Siege Mentality

An ITV News image of an Apprentice Boys Parade in Derry

As educators, we do not have a dog in the fight. 

Our purpose in our sophomore Facing History class is to present a conflict involving bias on both sides, and to examine the ways in which these two groups have treated each other poorly, and the ways in which two such groups could--and have--worked to make peace. The idea is to ultimately reflect on our own biases, our own missteps and the possibility that the better angels of our nature can be employed to make the world a little better, and not worse. 

On the Unionist side, a rabble-rouser like Ian Paisley is easy to detest, but so are Nationalists such as those IRA members that felt the killing of innocents was an acceptable sacrifice for their cause. 

That said, from a humanist perspective, I have a hard time with a group such as the Apprentice Boys, whose August parade is a celebration of the Protestant defeat of the Catholics in the Siege of Derry in the late 1600's. This parade marches right past the Catholic Bogside neighborhood, so the oppressed majority can view a loud drum-filled celebration of their defeat by the Protestant minority that have dominated them politically for well over three hundred years. This celebration has traditionally led to varying levels of violence, including but not limited to the Battle of the Bogside, the trigger event for the entire Troubles period. It strikes me as an in-your-face reminder of oppression comparable to the white minority's annual celebrations of the defeat of the Zulus in the Battle of Blood River in South Africa.

But I acknowledge that I am an outsider, a person who might not get the meaning in this popular organization's most well-known parade. One of the things that I hope to get from our trip to Northern Ireland is a better understanding of the motivations of this historical and cultural organization.

According to an unattributed quote on their website, the motivating idea for this organization is that "a people who take no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy, to be remembered with pride, by remote descendants." So pride in a culture is emphasized, pride in a history. I have seen reports that these parades result in less violence these days than they once did, and the organization was finally granted permission to open their own "Siege Museum" in Derry in 2013, to "promote understanding of our history and culture." So I am giving them a chance. 

We arrive in Derry around noon on August 12th. Completely by accident, we are arriving on the very day of the Apprentice Boys' famous annual parade.

Privilege and Separation and Representation

James Baldwin in an image from Esquire magazine.

A word stuck out to me from the 1981 BBC documentary The Troubles. The scene was a 1960's parade of Unionists marching through Derry to commemorate the Battle of the Boyne, at which William of Orange secured victory for the Protestants in 1690. The commentator was saying that the Protestants were marching to--among other things--assert their "privilege."

In America today, it is common to hear people speak of white privilege, the way in which white people can freely go about their business without worry that their race will be a factor in how others treat them in our society. The concept was around before Peggy McIntosh's famous 1989 article White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, but that article and the embrace of it by many educators certainly helped to accelerate the use of the term in popular media in the years that followed. But it was not as much in common parlance in the early 1980's (in the United States at least). To hear the British commentator speak of Protestant privilege in Northern Ireland in 1981 really stood out to me, and made me think about whiteness in America in relation to Protestant Unionism in Northern Ireland.

So before we judge a group that has maintained an unsteady dominance in a region since 1690, we as "white" Americans should acknowledge the place we have held in our own region since about 1607. And before we judge the walling off of cities to separate people along sectarian lines, we should look at the history of how real estate developers have built invisible (yet entirely visible, if you are really paying attention) walls between races here in our own cities.

These thoughts were going through my mind as I watched Raoul Peck's ingenious James Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro on the night of a day in which I learned that one of my black eighth grade school buddies had been killed in Atlanta, where he had been living. He was something of a legendary MC by the time he died, according to several internet sources (actually eulogized as a "legend" by none other than Kurtis Blow). But I had been unaware of that, pretty much unaware of every development in his life since eighth grade. I wouldn't say we lost track of each other's lives for any real reason; it just sort of happens.

Baldwin talks about childhood friends of different races whose friendships end "at the schoolhouse door" and how walling off one another from each other's lives can lead to very negative outcomes and effects.

