Virginia Correctional Enterprises
Inmate-sourced labor for furniture and clothing that public entities throughout the commonwealth are required to buy.
They furnish residence halls for Virginia’s colleges and universities.
“A Virginia House of Delegates subcommittee voted Tuesday to table SB701, a bill that would prohibit discrimination in public employment based on a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, effectively killing the measure for the remainder of the session despite widespread support for LGBT employment protections across the commonwealth, including among Republicans in the state Senate.”
Equality Virginia has posted a video of the SB701 House Subcommittee Meeting on employment non-discrimination in Virginia. It features my colleague Mary Shelden testifying quite movingly on the need for equitable protection for LGBTQ public employees in our state.
The speakers at this meeting vocalize a lengthy list of reasons that non-discrimination legislation is necessary, including very real and measurable economic indicators that show this kind of weakness in our legislation is terrible for Virginia and for its employees. Simply put: we’re not competitive as an employer, and we promote a culture where we target a large and valuable subset of our population to be siphoned away to more progressive states where they will work, enrich their environment, and pay taxes.
If the economic indicators aren’t compelling, perhaps democracy is more so. As several speakers here point out, the extreme conservative leaning of our government no longer represents the people of Virginia, especially on this issue. A majority support a non-discrimination bill. Virginia is trending left, and our government knows this.
Finally, for those who are not moved by economic prosperity or the often-touted Voice Of The People, there remains an undeniable moral imperative. Many of these speakers, including my coworker, could legally be fired simply for speaking. That is the reality of discrimination in our state, and it’s indefensible. There is no cause in a just society to force public employees to self-censor in public forums or to live and work under constant threat of retaliatory job loss.
It’s embarrassing, frankly, to listen to people speak in opposition of the bill. Chris Freund of the Family Foundation stepped forward to claim there is no evidence of discrimination taking place and to request we wait to impose legislation when there is some indication of a real problem. Delegate Todd Gilbert followed this claim, with a seemingly willful refusal to acknowledge the discrimination he carries out by tabling the bill.
They demanded examples of discrimination in response to the testimony of state employees that the need to hide one’s personal life for fear of retaliation constitutes ongoing discrimination, as does a litany of crimes, including the denial of partner benefits. Can you really demand people speak out about real dangers they face while denying them protection for their testimony?
Those who speak against the bill are floundering; they are struggling to make sense, even to each other. They operate under the position of the “moral majority,” but they are marginalizing themselves. It’s not a proud thing to speak out against basic civil rights. When I hear Chris Freund speak, I hear the grief it will later cause his grandchildren.
You can locate and contact your legislators here.
You can contact Delegate Gilbert here.
You can contact Chris Freund via email at chris@familyfoundation.org.
Photo: Margaret M. Cook, July 2011
For a few years now my colleague Mary Shelden has been working at The Holley School documenting the work of those who promoted accessible education for freed people in Virginia after the Civil War:
In the aftermath of the American Civil War, blacks all over the South celebrated their emancipation. Even so, after centuries of slavery, departing the homes and plantations of their former masters, they very often found themselves without means of subsistence. As Emma Diggs Carter, a granddaughter of slaves, observes, “We were cast out with nothing. No shelter, no food, no means of an education – we didn’t have anything.” Still, having been denied an education by law under slavery, the freed people of the South knew that they must find a way to educate themselves and their children. Education was, they knew, the key to both present survival and future success….
The Holley Graded School Historic Site preserves an icon of black education on Virginia’s Northern Neck; the school was established for the purpose of teaching African Americans emancipated at the end of the Civil War. Glasgow Blackwell and other blacks of the Lottsburg area, affiliated with the neighboring Zion Baptist Church, called the first teacher, Caroline Putnam, in 1868…Putnam, the younger partner , lived until 1917, stipulating in her will that the property be deeded to a board of trustees comprised of local blacks for the continued purpose of black education (Holley School and Holley School Histories).
Today, Dr. Shelden, a handful of very dedicated VCU students, and the incredible board at the Holley School have created a website to promote the school’s work and history. They have been transcribing a small library of letters that reflect the survival stories of the survivors of slavery, and they have collected oral histories of the trustees, alumni, and their descendants.
Photo by Margaret M. Cook, July 2011
Have a look!
The project was supported by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. You can visit their site for information about ongoing projects or the grant application process.
