Category: Yellow Springs News

Seeding a food revolution

Here in the heart of industrial agriculture, a quiet revolution has begun. It’s small-scale, and plans to stay that way. Its dimensions are measured not in acres, but millimeters. Some of the revolution’s most diminutive members are smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.

The revolution is seeds.

Seeds are a powerful “under the radar” aspect of the local food movement, according to Beth Bridgeman, instructor of cooperative education at Antioch College. This fall, she is leading an effort to raise area residents’ seed consciousness. In collaboration with the Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance, Bridgeman is organizing “Seed School,” a six-day introduction to growing, saving and sharing seeds geared to gardeners, farmers, chefs, students, activists, local policymakers and anyone at any skill level with an interest in local food and sustainable agriculture.

“We’re hoping people come from across the Miami Valley and beyond,” said Bridgeman in a recent interview. Seed School will take place Sept. 29–Oct. 4 at the Vernet Ecological Center in Glen Helen. Seeds used in the school will be harvested from the Antioch Farm across the street.

Why seeds?

“It’s where food begins,” said Bridgeman. Consider a locally grown tomato. It could be grown from seed ordered from a seed catalogue — or it could be grown from seed that has dozens or even hundreds of years of history in Miami Valley soil. In the latter case, said Bridgeman, the tomato would be well-adapted to local conditions. And it would carry what she calls “seed stories,” the histories of the people who’ve grown and saved that variety’s seeds through the years.

“There are lots of seed stories in the Miami Valley,” said Bridgeman, who previously worked as an educator in Greene County’s OSU Extension. “This is particularly true in immigrant communities. People who arrive from elsewhere want to eat their own food. They may have brought seeds from their native countries, or they may source and save seeds from plants that resemble their native foods.”

Local seeds have benefits beyond the cultural. “Here in the Miami Valley, we’re zone 5B/6A,” said Bridgeman, referencing the USDA’s regional Hardiness Zones — and noting that the shift in zones is underway because of global warming. “That’s the same zone as Denver!” Plants growing in our region will experience conditions very different from those of dry, mile-high Denver, despite the common zone designation, and seeds harvested year after year from locally grown plants will adapt, over time, to our particular climate. That means greater hardiness and potentially better natural defenses against pests.

To Bridgeman, another compelling reason to plant and replant from local seeds is food security. “I’m learning that you can’t have food security unless you have seed security,” she said. A food security committee she serves on in Dayton has been talking recently about the idea of “disruption” in food systems. “When food is coming from 500 miles away and there’s a breakdown in the grid or transportation system, that’s a problem,” she said. “The closer you grow to home, the better.”

Seeds themselves are under threat. “Ninety-seven percent of seed varieties have been lost since 1900,” said Bridgeman. This is a consequence of market dynamics, she added. “As seed companies have gotten larger and agrichemical companies have taken them over, research has increasingly focused on just a few varieties.” Rather than hundreds of tomatoes, many consumers have access to just half a dozen on grocery shelves. Currently, the six biggest agricultural companies own 85 percent of seed companies, she noted.

These companies are patenting seeds and — even more controversially — individual seed traits, such as drought resistance in corn. “Think about that,” said Bridgeman. “A company owns the idea of drought resistance in corn!”

Many traits are now introduced through genetic modification, she added. Different from the hybridization that happens in nature, and the breeding for specific traits that people have undertaken for centuries, genetic modification involves the insertion of genes from one variety or species (sometimes even crosses between plant and animal) into another. Seeds of genetically modified plants carry the new genome, representing a life form “unseen in nature,” said Bridgeman.

Saving and planting local seeds is one way — at a fundamental level, the way — to restore regional biodiversity and take back control of seeds from corporate producers. “I’m a big proponent of seed sovereignty and agricultural democracy,” Bridgeman noted.

This summer, she and five Antioch students, all of whom work on the Antioch Farm, attended the Seed Savers Exchange conference in Decorah, Iowa. Seed Savers Exchange is one of the largest nongovernmental seed banks in the United States, and the annual conference helps collect and disseminate thousands of heirloom varieties for preservation, scientific study and gardeners’ use.

“I learned how important it is to teach other people — how you need to grow gardeners as much as you need to grow gardens,” said Elaine Bell, ’16. “I’m interested in any opportunity to help change the direction of how we grow our food.”