And yet, in our country, in spite of the way race plays into all of our major systems--educational, residential, political, economical--there are still black voices in government at every level. Right now, in the United Kingdom, the Nationalist voice has stepped away from the table. While the more moderate Nationalists of the SDLP have lost the three seats they formerly held--and occupied--at Westminster, Sinn Fein has gained three more abstentionist seats, bringing their total of empty chairs to seven. No Nationalists are seated at Westminster anymore, while the Unionist DUP gains an incredibly valuable bargaining chip as they agree to complete Theresa May's Conservative majority in the UK government. All this is going on while Northern Ireland's own power-sharing assembly at Stormont is suspended over the fallout from a green energy funding scandal and other disagreements. Who will make the case to the UK now for the rights of the minority in Northern Ireland?

In I Am Not Your Negro, as Baldwin discusses the Sidney Poitier-Tony Curtis relationship in The Defiant Ones, and the differing white audience and black audience responses to it, he categorizes the white racist impulse as springing from fear of having one's dominant position overturned, while the black antagonistic impulse comes from rage. Perhaps The Battle of The Bogside and similar Northern conflicts spring out of this same construct: Unionists fearful of the loss of their country assert their historical power and privilege, while enraged Nationalists throw petrol bombs. As Baldwin said, not in this particular documentary but elsewhere, in The Fire Next Time, "the glorification of one race (or group) and the consequent debasement of another... always has been and always will be a recipe for murder."

Baldwin's repeated request was for the dominant other to recognize him--and he often speaks of himself as a larger, representative self--as equally human. 

Northern Ireland's story is all of our stories.

A Discussion with Two Students

Remsen and Jocelyn at New Haven Academy

The following is the transcript of a recorded conversation I had with two of the most vocal students from David Senderoff’s section of the sophomore Facing History class. They are both my own students in US History. I wanted to know what they felt they had learned in the class, and whether they felt it was the right pairing of case studies.

Did you guys know anything about Northern Ireland as a country, or as a place with problems, before this class?

Jocelyn: I knew like a very vague background, just because I’m Irish and it’s part of my family history so it comes up now and then, but none of the details, no.

Remsen: I had no prior knowledge of the Troubles, no. (Pause.) I mean we had friends that lived in Ireland. I don’t know where. We marched with County Sligo in the Irish Festival one time, but... (laughs.)

That’s in the Republic, but it’s very near the North. For instance, when Senderoff and I go, the night before we enter the North, we’re staying at the town of Sligo. It’s a fantastic place. That’s actually where William Butler Yeats, the famous Irish poet, is buried.

Remsen: (enthusiastically) Oooh.

Jocelyn: Oh, wow.

What would you say about what you’ve learned this semester? What are you going to take away from it?

Remsen: Well, there’s so much. It’s so interesting. We watched the documentary the other day about how children have coped with it… since. And just comparing it to South Africa and their efforts to reconcile with what they’ve done. It was really interesting. Just this tension that built up for no really good reason... and trying to come to terms with that afterwards was really interesting to hear about.

Jocelyn: I guess one of the biggest takeaways for me was how arbitrary prejudice can be. And how violence just erupts so easily when there’s a bigoted environment present. And I know that’s not new information, but this very much solidified it in my mind.

That’s well said. Maybe your answer would be the same to this, but how would you compare what you found out about South Africa… South Africa itself and also the Truth and Reconciliation Commission... to Northern Ireland and the Good Friday Agreement? How do those things fit together for you?

Jocelyn: I guess the initial events are fundamentally the same. There’s a group in power that wants to claim more power by demonizing a minority group. And that’s present all over the world all the time. That’s just very human. But as far as the Truth and Reconciliation and the Good Friday Agreement… I think those are both outstanding examples of what a group of people are capable of when there’s an understanding that this place has been wronged and there needs to be a change in the environment. That seemed really specific to these two areas. I’ve never heard of anything else like that. Did that make any sense?

Remsen: Yes!

Yeah. Full Disclosure… I don’t know if you knew this... we used to teach South Africa and then Rwanda.

Jocelyn: I took a Yale class on the Rwandan Genocide!

