Separate, But Equal — the film:

In this documentary, Wilson poses the question without using a single image of a fire hose, growling dog, or burning cross to help make his point.  Henry Clay Anderson’s photographs and the stories surrounding them serve to reshape the image of African Americans in Mississippi during legal segregation.  His rediscovered photographs document a virtually ignored and neglected chapter in African-American history: the proud, dignified community of middle-class blacks that existed throughout the South at the dawn of the civil rights movement.  The photographs contained in this film are works of art, but they are also historical documents.  And, thankfully, they have been acquired by the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington, DC and will be on permanent display in 2016.

Henry Clay Anderson, a professional photographer who lived and worked in Greenville, Mississippi, established Anderson Photo Service in Greenville in 1947. Throughout the ’50’s and ’60’s, he photographed every aspect of his relatively prosperous black community, recording the daily lives of the men and women who built the Greenville schools, churches, and hospitals that served their segregated society. He photographed family gatherings, weddings, funerals, and events at the black high school. He photographed nightclub musicians, itinerant entertainers, and a wide range of professionals at work.

Program Description

Reshaping African American History and Building Community Esteem

Wilson uses his film and its subject matter as a window into the lives of African-Americans during legal segregation in Mississippi — a world that has been overlooked in the aftermath of the civil rights movement – the community of black middle class Southerners who considered themselves first-class Americans despite living in a deeply segregated society.

Through Anderson’s photos of life in Greenville, Wilson shows how a cooperative system can create empowerment in the community and beyond.  He addresses the importance of education and economic development as a means to pull oneself up by one’s own bootstraps, per Booker T. Washington in Up from Slavery. Wilson also examines how the power of place can be a factor in community development and how that factor can affect other aspects of our lives. He also examines the role that news publications play in the interconnectedness of, and divisions within, society and how that has helped and hurt the African-American community.

Bios

Shawn D. Wilson (Writer and Director)
Co-author of Separate, But Equal:  The Mississippi Photographs of Henry Clay Anderson, Wilson has spent the past 10 years working as a filmmaker and producer. His clients included The Historymakers where he produced dozens of interviews with influential African Americans, including Lynn Nottage, and Marc Morial. He is also research consultant to the Smithsonian NMAAHC. “Separate, But Equal” marks his directorial debut.

Ilyana Kadushin  (Producer and Composer)
A co-founder of Lythion Music, Kadushin produced and scored “Separate, But Equal”.  She is globally known as the voice of best-selling audio book series “Twilight”, and has toured and spoken at fan symposiums and book store events as that voice. A dedicated activist for progressive causes, Ilyana and her company have written and performed their music live to benefit organizations like:  Amnesty International, True Body Project, Wildlife Federation, Hands Up Not Hands Out (Ilyana is an ambassador) and Rock’NRenew.

Hewitt tells the inspiring story of Hardwick, Vermont, the town at the center of his book, and explains how other communities can learn and benefit from Hardwick’s unique food system model. He discusses the key components – both tangible and intangible – necessary to build local food systems and addresses the very real challenges this work entails.

As the global economy continues to limp toward a future that can sometimes seem bleak and dispiriting, Hewitt delivers a message that is at once sobering and profoundly inspirational. We can heal our communities and the citizens within them; we have the power to put them on a path toward long-term health and stability. We know we need to change course. Ben Hewitt shows us how.

Program Descriptions

Growing a Local Food System

What do we talk about when we talk about local food? Hewitt’s nuanced and inclusive accounting of what makes a healthy food system is essential information for anyone interested in fomenting local agriculture, whether it’s at the level of an individual business, a non-profit, or a community alliance. He discusses the “local food as economic driver” model, as well as the “local food as local nourishment” model and how they can work in conjunction to create truly sustainable enterprise.

Re-imaging Prosperity

Recent events have exposed the tremendous vulnerability of the growth-as-prosperity model. Hewitt explains how we can (and why we must) move toward a more durable form of prosperity that is not dependent on credit and supplies from afar. The traditional metrics for prosperity are failing us; Hewitt discusses what metrics we should be using to gauge the long-term health of our communities.

Marketing Local

For too long, local food has carried elitist connotations. It’s perceived as expensive, inaccessible, and liberal. Hewitt discusses how we can change the framework of the discussion to be more inclusive of all political and socioeconomic groups and he talks about the “360-degree” issues that can unite people from across the spectrum.

Bio

Ben Hewitt, author of the acclaimed The Town That Food Saved, writes and farms in Northern Vermont. His work has appeared in numerous national periodicals, including the New York Times Magazine, Wired, Gourmet, Discover, Eating Well, Men’s Journal, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, and many others. Ben’s next book, Making Supper Safe, will be published by Rodale in 2011.

Ben lives with his wife and two sons in a self-built home that is powered by a windmill and solar photovoltaic panels. To help offset his renewable energy footprint, Ben drives a really big truck.

In his lectures, Dr. Ali uses his wide-ranging experience of traveling and researching on six continents to provide real-world examples of how communities and corporations are dealing with the growing problem of resource scarcity, and he provides solutions for reconciling this reality with the equally urgent need for environmental conservation — advocating a practical approach focusing on global development, poverty alleviation and a sustainable future.

Program Descriptions

Constructive Consumption: Greening a Poor Planet

Would the world be a better place if we curbed our desires for material goods? Basing his analysis on the examples laid out in his book, Treasures of the Earth: Need, Greed and a Sustainable Future, Dr. Ali’s nuanced conclusion respects the human desire for material goods, but makes the forceful argument for a more ecologically driven economic and social system that helps to reduce global poverty.  Forbes profiled Dr. Ali’s thesis in a special feature.