Anthea Van Geloven, ’17, said she was amazed to realize how much the plant and animal breeds we rely upon for food have been manipulated by humans. “Nothing is anywhere close to what you would find in the wild,” she said.

Both students came back enthusiastic about seed saving, which is the heart, or germ, of Seed School. “We’ll teach people about winnowing, pollination, and harvesting. There will be accessible learning about seed genetics,” said Bridgeman. Her goal is to grow a seed-saving community — one that will flourish well beyond the course.

Seed saving is an art and science that’s as old as agriculture itself. Before seed catalogues and their online counterparts, people saved seeds from one planting season to the next, and shared them with their neighbors. In recent times, such informal seed-saving communities have been augmented by more organized efforts. Some public libraries are creating “seed libraries,” said Bridgeman, using old card catalogues to hold seed packets and information gathered about seeds’ origins. “Open drawer B, and you’ll find Detroit Red Beets.”

Seed banks, such as Seed Savers Exchange and others around the world (the USDA maintains a massive one), are the broadest and most formalized seed-saving communities. Two seed savers from Cleveland, whom Bridgeman met at the Seed Savers Exchange conference, are launching the Cleveland Seed Bank, the only such effort in Ohio.

But all it takes to start a seed-saving community is a few people — knowledgeably — swapping seeds. “Seeds should be available to everyone,” said Bridgeman. At Seed School, and in the communities it sows, the power of these tiny revolutionaries will be.

-To register for Seed School, visit: http://www.rockymountainseeds.org/attend/seed-school/144-antioch. For more information, contact Belle Starr at belle@rockymountainseeds.org or

Beth Bridgeman at bbridgeman@antiochcollege.org. Early-bird registration (before September 1) is $600, which includes all classes and meals. Partial scholarships are available.

Solar sheep come to Antioch Farm

Last weekend eight “self-fertilizing lawnmowers,” also known as sheep, arrived at the Antioch College Farm. The sheep, part of the college’s commitment to sustainability, are a pilot project to study how they behave around the solar array, how many are needed to manage the vegetative growth around the five-acre array, and their grazing patterns. The sheep are fed organic grain and fresh water each morning by students who work on the farm.

This is the third year that the college has had sheep on the farm, according to College Communications Director Matt Desjardins, and the length of the pilot project is not yet known, as it will be determined by how the sheep behave beneath the solar arrays. The sheep’s breed is Dorper-Katadin.

Antioch College historian eyes race, community

When most historians have written about Harlem, they’ve focused on the hostility of early white residents when blacks began moving into their upper Manhattan neighborhood, and the area’s evolution into an African-American ghetto known for its violence and dysfunction.

But Kevin McGruder, assistant professor of history at Antioch College,  has a different, more nuanced story to tell about the neighborhood he came to love as a resident, churchgoer, business owner and historian. Specifically, he tells the story of early white Harlem residents who appeared to hold diverse views of their African-American neighbors. And he believes that Harlem was originally a place of aspiration for the blacks who moved there, who created churches, neighborhood organizations and other components of community.

“The ghetto emphasis focuses on disarray,” McGruder said in an interview last week. “I’m not saying that didn’t happen, but there hasn’t been enough emphasis on community formation. What was the goal of people moving there?”

For the past several years, McGruder has studied old newspapers and historical documents to find answers to that question. And the result of that research, Race and Real Estate: Conflict and Cooperation in Harlem, 1890 to 1920, was published last month by the Columbia University Press.

McGruder will discuss and sign copies of his recently published book Tuesday, Aug. 4 at 7 p.m. at McGregor 113 on the Antioch College campus. The book is an extension of his doctoral dissertation.

The dissertation grew out of McGruder’s longtime interests in real estate, Harlem and African-American history, he said in a recent interview. Before getting his Ph.D. from the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, he had worked in community development nonprofits in Cleveland and New York City, along with serving as director of real estate of the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, of which he’s a member. He was also co-author of a previous book, Witness: Two Hundred Years of African-American Faith and Practice in the Abyssinian Baptist Church.

Research for Race and Real Estate involved combing through many historical documents in the City Registry in New York, supplemented by stories in newspapers of the time, which he found on microfilm in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library, where he was scholar in residence during 2011–2012. Not surprisingly, as a historian, having access to so many original documents “was paradise,” McGruder said.

