Crivella’s Wayside Inn. Tucked away in the 1000-block of East West Highway near downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, this former restaurant was the scene of non-violent civil rights protests between 1962 and 1965. Montgomery County in 2006 bought the former Crivella’s Wayside Inn. After holding listening sessions with members of Silver Spring’s historic Black community, county leaders worked with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History to collect stories, artifacts, and design exhibits to tell the story of Silver Spring’s Black communities, from colonial plantations and enslavement through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement.
That’s what a journalist writing about a new Silver Spring Civil Rights Museum might have written had there been a museum developed in the former Crivella’s space. Instead, Montgomery County officials demolished the former restaurant and erased its history. This post explores a lost opportunity for Montgomery County to confront its segregationist history and seek reconciliation with its African American residents, past and present.
Crivella’s Wayside Inn
In early 1962, a U.S. Department of Labor employee whose office had recently moved to Silver Spring from Washington decided to have lunch at nearby restaurant. Just a few weeks earlier, the Montgomery Council had enacted an open accommodations law making it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race.
Crivella’s was owned by Samuel A. Crivella Sr. (1904-1980). His parents, Nunzio and Sarah Crivella, were Italian immigrants who settled in Baltimore in 1901. Nunzio identified himself as a butcher in immigration documents. He became a grocer in the United States. By 1910, the family was living on H Street N.E. in Washington, D.C.
H Street was was a diverse ethnic community with many European immigrants: German and Russian Jews and Italians. Nunzio quickly accumulated enough wealth to begin buying several properties in the corridor. He opened his own grocery store and his family lived in homes they owned.
Crivella’s Market operated at 10th and H streets for several years. Nunzio’s sons joined him in the business and they traded as N. Crivella and Sons: Joseph (born in Italy in 1896) and later Samuel (born in Baltimore in 1904). Nunzio and Sarah’s other son, Tony, becacme a barber. The couple also had two daughters, Rose and Jenny.
According to an obituary, Nunzio Crivella retired in 1932 and died a decade later, in 1942. His sons, Joseph and Sam, succeeded him in the family business.
By the late 1930s, Sam and a partner, Louis Pisapia, appear to have been renting a Georgia Avenue storefront on Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring, just north of the District of Columbia. He called it the “Wayside Market.” In the late 1930s, the market appeared in several newspaper articles, including one in 1937 about a robbery. In 1944, the federal government ordered the store closed for three weeks for violating war rationing regulations.
Around the same time that the Wayside Market was operating, a restaurant in a new building on East-West Highway was opening up. According to newspaper coverage of its liquor license applications, it was called the “Wayside Inn.” There is no available documentation to show a connection to Crivella prior to 1948.
Samuel Crivella obituary photo. The Washington Post, May 10, 1980.
In July 1948, Sam Crivella bought a rectangular lot at 1008 East-West Highway. Already the site of the “Wayside Inn,” Crivella kept the name (perhaps because he might have had a financial interest in it before buying the real estate) and continued to do business there until he retired in the late 1950s.
Sam Crivella and his wife Roselea had two children: a son, Samuel Jr., and a daughter, Mary. The junior Sam Crivella took his father’s place as the restaurant’s manager. The elder Crivella had already stepped away from the restaurant and was enjoying his retirement when the family’s business began appearing in court documents and headlines, his daughter told me in 2017.
Samuel Crivella Jr. was in charge of the restaurant in early 1962 when the Montgomery County Council enacted an open accommodations law. The law prohibited discrimination on the basis of race in public places in the county, including parks, hospitals, lodging establishments, and “all restaurants, soda fountains and other eating or drinking establishments.” Prior to that point, business owners could serve or decline to serve anyone they wished.
Montgomery County Open Accommodations Law.
The new law, titled “Elimination of Discrimination in Places of Public Accommodation” (Ordinance No. 4-120), became effective in February 1962, a few months after the U.S. Department of Labor moved several hundred office workers from downtown Washington, D.C., to Silver Spring.
Office building at 8701 Georgia Avenue, Silver Spring, Maryland. Shortly after the building was completed, the U.S. Department of Labor announced that it was leasing space there and in another building on Eastern Avenue. The move involved 620 employees, including 150 to 200 African Americans. This eight-story modern office building was designed by Washington architect Edwin Weihe. According to the Montgomery County Historic Preservation Office, the building is historically significant for its architecture: its design by Weihe and as an “early local example of the glass curtain wall office building.”
More than 200 African Americans were among the agency staff transferred. That point wasn’t lost on journalists who noted that Silver Spring was rigidly segregated. “Silver Spring has a very small Negro population,” wrote the Washington Post in October 1961. “A recent study by the Montgomery County Human Relations Commission showed that some eating establishments will accept Negro patronage and some will not.”
The Washington Post, October 17, 1961.
The Black press at the time was more blunt in its take on the move. Jet magazine reported in November 1961, “More than 300 Negroes were among 1,000 Labor Dept. employees shifted from Washington to new work quarters in exclusive, nearly all-white Silver Spring.” The headline read, “Goldberg Integrates Swank White Md. Suburb.”
Crivella’s Wayside Inn became the first battleground where the county’s new public accommodations law was challenged and Department of Labor employees led the charge.
Integrating Silver Spring: Roscoe Nix and Crivella’s
“Denying that the shift is a calculated attempt to integrate suburbia, a Department spokesman said Labor Sec. Arthur J. Goldberg is not unhappy at what he called ‘an unintended dividend of social progress,’” wrote Jet magazine, in its coverage of the Department of Labor’s Silver Spring move. There’s a direct through line connecting the fall 1961 agency move to the 1962 Montgomery County Open Accommodations law to the civil rights actions that took place at Crivella’s starting in the spring of 1962.
Roscoe Nix. Source: Montgomery County Volunteer Center.
Roscoe Nix (1921-2012) was born in Greenville, Alabama. He attended Alabama A&M University for three years before enlisting in the army during World War II. After the war, he graduated from Howard University. He was working in the Department of Labor in 1961 when his office relocated to Silver Spring.
Historian Bruce Johansen interviewed Nix for a dissertation on Silver Spring. He recounted the decision in 1962 to eat at Crivellas. Johansen wrote,
Roscoe Nix was well aware that Montgomery County had passed the ordinance and knew of the tavern exemption, but mainly because Crivella’s Wayside Restaurant was not a bar, he could see no reason why he and an African American friend should not lunch at the downtown Silver Spring family-owned business. “I had a friend who was a minister who came out to have lunch with me one day,” he remembers. “We were looking for a place to eat lunch and spotted one.” The friend asked if they were welcome to go inside, to which Nix replied, “Sure, we can go in there.” So they did. He recounts what happened next:
We went in there and immediately this waitress came over and told us ‘all of these places are reserved, so you can’t sit down.’ So we left. He [the friend] said, ‘I think she’s lying.’ So what we did, we had a friend who looked Caucasian and we decided that we were going to go in there at around 11:45, this may have been a couple of days or a week later even. And we said to her, ‘Get something on the table, whatever it is.’ The quickest thing she could get was something she didn’t like, onion soup.
