Welcome!A Workshop on Social Change

A workshop initially presented for the Washington Gladden Society at the

2015 NACCC Annual Meeting and inspired by the Lillian E. Smith Symposium on Arts and Social Change

Lillian E. Smith Center of Piedmont Collegehttp://www.piedmont.edu/lillian-smith-center | Join us on Facebook

Craig Amason, DirectorLESCenter@piedmont.edu | 706-894-4204

“The question in crisis or ordeal is not: Are you going to be an extremist? The question is: What kind of extremist are you going to be?”

--Lillian SmithSpeech prepared for the

Institute on Non-Violence and Social Change, 1956

Lillian Eugenia Smith, 1897 – 1966

Inducted into the Georgia Women of Achievement in 1999

Link to Lillian Smith video on website forGeorgia Women of Achievement

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid618568018001?bckey=AQ~~,AAAAAEM5N1U~,8TYAlu2PuKzK4sTt6U23R74dsP6KyiLF&bctid=2674484420001

Ivy Hill is the name of a historically African-American neighborhood in Rabun County, Georgia, at the base of Screamer Mountain, the site of Lillian Smith’s summer camp for girls and her home. Ivy Hill was the location for one of two “colored” schools in the county. Throughout her adult life, Lillian Smith remained well acquainted with her neighbors in Ivy Hill. She also encouraged the local authorities to move forward with integration, in spite of reservations that some of them held. She was sympathetic to the fears and concerns that Ivy Hill parents and children certainly felt with the approach of such a major change, so she hosted an ice cream social at her home for them the day before schools were integrated in September, 1965. Some of those same children were most likely in attendance a year later at her memorial service on the mountain.

The following video is a short interview session with two of the students from Ivy Hill who were just starting elementary school in 1965. Cherryl Long and Keith Owens explain what it was like to attend a one-room schoolhouse with one teacher and how it felt to enter a classroom with white children for the first time. Infused with a sense of optimistic grace, their stories offer a microcosmic glimpse of the transition away from segregated education in rural northeast Georgia. Their poignant memories of walking on a trail up the hill to see Miss Lil are a testament to the impact this great humanitarian had on their lives, and the lives of so many more.

Link to Ivy Hill School Integration videoPiedmont College YouTube channel

https://youtu.be/NVn7yi9mH0A

• Quotations for this workshop are found in Our Faces Our Words

• Published in 1964 by Lillian Smith, the final book released before her death in 1966

• Written as dramatic dialogues designed to reveal struggles faced by young civil rights workers of the early sixties

• Concludes with an epilogue with Lillian Smith’s own thoughts on the civil rights movement

• Includes photographs illustrative of this turbulent period of U.S. history

Workshop Instructions

• Introduce yourselves to your table group.• Examine the sheet with the two photographs and the quotation

provided for your group.• Discuss ramifications of the photographs and the quotation in the

context of the question: “What kind of an extremist are you?” (suggested time 10 minutes)

• Appoint a spokesperson for your table group.• Prepare a summary (1-2 sentences) of your observations for the

spokesperson to share with all the workshop participants while your group’s photographs and quotation are displayed. (suggested time 10-15 minutes)

“There is nothing on earth more dangerous than a violent man pretending to be nonviolent

– nothing more dangerous except ten or a hundred of them.”

Photo by Martin via Flickr

Post-2006 Pre-1966

“Every time I stereotype anybody, or any group or any situation I am thinking violently. Every time I evade seeing this whole civil rights-segregation-

human-relations Thing as it is, every time I look at it on the surface, refusing an understanding of its depths and heights, I am committing a spiritual

violence.”

Photo by Stephen Melisethlan via Flickr

Post-2006 Pre-1966

Photo by Dan Lurle via Flickr

Post-2006 Pre-1966

“We try; God, how we try to keep cool, to feel compassion, to stay nonviolent – but how can

you with pressure after pressure after pressure!”

“Here is the point of change: where systems are abandoned and human relationships are

begun.”

Post-2006 Pre-1966

“Jesus and his Twelve were a pitiful little group: nobody in our twentieth century, today, would think a group like that could change anything.

But THEY did. How do we know these demonstrators cannot with God’s help bring

miracles to pass?”

Photo by Victoria Pickering via Flickr

Post-2006 Pre-1966

“I think I still believe God can work miracles even in the church; but I don’t know: God, as we look

at human history, has had a way of choosing one man, one boy, one woman or a small band of people to do God’s work. The church should

sustain the work that the lonely ones do – that is its job – but does it?”

Post-2006 Pre-1966