photograph courtesy columbia university
Jelani Cobb, dean of the Columbia University Journalism School, will be the keynote speaker at the fundraising event on October 30th.
Being raised in Jim Crow Memphis required some strenuous mental gymnastics among the white people who benefited from it, certain tricks for not thinking. Far too many embraced such mental sleights of hand unquestioningly, but others, as they learned of the wider world, learned to think outside the racial box. And in them was stirred a determination to foster change.
Margot Stern Strom was one of the latter sort of Memphians, with powerful consequences. As she relates in an online video about her youth here, “From the day I was born, I began to learn my lessons. I learned it is possible to pray at night and ride in a Jim Crow car the next morning. … I learned it the way all my Southern people learn it, by closing door after door, until one’s mind and heart and conscience are blocked off from each other and from reality.”
And then she unlearned it. After her educational career took her to Boston in the 1970s and she found herself teaching 8th graders about the Holocaust, she began to see connections and contradictions between the lessons our communities teach us and the way our own history is represented. And so, in 1976, she founded a nonprofit seeking to address those contradictions head-on: Facing History & Ourselves.
Now, nearly half a century later, that nonprofit continues its mission of using “lessons of history to challenge teachers and their students to stand up to racism, antisemitism, and other forms of bigotry and hate,” still going strong after Strom’s passing in 2023. Headquartered in Boston, it now has branch offices in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco, Cleveland, London, and, yes, Memphis.
That lends a personal dimension to the fundraising event that Facing History & Ourselves (FH&O) is hosting in Strom’s hometown, taking place at the Scheidt Family Performing Arts Center on Thursday, October 30th, at 6 p.m. And, with the powers that be seemingly poised to restore Jim Crow-like regimes in our time, showing support for FH&O is more important than ever.
That’s a sentiment shared by the event’s keynote speaker, Jelani Cobb. As both a staff writer for The New Yorker and dean of the Columbia Journalism School, he’s confronted racial and cultural politics in his writings for over two decades, and knows just how necessary FH&O’s lessons are.
“I’ve always been a fan of what you might call applied history,” he says. “A lot of times, young people aren’t interested in history because they think it’s just an arid collection of dates and facts. The way we present it to them, the past is inert. We don’t give them a sense of how the past is ambient, how it surrounds us, and how it can inform the way we move through the world right now. And so I think that’s one of the most vital things that Facing History & Ourselves does.”
As Cobb explains, teaching history with that in mind can have a profound effect on our lives. “It’s crucial that we have history be applicable to the world that we’re operating in now,” he says. “That was the initial rationale for us even studying history in an organized way, just to understand long term patterns. We study history for the same reason that people used to have weather almanacs: to try to understand how to navigate the world we’re in.”
“We study history for the same reason that people used to have weather almanacs: to try to understand how to navigate the world we’re in.” — Jelani Cobb
And, Cobb emphasizes, studying history is also an object lesson in critical thinking. “When we talk about things like media literacy, which is obviously increasingly important, what we’re really trying to get at is a particular type of critical and analytical ability, and that’s fundamental to what we’re supposed to be doing in education.” To that end, his talk at the FH&O event will focus on “the historic vulnerabilities of American democracy, and how they inform the moment that we’re in right now.”
Connecting the dots between then and now, of course, is FH&O’s strong suit. As Cobb puts it, “The way that we teach history needs an overhaul, and we have to present our students with a sense of the past that lets them understand the stakes, that lets them understand the kind of human dimensions, the drama, the striving, the ambitions, the longings of people who lived and died before they did. But also to say that humanity hasn’t changed that much. It’s not that hard to put ourselves in the shoes of those people, and therefore it’s not that hard to understand the applicability of what we learned from history to the current moment.”