After Peggy, a co-worker from the Labor Department, had placed her order, Roscoe entered with a second African American woman friend. This other woman, he said, “was obviously black. And the two of us, we went in and she [Peggy] said, ‘Come on over and have a seat.’ The waitress said, ‘you can’t sit there.’ And we said, ‘Why?’” At their request, the waitress brought the manager to them. “He said, ‘This is a private club,’” to which Peggy responded, “Well, I’m not a member of the club.” The manager told Peggy that there would be no charge for her soup and then called the police. As Nix remembers, the officer was polite but said that there was nothing he could do about the refusal of service. “Trying to be nice, he said, ‘Well, you know, they can refuse to serve you. They can refuse to serve a dirty white man.’ So we left.” Bruce Johansen, Imagined Pasts, Imagined Futures: Race, Politics, Memory, and the Revitalization of Downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, pp. 319-320.
That episode triggered three years of proceedings before the Montgomery County Human Relations Commission and litigation. It is hailed as a pivotal point in Montgomery County and Silver Spring’s civil rights history. The subsequent protests included sit-ins and demonstrations that attracted Washington civil rights leader Julius Hobson.
Baltimore Afro-American, May 5, 1962.
Roscoe Nix’s leadership in that moment set him on a trajectory to spend the remainder of his life in civil rights. He left the Labor Department and went to work for the U.S. Justice Department’s Community Relations Service, which focused on conflict resolution in cities experiencing civil unrest. He became the Maryland Human Rights Commission’s executive secretary in the late 1960s and in 1974 he became the first African American elected to the Montgomery County School Board. Nix also served as the Montgomery County Chapter of the NAACP president for a decade (1989-1990) and in 2001 he was inducted into the Montgomery County Human Rights Hall of Fame.
Yet, despite the significant events that took place at Crivella’s, in downtown Silver Spring there are no commemorative plaques, markers, or monuments celebrating Nix’s achievements and the civil rights movement in the Washington suburb.
The Silver Spring Civil Rights Museum
The Crivella family sold the restaurant in 1978. They rented the space to a series of businesses, including a car rental agency and video store, before selling the property in 2006 to Montgomery County. The building had been surveyed in for the Silver Spring Central Business District Historic Sites Survey. The historic preservation consultants working under contract to the Montgomery County Planning Department documented the former Crivella’s restaurant in a three-page Maryland Historic Trust Determination of Eligibility Form.
Former Crivella’s restaurant, 1008 East-West Highway. Maryland Historic Trust Determination of Eligibility Form, 2002.
According to the survey, which was published in 2002, the property was not eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. The form contained no narrative statement about the building’s history. According to the survey,
This is a 1-story brick building that has been heavily altered. It has a flat roof that has been decorated with a small asphalt shingled porch roof supported by wrought iron railings. The majority of the structure has been faced with T-11 siding and all windows and doors have been replaced with large aluminum sash insulated windows.
2002 Historic Resources Survey form.
Montgomery County government held onto the vacant building for several years before demolishing it in 2008 or 2009 to complete a new pedestrian master plan for the neighborhood. The county rebranded the new space “Bottleworks Lane” to commemorate two historic bottling works that had been located nearby. A local blogger captured its opening in 2009 with local dignitaries (Reemberto Rodriguez, Jamie Raskin, Isiah Leggett, Chris Van Hollen, and Nancy Floreen, left to right) cutting a string with plastic bottles suspended from it.
Bottleworks Lane Ribbon cutting ceremony, December 18, 2009. Dan Reed on Flickr.
Montgomery County lost a tremendous opportunity to tell Roscoe Nix’s story and the history of the civil rights movement’s efforts to strangle Jim Crow in Silver Spring. To learn about segregation in Silver Spring, the Black experience, Roscoe Nix, and the civil rights era, folks need to read obscure dissertations and academic articles. They won’t find these stories in the downtown Silver Spring Heritage Trail markers or in books about Silver Spring history or in public art commemorating other notable Silver Spring residents and events.
Isn’t it about time Silver Spring stepped up and confronted its racist past and its racist presentation of history and celebrated the community’s significant civil rights achievements?
Former Crivella’s Wayside Inn site/Bottleworks Lane, August 2016.
Opinion: I’m a conservative who believes systemic racism is real
Opinion by Michael Gerson Columnist June 21, 2021 at 1:48 p.m. EDT844
The phrase “systemic racism,” like “climate change” and “gun control,” has been sucked into the vortex of the culture war. The emotional reaction to these words seems to preclude reasoned debate on their meaning.
But a divisive concept can be clarifying. I know it has been for me: I don’t think it’s possible to be a conservative without believing that racism is, in part, structural.
Most on the American right have dug into a very different position. They tend to view racism as an individual act of immorality. And they regard the progressive imputation of racism to be an attack on their character. In a free society, they reason, the responsibility for success and failure is largely personal. They’re proud of the productive life choices they’ve made and refuse to feel guilty for self-destructive life choices made by others.
It’s an argument that sounds convincing — until it’s tested against the experience of our own lives.
I grew up in a middle-class neighborhood of a middle-class suburb in a Midwestern city. I went to a middle-class high school, with middle-class friends, eating middle-class fried bologna sandwiches. And for most of my upbringing, this seemed not only normal but normative. I assumed this was a typical American childhood.
Only later did I begin to see that my normality was actually a social construction. By the time I was growing up in the 1970s, St. Louis no longer had legal segregation. But my suburb, my neighborhood and my private high school were all outcomes of White flight. The systems of policing, zoning and education I grew up with had been created to ensure one result: to keep certain communities safe, orderly and pale.
I had little hint of this as a child. It seemed natural that I hardly ever met a person of color in a racially diverse city or seldom met a poor person in a place with some of the worst poverty in the country. All I knew was that I shouldn’t get lost in certain neighborhoods or invite Black people to the private pool where we were members. (My brother did once, and there was suddenly a problem with processing our membership card.)
But none of this was neutral or normal. Systems had been carefully created to ensure I went to an all-White church, in an all-White neighborhood, while attending an all-White Christian school and shopping in all-White stores. I now realize I grew up in one of the most segregated cities in the United States.
Was this my fault? Not in the strictest sense. I didn’t create these systems. But I wish I had realized earlier that these systems had created me.
This is what I mean by systemic racism. If, on my 13th birthday, all the country’s laws had been suddenly, perfectly and equally enforced, my community would still have had a massive hangover of history. The structures and attitudes shaped during decades and centuries of oppression would still have existed. Legal equality in theory does not mean a society is justly constituted.
For me, part of being a conservative means taking history seriously. We do not, as Tom Paine foolishly claimed, “have it in our power to begin the world over again.” We live in an imperfect world we did not create and have duties that flow from our story.
There is an important moral distinction between “guilt” and “responsibility.” It is not useful, and perhaps not fair, to say that most White people are guilty of creating social systems shaped by white supremacy. But they do have a responsibility as citizens, and as moral creatures, to seek a society where equal opportunity is a reality for all.
It is true that “wokeness” can be used as a political weapon. It is true that shame culture can be cruel and misdirected. And, as a conservative, I believe that equal opportunity, rather than mandated economic equality, is the proper goal of a free society. But what if we are (to employ a football analogy) not 30 yards away from the goal of equal opportunity in the United States, but 70 yards? What if equal opportunity is a cruel joke to a significant portion of the country? Shouldn’t that create an outrage and urgency that we rarely see, and even more rarely feel?
Though our nation is beset with systemic racism, we also have the advantage of what a friend calls “systemic anti-racism.” We have documents — the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the 14th Amendment — that call us to our better selves. We are a country that has exploited and oppressed Black Americans. But we arealso the country that has risen up in mass movements, made up of Blacks and Whites, to confront those evils. The response to systemic racism is the determined, systematic application of our highest ideals.
