August 28, 2023: of anniversaries and beginning again

Monday, August 28, 1963 marks the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the occasion most remembered for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s “I Have a Dream” oration. Over the weekend, thousands of people returned to the Lincoln Memorial for what organizers described as a “Not a commemoration – a continuation” of the Freedom Movement. (I am using “Freedom Movement” to what is generally known as the Civil Rights Movement after conversations with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee veteran Ruby Sales. Sales notes that this is the way the activists referred to their work, seeing it as part of a long tradition of advocacy and resistance stretching backwards and forwards across time and distance.)

Current events have a cruel way of underscoring the need to stay in the fight against hatred and oppression. As the thousands gathered in Washington, police say a 21-year-old White man who hated Black people walked into a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida, shot three Black strangers to death, then turned the gun on himself. The next day, mourners gathered at Jacksonville’s St. Paul’s AME Church. According to a report in The Guardian, Rev. Willie Barnes exhorted congregants to hold on to Jesus’ hands but confessed, “I’m fighting, trying not to be angry.” Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan wept, saying, “It feels some days like we’re going backward.”

In about one month, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) plans to hold its 108th Annual Conference in Jacksonville. For several months, ASALH leaders have criticized Florida’s political leaders for the restrictions they have imposed on the teaching American history in its public schools. Most recently, Dr. Johnetta Betsch Cole, president emerita of Spelman College and Bennett College, decried the Florida Board of Education’s imposition of new middle school standards demanding that children be taught “how slaves developed skills which in some instances could be applied for their personal benefit.”  Noting the decades of scholarship documenting that enslaved Africans came to these shores with a wealth of skills and knowledge, Cole concludes,

Throughout my life that began in Jacksonville, Florida during the days of legal segregation, I have built positive relationships with White people who unequivocally admit to the injustice of enslavement.  I am left wondering who Florida’s new academic standards are meant to serve, because they clearly do not serve Black children, White children or any other children who are capable of far more honesty and courage than Florida’s school system seems to be willing to admit. We must do all that we can to stop the Florida Board of Education from requiring middle schools to teach these new so called academic standards that perpetuate ignorant and bigoted ideas about enslaved Africans who with their descendants have helped to build our country and are committed to continuing the struggle toward a more perfect union.”

Johnetta Betsch Cole, Ph.D. “Florida’s New Middle School Standards Will Harm All of Florida’s Children”

Reflecting this weekend on the anniversary, the news, and the work ahead, I found valuable insight in several episodes of Prof. Meacham’s “It Was Said” podcast. The podcast places great speeches from the 20th century in the context of their historical moment, and two excellent episodes give particular attention to the March. One, future Congressman John Lewis‘ “We Want Our Freedom Now,” illuminates how the young president of SNCC navigated the pressure from the older March leaders and even the White House to tone down criticism of the Kennedy administration and demands for immediate action in his draft. You can watch the speech below and hear the podcast episode here.

Lewis began, “We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of…,”

The other episode, MLK Jr., The Last Speech, is actually focused on Dr. King’s April 3, 1968 “Mountaintop” speech, delivered the day before his assassination, but it includes the “I Have a Dream” speech as well, focusing on its little-discussed argument for economic justice – an argument that he would repeat and refine until the end of his life.

It was also at the 1963 March that Roy Wilkins, Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, announced the death of the protean scholar and activist William Edward Burghardt DuBois, a cofounder of the organization Wilkins led. Not long before, from his home in Accra, Ghana, Du Bois had been one of the many senders of congratulatory telegrams to the march organizers.According to a published excerpt from Charles Euchner’s book, Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the March on Washington (Penguin/RandomHouse, 2011), Du Bois wrote, “One thing alone I charge you, as you live, believe in Life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader and fuller life. The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth simply because the Great End comes slowly, because time is long.” Nonetheless, Wilkins’ tribute had been begrudging. He had been sharply critical of Du Bois’ turn toward Marxism, initially saying, “I’m not going to announce that Communist’s death.” Fellow March leaders Bayard Rustin and Asa Phillip Randolph changed his mind, and Wilkins said,

“Regardless of the fact that in his later years Dr. Du Bois chose another path, it is incontrovertible that at the dawn of the twentieth century his was the voice that was calling to you to gather here today in this cause. If you want to read something that applies to 1963 go back and get a volume of The Souls of Black Folk by Du Bois, published in 1903.”

