[Dialogue] MLK Weekend, April 6, 1968

Mon Apr 10 12:06:55 PDT 2017

Jo,
What an incredible, living-changing story! -- thank you for sharing it with
us.
--Joyce

On Sun, Apr 9, 2017 at 8:54 PM, Jo Nelson via Dialogue <
dialogue at lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:

> I posted this in my blog on the weekend, and it forwarded to my Facebook
> page.  Someone requested that I also send it to the O:E list, but I am no
> longer on it, so I chose to put it here.
>
>
> MLK Weekend, April 6, 1968
>
> 49 years ago, I participated in a history- and life-changing event on the
> West Side of Chicago.
>
> I was 19 years old, in my second year at the University of Iowa, and
> traveled with my campus Wesleyan Foundation group to take a course called
> “Cultural Studies I” at the Ecumenical Institute on the West Side of
> Chicago.
>
>  The day before the course was scheduled to begin, Martin Luther King was
> assassinated.  From our small-town Iowa perspective, though, we saw no
> reason not to go to Chicago for the course.
>
>  When we arrived in Chicago after a 5-hour drive on Friday, it was clear
> that the assassination had catalyzed unrest, but it wasn’t clear what was
> going to happen.  The others in the car decided to turn around and go home,
> just in case.  My brother and his family (David and Linda Zahrt, Jay and
> Heidi) were working at the Institute, and they weren’t fleeing, so I
> decided to stay.
>
>  The first session on Friday evening began as scheduled in a lower floor
> room with windows at ground level.   I remember sitting next to what seemed
> to me to be an older man, Sheldon Hill, and thinking “there is no
> generation gap”, because we seemed to be on the same page of
> understanding.  As the session progressed, we heard shouting out on the
> street and saw legs running by with gun barrels.
>
>  After the session ended, I went up to my dorm room and looked out.  I
> could see fires burning within a block or so on 3 sides of the building,
> and on the fourth side was the Eisenhower Expressway filled with cars
> getting out of the city.
>
>  I went to my brother’s apartment to talk with him and hang out with
> family. I didn’t want to be alone, as it was pretty scary and I was
> stranded. After a little while there was a knock on the door, and we were
> told everyone was evacuating the building, as someone had broken in and
> tried to start a fire in the building.
>
>  There was a long-unused tunnel between the Institute campus and a
> hospital across the street.  Somehow the tunnel was opened and we all went
> across to the hospital basement.  By this time almost every participant had
> escaped via the expressway, so there were only a couple of participants and
> Institute staff.  My brother and sister-in-law asked me to watch their two
> small children, who were wild with the energy around us.  At various points
> the National Guard would come in to get coffee, and smoke would roll in
> with them.  Someone had a radio, and we heard that inner cities were
> burning all over America.  It felt like Armegeddon.
>
>  At daybreak on Saturday, when the rioters were exhausted and it was a
> bit quieter, we walked across the street back to the Institute.  The entire
> staff (maybe 40 people) gathered in Room A to decide what to do.  The
> children were in a nearby room with a couple of mothers.  There were only 3
> of us who were not staff, one of whom was the president of the Institute’s
> board.  I watched as the staff talked through their profound commitment to
> help the community develop, and the dangers that staying there would have.
> In the end, they decided by consensus to stay and risk their lives to
> support the community, since they had made a commitment.  They also decided
> to send out the children and the women who were pregnant to friends and
> supporters in the suburbs for safety, since the children had not made a
> conscious decision to risk their lives to stay.
>
>  As a non-staff family member who did not live there, I was also sent out
> with the children to the home of a suburban colleague who was mobilizing
> her entire network to find places for all the “refugee” kids to stay.  I
> was then sent to a home in Lake Forest, Illinois, which at the time was the
> richest town per capita in the world, with two toddlers. David Prather was
> 1 and Dietrich Laudermilk was 2 years old.  I had no idea of how to take
> care of toddlers, and spent the night putting them back on the bed after
> they had rolled off.
>
>  On Sunday morning I was able to get through to my brother and tell him
> where his kids were, and where I was.  The one other stranded participant
> was a student from Nebraska, and got in touch with me to ride back with
> her.  By Sunday afternoon we were on the road home.
>
>  The next day I got up for my first class, but couldn’t make it through.
> I came back to the dorm, and slept for 24 hours straight.
>
>  During that event in Chicago, I witnessed a group of people deciding by
> consensus to risk their lives to honour their commitment to work with the
> community.  That is a rare experience.  I realized that this group of
> people were no ordinary group.  Their care was profound.  It’s a big part
> of the reason I started to work with the Institute (which morphed into the
> Institute of Cultural Affairs) as soon as I graduated from university, and
> why I am still with it all these years later.
>
>  Some of the impact of that event was the catalyst that created ICA’s
> mode of radical participation in development:  it became very obvious that
> communities didn’t thrive from nice white educated do-gooders trying to
> help, but that they change deeply from local people and local leadership
> working collaboratively.  Outsiders have a role in the partnership, but the
> lead comes from the community.  The facilitative approach as an equal
> partner is the only way to make a difference.
>
>
> --
> Jo Nelson, CPF, CTF  <jnelson at ica-associates.ca>
> Certified Professional Facilitator and ICA Certified ToP™ Facilitator
> ICA Associates, Inc.
> 401 Richmond Street West, Suite #405, Toronto, Canada. M5V 3A8
>
> Ph. 1 416-691-2316, x2230 <(416)%20691-2316>  Toll-free 1 877-691-1422
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> Website http://ica-associates.ca
> Cellphone 647 233 6910 <(647)%20233-6910>
> Skype “jofacilitator”
>
>
>
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> Consulting/Change Management
> Pre-qualified Vendor, Alberta Education Resource List
>
>
> *“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To
> change something, build a new model that makes the existing model
> obsolete.Richard Buckminster Fuller”*
>
>
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>
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