Shifting Social Tectonics
Cholla Express: July 2020
This is not a political newsletter, and this issue won’t dive into the political fray.
However, there are times when current events overwhelm the social equilibrium, and the business of ordinary life takes on a political charge.
The pandemic had already created this sensation. All of a sudden, ordinary public behavior took on a new layer of significance. A handshake was no longer a friendly greeting, but a dangerous act. Social life, exercise, work dynamics, religious ceremonies, grocery shopping: everything we do, we had to adjust for the existence of this new virus. Mask-wearing is now a public signal of private attitudes. “Going to a coffee shop” is now a controversial proposition.
The death of George Floyd sent more shockwaves through our social ecosystem. Cities erupted across America. People gathered and marched, day after day, protesting racial injustice, demanding change. Corporations released new slogans denouncing racism. The first Tuesday in June was “blackout Tuesday,” when millions of Americans posted black squares to their Instagram pages, intended to create time to educate oneself about justice-related issues.
In Arizona, on the first few nights of protests, downtown Phoenix and Tucson saw some late-night violent clashes between protesters and the police, along with scattered vandalism. The state Capitol building was fenced off and reinforced with barbed wire. On the third day of protests, looters — a dozen miles away from the official protests in downtown Phoenix — destroyed shops at Fashion Square Mall in Scottsdale, prompting a statewide curfew that lasted for a week. During the curfew and beyond, non-violent protests continued unabated.
These recent protests, and the cultural force behind them, got me interested in reading about the local history of race relations. In the next segment, I explore one piece of the civil rights movement in Phoenix.
As far as we may have come towards fixing legal barriers to equality, we clearly still have a long way to go towards building a more just, more harmonious society.
One of the modern obstacles to social conflict resolution is that, even within geographical boundaries, we don’t occupy the same polis.
In ancient Greece, the word polis, or city-state, captured the emotional bond of the community, in the same way the English word “home” captures a stronger emotional sense than “house.” The Greek word politika captured the whole of societal affairs — it wasn’t limited to what government officials were doing. All interactions and activities, even those related to culture and commerce, made a tangible impact on the social ecosystem of the polis, and thus fell under the realm of politika.
Today, we don’t occupy the same polis because we’re fed by different informational streams, individualized by our preferences, subscriptions, and follows. These informational feeds transcend geographic boundaries, especially as national news outlets and big tech companies squeeze out local news gathering operations.
The varying feeds can produce different notions of reality, to the point where neighbors on the same block might have wildly different understandings of what’s really going on in the world.
The United States has always been a raucous place for competing ideas about national identity. In the early days of our founding, heavily partisan newspapers, funded by competing factions, threw mud at one another incessantly, trying to move public opinion and gain a political edge.
So it’s not like a fracturing of information is, by itself, an existential problem for this country. But the size and complexity of the country has grown dramatically. The population of Arizona today is more than double the population of the American colonies around 1776.
Our institutions are showing their age.
The United States is viewed idealistically as a melting pot of cultures: a place where people from all backgrounds, religions, and ethnicities can live under shared ideas about freedom and democracy. Where everyone can pursue their individual destinies and achieve the American dream.
The national dispute we seem to be having is over the validity of this idealistic view. Should we strive, within our current systems, to realize these ideals? Or is the American experiment corrupt in some irreconcilable way?
The old fault lines of division are still present, never fully resolved. New fault lines are emerging, along with the fracturing of informational feeds, which intensifies the rhetoric and allows more radical currents to thrive.
Where do we go from here?
It’s my hope that, while we may not succeed in knitting together perfect agreement — this is neither possible, nor desirable in a free society — we can at least gather around a set of values that tie us together in this democratic project. Without this gathering, productive reforms will fail and radical currents will prevail.
Nobody needs to endorse political vitriol to be civic-minded in their approach to ordinary life. We are members of a polis, and each of us contributes, in our professional and social roles, to the health of our public community.
It’s only in the throwback Greek sense of the word that you could call this a political newsletter.
A Look Back in Time: Integrating Arizona Schools
In the warehouse district of Downtown Phoenix, there is a museum dedicated to the cultural and historical contributions of African-Americans in Arizona. The museum is housed in a building that used to be a segregated high school within the Phoenix Unified School District.
Arizona doesn’t typically get grouped together with “the South” when students learn the history of racial segregation in the United States, but the state did have laws, from the time of statehood in 1912 until the early 1950s, segregating elementary schools. Segregation was optional at the high school level. Public transportation and public parks weren’t segregated, but discrimination was frequent in other areas of society, including restaurants, hiring practices, and housing.
Carver High School opened as a segregated Black high school in 1926. In 1945, the school hired a principal named W.A. Robinson, who became an effective and influential educational leader. He acquired new instructional resources for Carver High, and expanded the school’s curriculum. He recruited highly trained teachers from across the nation. Under Robinson’s tenure, Carver High became the only school in Arizona where every faculty member held a master’s degree.
Advocates started pushing back against school segregation in the late 1940s. Civil rights groups like the NAACP had already been active for racial justice, and they were joined by new groups like the Greater Phoenix Council for Civic Unity, which strengthened the organized effort to integrate schools. Ending school segregation was seen as a first step toward ending other patterns of racial discrimination.
A lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of school segregation was victorious in Maricopa County Superior Court in 1953. The successful overturning of school segregation in Arizona took place a year before the Brown vs. Board of Education decision ended school segregation nationally.
In researching this segment, I came across several articles written by W.A. Robinson in academic journals. In his writings, he explains the opportunities and challenges of school integration. He paints an image of a Phoenix where schools labored to make racial integration work, despite the continued presence of discrimination in other areas of society:
“There is a fairly strong feeling in the schools among teachers, students, and administers that getting rid of segregation was motivated by moral forces, and that it is the responsibility of everyone concerned to see that desegregation is a success and that it is through-going.”
W.A. Robinson, 1956, The Progress of Integration in the Phoenix Schools
Some of his writings called attention to the importance of diversifying libraries of newly integrated schools, to make sure that each group could read about successful role models. Robinson’s articles reveal his thoughtful leadership, not just for the state of Arizona, but as a contribution to school integration across the nation.
After segregation was overturned, Carver High School closed, and the building was used for storage. Black teachers from Carver were reassigned to different district schools. Some of the teachers began teaching classes with entirely white students. Some of the district schools had never before had a Black employee.
In 1991, a group of Carver alumni purchased the school building and raised money to turn it into a history museum:.
The George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center is a historical preservation site that is dedicated to the Collection, Documentation, Preservation, Study, and Dissemination of the History and Culture of Africans and Americans of African Descent in Arizona.
Affectionally known as The Carver Museum, we carry out its mission through exhibitions, archives/collections and a variety of community educational programs designed to explore the roles of African derived Americans in shaping the history of Phoenix and the state of Arizona.
I had planned to visit the museum and write more about it for this issue, but it’s currently closed due to Covid-19. The museum told me to check their website about any re-opening plans.
Among the current discussions about how race can better be understood in the population, people talk about education: what we should teach, how we should teach it. Toward this end, I think one of the best things we could do is to acquaint students will the local histories of their communities. Local museums like the Carver Museum can help kids get a sense of grounding, in order to better understand the larger contours of history.
Sources: Besides those already linked in this story, I relied heavily on this article by Mary Melchor in The Journal of Arizona History
The Cholla
When people think about Arizona cacti, the first image that will come to mind is the Saguaro. Its prominent size, handsome shape, and uniqueness to the Sonoran desert make it a natural fit to symbolize the state. The blossom of the Saguaro is the official flower of the state. If you ever drive from Arizona and go east to New Mexico, the most distinguishing change in the desert scene is the disappearance of the Saguaro.
The Cholla also finds a home in the Sonoran desert, but with over 30 varieties, they are much less distinct in appearance. They have also been introduced to different regions, including South America, the Indies, and Africa.
The cartoon pictured here is from Reg Manning, who was a cartoonist for the Arizona Republic from 1926-1980. Manning won a Pulitzer Prize in 1951 for one of his cartoons about the Korean War.
The picture is from a book all about the varieties of cacti in the Arizona desert, titled “What Kind of Cactus Izzat?” He also wrote a book called “A Cartoon Guide to Arizona,” an item that is now on my wish-list of Arizona memorabilia.
Here’s the excerpt on the Cholla from his cactus book:
“CHAW-yuh — that’s how you pronounce Cholla — and that’s what they do to you upon the slightest provocation — CHAW yuh! Without qualification, the Cholla breed gets our award as the most-unpleasant-cactus-of-the-month-to-sit-on. The Cholla family takes in all of the “cylinder-jointed” varieties of cactus, whose segments range in size from links no bigger than a pencil to some that are as fat as a baloney. But in the Southwest, when you hear someone speak (bitterly) of a Cholla, he is usually referring to one of the so-called “jumping” varieties.
Cholla blossoms come in almost every conceivable shade with the accent on yellows and reds. Chollas are found throughout the cactus belt and push northward, thinning out and diminishing in size, into Nevada, Utah, Colorado and tips of Oklahoma and Kansas.”
The only critique I would make to this description is the pronunciation, which should be: CHOY-yuh.
Links and News
Speaking of cacti, there is some drama surrounding the destruction and possible theft of Saguaro cacti in the border-wall construction areas along the Arizona-Mexico border. I didn’t get a chance to thoroughly research this drama, but here’s an article that might get you started if you care to investigate further.
This is a great historical piece about the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic in Arizona. Published in Phoenix Magazine by Douglas Towne: “Deja Virus: The 1918 Spanish Flu’s striking parallels to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
In last month’s issue, I included a bit of Arizona water history. With the continued presence of a drought, water shortages are a long-term concern. But it’s already a concern in Navajo Nation. The lack of consistent running water and water infrastructure has probably contributed to the bad coronavirus outbreak in that area. Read this piece in the Arizona Republic to learn more: “Navajo Nation's water shortage may be supporting COVID-19 spread”
Three major fires have been burning this past month across the state. One in northeast Phoenix. One near Tucson. One near the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. They are three of the top-ten largest fires in Arizona history.
I don’t know about you, but I’m hoping for some better news to report on in the next couple months. If you find something, send it my way!
One Last Thing
I’ve been trying to disconnect from social media, lately, but I haven’t been able to disconnect entirely from Twitter, which is where I read breaking news and continue to spend way too much time doomscrolling.
Alas, there is some uplifting content to be found on that website.
And here it is:
Cheers.