Yes. And then we switched it to Northern Ireland for a number of reasons. Partly because the resolution in Rwanda, which was a thing called Gacaca… they took an ancient African court tradition and they re-started it to judge the crimes of the Rwandan Genocide and we were teaching that… but then a few things started happening for us. One thing was that it wasn’t working that well in Rwanda. We had some contacts in Rwanda who were saying bad things could happen again. This resolution hasn’t really worked out. And some other people were saying it had worked out. It was so complicated. We weren’t sure what to think. And then also, and this is a real thing: because we had done South Africa and then Rwanda, a lot of our black students felt like, “Why do we have to see all this suffering of black people in a row? We don’t see anyone else suffering.” So we said, how can we get this thing... like you enunciated… how can we get this thing of people where there’s been prejudice and now they try to resolve it, in a country where it’s not yet another African country.  That’s when we thought, “Maybe we should do Northern Ireland.”  I knew about Northern Ireland in a way that someone who knows about the world knows about a place, but I didn’t know it deeply at all. So we started looking at it, and that’s what it’s been built from. So I guess my question to you is… South Africa and then Northern Ireland… is this the right two case studies to have in a row?

Remsen: I really like the contrast but also the similarities between the two. Because I definitely recognized, once we started learning about the Troubles, I was like this is a lot like South Africa. And I saw what you were trying to get at, the overarching theme. I liked the contrast, the dichotomy.

Jocelyn: I agree. I think they work well together.

When you learn this history, is it hard for you to empathize with white people who happen to be South African, or with Protestant Unionists who happen to be from Northern Ireland? Is it hard to empathize with people on the side that has the power?

Jocelyn: For me, yes. And I wish it wasn’t. In society, we are taught to identify with the underdog, or the group that’s being discriminated against. And that makes absolute sense, because they’re grappling for the same things we all are. It’s easier to identify with. But it does get dangerous when the lesson is completely apathetic to the group in power, just because it other-izes them… if that’s a word... separates them… and it makes it really hard to look at the situation objectively.

Remsen: I found it harder to have empathy for the white South Africans more than the Protestant Irish people. I guess because the Protestants and Catholics, they both wanted something and they both were clashing, but the White South Africans just came in and overtook this country. But I definitely think there were similarities between how the two groups worked. The cycle of hatred.

It’s an interesting thing about history that the 1600’s were a time when… obviously... the English starting coming to America--Jamestown and all that--and the whites started coming to South Africa and the English--who were already ruling Ireland--were really cracking down in the 1600’s. There was a lot of fighting and there were a lot of things that are remembered in the memory of all Irish people. Because until 1922 and the partition, all of Ireland was ruled by the British. There was something about the 1600’s… people from the powerful countries were coming and taking over the less powerful countries, or they were cracking down on the less powerful countries they already owned. And then there’s a long history since then. Because the class is so short, and the unit is short, there’s a lot more depth that one could go into about what caused this Troubles period and what happened in the Troubles period. And I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to really get all that in, or if that’s even possible. It may be that this class just needs to scratch the surface of it. But there’s a lot of political stuff. I’m realizing more than ever that there are three sides in this. Because there’s the Catholics and there’s the Protestant Unionists and it’s easy to think of the Unionists as being very pro-United Kingdom, because that is what they are fighting for, to stay in the United Kingdom, but they’re not necessarily pro-British exactly. The British troops that came in… there’s a lot of resentment even from the Protestants. Sometimes the British take away control. And after the problems of 1972, we don’t really go into this… the British took power away from the Unionists and said we are going to control Northern Ireland from London, and the Protestants really did not like that, and they fought to take their power back.

Jocelyn: (to Remsen…) Is it easier to empathize with the Protestants because the British are portrayed as the bad guys in the class?

Remsen: Yes. Definitely. Yes.

Jocelyn: I felt the same way.

Oh, that’s interesting. So you perceive that the Protestants are not seen as all-powerful. Good point. They’re more powerful, but they still don’t have complete power. And power-sharing is an interesting thing, because Northern Ireland is a majority Protestant country. So they can say, we are the majority, it’s a democracy; we should have the most power. But if they are going to have peace, they need to share that power. So power-sharing became a thing Catholics were vying for, both in the 1970’s and then again in the Good Friday Agreement.