What McGruder found in his research was that Harlem at the turn of the century was a place of some fluidity for blacks, many of whom moved there from other African-American enclaves, such as Greenwich Village and the district now known as Chelsea, formerly the Tenderloin. Harlem was at the time on the edge of developed Manhattan and was surrounded by fields, so that the neighborhood provided a more expansive, country-like atmosphere compared to the inner city.

While the conventional history of the African-American migration to Harlem is that whites responded with hostility, McGruder was surprised to find that, while there was hostility, there was also evidence of cooperation between the races. For instance, bank loans were largely unavailable to blacks, so that those seeking to buy homes depended on getting loans from the white property sellers, who apparently didn’t resist selling to blacks. The evidence of fluidity and cooperation between blacks and whites indicates a time when race relations were considerably better than they became later in the 20th century, McGruder believes.

This complex relationship between the races at that time seems to belie the assumption that difficult social problems such as race relations inevitably get better with time, McGruder said. Rather, his book shows that progress in race relations ebbs and flows over time, with more mutual understanding and cooperation evident in some periods than others.

“The notion that things get better just because time has passed — there’s no evidence of that,” he said.

In Race and Real Estate, the story of how blacks and whites interacted as neighbors and business associates in Harlem is told through the perspectives of four actual individuals. There was white businessman Henry Koch, retired white policeman John Taylor, African-American Pastor Hutchins Bishop and Phillip Payton, an African American who became a leading real estate agent catering to black families.

Telling the story through the perspectives of these actual individuals “makes the story more real,” McGruder said.

Around the time McGruder finished the book, he was hired by Antioch College. Coming to Yellow Springs, he took to heart the stories of those early African-American families establishing community in a new location. McGruder, too, sought membership in a church community, the Central Chapel A.M.E. Church, and also became a member of the World House Choir, to deepen the connection to his new home.

While McGruder is sinking roots into his new home, he will always have a soft spot for Harlem, where he maintains a membership in the Abyssinian Church. And it’s likely he’ll return often, as his next project is a biography of Phillip Payton, the realtor who made a difference to many African-American families when he helped them find homes in turn-of-the-century Harlem.

Antioch College attracts generations

Bo Waite has fond memories of visiting his grandparents’ house on West North College Street when he was a small child in the 1950s. There was a pasture with cows grazing behind the property, a garden tended by his grandfather, also the Antioch College maintenance supervisor, and the 1830s home cared for by his grandmother, a first-grade teacher at Mills Lawn.

A few years ago, some 50 years after his grandparents sold the house, Waite purchased it, and moved in last summer.

Waite, also an Antioch College graduate and the fifth person in his family to attend Antioch, is thrilled to be back in the village that informed his early life, he said in a recent interview.

“I’m still rediscovering it,” Waite of Yellow Springs, citing some draws: “The peacefulness, the quiet, the natural beauty of the Glen, the opportunity to be part of a community.”

As for the appeal of coming back to live near his alma mater, from which he graduated in 1972, it’s universal among his classmates.

“We’re all such radical romantics for Antioch,” he said.

Completing the Antioch circle, Waite moved to the house with his partner, Angie Bogner, a longtime health and fitness expert who is now a pilates instructor and personal trainer at the Antioch Wellness Center.

Bogner, originally from Cincinnati, moved to town after nearly 30 years in San Francisco, and finds the change refreshing.

“My nerves were just frazzled after 29 years of living in an urban environment,” Bogner said. Yellow Springs, meanwhile, is beautiful and serene with people who are “tolerant but polite” with “a total lack of aggressive rudeness.”

“It’s refreshing to say ‘hi’ on the street and see people who are not looking at their phones,” Bogner added.

Together, Waite, a psychiatrist still practicing in Cincinnati, and Bogner are reviving Waite’s grandfather’s garden.

“My grandfather was a horticulturist — he grew asparagus, concord grapes, roses,” Waite said. The same garden area, was also cultivated for decades by the late Anna Gregor when she lived there, and was equally “amazing,” Waite said.

Waite’s grandfather, Henry Chester Waite II, and his wife Genevieve, moved to Yellow Springs from St. Cloud, Minn. in the 1920s to follow the “town hero” Arthur Morgan, an engineer who flood-proofed Dayton before jumpstarting Antioch as its president, Waite explained. They originally lived in the house that is now the Yellow Springs Dharma Center.

“[Morgan] was the town boy done good,” Waite said. “So my grandfather came to go to the college the town hero had saved.”