Community, Service, and Learning
[Uncovering the slave burial ground, 24th May, 2011]
A year ago last week the city of Richmond broke asphalt on a parking lot that had, for years, covered a burial ground used for slaves. I attended the ground breaking ceremony with three of my coworkers.
I, like my colleagues, taught the controversy in class. Some taught students about the debate as a way of engaging issues of social justice; I taught Dovi’s article (linked) as part of a long unit on local history, Southern identity, and community.
This year when I taught my classes about the burial ground, several things had changed: first, the asphalt had been removed, which changed our conversation considerably; second, my course this year was significantly different from year’s past. This year I had made “community engagement” an non-negotiable portion of their grade. All students had three options: to design for themselves as service learning project, to participate in a public art project, or to engage in research that would be presented to the public.
I’ve written extensively about the public art project here already, but not about the service learning component. By the end of the semester twenty-two students opted to participate. Together they committed over four hundred hours to twenty-six local organizations. The project seemed incredibly successful, and it has left me wondering what the role of service might be in a program like ours. Our class is necessarily more of a “community” than their other classes. We are small, and we are together all year. Seeing student reports on their service, on their long- or short-term impact, on their relationship to a city they have perhaps never seen before arriving on campus, and on a city they perhaps did not hope to know well was fascinating, and wholly refigured my sense of what it means to be a student, a teacher, and a person affiliated with VCU.
[photo taken from a student presentation on mural painting on the East End]
Service, I can’t help but think, is integral to education. Recognition of need in one’s community is more informative than most of what we learn both in school and elsewhere. I can’t help but think back to Jane Addams and her apt assessment of the neglect that is our failure to engage young people with work that needs done. She claims that “we have in America a fast-growing number of cultivated young people who have no recognized outlet for their active faculties. They hear constantly of the great social maladjustment, but no way is provided from them to change it, and their uselessness hangs about them heavily (21).”
Talking about “service,” however, is a complicated task, as is seeing oneself as capable of serving others. Addams follows her assertion that young women must be engaged locally with a warning of the misled superiority of those who would assume the extent of their own ability to serve:
“Many of the difficulties in philanthropy come from an unconscious division of the world into the philanthropists and those to be helped. It is an assumption of two classes, and against this class assumption our democratic training revolts as soon as we begin to act upon it (62).”
How, then, do we serve our community and ourselves without assuming this kind of distinction?
I don’t have an answer to this question yet; it’s an unsettling admission as I know service will be a core component of my courses next year. It’s also unsettling as I engage in service myself at OAR, and am in the process of applying to teach an SL designated course through VCU’s Open Minds program.
I do, however, have this to report: my colleague Mary Shelden engaged her own students in a service project at the William Byrd House in Oregon Hill.
[photo: William Byrd House Community Center, 2012.]
Working at Byrd House allows students to participate in community initiatives that originate in the community and not outside of it. Byrd House, like Hull House, is a settlement school, a organization built in a community, by the community, for those who live around it. This model, I hope, might help students to see that they service does not mean solving the problems of others, but engaging others in facilitating outcomes they have chosen for themselves.
[photo: Empty Bowls, William Byrd House, Apr. 29th, 2012.]
——
Addams, Jane. “The Subtle Problem of Charity.”The Jane Addams Reader. New York: Basic books, 2009.
The Shockoe Examiner
It’s back after quite some time dormant. Ray Bonis, one of the authors and archivist at VCU libraries, has been helping my students with some fascinating research projects. Check out the SE, which has just posted some great historical footage of Richmond.
Inside Out Richmond
Throughout this semester my students have looked at Richmond and at other urban environments to assess community planning and the considerations and compromises we all engage in when we choose to live as a group. It’s an interesting unit. Students are used to feeling like individuals, and they (like many of us) make the assumption that we do our best to live as separately as possible.
They’re not wrong. Even though the United Nations predicts that by 2050 in parts of the world 84% of the population will live in urban centers, it’s not at all clear that we live “together.” We’re more connected, yes, but there is also a lot of reason to believe accessibility gaps are incredibly pronounced.
One source for questioning the relationship of individuals to their communities that my students and I have used over the last two years is the work of JR. These images continues to be one of the most successful in inspiring student engagement and in magnifying learning outcomes. This year, when students heard JR’s request that a larger community internationally “stand up for what [they] care about by participating in a global art project” they requested that we participate as a class.