Jocelyn: Those nuances aren’t touched on at all. And then it becomes really black and white, and that’s dangerous.

It’s true. And another nuance is that Derry, the second-biggest city in Northern Ireland, is actually majority Catholic, but it’s gerrymandered. The Protestants designed the voting districts, so you have a population that has a third more Catholics, but there’s a third more Protestant MP’s… like American Congressmen… representing the city than Catholic MP’s. The Protestants created the districts to create a permanent majority. And we do that in this country as well; there was just this Supreme Court case about gerrymandering political districts in North Carolina…

Jocelyn: John Oliver had a good episode on that.

There’s so much to teach. But how do we fit all that in and still keep it a very dynamic course?

Remsen: I liked the discussions… that there were so many discussions, and not just writing. I love writing, writing is great, but I like how there were more discussions in this class, and they led us on a trek to relate this content to other topics.

What more would you want to know from this course?

Jocelyn: Oh, so much. From the overall course, or about Northern Ireland?

About Northern Ireland.

Jocelyn: I want to know more about the present day implications. How it sort of worked out. And I’m very biased, because my grandparents were ostracized from their little Illinois community because they were a different religion. Obviously, it’s still a present thing, and I want that touched upon I guess. When we learn about topics like this in a history class, it’s viewed through a lens as if it’s in the past, but there’s still so much bigotry left over from this event.

That’s a good note, and it gives me some purpose, because this summer--when I’m there--that’s one of my big questions too. I know from talking to people that it’s way better than it was in the time of the Troubles. But I read the papers from there from time to time, and it sometimes seems like very little has changed, except maybe the prevalence of the violence. But has anything really changed? There are some integrated schools… there are not very many… but you’ve seen that film (Breaking the Cycle of Violence in Northern Ireland) and you can read between the lines. You can see there is still prejudice, people still make these assumptions about one another.

Jocelyn: That film is great. It should stay in the curriculum in the future.

Yes. We’re going to meet that guy… Alan McBride (this is a reference to a person in that film, a Protestant whose wife was killed in the I.R.A.’s Shankill bombing and who went on to become a peace-worker for those traumatized by the Troubles from both sides).

Remsen: Oh, my God. I’m so jealous that we won’t get to take this class next year.

Jocelyn: Take us with you!

I know. It’s great to study a small country, because you get access to these people. The guy who is taking us on the Bloody Sunday tour and the Derry walls tour, his father was killed at Bloody Sunday. Everyone knows everyone else. And a friend that we’re staying with mentioned that his father was once in prison with Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein and earlier the I.R.A., talking about strategy.

Someone: Wow.

There’s also a film that I showed, that not all the sections got a chance to show, about Bloody Friday, when the I.R.A. got huge revenge for Bloody Sunday. You can see it on youtube. The I.R.A. ideal at that time was that they always gave warnings when they were going to bomb, so...

Jocelyn: Was that the tackle shop bombing?

You mean the fish shop? No. That was much later. That was 1993. Bloody Friday was… in ‘72, in the summer, the I.R.A. planted something like twenty-seven bombs in East Belfast.

Jocelyn: Oh, no!

And they gave warnings, because the I.R.A. ideal at that time was that you give warnings, so that you destroy buildings and disrupt commerce, but you try not to kill people. But there were too many bombs going off one after another, and many were hurt and many were killed. It’s a balance. The terrible violence of the Catholic backlash. That shows you the balance, because people were really scared. I lived in England in the late 1970’s and we were really scared of the I.R.A., because they were planting car bombs in London. Both sides have a lot of blood on their hands. And we could get that message across more, especially if we all showed Bloody Friday.

Jocelyn: I want to know more about the I.R.A., because in some of our readings and the films, they were portrayed as the protectors of the Catholic people, but in some they seemed like…

Remsen and Jocelyn: (together…) Terrorists!

Both of those things are true. Also they split, because there was the official I.R.A. and the provisional I.R.A., and the provisional I.R.A. was more violent. They disagreed...

Remsen: We didn’t get into any of this.