WHEREAS, on June 17, 2021, President Joe Biden signed the bill establishing Juneteenth National Independence Day a federal holiday; and
WHEREAS, in 1860, Montgomery County had a population of 18,322, including some 5,500 slaves and 1,500 free blacks. Maryland would remain a slave-holding state until the Maryland Constitution of 1864 outlawed slavery on November 1, 1864; and
WHEREAS, Juneteenth has come to symbolize freedom for many African Americans just as the Fourth of July means freedom to all Americans; and
WHEREAS, Juneteenth is one of several freedom-day celebrations commemorating the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and celebrates the notification of the last slaves in Galveston, Texas by General Gordon Granger on June 19, 1865, almost two and a half years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation; and
WHEREAS, throughout our nation, Juneteenth is celebrated annually as a historical and memorable tribute to our country’s African American heritage and triumph of the human spirit over the cruelty of slavery; and
WHEREAS, the Quakers in Montgomery County actively participated in the freedom of slaves and were the first to provide secret trails to the Underground Railroad and safe houses leading to Canada and freedom; and
WHEREAS, tonight we honor the life-long contributions made by Dr. Elwood Raphael Gray, Willie Mackey King, Reverend Dr. Sterling King Jr., John Macklin, and Dr. Hercules Pinkney who have served to further the cause of social justice, inclusion, and a more harmonious Montgomery County; and
WHEREAS, Montgomery County is proud to join in honoring Juneteenth with this twenty fourth countywide celebration to promote and enhance the unity and spiritual strength that brought Africans out of slavery and sustained their dignity and perseverance to the present day.
Signed this 19th day of June in the year 2021 Marc Eirich, as County Executive,
and Thomas Hucker, as Council President proclaim June 19, 2021 as JUNETEENTH in Montgomery County.
We encourage all residents to observe the 156th anniversary of this historic day. &�£:R✓
V MARC ELRICH County Executive
;LJ(L_ TOM HUCKER Council President
President Biden Announces Michael D. Smith as Nominee for AmeriCorps CEO
As we continue to work in partnership with you to advance the Biden Administration’s vision that everyone should be able to serve in communities across the country, I am pleased to share President Biden’s intent to nominate Michael D. Smith, Executive Director of the My Brother’s Keeper Alliance and Director of Youth Opportunity Programs at the Obama Foundation, as AmeriCorps’ next Chief Executive Officer.
A former colleague and fervent champion, Michael has an incredible story steeped in service and well represents our commitment to getting things done for the country. He’s a long-time advocate, changemaker, and innovator who can undoubtedly help us expand access to and interest in national service and community volunteerism—both which can drive change related to challenges communities around the country are facing, like COVID recovery, economic justice, racial equity, disaster mitigation, conservation efforts and so much more.
Michael Smith currently serves as Executive Director of the My Brother’s Keeper (MBK) Alliance and Director of Youth Opportunity Programs at the Obama Foundation. MBK Alliance leads a national call to action to build safe and supportive communities for boys and young men of color where they are valued and have clear pathways to opportunity. Smith was part of the team that designed and launched the My Brother’s Keeper initiative in the Obama Administration, and was appointed Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director of Cabinet Affairs for My Brother’s Keeper, managing the initiative and interagency Task Force at the White House.
Prior to joining the White House team, Smith was director of the Social Innovation Fund, Senior Vice President of Social Innovation at the Case Foundation, and helped build national initiatives aimed at bridging the “digital divide.” Smith is a Senior Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity and a member of Boys and Girls Clubs of America’s Alumni Hall of Fame, the highest honor bestowed by the organization. He also serves on the board of directors of Results for America and Venture Philanthropy Partners.
We look forward to the leadership Michael will bring to the national service team and are prepared to work with the White House and Congress throughout the confirmation process. View the full statement on our website.
In Service,
Mal Coles Acting Chief Executive Officer AmeriCorps
Opinion: Maryland’s education crisis worsens every day students are out of school
Opinion by Margery Smelkinson Washington Post April 9, 2021 at 9:00 a.m. EDT15
Margery Smelkinson is an infectious-disease scientist and a leader in Together Again MCPS.
President Biden wants schools fully reopened by his 100th day in office, April 30. To help this along, his policies and administration have provided money, given vaccinations to educators and revised Centers for Disease Control and Prevention physical distancing guidance to enable more students to enter classrooms. Unfortunately, meager reopening efforts by state and county officials may preclude Maryland from achieving this goal. The state hovers near last place in the country for offering live instruction.
Weeks ago, Maryland State Superintendent of Schools Karen B. Salmon encouraged districts to use three-feet distancing for all students in schools in accordance with the new CDC guidance, and Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said students “must have the opportunity to return to attending school in some form or fashion.” Sadly, Maryland’s largest districts are reopening glacially, and it was naive to assume they would do otherwise. They are clearly serving other interests. The unscientific policies and union demands that have kept schools closed for more than a year demonstrate our leaders’ ongoing apathy toward our children’s academic and mental well-being.
It will take far more than these weak nudges to get compliance out of districts, such as Montgomery and Prince George’s, that have been incredibly lethargic in returning students to classrooms. To achieve Biden’s goal, state leaders will need to mandate full reopening five days a week.
Eighty-six percent of U.S. public-school students attend schools that are offering instruction in person, many of them five days a week. The CDC reported in January that very few school outbreaks were recorded between March and December 2020 and that infection rates were the same in communities offering live instruction as they were in those offering virtual. This is because schools can be, and usually are, reopened safely with basic and inexpensive precautions.
However, as the state’s largest school boards remain slow to act, despite the research available on how to reopen safely, Maryland students are suffering the consequences. The state’s failing report card reflects this negligence.
Second-quarter data shows most districts in Maryland have doubled or tripled failing grades in math and English compared with last year. Most districts are also reporting significant drops in attendance. This school disengagement is a key driver of our youth mental health crisis, with diagnoses of anxiety and depression elevated over pre-pandemic times. The CDC, by comparing students learning in person with those learning remotely or in a hybrid model, links this mental health crisis, at least partly, to the seclusion of virtual learning.
Recognizing the extensive failings of online learning and the established safety of reopening, some of Maryland’s smaller counties, such as Cecil, Allegany and Carroll, have already returned students to school at least four days a week. In contrast, the lackadaisical reopening efforts of Montgomery, Baltimore, Howard and Prince George’s counties and Baltimore City, comprising 60 percent of Maryland’s students, are unscientific and disgraceful. As these districts also encompass three-quarters of Maryland’s Black and Hispanic population, this limits access to those very communities suffering the worst with online learning.
In January, Hogan called on schools to reopen for hybrid instruction by March 1, but these five districts are taking until mid-April or later to return all students for a piddling few days a week. Some students will have waited 400 days for even this little amount of in-person instruction. Being large does not excuse this sluggish return. Many similarly sized or larger districts have returned all students to schools in two to three weeks, including neighboring Fairfax County, with 188,000 students. A better showing by these large counties is essential to ending Maryland’s infamy as one of the states offering the least amount of live instruction.ADVERTISING
Adding insult to injury, even when students do return, many still languish in the isolation of Zoom because their teachers remain remote. Virtual instruction from the classroom is inadequate, does not address the academic needs of Maryland’s children, and does not reflect the live instruction that our children deserve and millions elsewhere are already receiving. Now that most Maryland teachers are vaccinated, which crushes transmission and infection, these accommodations must end. Teachers were prioritized for vaccination to provide live instruction.