VCU is lucky; it is an urban university. Its students have little choice but to interact closely with Richmond as a city. This was, in fact, VCU’s original mission. VCU’s founding document, the Wayne Commission Report, states unequivocally “the conditions prevailing in our urban centers present many of our most critical national, state, and local problems … we are aware that our future depends in large part upon the wisdom with which we attack and solve the dilemmas of our cities” (Commonwealth 33-34). Rapid urbanization has made the role of urban universities much more central to state, national, and even global development. As the report predicted, social conditions correlate to education levels, and VCU was founded with the purpose of enriching the social and economic welfare of the state of Virginia and its capital.
As part of our progression from the fall to the spring semester, my students have decided to bring a version of the Inside Out Project to Richmond. VCU’s Center for Teaching Excellence generously stepped forward to support our project by providing funds for printing. This winter students began photographing Richmond residents, and we’ve been posting the images at a flickr site set up for this project. The images themselves are to be installed around the city temporarily and will be made available to interested participants as permanent portraits for their home or workspace at the conclusion of our project. It’s our hope that a few images might be preserved to remain on campus as part of the special collections archives or the art we include in campus buildings.
Questions of civic engagement are central to VCU’s and the University College’s core goals. The VCU “Quest for Distinction” document’s emphasis on urban engagement has reaffirmed VCU’s commitment to the city of Richmond and its inhabitants and sees VCU as closely connected to the urban renewal happening in Richmond today. The changes happening in Richmond are not coming quietly or without concern. We are aware of that, and we share the city’s concerns. Community engagement is not solely a university-wide commitment; I believe it is an imperative for faculty to begin to engage their students more deeply in their surroundings and question more rigorously who is of value in urban space.
——
Commonwealth of Virginia. Department of Purchases and Supply. “Report of the Commission to Plan for the Establishment of a Proposed State-Supported University in the Richmond Metropolitan Area.” VCU Libraries Digital Collections. Virginia Commonwealth University. 1967. Web. 15 Oct. 2011
JR. “Use Art to Turn the World Inside Out.” TED. March 2011. Web. Accessed Sept.-Oct. 2011.
Virginia Commonwealth University. “Quest for Distinction.” 20 May, 2011. Web. 25 Oct. 2011.
Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat, World Population Prospects: The 2008 Revision and World Urbanization Prospects: The 2009 Revision. United Nations, 2010. Web. 25 Oct. 2011.
Source: people.vcu.edu
Charles W. Smith
I have discovered the digital archives of the Valentine Richmond History Center, and from them, Charles W. Smith.
According to VRHC’s site, Smith was born in 1983 in Lofton, Virginia:
“He studied at the University of Virginia, the Corcoran Art School and Yale’s School of Fine Art…He moved to Richmond in 1925 where he worked for the printing firm Whittet & Shepperson. He was the first professional artist to be hired by the Richmond School of Social Work and Public Health (later Richmond Professional Institute and the VCU) to teach art in 1927. This was before a year before a full time art program was developed by Theresa Pollak (1899-2002) in 1928. Published “Old Virginia in Block Prints” in 1929.”
I am in love. A combination of things have brought me here: the soviet posters that decorate our home, the Woody Guthrie print I procured from Yee Haw Industries, and a life-long love of Thomas Hart Benton’s lithographs. All of this has left me thinking about printmaking more than usual as of late.
And then, in the midst of all of this, Charles W. Smith:
Boul Fence, 1935.
Henry, 1935.
Crab Apples, 1935.
Window, 1935.
Clouds, 1935.
Mountain Garden, 1935.
Winter in Virginia, 1935.
The Clock, 1935.
——
All of the images above are part of the Valentine Richmond History Center’s Collection Database; VCU archivist, local historian, and all around man of distinction Ray Bonis has posted about Smith’s work for Richmond Magazine at The Shockoe Examiner. I do not know Mr. Bonis well, but he was kind enough to speak to my students at an evening panel last week, so he must be a first rate gentleman.
Virginia Tobacco
Falk Tobacco Company, date and photographer unknown. Image from VCU’s Cook Collection.
Xu Bing, “First Class.” from the Tobacco Project, exhibited at the VMFA last fall. Photo by Adam Currell, on Flickr (10 Sept. 2011).