If you want a really nuanced picture of a lot of this stuff, there’s a BBC documentary I’ve been watching, called The Troubles from 1981. It was six parts, but it’s separated into eight parts on youtube, each about twenty-seven minutes long. The frustrating thing is that only seven of the eight parts still exist on youtube. Part eight is just gone. So it ends in the mid-1970’s, even though it was made in 1981. So it was made during the Troubles. It’s really in-depth about the period… there’s also background information… but it’s really in-depth about the period from 1968 to 1981. There’s so many new things I learned. For instance, I learned that event in 1969, where the Catholics were throwing the bottle bombs, the Battle of the Bogside, didn’t just happen that year. The Apprentice Boys parades kept happening past the Bogside and there was a riot every year on that day. They didn’t learn any lesson from that event; they just kept re-doing it every year. It was apparently so common that the news media stopped even reporting on it. Early in the documentary, they flash-forward to it going on in 1981, and it looks pretty similar to the violence of 1969.

Remsen: That’s the thing! Parades. We all said parades don’t seem so important in the peace agreement, but they obviously were.

Yes. And they never stopped. These kinds of parades are still happening today.

A shifting political landscape as we prepare for our trip...

UK Prime Minister Theresa May's plan to solidify her majority before Brexit has back-fired as of yesterday, leaving her Conservative party with just 48.9% of Parliamentary seats after losing twelve seats. She has to reach out to another conservative group in order to bolster her majority. That group will be the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), the major Unionist party of Northern Ireland, formed in 1971 by the extremist Unionist Ian Paisley. The 1.5% (10 members) that the DUP have in Parliament (after adding two seats today) will bring the Conservatives over the 50% line. Suddenly, it looks like this relatively small block will have out-sized negotiating power.

Meanwhile, the DUP's opposition within Northern Ireland (Sinn Fein) seems to see this historical election result--in which they gained three more abstentionist seats, bringing the total to seven--as making the way for their moment. According to the Belfast Telegraph's front page, Sinn Fein leaders Michelle O'Neill and Gerry Adams see this vote as a vote against Brexit, and as an opportunity to re-establish government within Northern Ireland at Stormont and designated status for the North within the EU. It seems to be a very volatile moment for the country, when things could go any of several different ways. The Irish Times' front page is reporting the result as strengthening the DUP's hand by emphasizing May's reference to her coalition with her DUP "friends and allies."

I am very interested and anxious to hear how all of our contacts in the North and the Republic are looking at today's news.

I enclose links to both the Telegraph and the Times coverage below:

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/sinn-fein-ready-to-resume-talks-aimed-at-reestablishing-stormont-executive-after-watershed-election-35809208.html

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/uk/uk-election-theresa-may-set-to-work-with-dup-friends-and-allies-1.3112046

O'Neill vs. Paisley: A familiar political paradigm

Terence O'Neill, Unionist Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, 1963-'69, photographed by Victor Patterson

A divisive and bigoted media personality who everyone originally took as a joke plays on the fears of the populace in order to foment violence and secure political victory over a well-meaning and conciliatory centrist whose somewhat arch personality turns people off and inspires mistrust from both sides. Sound familiar?

But the above paragraph is not intended to be about the American general presidential election of 2016. It is about the infighting between two Unionist politicians in 1960's Northern Ireland: Terence O'Neill, the centrist Unionist Prime Minister of Northern Ireland who tried to make concessions to the Nationalist side, and Ian Paisley, the fiery preacher of hardline Unionism who made sure O'Neill's experiment would fail.

Looking at the rivalry between these two men brings up a lot of the nuances about the three sides in this conflict--Nationalist, Unionist and British--and what they each wanted and were willing to accept and not accept. It also provides a good illustration about how an uncomfortable situation in the early 1960's became an incendiary one by the end of that decade. The Troubles may have been inevitable, but it seems that O'Neill sensed this and tried to be proactive. He apparently never really gained the Nationalist/Catholic's trust (about whom he was somewhat condescending) and he certainly alienated many on his own side, but he did try.