Eco-peace: Using Environmental Issues to Resolve Global Conflicts

Can environmental issues resolve intractable conflicts?  Dr. Ali’s wide-ranging efforts at peace-building, and his professional training as a mediator at the international level, enables him to outline specific examples of how ecological factors have been able to promote peace, with good leadership, among seemingly irresolvable territorial conflicts. Dr. Ali’s work in this domain has been endorsed by famed ecologist E.O. Wilson and Nobel laureate and founder of the Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus.

Building Peace in the Muslim World

Dr. Ali provides a personal account of his experiences of growing up in both Pakistan and the United States, and how that has provided him with insights into resolving the conflicts between Islam and the West. He also discusses his research on madrassahs (Islamic religious schools) in Pakistan where he has been trying to promote an environmental education curriculum. Dr. Ali’s work on madrassahs has been profiled by the Brookings Institution.

The Science of Stuff: From the Basics of Environmental Science to a Smaller Chemical Footprint

Explaining the basics of environmental science — focusing on how materials flow through our economy and our dependence on “the elements of the earth” — Dr. Ali’s enlightening and entertaining lecture takes audiences through basic chemical processes, then looks at the challenges of developing materials that can have a minimal impact on the environment while meeting societal needs.

Bio

Saleem H. Ali is Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, and on the adjunct faculty of Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies. Author of the book Treasures of the Earth: Need, Greed and a Sustainable Future, Dr. Ali’s research focuses on the causes and consequences of environmental conflicts and how ecological factors can promote peace. He is on the visiting faculty for the United Nations mandated University for Peace (Costa Rica), where he teaches a course on Indigenous Environment and Development Conflicts.  He is also the editor of the widely acclaimed volume Peace Parks: Conservation and Conflict Resolution.

Dr. Ali has also been involved in promoting environmental education in madrassahs (Islamic religious schools) and using techniques from environmental planning to study the rise of these institutions in his ethnic homeland of Pakistan.  His book, Islam and Education: Conflict and Conformity in Pakistan’s Madrassahs, grew out of these experiences.  A member of the World Commission on Protected Areas and the IUCN Taskforce on Transboundary Conservation, some of his current research on environmental health perception in mining areas and social responsibility in the mining sector is supported by the Tiffany & Co. Foundation.

A professional mediator, Dr. Ali has conducted workshops on consensus-building for private and public interests, as well as peer review of research publications for the World Bank, the International Institute for Sustainable Development, The Woodrow Wilson Center, the Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, the Natural Resources Forum and Yale University Press.  Dr.  Ali received his doctorate in Environmental Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an M.E.S. in environmental law and policy from Yale University, and his Bachelors in Chemistry from Tufts University (summa cum laude).

Yet what happened over the next eight years was a roller-coaster of inspiration, confusion, doubt, and soul-searching as his reporting and experiences slowly chipped away at his faith. While reporting on hundreds of stories, he witnessed a disturbing gap between the tenets of various religions and the behaviors of the faithful and their leaders.

He investigated religious institutions that acted less ethically than corrupt Wall St. firms. He found few differences between the morals of Christians and atheists. As this evidence piled up, he started to fear that God didn’t exist. He explored every doubt, every question—until, finally, his faith collapsed. After the paper agreed to reassign him, he wrote a personal essay in the summer of 2007 that became an international sensation for its honest exploration of doubt.

Losing My Religion is a book about life’s deepest questions that speaks to everyone: Lobdell understands the longings and satisfactions of the faithful, as well as the unrelenting power of doubt. How he faced that power, and wrestled with it, is must reading for people of faith and nonbelievers alike.

Bio

An award-winning journalist, author, blogger, speaker, college lecturer and media consultant, William Lobdell worked for 18 years with the Los Angeles Times and its sister newspapers. Lobdell covered the religion beat for The Times for eight years, first as a columnist and then as a beat reporter. He earned several national awards for his work before becoming a metro editor for the paper in 2006. He left the paper in 2008.  He also has been a visiting faculty member for 12 years at the University of California, Irvine, where he teaches “Religion and the Media” and “The Internet, Blogs and Politics.”

In Economic Gangsters, Miguel and Fisman use economics to get inside the heads of these gangsters, and propose solutions that can make a difference to the world’s poor, including cash infusions to defuse violence in times of drought and steering the World Bank away from aid programs most susceptible to corruption.

These two sleuthing economists follow the foreign aid money trail into the grasping hands of corrupt governments and shady underworld characters around the globe, and invite audiences to witness ingenious black marketeers game the international system; follow the steep rise and fall of stock prices of companies with unseemly connections to Indonesia’s former dictator; see what rainfall has to do with witch killings in Tanzania…and much more.

Program Descriptions

Is It Africa’s Turn?:
Progress in the world’s poorest region

Miguel, whose main research focus is African economic development, has been teaching a course on this subject for 9 years, and has conducted field work in Kenya, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and India.  In his lectures, Miguel draws on his considerable depth of knowledge and on-the-ground experience to detail the ups and downs in Africa since independence.  In particular, he puts in context recent economic and political progress, which have raised hopes for the first time in decades. How long will this up-tick last, how will it affect/be affected by the global economy, and what part will  American, Chinese and Indian interests play in the outcome — especially in the face of the current economic crisis? Miguel addresses all of these crucial questions and more, as he pulls back the curtain on this least understood region.

Bio

Professor Miguel earned S.B. degrees in both Economics and Mathematics from MIT, and received a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, where he was a National Science Foundation Fellow. Miguel is a Faculty Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Associate Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, recipient of the 2005 Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and winner of the 2005 Kenneth J. Arrow Prize awarded annually by the International Health Economics Association for the Best Paper in Health Economics.