly meaningful story, but my sentimental side couldn’t ignore it. Laughing at Deep Southern state legislatures just appeals to my better nature.

Anyway, on to actual discussion-worthy news: also in February, the Atlantic was reporting on “A School District That Was Never Desegregated” in Cleveland, Mississippi. This small town is still trying to figure the actual methods by which it will racially integrate its schools in response to a lawsuit “originally filed in 1965.” According to the article, the previously all-black schools are still basically all-black. This issue of school desegregation still lingers on this country, especially in the Deep South; the article tells us:

Cleveland is one of 179 school districts in the country involved in active desegregation cases. Mississippi has 44 of these cases—more than any other state.

If that statistic is correct, then that notoriously difficult Deep Southern state alone – one of fifty states – has about one-quarter of the nation’s ongoing “active desegregation cases.”

Reading further, the article says that the order to get moving on integration came in 1969, that magnet schools were created thirty-one years later in 1990, and that an IB curriculum was instituted at the black school in 2012— all to minimal effect. So, the Department of Justice is going to step in and give them a hand . . . Just what all Deep Southern politicians love and adore— oversight from the Feds.

Moving from Mississippi’s school system to its legal system, NPR reported in mid-February about a federal judge there who gave a stirring historically minded speech as he was sentencing three white defendants who had been convicted of killing a black man. In this fairly long speech, which evokes the history of lynching and racism, prominent perspectives on a racist past, and vivid details about the murder of the black man, Judge Carlton Reeves refuses to lighten the burden of Southern racism as a driving force of cruelty and inhumanity. As in some of my other commentaries in this series, rather than try to restate, I will simply direct the reader to the speech itself— there’s no way I could tell it better.

About a month later, in mid-March, the Daily Beast reported from Mississippi that “a 54-year-old African American man, Otis Byrd, was found dead hanging from a tree.” Due to the eerie circumstances that greatly resemble an old-style lynching, the ears of law enforcement perked up immediately. According to the brief story, a friend had dropped Byrd off at a Vicksburg casino and the next time anyone saw him he was dead and “hanging about a half mile from his last known residence.” Byrd had once been convicted of murder but had been out of prison for nearly ten years.

In a more extensive reporting on Byrd’s death, MSNBC’s coverage on March 21 explains in more detail that Otis Byrd had a robbed a small store in 1980 and had killed a white woman, the store’s owner. He served about two-and-a-half decades for that crime, but had mostly stayed out of trouble since being released. By late March, an investigation of his death, which involved the Department of Justice, was well underway.

By early April, the case was still unsolved. CBS News coverage from April 8 tells us that it was still unclear to law enforcement whether his death was a homicide or a suicide. However, his family had hired a lawyer who is quoted this way:

“The family is grieving. They do plan to take action. There is a long history of lynching in Mississippi. Byrd was found dead three weeks ago and the family still has limited information and wants answers,” Dennis Sweet III said.

Moving over to Louisiana, Mother Jones online ran a story in early March from the strange annals of pop culture trivia: “The Town From ‘True Blood’ Is Filled With Toxic Explosives the EPA Fears Will Blow Up: The government’s plan was to set them on fire.” That site of filming for the HBO vampire series “True Blood” – Doyline, Louisiana – is sitting right near a former army base where “a munitions recycling company” is now “storing 15 million pounds of toxic military explosives on-site.” The MoJo article provides a little history on the situation then goes on to say:

Now the race is against the clock. The bunkers are falling apart—pine trees are growing on the roofs of several of them—which means the increasingly unstable materials are now being exposed to moisture. And the EPA has warned that the explosives, which become more unstable over time, are increasingly at risk of an “uncontrolled catastrophic explosion.” So in October, the EPA announced it would do something it had never done before—approved a plan for a large-scale controlled burn of the hazardous military waste.

Locals are none too pleased about the discoveries, which came from a raid of the company’s operations on the former base facility. Yet, the folks in Doyline are kind of safe— for the moment: “The Army’s best guess for when the materials would become serious risks for self-combustion was August of 2015.”

Over in my necks of the woods, in Alabama, al.com reported in March that the “Alabama Police officer who slammed down Indian grandfather indicted on federal civil rights charges.” This incident got some national attention (for a minute) as another unfortunate case involving a white police officer and a person of color. In this case, an Indian-born grandfather had moved to Madison, Alabama to help his family with a new grandchild, and the article explains that he liked to take a walk in the morning . . . but:

Video from a dashboard camera shows [police officer Eric] Parker and another officer confront Patel. At one point, Parker slams the 57-year-old Patel to the ground. Madison police later called paramedics. Patel was left partly paralyzed. He was transferred from Madison Hospital to Huntsville Hospital where he underwent spinal surgery.

Eric Parker was then charged with having used excessive force— and Alabama made national news for racialized violence . . . again.

Finally, in news of far more local interest, the state of Alabama has lost one of its distinct and recognizable institutions, and is set to lose another. Recently, Birmingham’s Bottletree Cafe closed. Well-known as a venue for great music, Bottletree had hosted every kind of band you can imagine. (I still regret skipping a chance to see Black Joe Lewis there a while back.) This story from al.com does a great job of summing up their great history, and this one, “How Birmingham Became an Indie Rock Destination,” will provide some insights, too.

And so goes War Eagle Supper Club, well-known to Auburn alums and fans. This Opelika Auburn News article from July 2014 covered Supper Club’s 77th anniversary and also provides a little sense of place and its history. Unfortunately, this article from the same source in early April 2015 covers the fact that it’s closing at the end of the year . . . So sad.

That’s it for the twelfth installment of “Some of Other News from Around the Deep South.” Check back for lucky number thirteen in July.
Filed under: Alabama, Bible Belt, Civil Rights, Louisiana, Mississippi, Social Justice, The Deep South, The Environment

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #64

“Scatology and profanity in all its forms were officially forbidden, of course, but ‘cursing’ was a badge of toughness and looming manhood, and all of us used it with exuberant defiance around each other.”

– from the chapter “Big Boy” in Son of the Rough South: An Uncivil Memoir by Karl Fleming

Filed under: Civil Rights, Literature, Teaching, Writing and Editing