Meanwhile, Presbyterian Minister and MP Ian Paisley saw the paranoia and mistrust that O'Neill was starting to inspire in their fellow Unionists, and he milked that vein to his own political advantage, effectively destroying any chance for reconciliation that may have been possible. Paisley's extremists saw the Catholic Civil Rights movement as a premise to overthrow their world, and their violent reaction against it--just like England's violent reaction against the Easter Uprising leaders over fifty years earlier--led to the explosion of violence that was soon branded as the Troubles. A fairly dormant IRA, made the bogeyman by Paisley, soon became a very real threat rejuvenated by the violence with which a certain section of Unionism met the Civil Rights marchers. Like US violence in the Middle East leading to the birth of ISIS and new branches of Al Qaeda, Unionist reaction to a perceived threat spawned a very real one from the Nationalist side.

All of this Unionist in-fighting and rising violence between them and the Nationalists was taking place at a time when the Labour government with anti-Union Harold Wilson as Prime Minister had taken hold in London in 1964. The Unionists felt more imperiled than ever before, and O'Neill's outreach to the Nationalist side and to the Republic came at exactly the wrong time for many of them. Paisley, in contrast, must have seemed to some like the protector of the world they knew against the new world that threatened their sense of their nation. He had, according to McKittrick and McVea's Making Sense of the Troubles,  "substantial support within a section of rural and working-class Protestants. His mix of religious fundamentalism, personal charisma and talent for self-publicity was a potent one" (p. 35). Again, the comparison to contemporary American politics begs to be made.

A recent conversation I had with some of our students--the transcript of which I will soon publish in this blog--has made me realize that we may need to get into these sorts of nuances in our course, to keep things from being too dangerously black and white. Unionism comes in several different colors, just as Nationalism does as well. This is a deeply complicated history, and I suspect we may need to devote more time to it, within our 10th grade Facing History course, in order to really do it justice.

Ian Paisley: the Donald Trump of the Troubles?

Reflections on the 1981 BBC series, "The Troubles"

When teaching the Troubles as a unit in a one-semester course that focuses on prejudice, conflict, judgment and justice--and that also covers South Africa--details are bound to be left out. No one unit can get into all of the complexities of the situation, and you have to be alright with that as a teacher. One can only try to go as in-depth as possible on the material that one can cover, while frequently checking for student understanding. But one hopes that students become engaged enough and curious enough to look deeper. If they do, the 1981 BBC documentary series "The Troubles," directed by Ian Stuttard and compiled of key first-hand historical footage, is a good place to start.

Northern Irish teacher Peter Rogan brought the series to my attention when he sent me the YouTube link. The original series was presented in six parts, but it's been loaded on to YouTube in eight parts, with each segment running about 27 minutes. Frustratingly, part 8 (which presumably brings us from 1975 to 1981) is currently missing from YouTube. Nonetheless, what remains brings us a detailed look at the developments of the Troubles period made at a time in which it seemed the period would never come to an end.

Here are a few of the ways in which this documentary deepened my own understanding:

--I have never before heard the Russian word "pogrom" used for anything other than the killing and destruction of Jewish people and villages. In this film, many interviewees use the term for what was done to the Catholics of the North in the early years of partition in the 1920's.

--A helpful Northern Ireland map with orange representing areas of Protestant majority and green representing areas of Catholic majority is frequently employed in discussing the problems of partition.

--The Black American Civil Rights Movement was even more of an influence on the Catholic Civil Rights Movement than I had realized. The introduction of television to Northern Ireland just at the time that Black American people were agitating for voting rights, integration and fair treatment is pointed out as a seminal influence on the movement.

--Protestant politician Alan Cooper seems an even more forceful advocate for Catholic Civil Rights than the 2002 film Bloody Sunday shows him to be.

--The Civil Rights protests--even when they were totally nonviolent--were hugely controversial and threatening to the Unionist power structure.

--Police brutality in the early Troubles period was even worse and more blatant than I thought.

--We teach about Catholic/Nationalist resentment of the United Kingdom, but we could do more with the frustrations of the Protestant/Unionist contingent at the way the British government has treated them (such as the taking away of power from Stormont in the period after Bloody Sunday). There are truly (at least) three sides in this conflict.