Fully reopened schools are essential to reverse the downward trajectory of education in Maryland. Parents are ready to send kids back, but the largest counties are moving far too slowly, lengthening waitlists instead of responding to community needs and recognizing the urgent harms of online learning.
Every day our children are out of school worsens this academic and mental health crisis. This is particularly pressing as a recent national survey shows large racial disparities among students learning in person and those learning remotely, which will undoubtedly widen the education gap between White students and students of color.Advertisement
Schools are open five days a week in most states. In some cases, where local leaders have floundered, governors and state boards of education have required schools to provide full-time live instruction.
With the fourth quarter approaching, state leaders here must mandate schools fully reopen this spring. Every day that they don’t, Marylanders continue to fall further behind.
Among Good People dedicated to social justice, progressive causes and personal growth, there is often a high value placed on self-awareness and authentic expression. Being fully present, having feelings and being transparent about one’s experience and perspective are encouraged – at least that’s the intent. However, I often find that the value of authentic expression and feelings extends only throughout the territory of “positive emotions” like love, joy, connection, harmony, compassion, and even grief. “Negative” emotions – shame, envy, contempt, anger – aren’t as welcome. Especially anger.
Anger seems to especially unnerve and threaten good-hearted, progressive people. It’s often treated as an emotion that’s unsuitable for “evolved” people, who should transcend such “inferior” feelings. Maybe it’s because anger typically occurs in the belly and deep torso – long considered an inferior part of the body – instead of the chest or head. Maybe it’s because racial, cultural, class, and gender dynamics (White, middle-to-upper class, female) and these groups’ corresponding aversion to anger pervades many social justice, progressive, and personal growth communities. Maybe it’s just plain old fear.
This aversion to anger is not serving us, because anger serves us. Anger is not an inferior, or even “negative” emotion. Like all emotions, it gives us valuable information about our experience; about our interpretation of what’s going on around us. Anger lets us know we’re experiencing disrespect or the violation of a boundary. As a highly social species, expressed anger has helped humans keep each other in check for tens of thousands of years by showing displeasure with those who violate social norms essential to our survival. It’s helped us maintain cohesive communities and survive multiple threats to our existence as a species.
This might be why Good People fear anger. We fear power.
Good People often eschew power. We’ve seen individuals with power abuse and violate other individuals in the home and in the streets. We’ve witnessed people with power disrespecting and belittling other people at work. We’ve experienced institutions and companies with power cheating and decimating entire groups of people in society. We’ve witnessed nations and ethnic groups with power invade and murder other nations and ethnic groups.
So we reject power as harmful, even evil. This is a mistake. Power isn’t the problem, it’s one form of power that’s the problem: Power Over. While there’s evidence that merely possessing Power Over – even temporarily and in laboratory settings – triggers bad behavior in humans I maintain that the real problem is abuse of Power Over, intentional or not. Power is merely a tool or resource.
Also, other forms of power exist, which aren’t only useful, they’re essential to creating change and a world that works better for everyone. In his enlightening work with The Co-Intelligence Institute, Tom Atlee explores three other types of power besides Power Over: Power With, Power From Within, and Power As. He also talks quite a bit about Wholesome Power. This is the kind of expansive thinking Good People should adopt and embody. Thinking of power in limited terms as only one form – which is inherently evil – deprives Good People of one of the engines of much-needed (capital C) Change.
I define power as “the ability to create a result.” Results are desperately needed. Good People who are trapped in Overheartedness aren’t moving us forward. Those who live only in peace, love and kindness aren’t moving us forward. In his excellent book Power and Love, Adam Kahane describes the importance of both Power and Love to move change – that to wield only one is to walk with only one leg. Drawing on Paul Tillich, Kahane defines power as “the drive of everything living to realize itself, with increasing intensity and extensity” and love as “the drive toward the unity of the separated”. He writes:
“love is what makes power generative instead of degenerative. Power is what makes love generative instead of degenerative.”
He reminds us that Martin Luther King said “power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic….this collision of immoral power with powerless morality constitutes the major crisis of our time.” Kahane adds:
“love without attention to or transformation of power can be, not merely sentimental and anemic, but reinforcing of the capacity of the already powerful to act recklessly and abusively.”
We must exercise our power. Of course anger isn’t the only source of power, but it is a high-octane fuel for Change. Think about moments in history, and moments in your own life, where anger moved stuckness and led to beneficial change. Think about where we’d be in the USA without mass protests and sustained, disobedient resistance to oppression: women probably wouldn’t have the vote, African Americans might still be slaves, laborers would be more abused, and LGBT people might still live in the closet. Righteous anger fueled many of these movements. In my own life, once I realized I was angry, realized it was OK to be angry, began to honor and respect my anger then choose new behaviors, I became more fulfilled, more successful – and less depressed.
In fact, to NOT be angry in the world today may be a sign of insanity. Despite our myriad triumphs and all the progress we have to celebrate, most of us live with a crippling amount of unnecessary oppression, injustice, invasions of privacy, and dishonoring of our sacred personhood. I believe that our numbing to this, and increasing apathy as we drown in a sea of irrelevant information, is something to be deeply concerned about. Many of us become paralyzed by anxiety or depression, which is arguably a reasonable and healthy response to the state of the world, but doesn’t move us to do anything about it. Anger is an appropriate response to oppression, injustice, disrespect and dishonoring. I recently wrote a friend that had I been in Sandra Bland’s shoes during that fateful traffic stop in Texas two weeks ago, I’d probably have been just as “combative”, and rightly so.
To not be angry may also be a sign of denial or privilege. I was shocked by those who claimed after 9/11 there was nothing they believed, cherished or experienced – nothing – that would ever cause them to fly a plane full of people into a skyscraper full of people. I’m troubled by those who can’t fathom why African Americans set their community ablaze after an unjust trial verdict or yet another incidence of police violence against them with no meaningful consequences for those responsible. I don’t understand either of these views. I can imagine a dozen scenarios that would cause me to commit horrific acts of violence in the name of justice, survival, blind rage, terror, staggering grief or sheer desperation. How fortunate, or how numb, are those who can’t (or won’t) imagine such possibilities. How fortunate or numb they must be to be unable to identify a single incident in their lives deserving of outrage. How separate they must feel from the rest of us who, as I outline in my poem corajuda, have “excellent reasons and outstanding references” for our anger.
Being in touch with anger and what I’m capable of doesn’t mean I would commit horrific acts. Feelings don’t have to lead to action. Feelings aren’t a statement about a person’s character or worth – behavior is. Deciding mindfully, with our “upstairs” executive function brain, what to do with our anger is where we truly own our power. Owning our anger allows us to use our precious energy making effective choices instead of suppressing our feelings with shame. Being in touch with our anger allows us to empathize with other humans, and become curious about why someone might fly a plane full of people into a skyscraper full of people or burn down their community.
Such empathy and curiosity can lead to real change and sustainable solutions. It’s a new way to approach our problems. Eckhart Tolle said “Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath.” Marshall Rosenberg said “Violence in any form is a tragic expression of unmet needs.” Pain must be heard, felt, respected, then healed. Unmet needs must be met somehow. This is how to diffuse anger – not denial in ourselves or others.
