Ethos

The author of the previous post, ‘Thank you Rosa Parks’, is Steve Chase. Steve is one of the most remarkable activists in highter education. We met years ago while we both lived in Minneapolis, and he had deeply influenced my understanding of environmental justice, as well as nonviolent action. His activism is akin to that of the abolitionists of slavery and child labour, the early union movement, and in his time, the civil rights movement. At his core is a moral sensibility about the dignity of human being, our mutual responsibilities to each other, and our wider obligations to other animals and the natural environment. He became an ethics advisor for Practical Ethics (www.practicalethics.net) in 2005.

Steve earned both his MS (1996) and doctorate (2005) from the environmental studies program of Antioch New Englad Graduate School. He also directs Antioch’s innovative program in Environmental Advocacy and Organizing — the only graduate program in the US specifically tailored to the training needs of public interest advocates and community organizers. Taking a broad view of environmental politics, the program addresses the overlapping issues of environmental protection, corporate accountability, and social justice.

Steve currently teaches courses in Patterns of Environmental Activism; Corporate Power, Globalization, and Democracy; Organizing Social Movements and Campaigns; Organizational Leadership in the Nonprofit World; and Environmental Justice Along the Mississippi. He also supervises Advocacy and Organizing student practicums, and is developing a course on Popular Education for Social Change, as well as a summer on-line reading seminar in Radical Political Theory.

Steve’s research interests include activist education, ecological politics, environmental justice, corporate globalization, and democratic social movements. His publications include being guest editor for a special Orion issue on “Nature and Justice” in 1996, as well as editing and writing the introduction for the book Defending the Earth: A Dialogue Between Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman. His essay “Changing the Nature of Environmental Studies: Teaching Environmental Justice to ‘Mainstream’ Students” was recently published in The Environmental Justice Reader, a University of Arizona Press anthology. Other articles and essays of his have appeared in Orion; Terra Nova; The Trumpeter; Whole Terrain; Z Magazine; Race, Poverty, and Environment; Environment, Place, and Ethics; and The Journal of Multicultural Environmental Education.

A long time activist and activist educator, Chase is currently a member of the National Organizers Alliance, the Boston-Area Popular Educators Network, Human Rights Educators Network, and United for a Fair Economy’s National Trainers Network. He also does consulting for the New England Grassroots Environmental Fund and Training for Change’s Strategy Project.

You can learn more about his advocacy program, or request Steve as a guest speaker, through the contact information below.

Steve Chase, PhD, MS Director, Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program Antioch New England Graduate School 40 Avon Street, Keene, NH 03431 603.357.3122 x298 steven_chase@antiochne.edu www.antiochne.edu/es/eao/

cheers, Bill

William Lynn :: Nov.19.2005 :: Politics :: 1 Comment »

Four years ago, I founded a one-of-a-kind master’s program at Antioch New England Graduate School to train public interest advocates and grassroots organizers working for environmental protection, corporate accountability, and social justice. People have occasionally asked me what inspired me to dream up the Environmental Advocacy and Organizing program. My answer is always the same: Rosa Parks.

Parks, who died at home last week, became famous in 1955 when she refused to move to the back of a segregated bus for a white man. She was immediately arrested, and her act of defiance sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which won the first major victory against legal segregation in the South and launched a national movement for civil rights.

People can usually see how Rosa Parks sparked my interest in nonviolent activism for the common good. What they don’t get is how she inspired my interest in activist training and education.

Like most people, I used to think that Rosa Parks was just a tired, middle-aged seamstress who got fed up with the indignities of racism on the evening of December 1, 1955. However, when I was a teenager, an older Quaker activist told me the real story of Rosa Parks.

For starters, Parks was a seasoned activist, not a novice. She had been an active member of her local NAACP chapter for over twelve years before refusing to move to the back of the bus, and she had participated in many discussions about how to launch a successful campaign against segregation. Contrary to the conventional story, her act of civil disobedience was pre-planned and aimed at sparking a powerful movement for freedom.

Secondly, Parks was a trained activist. The summer before her famous act of civil disobedience, Parks attended a ten-day activist training workshop at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. During a radio interview years later, Studs Terkel asked Parks what role Highlander played in her decision to act. Parks answered, “Everything.”

Highlander Folk School was founded in the 1930s by Myles Horton. His vision for the school was to bring poor and oppressed people together, encourage them to grapple with their everyday social problems, provide an arena for deep political reflection, and, ultimately, provide training workshops in the skills and strategies of social movement organizing.

During the 1930s and the early 1940s, Highlander focused its educational programs on the southern labor movement. By the early 1950s, Highlander moved into civil rights activism and Horton brought together blacks and whites interested in confronting the problem of segregation.

To deepen the effectiveness of this work, Horton hired Septima Clark, the School’s first black staff member, as his Education Director. A public school teacher who had been fired and blacklisted because of her volunteer work with the NAACP, Clark cemented Highlander’s ties over the years with many of the people who eventually became leaders of such groups as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

At Highlander, these people were encouraged by both Horton and Clark to take what they learned and apply it in their own communities. As Horton said to generations of participants at Highlander’s training workshops: “The way to use this information is not to say that we have learned a lot, and isn’t it wonderful and great to have been at Highlander…. You’re here to act on it. This is education for action. Now, how are you going to act on this? Let’s just plan what you’re going to do when you go back.”

In her own recollection of Parks’ first visit to Highlander, Septima Clark reports how Parks struggled with her fears over taking the kind of daring action against segregation being discussed by workshop participants and Highlander’s trainers. As Clark remembers it: “Rosa Parks was afraid for white people to know that she was as militant as she was. She didn’t even want to speak before the whites that she met at Highlander, because she was afraid they would take it back to the whites in Montgomery. After she talked it out in that workshop that morning and she went back home, then she decided that ‘I’m not going to move out of that seat.’”

With her dramatic action a few months later, Parks earned her “diploma” from Highlander and rightly became revered as the grandmother of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. Unknown to her, she also inspired the creation of a two-year activist training program in Keene, New Hampshire a little over 46 years after her big day.

Thank you, Rosa Parks.

Steve Chase is the director of the Department of Environmental Studies’ Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program at Antioch New England Graduate School.

Reprinted with permission from the Keene Sentinel, November 1, 2005

Steve Chase
Program Director
Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program
Department of Environmental Studies
Antioch New England Graduate School
40 Avon Street
Keene, NH 03431
603-357-3122 ext. 298
603-357-0618 (fax)
Steven_Chase@antiochne.edu
www.antiochne.edu/es/eao/default.cfm

Note: The following opinion column on Rosa Parks’s activism was first printed in the Keene Sentinel on Tuesday, November 1, 2005. The Keene Sentinel grants full distribution or reprint rights to this piece as long as credit for first publication in the Sentinel is given.

Steve Chase :: Nov.05.2005 :: Ethics, Politics :: Comments Off