--The Loyalist/Unionist internal feud between Paisley's Loyalists and Faulkner's "official" Unionists in 1973-'74 over power-sharing (the Sunningdale Agreement), and the resulting Protestant strike of 1974 that destroyed this agreement, is an important and interesting wrinkle, but perhaps too much to include in a very short high school course.

--Riots in the Bogside over the Apprentice Boys parade happened every year during the Troubles, not just in the 1969 Battle of the Bogside. They became so commonplace, in fact, that--according to this documentary--the newspapers simply stopped reporting them.

I am slowly making my way through the book Making Sense of the Troubles by David McKittrick and David McVea (while also going through Inventing Ireland by Declan Kiberd and Bitter Freedom: Ireland in a Revolutionary World by Maurice Walsh) in preparation for this trip. It will be interesting to see how McKittrick and McVea cover this same content.

Why we need to go to Northern Ireland

A sign on the street in Birmingham, Alabama

One piece of feedback on the first draft of our grant proposal to go to Northern Ireland was that we could learn what we needed from books and videos and the internet. Why did we need to actually go there?

That was a question I had not previously considered. It seemed obvious to me that one needs to walk the streets of a place in order to teach its history. But I hadn't really put my finger on why that was. After a few years teaching the U.S. Civil Rights Era, I had a very meaningful visit to Alabama. After a few years teaching the Holocaust, I had a powerful trip to Poland. I realized that, if I could say what was important to me about those earlier historically-steeped journeys, this would be a way to understand my need to be in a place that I teach, and a way to explain it to others.

So here are a few things I have learned by actually standing in the places where history happened. 

Montgomery, Alabama: Before I went, I became very interested in Vernon Johns--the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church immediately before King was there--who is profiled in the first chapter of Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters: America in the King Years. I was using Johns with my "social action project" students as an example of a social activist who used sarcasm and verbal confrontation as a means to speak truth to power. Johns was known for sermons with titles such as "segregation in the afterlife." If I had never gone to Dexter Avenue, I might never have realized that the Alabama statehouse stands at the end of the same street. So the very politicians who were maintaining Alabama's Jim Crow policies had to pass Johns' church on their way to work, and would have seen the sign announcing those sermons every working day.

Selma, Alabama: To understand Selma's place in the Civil Rights movement--beyond just the famous marches--it helps to stand on the steps of the Brown Chapel AME Church and look out at the large block of housing project buildings that face it. As I stood there with a group of fellow teachers on a Teaching American History grant, the docent from the Voting Rights Museum pointed out to us that the church was the perfect center for civil rights activism because it faced a densely populated living area for Selma's Black population. In this way, the impressive marches that set off from there were able to engage the curiosity and participation of the local residents who saw the excitement and new power taking place right at their doorstep. As in Montgomery, geography and architecture were forces as much as speeches and actions. This is something you can only fully appreciate by being there.

The Rema Cemetery in the Kazimierz neighborhood of Krakow, Poland: The legend goes that the Nazis used the tombstones of this little cemetery for shooting practice until they shot at the grave of the important Rabbi known as the Rema and the bullets bounced back at them. Terrified, they never entered the cemetery grounds again. If you walk through this cemetery today, you can examine many tombstones that are indeed riddled with bullets, as well as completely smashed ones that have since been used to fill in cracks in the brick walls. The Rema's grave remains unscathed.

The Lodz Jewish Cemetery in Poland: Well preserved because it was in the ghetto, I have read that this cemetery is still the largest Jewish one in Europe. The beauty and opulence of the graves serves as a testament to the importance of Jews in the history of Lodz before the Holocaust. Especially striking is the tall monument at the grave of Izrael Poznanski, a 19th century Jewish industrial magnate whose palace--now a museum about the history of Lodz--is also a striking feature of this city, and one that can only be fully appreciated by seeing it with your own eyes, a startling baroque palace three blocks long suddenly appearing in the middle of a city of grey industrial buildings.