Yet sometimes anger doesn’t need to be diffused, it needs to be transmuted – into action. Or anger needs to transmute another emotion, like fear. I recently saw a Facebook post from a younger female acquaintance who was understandably upset by (yet another) man groping her at a busstop. She expressed her profound fear and devastation at this repeated behavior in men around her. I was struck not only by her lack of anger, but the lack of anger of almost everyone who responded (only offering empathy and concern). It makes me super angry to witness one more young woman so programmed to see herself as powerless that her response to a man grabbing her in public is fear and running away instead of baring her teeth, fiercely snarling NO in his face and kneeing him several times in the groin until he falls down. It makes me super angry that none of the Facebook bystanders (except me) urged her to conquer her fear, learn to defend herself, and kick the shit out of the next a-hole who dares to invade her space.
Fear comes when we see ourselves as less powerful than the other. This is often an illusion of our powerlessness, or our limited read of where we stand in the Power Over paradigm. Having, feeling, and expressing anger is a result of taking a stand for our worth; of owning our power. Anger is a sign of awakening self-love. It’s a remembering of self-respect.
We need the self-loving force of anger to drive change not just in our individual lives, but as a collective. Writer Courtney Martin recently said “one of the things I feel like my parents really entrusted me with was this idea that you should trust your own outrage. And being able to honor that anger, to me, is one of the most important muscles of a rebel.” We can be a rebel in our own lives, or a rebel in the world. Or both. The value of anger is its power as a righteous catalyst for individual and collective Change. Let’s not dishonor it.
So what are you angry about? And what are you going to do about it?
Germany faced its horrible past. Can we do the same?
Shortly after the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in 2016 on the National Mall, I was speaking to some patrons of a successful nonprofit about the importance of candid racial dialogue in politics and in the places we live, work and worship.
One of the participants had recently toured the museum and had a pointed question. Why, she wondered, were all the exhibits that visitors first encounter dedicated to slavery? Among other things, she was referring to a reconstructed cabin built by former slaves from Maryland and a statue of Thomas Jefferson next to a wall with the names of more than 600 people he owned. “Couldn’t the exhibits begin with more uplift?” the woman asked, arguing that Black achievement was more worthy of the spotlight. She suggested that the museum should instead usher visitors toward more positive stories right from the start, so that if someone were tired or short on time, “slavery could be optional.”
Her question was irksome, but it did not surprise me. I’d heard versions of the “Can’t we skip past slavery” question countless times before. Each time serves as another reminder that America has never had a comprehensive and widely embraced national examination of slavery and its lasting impact. Yes, there are localized efforts. But despite the centrality of slavery in our history, it is not central to the American narrative in our monuments, history books, anthems and folklore.
There is a simple reason: The United States does not yet have the stomach to look over its shoulder and stare directly at the evil on which this great country stands. That is why slavery is not well taught in our schools. That is why the battle flag of the army that tried to divide and conquer our country is still manufactured, sold and displayed with defiant pride. That is why any mention of slavery is rendered as the shameful act of a smattering of Southern plantation owners and not a sprawling economic and social framework with tentacles that stamped almost every aspect of American life.
We can read about, watch and praise documentaries and Hollywood projects about the Civil War, or read countless volumes on the abolitionist or civil rights movements. But these are all at a remove from the central horror of enslavement itself. From the kidnappings in Africa to the horrors of the Middle Passage, the beatings and the instruments of bondage, the separation of families, the culture of rape, the abuse of children, the diabolical rationalizations and crimes against humanity — no, we haven’t had that conversation. We have not had that unflinching assessment, and we are long overdue.
America experienced 246 years of slavery before it was officially ended with the passage of the 13th Amendment. That was followed by decades of legal segregation and oppression under Jim Crow, followed by a period of willful blindness and denial. A tourist from a foreign land might well conclude that the Confederacy had actually won the Civil War, based on the number of monuments, buildings and boulevards still named for heroes of its defeated army. The real truth of our shared history was a casualty of that war and, like any wound left untended, the results can be catastrophic.
A full accounting of slavery is one of terror and trauma, and for decades the natural inclination was to ask, why would anyone want to claim that history? But at a moment when the United States is dangerously divided, when we are having bitter and overdue conversations about policing, inequality and voting rights, when marauders fueled by white-nationalist rhetoric can overwhelm the Capitol, proudly waving the Confederate battle flag, the more important question is this: What happens if we don’t?
A supporter of then-President Donald Trump holds a Confederate battle flag outside the Senate chamber during rioting inside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
Historians often look to “collective memory” — how groups of people typically recall past events — to help decipher a nation’s identity and soul. These memories can change over time, and there is evidence that people remember things that never happened. But collective forgetting can be just as revealing.
The United States is not the only country with an evil antecedent that was swept aside, forgotten or minimally examined. That list is long, but one country offers a powerful alternative path. Barely three generations ago, Germany hosted horrors that killed millions and left the nation split in two. This was not a legacy that most Germans were inclined to honor. And yet, today, less than 100 years after the rise of Adolf Hitler, Germany has made a prodigious effort to come to terms with its past with regularized rituals of repentance and understanding.
This collective culture of atonement is captured in the eight syllables and 26 letters that comprise the German word Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung. It’s a mouthful that translates loosely to “working off the past.” But its full meaning goes deeper than even that awkward phrase suggests.
Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung refers to Germany’s efforts to interrogate the horrors of the Holocaust and the rise of Nazism. It has been a decades-long exercise, beginning in the 1960s, to examine, analyze and ultimately learn to live with an evil chapter through monuments, teachings, art, architecture, protocols and public policy. The country looks at its Nazi past by consistently, almost obsessively, memorializing the victims of that murderous era, so much so that it is now a central feature of the nation’s cultural landscape. The ethos of this campaign is “never forget.”This collective culture of atonement is captured in the eight syllables and 26 letters that comprise the German word: Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung. It’s a mouthful that translates loosely to “working off the past.” But its full meaning goes deeper than even that awkward phrase suggests.
“There isn’t a native equivalent for this word in any other language, and while many countries have in one way or another tried to confront past evils, few if any have done what Germany has done,” said Susan Neiman, a moral philosopher at Berlin’s Einstein Forum who has long studied the social aftermath of the war in Germany. An American Jew raised in Atlanta, Neiman has spent most of her adult life in Germany and is the author of a book about the inquiry: “Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil.”
“They got right the idea that a nation has to face its criminal past in order to become whole and strong and not riven by unsaid guilt, unsaid resentment,” she explained. “They got right the idea that here is a process that one can go through that it takes time, but that you come out better in the end. And they got right the idea that it has to happen on several fronts.”
What ushered in the era of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung? There is no singular hero or postwar epiphany you can find in the history books. Germany came to it slowly and, it must be said, reluctantly. And it took a different generation born long after Germany’s surrender to stoke the idea. It is important to remember that Germany did not immediately reach for atonement after World War II. Former servants of the Reich drifted back into government. And even with the Allies’ strict protocol of war crimes trials and denazification — a process that at the time was often called “victor’s justice” — Germans often cast themselves as victims in the decades immediately following World War II.
The televised 1961 trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann, a chief architect of the Holocaust, and the Auschwitz trials of former Nazi war criminals from 1963 to 1965, began to alter that view. The two tribunals awakened public interest in the previous generation’s horrifying immorality. The Auschwitz tribunal was billed as the “trial of the century” in Europe, and it stirred an appetite for a deeper explanation of what happened between 1930 and 1945. It also sparked questions about why so many everyday Germans willingly marched along that dark path.