Roy Wilkins cf Charles Euchner Nobody Turn Me Around

In a 1961 oral history recorded with Smithsonian Folkways, Du Bois recalled his turn from pure scholarship to activism. You can hear him tell his story in his own voice:

As Euchner and others have documented, Wilkins want Bayard Rustin to have a leadership role in the March because he was gay. He wasn’t alone in his antipathy. I couldn’t help but think of him when I opened my podcast feed this morning and found the final installments of the searing and thoughtful limited-edition podcast series After Broad and Market, helmed by veteran journalist Jenna Flanagan. (As of this writing, the website doesn’t have the most recent episodes posted, but they can be heard if you click on any of the podcast hosting links, and I imagine the website will be updated soon.) In June, Flanagan made a TikTok video introducing the series and explaining what the series was about and why it mattered so much to her.

@jflannys Say her name! Sakia Gunn! Sakia Gunn! Sakia Gunn! I have been waiting 20-years to unpack and retell this story. I was shook when I learned of the murder of 15-year old Sakia Gunn for being an out and proud lesbian in Newark, NJ. But I was more shook by the lack of attention and interest her story garnered. Black girls have the right to live openly, move freely and love unapologetically and my new Podcast, After Broad and Market explores why we still struggle to let that happen AND how Newarks Queer community is working tirelessly to keep Sakia’s name alive. Follow anywhere you get podcasts! #sakiagunn #pride #sayhername ♬ original sound – Jenna Flanagan

I have personal and professional connections to each of these stories – I’ve written in the past about how my parents, aunt and uncle attended the 1963 March on Washington (I was in the city but considered to young to March, so I saw it on TV.) I serve on the editorial board of ASALH’s Black History Bulletin. And when Sakia Gunn was murdered, I felt led to track the press coverage for the next two years on my blog, up to the time of the conviction and sentencing of her killer. Having learned about the murder from an email from a former student who had spent part of her adolescence hanging out at the Chelsea Piers and coming back to her Newark-area home in the wee hours, I had a visceral reaction as a woman, a mother, and educator that led me to write a poem, A Libation for Sakia.

Both the media monitoring work and the poem got some attention from activists, scholars and journalists at the time, and like Flanagan, Sakia’s story never left me, even as I went on to study, write and teach about other issues. So I suppose that I shouldn’t have been surprised when Flanagan and her colleagues contacted me for an interview about the work I did back then, but I was. You hear my voice in the first episode of the series, and in a bonus episode in which I read the poem. But that’s not the reason to listen to the series.

Listen to the series because Flanagan does a beautiful job of letting the people who were close to Sakia Gunn tell her story, and their own. She also gives center stage to the activists and community leaders who have been working to make Newark safer over the last 20 years. Listen, too, as she reflects on how Sakia’s story challenged her as a Black woman journalist, and it affected the thinking of scholars and artists. And listen as she connects the dots between what happened to Sakia and the depressingly similar murder of Philadelphia-born dancer O’Shea Sibley at a gas station in New York City earlier this summer.

In a June, 2023 interview about the podcast series, Flanagan told WNYC’s Brian Lehrer, “As a young Black woman, [Sakia’s story] was one of those reminders that no, people don’t value your life in the same way. I think that’s part of the reason why the story just never left me.” Yeah, that part.

Bayard Rustin said, “When an individual is protesting society’s refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.” By that definition, Sakia Gunn died with dignity, but she shouldn’t have had to. Ella Baker, the executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and guiding spirit behind the creation of SNCC, said, “We who believe in freedom cannot rest,” and SNCC Freedom Singer Berniece Johnson Reagon put that in a song. This is the charge to us today.

Journalism educators and allies should build a pro-democracy social media network. Here are some thoughts on how to begin.

