A war inspires lasting peace activity

Barbara Reynolds, photo courtesy of Antiochiana

Barbara Reynolds, photo courtesy of Antiochiana

On the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan, the 50th anniversary of the founding of the World Friendship Center in Hiroshima and the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Wilmington College Peace Resource Center, the PRC will hold an anniversary peace conference next week. The event, “Justice and Peace: a Call to Local and Global Communities,” takes place Thursday and Friday, Sept. 10 and 11, at the Peace Resource Center, directed by Yellow Springs resident Tanya Maus.

Both the Friendship Center and the PRC were founded by Barbara Reynolds, a former Yellow Springs resident. Barbara went to Japan in 1951 with her children and husband, Earle, who as an anthropologist was sent to study the effects of radiation on the bombing victims. They stayed three years before Earle built a boat, the Phoenix, which the family sailed to protest nuclear testing throughout the south Pacific and later to Vietnam in the 1960s.   h.

The PRC conference keynote speaker is Norma Field, the Robert S. Ingersoll Distinguished Service Professor of Japanese Studies Emerita at the University of Chicago, who will give the talk, “How Can We Say and Mean Peace Today?” at 6 p.m. at the Boyd Cultural Arts Center. The conference will also include plenary speakers and workshops on peace strategies and Kingian nonviolence, as well as a panel discussion on peace initiatives in local communities. For the schedule of events go to wilmington.edu and search “PRC 40th.”

See the full story in this week’s News.

Conference Schedule

Thursday, September 10

9:30 a.m.
Quiet Reflection
Dan Kasztelan, Pastor, Wilmington College
Jessica (Reynolds) Renshaw, “Birdsong Meditation”
World Friendship Center Choir: “Life of World, Spirit of Hiroshima”

10:15 a.m.  Opening Ceremony and Memory Sharing
• Remarks, Peace Resource Center Director, Tanya Maus
• Remarks, Peter van den Dungen, Professor Emeritus, Bradford
University
• Remarks, Michiko Yamane, Chair, World Friendship Center,
Hiroshima, Japan
• Memory sharing led by Terry Miller, Professor Emeritus,
Wilmington College and organizer for the 1975 conference.

1:00 Plenary Talk 1: Barbara Reynolds, Hiroshima,
and the Origins of a Transnational Anti-nuclear Movement
Elyssa Faison, Professor, University of Oklahoma

2:30 p.m. Plenary Talk 2: Dr. King and the Philosophy of Kingian Nonviolence
Kazu Haga, Director, East Point Peace Academy

6–7 p.m. Keynote Address: How Can We Say and Mean Peace Today?
Norma Field, Professor Emerita, University of Chicago

7:15
Workshop 1: “Hands-On Peace”: Kingian Nonviolence
with Kazu Haga, East Point Peace Academy
Kazu Haga, Director, East Point Peace Academy

Friday, September 11

9:10 a.m. Panel 1: Global Peace Initiatives in our Local Community
Chuck Watts, Wilmington AM Rotary, Empathy Surplus Project
Nicole Friend, Arcadia Learning Commons
Michael Kalter, RPCV, Southwest Ohio Peace Corps

10:40 a.m. Tour of the Peace Resource Center
Tanya Maus, Director, Peace Resource Center, Wilmington College

11:30 a.m. Panel 2: Peace Pilgrimages and Awakenings as Alternatives to Violence
Roy Tamashiro, Professor of Multidisciplinary Studies, Webster University
Kazu Haga, Coordinator, East Point Peace Academy
Stephen Potthoff, Associate Professor of Religion and
Philosophy, Wilmington College

11:30 a.m. Panel 3: Museums as Peacemakers: Harmonizing Institutional and Community Visions of Peace
Kazuyo Yamane, Vice Director, Kyoto Museum for World Peace at
Ritsumeikan University
Ruth Brindle, Director, Quaker Heritage Center
Jerry Leggett, Director, Dayton International Peace Museum

1:50 p.m. Workshop 2: Defining Justice and Peace on our Campus
Marcus Benson, Greek Life, Iota Phi Theta Fraternity
Riley Foley, Quaker Leaders, Gay Straight Student Alliance
Carly Pritchard, Active Minds, Faith in Action
Ja’Cole Tabor, Black Student Initiative
Montana McFarland, Delta Tau Alpha

1:50 Workshop 3: Defining Justice and Peace in our Local Community
Julie Brassel, Director, Alternatives to Violence Center
Mark Rembert, Director, Wilmington Chamber of Commerce
Dean Feldmyer, Pastor, The Wilmington United Methodist Church

3:20 p.m. Tour of the Quaker Heritage Center
Ruth Brindle, Director, Quaker Heritage Center

4 p.m. Workshop 4: Defining Justice and Peace for a Global Community
Michael Snarr, Professor, Wilmington College
Norma Field, Professor Emerita, University of Chicago
Joyce Apsel, Professor, New York University
Peter van den Dungen, Professor Emeritus, Bradford University

5:20 Closing Ceremony

For questions or further information, please contact the Peace Resource Center
(prc@wilmington.edu/937-481-2371)

Celebrate Antioch College Foundry Theater

The Antioch College Performance Program will present “The Skin of Our Teeth” by Thornton Wilder, beginning with a “pay-what-you-can” preview on Thursday, Aug. 27. The show opens Friday, Aug. 28, and runs through the weekend, Saturday and Sunday, Aug. 29–30. On Aug. 28, an open house will celebrate one year of the Foundry Theater, preceding that night’s performance at 6:30 p.m. All performances begin at 8 p.m., and tickets are $8 for adults and $4 for children, seniors and non-Antioch college students.

“The Skin of Our Teeth” was written in the years between the Great Depression and World War II. It narrates the story of the Antrobus family, who weather several catastrophes, including an ice age brought on by an encroaching glacier, a destructive flood and a devastating war. Wilder won the Pulitzer for this unique take on human history.

This is the second full-length play directed by a faculty member within the Performance Program since the re-opening of the college. Louise Smith, associate professor of performance, is directing a cast that includes students Sean Allen, Hannah Priscilla Craig, Jack Hassler, Cole Gentry, Alli King, Malka Berro, Soleil Sykes, Katherine Schule, Isabelle Segadelli, Marcell Vanarsdale, Meli Osanya, Alana Guth, Will Brown and Gaerin Warman-Szvoboda; visual arts faculty member Michael Casselli; and community member Abi Katz-Stein. Antioch alumna Dr. Jill Summerville is providing dramaturgical assistance. Amanda Egloff, Foundry Theater technical director, is designing the lighting and set.

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