This 1961 photograph shows Adolf Eichmann standing in his glass cage, flanked by guards, in a Jerusalem courtroom during his trial for war crimes committed during World War II. (AP)
The trials culminated in a period when the world was entering an era of protest and social unrest as postwar baby boomers agitated for a new guiding sensibility. Unsettling questions about the country’s past also reverberated in private homes as children raised by people who had survived the war demanded a greater accounting of their relatives’ roles. Were the people at their kitchen table, at the desk in front of their classroom, at the cash register at the corner bakery connected to the atrocities described in those televised trials? And the questions raised by those real-life courtroom dramas created an urgency among historians, artists and government officials to research what happened while simultaneously looking for a path toward acceptance and respectability.
By the mid-1960s, West Germany’s economy was beginning to hum, but the country still carried the stench of history. Would anyone in the world buy those affordable little rear-engine Volkswagen Beetles if they came from a place that was indelibly branded with hatred and genocide? “As Germany got to be a little bit wealthier and people began to be able to travel within Europe,” Neiman said, “young people did start hearing the other side of the story, not just, poor us, we lost the war. They realized how uncomfortable it was to be a German visitor in France or in Holland or elsewhere in Europe. Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung came into use in the ‘60s, an abstract, polysyllabic way of saying, ‘We have to do something about the Nazis.’”
An employee at a Volkswagen factory inspects a Volkswagen 1200 Sedan, better known as a Beetle, on the assembly line in Wolfsburg, then in West Germany, in the 1960s. (Pictorial Parade/Getty Images)
A good deal of the energy that fueled the rise of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung happened at the grass roots with individuals changing the landscape by literally putting their hands in the soil, digging up the weeds that had grown over abandoned concentration camps and unearthing underground Gestapo torture chambers in the middle of Berlin.
In today’s Germany, children learn through their teachers and textbooks that the Nazi reign was a horrible and shameful chapter in the nation’s past. Cadets training to become police officers in Berlin take 2½ years of training that includes Holocaust history and a field trip to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. With a few exceptions for the sake of education, it is against the law to produce, distribute or display any symbol of the Nazi era, including the swastika, the Nazi flag and the Hitler salute. It is also illegal to deny that the Holocaust was real.
Instead, memorials of remembrance are ubiquitous and honor the vast array of victims of the Nazi regime: Jews, gays, Roma, the disabled and those who were viewed as disrespectable, anti-social or traitors. Some of the monuments are impossible to miss; others catch you by surprise. Many do both: The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe covers 4.5 acres in the heart of downtown Berlin, prime real estate set aside by parliament when the Berlin Wall came down — despite a long line of real estate interests that were eager to develop the property. The former Neuengamme internment camp in Hamburg features a sculpture of a twisted, bald and naked human form that conveys the soul-crushing history and the backbreaking work of camp prisoners in a brick factory. If one looks down into a large glass oculus cut into the pavement at Berlin’s Bebelplatz square, you will see a sunken library — featuring rows of empty white shelves that symbolize the thousands of books burned by Nazis. A bronze marker bears the inscription: “That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well.”
Many, if not most, of the memorials are far more subtle. Plaques and markers in many German cities note the locations of synagogues, schools and Jewish neighborhoods that were raided and razed by Hitler and his legions. Roughly 75,000 small brass “stumbling stones,” known as Stolpersteine, are embedded in the streets and plazas of hundreds of towns and cities throughout Germany and elsewhere. Each begins with the phrase “Here lived” and is followed by the facts of someone’s life — their name and birth date. And then that etching is followed by the grim facts of their fate: exile, internment, murder.
Memorial for the victims in the former Neuengamme concentration camp. BOTTOM RIGHT: Two Stolpersteine (stumbling blocks) commemorating Holocaust victims, are pictured in front of Fehrbellinerstrasse 86 in Berlin on Jan. 5, 2017. The small plaques the size of a child’s hand document the fate of a mother and daughter who lived in a small apartment: 50-year-old Taube Ibermann and Lotte, 19.
Imagine traveling through an American state and coming upon small, embedded memorials that listed key facts about the lives of the enslaved. Their names. Their fates. Their birth dates. The number of times they were sold. The ways they were separated from their families. The conditions of their toil. Imagine how that might shape the way we comprehend the peculiar institution of slavery, its legacy and its normalized trauma. Imagine if there were similar embedded memorials for Indigenous peoples, who were forced from their land, relegated to reservations far from their normal ranges and regions. Imagine stopping to fill up the tank at a roadside gas station and noticing the reflection off a gleaming brass marker that bears the names of the tribal elders who once lived where you are standing.
I am not suggesting that slavery and the Holocaust or the forced removal of Native American peoples are all in the same vein. They are each distinctly diabolical. But comparing these two countries’ paths forward from a dark past is instructive because it sheds light not on comparative evil but instead contrasting redemption. The United States helped dictate the terms of Germany’s future after the war. In the decades after that, Germany outpaced the United States in coming to terms with a shameful past that collided with the country’s preferred narrative.
By the time West German President Richard von Weizsäcker delivered a speech marking the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II in May 1985, the landscape had already shifted. Weizsäcker, then 65, was a leader in the center-right Christian Democratic Union, a former Wehrmacht captain whose father was the chief career diplomat for the Third Reich. And yet, there he was, gray-haired and solemn before the Bundestag, shifting the conventional narrative by asking his country to reconsider and remember the true nature of the nation’s past: “We need to look truth straight in the eye.”
“The young and old generations,” he said, “can and must help each other to understand why it is important to keep memories alive. It is not a case of coming to terms with the past. That is not possible. It cannot be subsequently modified or made undone. However, anyone who closes his eyes to the past is blind to the present. Whoever refuses to remember the inhumanity is prone to new risk of infection.”
(picture alliance/picture alliance via Getty Image)
Anyone who closes his eyes to the past is blind to the present. Whoever refuses to remember the inhumanity is prone to new risk of infection. (Richard von Weizsäcker, President of West Germany, in 1985 marking the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II)
Those words should reverberate and haunt us today in America, where a resurgent wave of white nationalism is widely visible. At a time when America’s political parties are at war over the teaching of critical race theoryin schools, it is hard to see how our governing leadership could possibly reach consensus about acknowledging and examining the horrors of slavery. Could someone in the conservative camp challenge the party’s prevailing ideology and demonstrate the introspective courage shown by Weizsäcker? I wish the answer were yes.
Yet it is important to remember that Germany’s path to truth was not swift or easy. It was halting and imperfect, and efforts to make reparation were awkward and meager. While there are now thousands of memorials across Germany, not all of them strike the right note, and debate continues as to how to provide something in the way of balm to families who still contend with public shame and private grief for loved ones lost in the war. And Germany is better at acknowledging its crimes in its big cities than in smaller towns far from the capital.
Nor has Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung been able to fully extinguish the forces of racial and ethnic hatred inside Germany. The country’s police and security agencies have been plagued by far-right extremism in the ranks and, as in many parts of the world, a strong anti-immigrant bias has taken root in activist groups. “The most thoughtful Germans, East and West, are reluctant to praise German Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung,” notes Neiman. “They are too aware of its flaws.”