Jelani Cobb, the Dean of Columbia University’s School of Journalism, announced his departure from Twitter this week in a New Yorker column that reflected on the devolution of a platform that once held promise as a global force for democracy and human rights, but which has become something else entirely under its new owner, Elon Musk:

My sepia-tinted memories of what Twitter was—or could possibly have become—dissolved at the prospect of stuffing money in the pocket of the richest man on the planet. Yet leaving has yielded its own complications, including unwinding connections to sources, colleagues, and roughly four hundred thousand followers. The alternatives that have gained prominence in recent weeks do not offer the same reach, or the rich vein of dissimilarity across social and geographic lines, that were some of the best aspects of Twitter. 

Jelani Cobb, Why I quit Elon Musk’s Twitter, Daily Comment, New Yorker Magazine, November 27, 2022

My former BlogHer colleague Liz Gumbinner echoes Cobb’s longing for what Twitter was at its best and dissatisfaction with the current alternatives:

Twitter is where I’ve created authentic connections and meaningful relationships. It’s where I’ve learned and grown so much from communities where I was most definitely not on the guest list, but allowed me to listen in quietly anyway. It’s where I’ve “met” so many people who have truly enriched my life and it’s not like we can’t meet somewhere else (say, here?) but still. 

Liz Gumbinner, “Twitter, you break my heart,” I’m Walking Here newsletter on Substack, November 23

I hear you Liz – although I would offer that for me, blogging and especially the original BlogHer was that space of possibility and authentic connection, and that dream faded with its corporate takeover and the rise of social platforms. We lost a lot when serious blogging got subsumed by social platforms with their discourse-flattening algorithms and inadequately-vetted ad tech. But I digress.

That one rich man’s caprice could ignite so much angst is a symptom of the larger vulnerability of the media ecosystem whose health is essential to the prospect of democracy. But the flight to alternative platforms based on open source software is an opportunity for journalism educators and civic media technologists to create a technological and curricular framework that will deepen students’ understanding of what it means to not only do pro-democracy journalism, but to strengthen a pro-democracy civic infrastructure. For example, why can’t we build a network of Mastodon instances centered in local communities and supported by students and researchers in journalism and computer science programs? Such an initiative would create organic opportunities for students, media leaders and community members to learn about the challenges of scaling platforms, policies related around design justice, digital redlining, content moderation, verification, and a host of other important issues related to online community engagement and civic participation. And it might create a more inclusive context for thinking through how we create a robust public square that is not captive to Silicon Valley.

Here’s how I think it can happen :

  • A National Academies-style summit focused on developing a pedagogical research and practice agenda that outlines the knowledge, skills and values students in journalism, computer science, design and related fields need in order to support community information infrastructures consistent with democratic values. The summit would bring researchers, thought leaders and activists together to share how work on the best ways to bring the best thinking about digital public infrastructure, pro-democracy journalism, algorithmic justice, better social media moderation and accountability into undergraduate and graduate curricula in journalism, communications and related fields. The state of research on pedagogical models for interdisciplinary computing collaboration would be a key focus. The proceedings would result in a monograph like the 2011 National Academies Report of a Workshop on the Pedagogical Aspects of Computational Thinking.
  • An open-source collaboration among journalism educators and civic media activists to develop curricular materials to support the creation, support and moderation of local social networks, similar to the collaborative effort behind the open source Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship textbook.
  • A network to support cross-disciplinary student collaboration and innovation.
  • The development of a strategy for ensuring that there is a freer exchange of ideas and resources between and among professional organizations, scholarly organizations, funders and other thought leaders around these issues. Organizations such as Free Press, the Democracy Fund, and the Center for Cooperative Media are laying the foundation for a pro-democracy media ecosystem, and the new Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard University is a hopeful harbinger of curricular innovation in this arena. What’s missing is the direct engagement with those who have been thinking about the computational journalism aspect of these issues from years – going all the way back to 2015 when Dave Winer argued that journalism students should learn to set up and run their own servers. The practical obstacle to Winer’s proposal was that most journalism programs lacked the faculty expertise, curriculum and assessment tools to integrate that kind of instruction into their programs. We’ve made progress since then, but there’s still a lot of work to be done, especially when it comes to strategies for the equitable distribution of computing education expertise to community colleges and small journalism programs. The computer science education community has been working on this problem, but I haven’t seen it on the agenda at the major journalism education conferences.