The Morgan connection goes back even further; Morgan was a paperboy who delivered to Waite’s great-great-grandfather in the late 1800s. While Waite was at Antioch, he visited the aging Morgan, who remembered Waite’s great-great grandfather, recalling that he was “the only lawyer I knew who actually read books,” according to Waite.

Despite being the fifth member of his family to attend Antioch, Waite was the first who actually graduated. His grandfather dropped out during an economic recession to work to support his family with a job at a Xenia broom factory. His father, who was born in St. Cloud, but grew up in Yellow Springs and who died this spring, left Antioch to join the Navy before going on to medical school. Waite’s aunt attended in the 1950s but transferred to Ohio State. And his sister dropped out of Antioch after marrying an upperclassman.

Waite’s Antioch experience was during the tumultuous late 60s and early 70s, with frequent protests and student strikes. Half of his graduating class dressed up in the bizarre style of the Merry Pranksters, he said. But Antioch was seminal for him, especially his year abroad in Kenya that led to an interest in medicine. After Antioch he went to medical school at Louisiana State University and has spent his career practicing and teaching psychiatry. The 65-year-old still runs a private practice and teaches out of the University of Cincinnati Medical College, where his approach is influenced by a mindfulness practice and talking to people about their experience, not just prescribing medication.

“I was interested in people’s minds and psychiatry seemed like applied medical philosophy,” Waite recalled of his career decision.

Bogner, 51, was a trainer for nearly three decades at various gyms and health clubs in San Francisco, spending 10 of those years working as a trainer at an assisted living center. With a focus on core strength and balance training and a specialty in senior fitness, Bogner is quickly developing a clientele at the Antioch Wellness Center, where she hopes to add new classes in pilates.

Bogner is also working to become certified in TRE, or Tension, Stress and Trauma Release Exercises. Founded by Dr. David Berceli, the practice “activates a natural reflex mechanism of shaking or vibrating that releases muscular tension, calming down the nervous system,” and returning the body to a state of balance, according to the TRE website.

Bogner will soon be the only certified TRE practitioner in the state of Ohio, she said. The exercises are popular with returning veterans, but can also be used for anyone that suffers from regular stress and are based upon the idea that trauma is held in the body, Bogner added.

“[Berceli] realized early on working in war-torn countries that in the case of trauma it’s a physiological event,” Bogner said. “Everyday stress can also become an unconscious muscular pattern that will feel a lot like trauma.”

Contact: mbachman@ysnews.com

Antioch College commencement inspires

Inspiring, rousing, uplifting — each component of the Antioch College commencement fit these descriptions on Saturday, as the college celebrated its first post-revival graduating class while reaffirming its social justice legacy in the light of the recent massacre of nine African Americans.

“We will not abide people coming into a sanctuary and killing us,” shouted Dr. Clarence B. Jones, the commencement speaker, to spirited applause from the packed house at the college’s South Gym. Jones, an attorney and speechwriter for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the last-minute replacement for civil rights icon Congressman John Lewis, brought to the event both civil rights bona fides and a passionate plea for a response to last week’s tragic event that’s “commensurate with the magnitude of the injury.”

While Jones made clear that he was not calling for violence, he emphasized that this country’s current level of racism and violence demands far more massive and effective protest than has been recently seen.

“We have to creatively think of different forms of protest. We’re not going to stand by idly and carry signs. We have to end this mess,” he said, adding that “I’m mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.”

The audience of students, parents, college leaders and staff  and Yellow Springs community members responded in kind to Dr. Jones, having been invigorated by the World House Choir both before and during the event. The local choir warmed up the audience with powerful renditions of “Glory,” with local rapper Issa Walker, “We Are Here,” “Tshotsholoza,” a South African freedom song,” and “We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For,” by Bernice Johnson Reagon.

Though audience members responded enthusiastically to Jones and the choir, the 21 Antioch College graduates, who received thunderous applause and a standing ovation as they entered the gym, were clearly the stars of the show.

“Very few will know what this class did for this college,” President Mark Roosevelt stated in his welcome. Even more important than creating new college practices and traditions and recreating old ones, the young people “allowed this college a chance. By being here, they showed this can be done …”

In his invocation, Professor Emeritus Al Denman called on the graduates to heal the ailing environment, and also to “Listen to each others’ songs, devise your own songs and sing, sing, sing!”