But if Germany’s reckoning with its Nazi past is a sprawling, complicated, messy, ongoing process, it is an active process. And because of that, its national compass remains pointed toward a more just and humane future. Our compass for charting a new course from a difficult history is shaky, and we should just admit that as we begin our own journey toward truth.
When Barack Obama was first elected president in 2008, there was an expectation that he would lead some kind of national conversation about race. We don’t place the same expectations on White leaders for some reason, but we should.President Biden was in Tulsa to mark the 100-year anniversary of one of the most vicious acts of racial violence in U.S. history. In 1921, an angry White mob attacked a thriving Black community known as “Black Wall Street.” A 35-block stretch of homes, churches and prosperous businesses was ransacked and burned; as many as 300 people died. Until recently, the Tulsa Race Massacre was missing from history books and rarely discussed. Biden met with survivors who were children when that terror was unleashed, and he spoke directly about white supremacy in a way few presidents have. “We should know the good, the bad, everything,” he said. “That’s what great nations do: They come to terms with their dark sides. And we’re a great nation.”
That is a start. Biden should keep his foot on that pedal and launch an official inquiry about uncomfortable historical truths, and do it in a way that ensures that it will extend over years, if not decades. Because it is time for the United States to convene its own version of a truth and reconciliation commission and fully examine the horrors of slavery and their continued aftermath. And it is time to do this with the full expectation that many Republicans will cry foul, howl at the fringes and try to undermine every aspect of the exercise.
That should not stop the effort. That is the very reason the collective American narrative needs a strong dose of truth. We need clear eyes and a firm spine, and then we need to chart a new path forward. That kind of step would also launch re-examinations of the treatment of America’s Indigenous peoples, the eugenics movement and the internment camps of the 1940s for U.S. citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent.
And yet we are in a moment when hard truths are not just inconvenient, they are challenged and dismissed with great fanfare. A growing cottage industry is taking root among those who use their animus to stoke the fires of white grievance and feed the false claim that the hidden motive of all truth-seeking is to elevate people of color by making White people feel bad about themselves.
It is not surprising that some White people would be reluctant to dive into this history. We are still producing textbooks where the enslaved are called “workers of Africa.” And while racial fatigue is a real thing leading to real tensions and discomfort, it sometimes seems that people claim to be exhausted by a conversation that has never really taken place. I wonder whether people are just repelled by the idea of this conversation or they are really rattled by what they might hear.
I also find it deeply ironic that there is such a fierce battle to evade and erase historical teachings about slavery because, in the time of enslavement, there was such an assiduous effort to document and catalogue every aspect of that institution, much in the way people now itemize, assess and insure their valuables. The height, weight, skin color, teeth, hair texture, work habits and scars that might help identify anyone who dared flee were documented. Their teeth, their work habits, their menstrual cycles and their windows of fertility — because producing more enslaved people produced more wealth — were entered like debits and credits in enslavers’ ledgers.
Poster announcing a slave sale in 1856. (Photo 12/Universal Images Group via Getty)
A startling example comes from Daina Ramey Berry, professor and chair of the history department at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of “The Price for Their Pound of Flesh.” Berry compares the sale of two “first rate prime males” named Guy and Andrew sold in 1859 at what was believed to be the largest auction in U.S. history. They were the same age and size and had similar skills. Andrew sold for $1,040, while Guy elicited a larger sum of $1,280. The difference was that Andrew had lost a right eye. A newspaper reporter covering that two-day auction in 1859 noted that the value of a Black man’s right eye in the South was $240.
Amnesia gets in the way of atonement in America. But amnesia is actually too benign a word because it sounds as though people just forgot about the horrors of slavery, forgot about people who were forced to work in the fields literally until their death, forgot that more than 2 million Africans died during their forced migration to this country in the way one forgets where they placed their car keys or their passport.
We’ve been through more than a willful forgetting; we’ve had instead an assiduous effort to rewrite history. We’ve built monuments to traitors and raised large sums of money to place the names of generals who fought against their own country all over highways and civic buildings. We’ve allowed turncoats to become heroes of the Lost Cause instead of rebels desperate to keep people in bondage.
On a personal level, this false narrative about America is another act of cruelty, even a kind of larceny. I view the real story, the genuine history — ugly as it is — as part of my people’s wealth. You built this country on the backs of African Americans’ ancestors. Our contributions — in blood, sweat and bondage — must be told. Our children, indeed, all of America, deserve to know what we have endured and survived to understand the depth of our fortitude, but also to understand that, despite centuries of enslavement and years of Black Codes and brutal Jim Crow segregation, our contributions are central to America’s might. The erasure is massive in scope.
Our inability to face this history is a stick in the wheel of forward progress, a malignancy that feeds the returning ghost of white supremacy, a deficit that paves the way for bias to return. We find ourselves pulled backward in time, reliving some of the same challenges that inspired the civil rights movement 60 years ago — restrictions on voting rights, police assaults on Black bodies, racial disparities in almost everything pandemic-related, from deaths and infection rates to access to vaccines.
We know the countries that combine truth and resolve have the best chance to reconcile with a difficult past. Truth is the most important ingredient, and it carries a special currency after four years of an administration that peddled falsehoods without apology and continues to use a series of big lies to justify a war on our democracy. It is long past time to face where truth can take us.
Pride is part of our brand in America. So, too, is strength. Shame doesn’t fit easily into that story. The Germans decided that discomfort could make them stronger by creating guardrails against a returning evil. We instead have reached for blinders.
There is no equivalent concept for Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung in our culture. It doesn’t even translate well into English. One might be tempted to think of it as working to shed the past — as in dropping pounds or paying a debt. But it really means something more prospective, like trying to build an ever bigger, ever more complicated structure off a foundation with serious cracks. Those flaws must be addressed, assessed, fixed and made sturdy before the foundation can take more weight.
To address something this monumental we often look to our biggest institutions to lead the way. But if we are to actually learn from the Germans, we have to widen our aperture. Yes, we will need leaders who have the courage to face this history to use their platforms and their muscle in government, business, religion, philanthropy and academia. But the reason Vergangenheitsaufarbeitungtook root in Germany was because its most ardent and committed proponents were closer to the ground. It wasn’t limited to the ivory tower, the C-suite or the pulpit. History was challenged from below.
Take the stumbling stones: The stories are researched by neighbors, schoolchildren, and church or civic groups. They raise the money and track down the victim’s relatives, and as protocol dictates, invite them to a modest installation ceremony. These small acts of atonement and grace led to a national willingness to confront an odious history.
Could we ever open our eyes here in the United States to confront the lies in our founding myths? Could we comprehend the strength that comes from learning the real story? Do we have the fortitude for a reckoning that goes so much deeper than placing a Black Lives Matter sign in the front yard or insisting that fidelity to the Confederate flag is really about honoring Southern heritage instead of an institution based in hatred? Can we hope to produce a generation of leaders who can speak and be heard and perhaps even embraced by people who occupy those opposing terrains? Our future as a united country of people ever more divided depends on it.
When I first learned about Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, I kept thinking about the encounter I had with the woman who had asked me if “slavery could be optional” within a museum dedicated to Black life in America. She wanted it swept from the story like an unsavory item on a menu: I’ll take a serving of patriotic history, but please hold the whippings and the bondage.
But, no, slavery cannot be an optional part of the national story. It should not be excised from the narrative we teach our children about who we are and what we have become.
We must admit to, examine, reflect, lean into and grow through that history. All of that history.
