Trey Clark
Marti Tippens Murphy
If there is ever a time for Facing History and Ourselves, it’s a year like 2017. This nonprofit educational organization aims to teach young people about the most potent forms of social injustice that show up in daily headlines — and to give them ways to deal with purveyors of hate.
For 25 years, the Memphis chapter has been providing schools with curricula that show how history, for good or ill, is made by the choices of individuals. The international organization has local roots, founded as it was 41 years ago in Brookline, Massachusetts, by native Memphian Margot Stern Strom, a Central High School graduate acutely aware of the racial disparities of the South. In Massachusetts, she helped develop a classroom course on tolerance and human behavior that examined how the Holocaust came about. This was the genesis of the organization that now helps people have difficult conversations about race, hate, and discrimination.
Memphis is one of Facing History’s 10 locations in the United States, England, and Canada. The organization also has educational partnerships around the globe, including China, France, Northern Ireland, and South Africa.
Marti Tippens Murphy is executive director of the local office. She grew up in Memphis and got a degree in international studies from Rhodes College. She went to California where she stayed nearly two decades, much of that time with the Los Angeles chapter of Facing History, including four years as director. She came to Memphis to helm the operation here three years ago, taking over from Rachel Shankman, who founded the local chapter in 1992.
This month, the 2017 Memphis Benefit Dinner will be held to celebrate 25 years of Facing History in Memphis. Keynote speaker Jelani Cobb is a staff writer at The New Yorker where he writes about race, history, justice, and culture. He also holds the Ira Lipman professorship at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. The dinner is October 23rd at the Memphis Hilton. For more information, go to facinghistory.org.
In a recent interview, Murphy spoke of the work the Memphis chapter has done, how it’s addressing contemporary events involving neo-Nazis and Confederate monuments, and her vision for the future.
Memphis magazine: What impact has Facing History and Ourselves had in Memphis?
Marti Tippens Murphy: I was recently talking with our board reflecting on what it was like before Facing History, and what the impact is now. Twenty-five years ago there wasn’t a curriculum in schools that helped kids really grapple with the most difficult issues we still face today. Now there is. But there always will be new kids that need Facing History, so we are helping through our curriculum, which is historical, and stories of individuals who had choices to make in history. We’re empowering kids to think about the world and their relationship to it. We, through our resources, help kids understand that there’s power in identity and knowing who you are and what you believe, and what you’re willing to stand up for.
We want them to understand that history is not just a set of facts and figures and dates, but the choices that individuals made that created the world we live in today. If they’re looking at the most pressing challenges of things that we still haven’t gotten right, they can trace those back to the roots of things that we maybe hadn’t dealt with in the past.
For most of us, including myself, we grow up not necessarily knowing all of the truth of history, and particularly when it comes to the United States and what happened in the critical periods both during and after slavery. So, we have resources on the Reconstruction period, and on the Holocaust, and on the Civil Rights Movement, and those things all connect to how we understand the way to move forward. Not just on a local level, but on a global level if you think about questions around immigration and refugees and genocides that continue to happen.
What is the age range and how do you reach them?
We offer a middle- and high-school curriculum. We work primarily with teachers, giving them resources and training, because that has a multiplier effect. If teachers are able to change their practices and be more effective and bring these resources, then we can reach so many more students. It all fits within the curricula depending on what kids are studying. For example, in sixth grade it’s going to be around identity and community, what it means to be a member of a community, who do we stand up for, and how we create that. It’s so relevant as kids are going into middle school.
In some of the other middle school grades, we might be looking at different reading, like Anne Frank, or in the eighth grade the Reconstruction period is taught. In high school we have a state-recognized elective, Holocaust and Human Behavior. So in different grades in high school, students can take that. They can take Facing History in a literature class, for example, with the teaching of To Kill a Mockingbird, which every student reads. It’s one of the most widely taught novels in our country, but our approach is unique in terms of not only giving the historical context, but also raising big questions around justice.
There is also direct work with students through our student leadership program at some 15 schools. It identifies leader students who go through Facing History training so they learn how to lead conversations with their peers around race, what it means to be a member of a community, around bullying, and so on. We’ve had students go through Facing History for 25 years, so they take that with them into their civic and professional lives.
We also have a group for young adults called Facing History Together, which is for people who had Facing History in high school, or maybe they didn’t but they are intrigued and interested in that work and want to support it. They get to participate in outside-of-the-classroom conversations where they get tools to think about how in their own communities they might talk about racial inequality or immigration, but with that Facing History lens.
We’ve always done community events, whether through teach-ins or bringing speakers like Jelani Cobb to town. Those help us think about what it means to be an American and how we can work together.
Facing History has the capacity to bring communities together and we are always looking for ways to do that. We continue to work with young adults because, as a country, we are not doing a very good job of that right now. We’re in our siloed spaces where we don’t have ways that we can reach across, and really come to some understanding and be solution-oriented enough with kids.
MM: What are some of the partnerships you’ve worked on?
We’ve had a long partnership with Playhouse on the Square — pretty much every year there’s a play that connects to our themes. We’ve partnered with the National Civil Rights Museum, where we did a series last year with talks connected to one of their initiatives. We commissioned the Upstanders mural across from the museum, which was in partnership with the UrbanArt Commission. We wanted to get people talking about proactive, positive examples in the past of how people were upstanders, and the different ways that you can do that. The fact that people have done it in very difficult times allows us to have hope, and it gives us examples to move forward. Those are the kinds of conversations that we want to promote.
What’s the relationship between the international organization and the local chapter?
All of our infrastructure is in Boston — human resources, administration, all that, and it really helps us. They create our website, the curriculum, and content, so that allows the staff here on the ground to make relationships in the community and do the program work. We obviously have a great community of people that we work with and many things that the organization has adopted were piloted here in Memphis.
What does the future hold for Facing History and Ourselves?
We’re in it for the long haul. I think about young people and they’re always going to need this kind of education, and they all deserve it. Our vision is that every student in Memphis has access to Facing History, not just for the individual student, but for the impact it can have on our community. What keeps me up at night is thinking about whether our kids will continue to be at risk for being marginalized or victimized, or harmed because of their color or their sexual orientation, or where they were born, or their religion. Facing History is a way to help them become empowered, but also for their peers and all of us to understand why we need to support each other.
It’s also so critical right now to keep kids from being lured into hate, and so we’re at an important time, I think, in our country, and we have to continue to give kids this opportunity to develop empathy, to develop their critical thinking, and to develop their voice. I’m just grateful that we are here and able to do that work, and we wouldn’t be able to do it without all the people that helped us get to where we are today. I mean, it’s 25 years of one person at a time, building where we are, and we’re really proud of it, and we’re really excited about our future.