Since much of my own work has been as part of interdisciplinary teams focused on deepening science literacy in non-STEM curricula broadly, and computational thinking in journalism curricula specifically, I have been privileged to learn from experts in other fields about the importance of identifying learning progressions and ways of structuring teaching collaborations, assessing learning, and applying best practices in community-engaged learning. There’s so much we can learn from each other, but building cultures of collaboration and mutual respect across cultures and disciplines requires care and thoughtful attention.

Automated media

In the old days, the first thing an aspiring journalists learned about the news business was that the business model was about “delivering eyeballs to advertisers.” Journalism historians tell us that advertising revenue facilitated the turn from partisan news media and pamphleteering to independent news outlets staffed by people who became professionalized as journalists with norms, ethics and standards of practice. The growth of advertising-financed news paralleled the growth of the industrial-era consumer economy and made news a viable business. The staff-and-line structure of industrial organizations made it easy and logical to separate the editorial and business functions of the newspaper, freeing journalists to focus on reporting without necessarily having to think about the business consequences – the so-called “wall between church and state.” The digital turn in journalism has, of course, destroyed that wall, but it’s done much more – it’s changed the business logic behind paying for content. Mark Andrejevic and his colleagues at Monash University are helpful here:

Since the mass media has few technological mechanisms for targeting specific groups of people, advertisers developed very rough proxies – concentrating ads for household products, for example, during daytime hours to reach homemakers (hence the term “soap opera”); or placing toy ads alongside Saturday morning cartoons.

The ads followed the content, and, in some cases, its timing and geography. These ads were available to large groups of people, and thus available for public scrutiny – and often became the topic of concern about stereotyping and predatory marketing tactics.

Going Dark: Holding platforms to account over targeted online advertising, July 5, 2021

As Andrejevic notes in his 2019 book, Automated Media, digital publishing platforms — including, but not limited to social media — give advertisers a way of targeting and surveilling consumers directly, just as they give governments and other powerful actors ways of shaping public opinion without debating openly in the public square. Instead, databases, machine learning and AI technologies foster opportunities to create media environments in which people can construct their own shared meanings and notions of epistemic authority. We see this in the power of hashtag activism and the infodemics of baseless conspiracy theories that endanger both public health and the viability of democratic regimes around the world. What Andrejevic gives us in this book is a way of understanding how the logic of the automated systems themselves — the machine-to-machine communication — helps to undermine the Enlightenment-era assumptions about the ability of reason and evidence win out in the marketplace of ideas.

Here’s how Andrejevic puts it:

Whereas automated machinery offloaded the social labor of production onto mechanized infrastructures, automated media seek to offload culture itself onto artificial intelligence and data-driven forms of social sorting and decision-making. The result is what might be described as an ongoing process of social de-skilling accompanied by the dis-embedding of key decision-making processes from the forms of social life and social interaction upon which they rely. The attempt to abstract core elements of human culture from the realm of social interaction (by offloading them onto automated information systems) makes it easier to misrecognize and ignore the underlying forms of social interdependence and recognition that enable the formation of shared or common interests and understandings. This social de-skilling is the result of what the chapter describes as the “cascading” logic of automation that characterizes the contemporary information environment: automated information collection generates so much information that only automated systems can meaningfully organize it. Once sense-making becomes automated, the next logical step is toward automated response, which, in turn, promises to surpass the capacities of human subjects. If automated machinery displaced human labor, automation targets the figure of the subject. 

Mark Andrejevic, Automated Media. Introduction

Andrejevic discusses the implications of this in some detail in this New Books interview:

I’m going to be spending some time with Andrejevic’s work. I think it has a lot to teach me as I grapple with the questions I raised in my February, 2021 blog post that asked what journalism educators need to know in the era of the fourth industrial revolution. I suspect I will want to put it in conversation with Ramesh Srinavasan’s “Beyond the Valley.

Here’s my 2021 blog post, if you’re curious.