What is the word for Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung in English?
President Proposes Increase in AmeriCorps Budget to Prioritize Economic Opportunity, Racial Equity, and Underserved Communities through National Service and Volunteering
The Biden-Harris Administration has submitted to Congress the President’s Budget for fiscal year 2022. As the Administration continues to make progress defeating the pandemic and getting our economy back on track, the Budget makes historic investments that will help the country build back better and lay the foundation for shared growth and prosperity for decades to come.
“Over the past year, America’s spirit of service has been on dramatic display. All across the country, Americans have united to combat COVID-19, address racial and economic inequity, and bring hope and help to those in need. For nearly three decades, AmeriCorps has tapped the ingenuity and can-do spirit of the American people to meet our toughest challenges.
As our nation grapples with a series of converging crises, AmeriCorps will continue to connect local organizations with people who want to serve to meet pressing challenges, including building a more inclusive and equitable economy for all.
For decades, national service has engaged Americans of all backgrounds in tackling our toughest challenges, uniting people to work together for the common good. Time and time again, we have seen that when our nation invests in national service, we all win. Together with community partners, AmeriCorps engages dedicated individuals in making our nation more fair, equitable, and united. The FY 2022 Budget continues this smart investment in the American people—an investment that solves problems, expands opportunity, strengthens communities, connects us with our neighbors, and unites our nation,” said AmeriCorps Acting CEO Mal Coles.
The FY 2022 President’s Budget includes the two historic plans the Administration has already put forward — the Americans Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan – and reinvests in education, research, public health, and other foundations of our country’s strength.
The Budget provides AmeriCorps with $1.2 billion, an increase of $89.2 million over the FY 2021 Enacted level, that will support AmeriCorps and its state and local partners in service to improve lives, strengthen communities, foster civic engagement, and engage Americans in national service and volunteerism. At AmeriCorps [the Corporation for National and Community Service], the Budget would:
Advance Racial and Economic Equity. The Budget provides $3.4 million to help nonprofit and voluntary organizations broaden their volunteer base, mobilize underserved individuals in volunteering, and increase their impact on community challenges. AmeriCorps will focus the Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service on advancing racial justice and equity solutions and the September 11th National Day of Service and Remembrance on increasing support for veterans, military members, and their families. The Budget also provides funding to support more individuals with different abilities to participate in national service. The Budget will help underserved and under-resourced communities develop program models that will benefit their communities and engage community members as AmeriCorps members.
Prioritize Underserved Individuals and Communities. The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to supporting and building on the investment made by the American Rescue Plan to expand national service opportunities to more people. In FY 2022, AmeriCorps will increase the stipend provided to AmeriCorps Seniors volunteers and also will work to optimize use of the Segal Education Award to make higher education more accessible. The agency will take steps to recruit and retain a diverse corps of members and volunteers from underserved populations, including strengthening relationships with Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic Serving Institutions, and Tribal Colleges; increasing our consultation and collaboration with Tribal communities; and undertaking targeted recruitment efforts. Through these and other efforts, more individuals from underserved communities will engage in national service and have stronger pathways to employment and economic opportunity.
Expand Use of Evidence-Based Approaches to Drive National Service. The Budget provides $4.3 million for AmeriCorps evaluation, an increase of $250,000 above the FY 2021 Enacted level that will bolster agency’s use of evidence and evaluation to drive programmatic and funding decisions and increase the use of evidence-based approaches in AmeriCorps programs. These efforts will strengthen the agency’s efforts to promote a culture of evidence and evaluation within the agency and among grantees by facilitating evidence-based and evidence-informed grantmaking.
As America confronts a series of converging crises, the role of national service and volunteering have never been more important. This Budget will provide resources to support AmeriCorps and its large network of partners in helping to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, rebuild the economy, address racial inequity, tackle the climate crisis, and meet other challenges with higher levels of impact, accountability, and efficiency. The agency’s primary programs are included in the Budget with the following funding recommendations:
AmeriCorps State and National. The Budget provides $501 million to AmeriCorps State and National, an increase of $46 million above the FY 2021 Enacted level that will support approximately 52,000 AmeriCorps members who will help communities in tackling challenges related to COVID-19, economic opportunity, environmental stewardship and climate change, and other community needs. With this funding, AmeriCorps State and National will continue to invest in evidence informed and evidence-based community solutions, providing a source of human capital to meet pressing community needs across the country and a pathway to economic and educational opportunities for Americans who serve.
AmeriCorps VISTA. The Budget provides $103.86 million to AmeriCorps VISTA, an increase of $6.5 million above the FY 2021 Enacted level that will support an estimated 8,000 full-time AmeriCorps members and summer associates, focused on capacity building for anti-poverty projects to enhance the diversity, equity, and inclusion of both AmeriCorps members and beneficiaries, and direct resources to under-served communities. VISTA will continue to promote evidence-informed activities that address needs including food insecurity, a long-time area of need made especially acute during the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, VISTA projects will support safe and affordable housing, improve access to health care, provide support for veterans and their families, and help communities become more resilient to the impacts of extreme weather, disasters, and climate change.
AmeriCorps NCCC. The Budget provides $37.7 million to AmeriCorps NCCC, an increase of $4.2 million above the FY 2021 Enacted level that will support an estimated 2,080 members in direct, team-based national service. This includes 1,440 members in the traditional program and 640 members in the AmeriCorps-FEMA Corps program. AmeriCorps NCCC will expand its impact with the addition of 80 members who will support priority needs around climate change and support veterans and military families. The Budget will also support a 28 percent increase in the daily food allowance and enhanced support to meet behavioral health needs.
AmeriCorps Seniors. The Budget provides $244.5 million, an increase of $19.5 million above the FY 2021 Enacted level that will support an estimated 175,000 Americans age 55 and older to address ongoing impacts of the pandemic including learning loss and food insecurity and meet other community needs in independent living, disaster response, substance abuse prevention, and the environment. The Budget will expand the number of RSVP volunteers serving communities, increase the stipend for Senior Companion and Foster Grandparent volunteers, and support outreach to new organizations and communities. The Budget provides for funding increases across all three AmeriCorps Seniors programs.
Enacting the Budget policies into law this year would strengthen our Nation’s economy and lay the foundation for shared prosperity, while also improving our Nation’s long-term fiscal health.
AmeriCorps has a proven record in meeting a wide range of community needs in education, health, economic opportunity, disaster services, supporting veterans and military families, and preserving public lands. Through our programs, we engage 250,000 individuals in results-driven service at 40,000 locations across the country, helping Americans succeed in school, live independently, and rebuild their lives after homelessness, job loss, or natural disasters.
International Day of the African Child takes place on June 16, 2021. The Day of the African Child has been celebrated every year since 1991, when it was first initiated by the Organisation of African Unity. It honors those who participated in the Soweto Uprising in 1976 on that day. It also raises awareness of the continuing need for improvement of the education provided to African children.
In Soweto, South Africa, on June 16, 1976, about ten thousand black school children marched in a column more than half a mile long, protesting the poor quality of their education and demanding their right to be taught in their own language. Hundreds of young students were shot, the most famous of which being Hector Peterson. More than a hundred people were killed in the protests of the following two weeks, and more than a thousand were injured. (With material from: Wikipedia)
Where is Day of the African Child? Worldwide World When is Day of the African Child? Wednesday, the 16th of June 2021
Posts by Paul Costello1