In their talks, the six graduates selected to speak were, in very different ways, articulate, passionate, creative and occasionally pointedly critical of their alma mater — just what you’d expect from graduates of Antioch College.

In his remarks, Guy Jack Mathews lauded his peers for their desire to do good but especially for their perseverence.

“We have proven time and time again that we can be devastatingly effective,” Mathews said, concluding that, “Together, we can change the world.”

While the official education Elijah Blanton received focused on political economy and the Spanish language, his most significant learning at Antioch involved “how to be here with each other and make things work,” he said in his speech.

And though Blanton acknowledged failures in the college community that led to the loss of a significant number of the original entering class, he also said, “I’m convinced I received the best education anyone has ever gotten.”

Speaker Nargees Jumahan, a graduate who was raised in Afghanistan, spoke of her high hopes coming to a college reputed to be a beacon of social justice. However, she said, “I’ve still been subjected to racism and classism in this institution.”

Jumahan said she felt “ostracized” for her religious practices when she took a month off to honor the Muslim holy days of Ramadan, and that “I have to constantly defend my country’s culture, religion and identity — it’s exhausting.”

Graduate Brendan Deal of Yellow Springs spoke of his search for the definition of an “Antiochian,” including “people who don’t have bags under their eyes — they have luggage,” those who “engage in passionate discussions on the future of the college at 3 a.m. every night,” and those who “can be dropped off in any city or country and within two days have a job and a place to stay.”

Deal concluded that he ended his four years at Antioch with “no idea of what an Antiochian is but I’m glad to be one,” and that he leaves the college more wise and empathetic and “more prepared to face the world.”

And graduate Seth Kaplan-Bomberg entertained the audience with an original song about his experience at the college.

In introducing Dr. Jones, the commencement speaker, Antioch College trustee David Goodman spoke of first meeting Jones during the difficult time following the disappearance of his older brother, Andrew, who was one of three civil rights workers killed in Mississippi in 1964. Goodman’s family was advised to call in Jones, who was an attorney for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Jones later became close to the family.

“I lost a brother who was my elder, but I found another one,” Goodman said.

There were several reasons why he agreed to deliver the college’s commencement address on two days’ notice, after Congressman Lewis pulled out last week following the death of a family member, Jones said.

One of those reasons was his connection to the Goodman family, according to Jones. And the second reason was “Antioch’s innovative and historical place in social justice history.”

While the civil rights movement is more than 50 years old, recent events, including the Charleston massacre, make clear that the need for social justice progress remains huge, he said.

“This nation is still infected and crippled by the twin legacies of slavery and the doctrine of white supremacy,” he said.

While most have ascribed the killing of nine African Americans to the mental illness of the shooter, the massacre was an unmistakable message of intimidation to African Americans, he believes.

“Something has to be done differently,” Jones said, to increase the effectiveness of current protests against racial violence. “We’ve got to get beyond this nonsense of racism.”

Graduates of Antioch College have a special role to play in the struggle for racial and social justice, Jones said.

“Antiochians have a sense of justice and righteousness that is different than most people,” he said.

Jones called on the graduates and the audience to join together and continue efforts to “make America what it was intended to be. Yes, we will make a difference.”

Following Jones’s speech, Roosevelt thanked everyone for their support of the revived Antioch College.

“The road ahead will not be easy, but our obligation to make it happen is deep,” he said.

To conclude the event, the World House Choir sang “I’ll Make the Difference”, including the refrain:

I had the courage to
keep goin’ on. 
I had the faith when
all hope was gone.
I had the strength to keep holding on.
I can make the difference, yes I can!

 

Civil Rights icon to address College

Fifty years ago, in the spring of 1965, the Rev. Dr, Martin Luther King Jr. came to Yellow Springs to deliver the commencement address at Antioch College, the alma mater of his wife, Coretta Scott King.

Earlier that same spring, Rev. King had been in Selma, Ala., as voting rights efforts there coalesced into what would become one of the watershed moments of the Civil Rights Movement. An attempt to highlight racial injustice and voter inequality by peacefully marching from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery turned bloody when unarmed participants were beaten by law enforcement officers. The violence of what would become known as Bloody Sunday, along with the related killings of civil rights supporters, shocked the nation. After an aborted second march, a third attempt, under the protection of federal troops, took place successfully March 21–25.

