Lucy Massie Phenix, filmmaker and director of You Got to Move, the 1985 movie about movements that have gained strength from social justice leadership workshops at the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee, calls the four shorts extracted from her eighty-six-minute original film “chapters.”
Phenix and co-producer Catherine Murphy are plucking the jewels from the crown of the original feature-length documentary to offer smaller, more digestible nuggets to organizers for use in political education projects and to teachers through Teaching for Change and the Zinn Education Project.
“Literacy is a core justice issue. It determines whether we’re going to have a functioning democracy or not. And [illiteracy] itself is the result of injustice.”
“We want educators to be able to share the shorts as part of their lessons and still have time for classroom discussion with their students,” Phenix tells The Progressive. She hopes viewers will come to the same conclusion as many who attended the Highlander sessions: We live in a class system that oppresses working people. To confront it powerfully, we must cross the racial divide and unite.
“Rosa Parks was working as NAACP youth director in Montgomery [Alabama] when she came to Highlander and learned there were white people that cared as much about civil rights and human rights as black people did. When she found that out she realized she could really step out,” Phenix says. “That Rosa didn’t know, but came to know, to me, that’s really important.”
Though she lives in the Bay area, Phenix grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, and currently has her eye trained on crucial political races in the South. Racial unity, she believes, will be key in undoing the stranglehold of figures like the senior Senator from Louisville, who took office in 1985—the year You Got to Move was released—and whom Phenix refers to as “arch anti-human Mitch McConnell.”
“I want to be a splinter,” she says, confessing her sense of urgency about the electoral battles this year. “I want people to feel the immediacy of having a splinter under their fingernail.”
The “chapters” contain stories of valorous historic conflicts—tales of the literacy campaign that undergirded the voting rights struggle in civil rights-era South Carolina; confronting the humiliations in the workplace that prompted black nurses and aides to organize the successful 100-day Charleston Hospital Workers Strike of 1969; East Tennessee community members in 1977 fighting a landfill contaminated by toxic waste; and Kentuckians in Harlan County seeking environmental justice via a lawsuit againststrip mining.
Each is compelling on its own, with fascinatingly complex characters who blossom with purpose and dignity like birds of paradise in a time-lapse video.
“I thought I was nobody,” says Gail Story in I’m Standing With You Neighbor, The Story of Bumpass Cove Citizens Group, describing the time before her sense of herself as a political actor blossomed.
Each short film features asymmetrical fights with dramatically high stakes, and all deliver the solace of good feelings that flow not necessarily from watching ordinary folks win by gaining concessions— though that, too—but from seeing adults step into their power to take their rightful place in public society.
I’m Standing With You Neighbor recounts how a small rural community in Bumpass Cove in East Tennessee, saddled with a hazardous waste landfill site, stood up to corporate polluters. This already passionate contest unfolds in the same moment as Second Wave feminism, with its promises of egalitarian equity and sexual liberation.
It’s painful to see the community members in the nineteen-minute film, especially two little boys who fish from waters so spoiled they’re precluded from eating their catch, acknowledge they’ve been cheated out of their birthright. But equally, it's energizing to see folks in Bumpass Cove transition to a more profound understanding of their reality. “We’re losing it, we’re losing it so fast,” Story says, “And we got to save it!”
An open field where grass no longer grows in many spots is shot through a scrim of reeds; tree branches frame the scarred acreage, drawing a circle around their denuded state. As Story, a mother of four who left school for marriage when she was fourteen, describes her personal movement from passivity to advocacy, she’s bathed in a gossamer light.
Luminosity, lucidity, and enlightenment are also the visual motifs running through They Say I’m Your Teacher, The Story of the Citizenship Schools. The eight-minute film documents how black Charleston taught many of its members to read so they could register to vote, which was at that time preconditioned by passing a written test about a provision of the South Carolina constitution.
It’s depicted mostly through the use of stunning black and white archival photos from 1950s South Carolina, and arresting archival film footage of scenes from Highlander, including one of a relaxed and smiling Rosa Parks. Other footage shows agricultural workers in overalls picking cabbage, but also smiling. They would soon become the school’s students, and eventually voters in Charleston’s primary elections.
The film is narrated with a feeling of immediacy by a radiant Bernice Robinson, who recalls her experiences teaching the first reading and writing class in Charleston’s Citizenship School in rich detail. Thinking of the moment when a sixty-five-year-old woman first read her own name from a blackboard still gives her goosebumps, she says. Robinson likens adults gaining literacy “to letting the light into the darkness.”
Literacy was the lens through which Catherine Murphy of The Literacy Project initially approached Phenix as a kindred spirit. Murphy’s most well-known film, Maestra, is about Fidel Castro’s 1961 campaign that effectively eradicated illiteracy on the island just two years after Cuba’s revolution. She says she’s eager to collaborate with Phenix on her next film about the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) Freedom Schools in Mississippi, which is currently a work in progress.
“Literacy is a core justice issue,” Murphy tells The Progressive. “It determines whether we’re going to have a functioning democracy or not. And [illiteracy] itself is the result of injustice.”
Unfortunately, this problem is not ceding much ground to solutions, although they abound. For instance Murphy says there are dozens of programs in Milwaukee alone, but “they’re not making a dent in the figures.” The last major National Center for Education Statistics study shows that one in five Americans older than sixteen cannot read or write adequately to fill out a job or voting registration application.
“It remains a major issue in the United States,” Murphy says, “largely because of the individualized way that we look at problems.”
Murphy says our society tends to blame the individual, making it their personal failing—e.g. they didn’t study hard enough, or they lack intelligence—rather than seeing literacy as a collective issue that requires collective solutions.
“And they blame themselves, too, rather than seeing that an injustice was done to them. Shame neutralizes those responsible from receiving our righteous rage, and generally speaking if we’re stuck in shame it’s hard to move into modes of resistance,” Murphy adds.
The ability to read, she insists, is not a measurement of creativity, commitment, intelligence, or imagination.
“It’s a very particular skill, a survival skill, and if it’s not taught adequately, it’s also a way to be marginalized and robbed of all access to certain kinds of power.”