i cried last night about the little petty frustrating things. i was laughing as i cried and talked with tonio. he’s a great listener with a mammoth heart. revelations that emerged from talking with him, roberto, and our next-door neighbor, anasa troutman: humans have been sent to earth to get over ourselves. people will try to shoot you in the mouth, but not because you needed to be shot in the mouth. they do it cuz they’re mouthshooters. so you can’t take it personally. mmm-hmm.

in the morning i met with elandria. some somewhat random questions surfaced:

1.      How do we have one organization that holds multiple generational tracks? How do we move the board to reflect our intergenerationality? What is our vision for intergenerational work and how do we want to make it happen? How does intergenerational work look different in
Appalachia and other parts of the South? How does youth organizing look different in the South?

2.      Many of us running youth programs are young adults ourselves. We rarely go through some coming-of-age ritual, but we take on a mighty amount of responsibility. How do we change that transition, so we bring our youthful wisdom about how we want to be treated over into adulthood? How do we support other young adults as visionaries?

we completed some things we needed to write. i helped rajeev edit his UNC-chapel hill transfer application during lunchtime. it’s excellent. i fixed myself a purple onion and cherry tomato omelette and savored it with my mother’s kadumanga (mango pickle) for lunch. chatted with jessamyn about repping future 5000 at the u.s. social forum meeting in atlanta this weekend and with ivan about him coming to highlander’s upcoming ‘interpreting for social justice’ weekend workshop. jona plans to come, too.

the education team and the 75th anniversary planning team had a meeting today about the website. elandria and i had a million ideas about how we wanted to make the youth program website pop. differences arose about whether to prioritize hot design and an amped-up website, for fear that the money that would take would pull from the program and development time and resources. we all agreed that highlander is about touching people’s lives and strengthening southern organizing. we had differences about how important it is to brand that concept and make it attractive to participants, donors, e’rybody. we had a quick break after that meeting and then the whole staff came together to debrief how this year on the new health care plan went. i had to cut from that meeting early to help rajeev wrap up his UNC application and send it off.

the staff spent the afternoon calling donors to thank them for their 2006 contributions. i had a couple interesting conversations. one was with a woman who used to work at the university in knoxville. she started a field program at highlander back in the day. she is older, and she said that she reads the newsletter with great pleasure. i asked her what she thought of the website. she said she doesn’t think anything of the website because she doesn’t visit websites. wow. my life is so web-dominated. many of my bonds with friends across the country and across the world are sustained through internet missives, myspace/ friendster/ facebook/ mybloc shoutouts. in between real life visits, i check out friends’ websites and blog postings to learn what’s the latest with them. as soon as i wonder the definition of a word or the best recipe for anything or what was that deejay’s first album, i go to my favorite websites. back to the conversation- she asked us to keep the newsletter strong, because there is a readership for it who will likely never touch the website.

i also called an older fellow who wasn’t eager to talk until he realized that i really just called to thank him for his earlier donation. he shared an amazing story about sitting on the porch with myles horton in 1961 and grieving when the workshop center and library were padlocked by the state. here is an excerpt from highlander’s history about the incident:

Highlander’s civil rights work provoked a vicious backlash among southern segregationists. At its 25th-anniversary workshop, held on Labor Day weekend, 1957, Highlander came under attack from the press. Aubrey Williams and Martin Luther King, Jr., both speakers at the event, were blamed for the racial strife that was growing throughout the South.

Soon afterward, the Georgia Commission on Education published a sensational piece of propaganda called Highlander Folk School; Communist Training School, Monteagle, Tennessee. Featuring pictures from the Labor Day event, including one of a black man dancing with a white woman, the publication proved to be an effective tool for organizing white supremacists against Highlander.

Billboard showing Martin Luther King at Highlander, identified as a “Communist training school.”

The campaign against Highlander culminated in 1961 in a move by the State of Tennessee to revoke the Folk School’s charter and confiscate its land, buildings, and other property. Despite the support of people such as Eleanor Roosevelt and United Nations Under-Secretary Ralph J. Bunche, the Tennessee Supreme Court was able to manipulate the law to shut down Highlander.

Anticipating the inevitability of defeat, leaders of the Folk School took action to preserve the idea and work of Highlander by securing a charter for the Highlander Research and Education Center. The new Highlander relocated to Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1961 and remained there until 1971, when it moved to its current location.

it is such a pleasure to be 26 years old, to be born in time to talk with elders like the ones i got on the phone today, remembering the details, making them come alive.

this evening tonio and i are making thai tofu and vegetable curry with rice noodles and mango with sticky rice for dessert. eager to curl up with a book.