At the steps of the Alabama Capitol, King spoke: “The end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. … I know you are asking today, ‘How long will it take.’ I come to say to you this afternoon however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long.”

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law by then President Lyndon Johnson later that summer.

Standing with King at the Alabama Capitol in 1965 was John Lewis, a young Alabama native who also had been with King and was the youngest speaker during the 1963 March on Washington. Lewis was one of the principal leaders of the Bloody Sunday march, the effects of which drew in King’s participation.

“Facing the Challenge of a New Age” was the title of the commencement address King gave to Antioch graduates amidst that tumultuous time.

Now, as Antioch College graduates its first class since reopening, and the nation marks the 50th anniversary of the Selma marches and passage of the Voting Rights Act, the college welcomes U.S. Rep. John Lewis to campus as its 2015 commencement speaker.

The Congressman representing Georgia’s Fifth District, which includes Atlanta, in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1986, Rep. Lewis has faced the challenges of his age since his childhood as the son of a sharecropper. Inspired by King and the Montgomery bus boycott, news of which he followed as a youth on the radio, he went off to Fisk University in Nashville, determined to be part of the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement. In Nashville, he joined the lunch counter sit-ins, and in 1961, he became part of the Freedom Rides, an initiative that challenged segregation at bus stations across the South and which nearly cost him his life. Repeatedly beaten by angry mobs, he was also arrested for challenging the Jim Crow laws of the time.

From 1963 to 1966, Lewis served as Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In that role, he also coordinated SNCC efforts to organize voter registration drives and community action programs during the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964.

After leaving SNCC in 1966, Lewis continued to work for human rights causes. He eventually entered politics in 1981 as the newly elected member of the Atlanta City Council.
He’s been called “one of the most courageous persons the Civil Right Movement ever produced,” as well as “the conscience of the U.S. Congress.”

Through more than 40 arrests and multiple physical attacks, some of which caused life-threatening injuries, Lewis remained — and continues to remain — a stalwart advocate of nonviolent action.

A short biographical film shown to visitors to his office in Washington, D.C., shows Lewis speaking about his longing for a world in which justice is available and equitable for all people. He tells of thinking as a child that he would become a minister, and rounding up the family’s chickens to be his congregation as he practiced his preaching.

His D.C. office bears mementos of his youth, including a large jar of jellybeans — not for eating, but as a reminder of one of the many impossible tasks Southern people of color were given when trying to register to vote under Jim Crow, one of which was to guess correctly how many jelly beans were in the jar.

Given all he has lived through, Lewis shows no bitterness or ill-will to those who hurt him. His philosophy of nonviolence and forgiveness are outlined in one of his more recent books, “Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change,” published in 2012. His latest literary release is an award-winning graphic novel, “March,” which he co-authored, about the 1965 events in Selma.

“We could not be happier to have Representative John Lewis at our graduation this year,” wrote Mark Roosevelt, Antioch College president, in an email this week. “The Class of 2015 are true pioneers. They have worked hard to re-create this great institution from their first moment stepping foot on campus as students. It’s only fitting that a leader with such an indomitable spirit delivers their commencement address. We are honored and excited to welcome Congressman Lewis to Yellow Springs.”

Mila P. Cooper, director of the Coretta Scott King Center at Antioch, agreed.
“Having Representative John Lewis speak at Antioch’s commencement is incredibly significant because of our history of involvement in the Civil Rights Movement and our continuing commitment to social justice,” she wrote. “It’s perfect that we have an icon of the Civil Rights Movement and a current leader in social justice issues as the commencement speaker for our first graduating class since reopening.”

Kevin McGruder, Assistant Professor of History, wrote that Lewis’ life offers significant lessons for young people.

“I think that John Lewis’ career of activism, that began when he was the same age as our students, can help Antioch students to understand that they can make important contributions on issues that are important to them now,” McGruder wrote. “Also, Congressman Lewis’ political career demonstrates that there are ways to use the skills of grass-roots activism to bring about change through our political system as well.”

Antioch’s 2015 commencement exercises begin at 10 a.m. Saturday, June 20, and the community is welcome to attend the proceedings, which will take place on the campus lawn between North Hall and Main Building. Tickets are not required, but RSVPs are encouraged to ensure adequate seating. For more information, go online to http://www.antiochcollege.org/commencement.

* The writer is a freelance contributor to the News.