I believe there is a certain energy left over in a place, made up of all of the people whose life experiences have sustained it, whether those experiences were full of joy or pain, both of which are present everywhere. 

When we walk along the Derry streets where the incidents we now know as Bloody Sunday took place, guided by the son of the victim Patrick Doherty, I know that we will feel something that no book or film or website can quite give us, and I know that we will carry that back with us, as teachers, to our classrooms and to our students.

My students checking out the monument which marks Poznanski's grave in Lodz, Poland

Peace Agreement Activity

New Haven Academy students look at some of the major negotiating points on the table during the time of the Good Friday Peace Agreement, and then come to decisions--in pairs--about what to include in the Peace Agreement and what could be left out. Toward the end of class, they look at what happened in the event, and compare their own decisions to the decisions made at Belfast.

Instructions

Negotiation Points

Discussing decisions

Making decisions

A what to include sheet

A What to leave out sheet

Excerpt from the actual agreement

The decisions reached at Belfast. How did we do?

Song as a Teaching Tool

The Gasyard Cultural Centre in Derry, 

Song lyrics can be especially useful as part of an "inquiry activity," where students are confronted with artifacts pertaining to a subject that they do not yet know much about (in this case, the Troubles) and are asked to create questions and inferences based on what they are seeing. This is used to inspire interest in the topic, and to guide further research.

Any student who fondly remembers their childhood and laments some of what has changed with the passing of time since then (essentially, any student at all) can relate to the lyrics of Phil Coulter's 1973 classic song of the Troubles, "The Town I Loved So Well," which is used--in the Irish Tenors cover version--as the soundtrack for the 2004 Showtime/United Nations documentary What's Going On: Breaking the Cycle of Violence in Northern Ireland. Because the song is so relatable, and because it suggests a lot without saying very much that is overly explanatory, it's a good choice when doing inquiry research early in a unit or class about this period.

The first part of the song paints a vivid picture of an economically depressed, but culturally vibrant, childhood and young adulthood in the Bogside neighborhood of Derry. The second part laments the changes brought on by the early Troubles period, as the man of the song returns to his childhood home. The overall effect is to humanize the period, to create an empathetic response in the listener no matter where they may or may not come from.

As a Catholic who grew up in a Nationalist neighborhood, Coulter recently revealed to the Galway Independent that he once worried that the song would be taken by Unionists as "a rebel song," which was "the last thing we needed." He says the song is in fact a love song to a town, and he points out that it was recently used as a theme in a citywide celebration, signifying its acceptance as a song that celebrates the city of Derry in a nonsectarian way.

I include the lyrics below (for teaching purposes only):

THE TOWN I LOVED SO WELL

In my memory, I will always see
the town that I have loved so well
Where our school played ball
by the gas yard wall
And they laughed through the smoke
and the smell
Going home in the rain,
running up the dark lane
past the jail, and down behind the fountain
Those were happy days
in so many, many ways
In the town I loved so well

In the early morning the shirt factory horn
Called women from Creggan, the moor,
and the bog
While the men on the dole
played a mother's role
Fed the children and then walked the dog.
And when times got tough
there was just about enough
And they saw it through without complaining,
For deep inside was a burning pride
In the town I loved so well

There was music there
in the Derry air
Like a language that we all
could understand
I remember the day
that I earned my first pay
When I played in a small pick-up band
There I spent my youth
and to tell you the truth
I was sad to leave it all
behind me
For I learned about life, and
I found a wife
In the town I loved so well

But when I returned,
how my eyes have burned
to see how a town could be brought to its knees
By the armored cars and the bombed-out bars
And the gas that hangs on to every breeze
Now the army's installed
by that old gas yard wall
And the damned barbed wire
gets higher and higher
With their tanks and their guns,
Oh, my God, what have they done
To the town I loved so well

Now the music's gone
but they carry on
For their spirit's been bruised,
never broken.
They will not forget,
for their hearts are set
On tomorrow and peace once again
For what's done is done
and what's won is won
and what's lost is lost and gone forever
I can only pray
for a bright brand new day
In the town I loved so well.


Songwriter: Phil Coulter

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