The Plain Talk We Need

I didn’t hear many answers yesterday. Did you?

Neither to my own four questions (see below) nor from local and state elected leaders telling us what they think about Washington’s threat to cut funding for schools. At a time like this.

We are now well accustomed to the latter - this unhelpful fear of most elected officials to speak out against even the strangest statements issuing from the Trump White House. Has that reluctance has now reached to the level of elected school board members? Have you calculating that President Trump has so worn out his welcome as any kind of policy-maker, that he has so squandered any credibility his office has that what he says or tweets just doesn’t matter? Then, let us hear you say at least that.

But let’s forget Trump and his empty bluster for a moment.

We are still clinging to the hope that Metro Nashville Schools leaders will state more clearly - and very soon - how our own schools will safely re-open sometime this fall. We know the problems you face. Let’s have some frank talk about the answers, and the basic Four Questions of yesterday morning are still good ones:

• How will our classrooms actually work?

• How will elementary schools and high schools differ in functional arrangements for the fall?

• How will the issues surrounding remote-learning, especially the hard learnings of last spring, be corrected now? Almost a third of Nashville students’ homes don’t have computers.

• What level of creativity are Nashville’s school leaders bringing to this critical planning? Will there be new variations of the school day, facilities usage, and transportation schedules to make possible enough separation of children?

This is a time of worry and great stress on the part of parents who are your constituents. So drop the jargon and speak plainly. We don’t need more talking heads, ceremonially introducing other talking heads, at any more flag-adorned podiums. Parents are worried and deserve good answers.

We’re waiting.

© Keel Hunt, 2020

What is the Battle Plan?

Today at 1:00 pm we are to learn how Nashville’s public schools will “re-open” in just a few weeks’ time in the midst of a worsening Covid pandemic.

This is an anxious moment for parents, faculty, and others who fear what may happen - and with good reasons. Because what presidents and governors and commissioners declare from their flag-adorned rostrums is one thing; what parents actually chose is quite another.

Only the deluded souls who’ve been persuaded this is all just a “hoax” are unconcerned now. Most other folks are genuinely worried that schools may not be safe for their kids.

It is essential for us all to understand the context this morning. Nationally, the norms in which America’s schools have traditionally operated are now being super-politicized:

• National polling tells us a majority of parents of school-aged children remain fearful of fully re-engaging school schedules. 

• On Tuesday, President Trump declared in his top-down manner that he was pressuring governors to see to it that America’s schools fully resume on schedule. He also pressured the CDC to back off its science-based guidance for how that should be done. (Today CDC refused to do this.)

• Trump threatened to withhold or impound federal funds if local school leaders don’t fall in line now. (I had expected we would hear something from at least a couple Nashville school board members, in response to this particular threat, but so far only silence.)

• The Governor of Florida quickly did fall in line, and so did his Florida commissioner of education. (We should pay close attention to what the governors of Tennessee and Georgia say and do next. They were the quickest, last month, to push re-openings of other activities - and we are seeing the consequences of that.)

• The Tennessean reports, this morning, that yesterday was Tennessee’s “worst day yet” in new Covid cases.

The Trump administration seems determined to weigh in against any strategy, by actual school leaders at the local district level, to do anything short of a traditional re-opening, with classrooms looking just as they did before this public-health disaster came. 

The question this morning is how much of this one-size-fits-all approach has influenced what Nashville’s school Director Adrienne Battle will announce today at 1:00.

• How will our classrooms actually work?

• How will elementary schools and high schools differ in functional arrangements for the fall?

• How will the issues surrounding remote-learning, especially the hard learnings of last spring, be corrected now? Almost a third of Nashville students’ homes don’t have computers.

• What level of creativity are Nashville’s school leaders bringing to this critical planning? For example, will there be new variations of the school day, facilities usage, and transportation schedules to make possible enough separation of children? This is not just about “deep cleaning” classrooms at the end of every day.

These are essential questions. Good and honest questions. We will see some answers, I hope, this afternoon.

© Keel Hunt, 2020

'When Comes the Day'

I am reminded once again this morning, reading through the many reader comments to yesterday’s July 4 post, how important it is to have good dialog among caring people through this time of strain and public division.

Our nation, from our capital cities down to the smallest neighborhood, are having plenty enough difficulties coping through multiple crises. We don’t need unnecessary rancor. I am, therefore, once again grateful on this morning to read multiple comments from folks who obviously value civility, whether we personally call it that or not.

Most reader replies come to me via direct messages to my email inbox. A few come on the ‘Comments’ page of this website. Have a look. But however you choose to let me hear from you, my thanks always to our Field Notes subscribers. There are 493 of you now, the updated count as of this morning!

I am reminded also this morning how our news media are so vitally important. Most reporters we know are doing essential work for us all, especially now, both across Tennessee as well as in Washington, DC. There are, of course, attacks upon them and the work they do; the attacks seem ultimately selfish. But the larger part of our population also seems to ignore all that as purposeful obfuscation and so much defensive politics. I’m on the side of our larger part.

We used to say “Election Day” back when it was just the one day. Today, thanks to the good-government reformers of the 1990s, we are fortunate that their work opened up broader participation in our democracy by way of early voting, for example. And this year, good people succeeded in making “absentee voting” more available to protect citizens who are rightly fearful of the coronavirus. May each of us follow through and find our own way to participate when your day comes.

This is how our nation has corrected its course before and, of course, can do so now once again. Even more so than yesterday, I am looking ahead to this election with optimism and great hope.

© Keel Hunt, 2020

Letter to My Country, July 4

For all the turmoil we Americans have experienced over the past month, a good deal of clarity has come through the smoke and noise:

• Americans are yearning to vote now, as never before. In the face of a fearful, murderous pandemic we are insisting (in record numbers) upon the freedom to vote absentee for safety’s sake. This choice is a deeply encouraging thing to me. Freedom from fear will find a way.

• The pandemic has revealed not only the weakness of our national government but also our inter-connectedness as citizens. The most dramatic instance of this is how we all want and need our schools to safely re-open – and not only for the children’s sake, but also to help Mom or Dad (or both) get back to work and help re-activate our walloped economy.

• We are also witnessing, as it unfolds in real time each day, what national leadership is not. This current Trump model, which is fully demonstrated now, is a distortion based on variations of manipulated fears – e.g., senators fearful, for whatever their reasons, of speaking plain truth to corrupt power. This is not the courage our nation needs now but weakness. This is how darkness takes hold, not hope, and any more darkness will not do.

But the rest of us are strong when, as citizens, we remember how resilient our large country has been, what other trials we have endured. We can be hopeful when we remember what our nation has been through in the past, the tests we have passed, our triumphs over other forms of darkness, of other demagogues.

On this bright morning of Independence Day, my feelings are of optimism and hope, coupled with a positive sense of defiance. We know we have the capacity to register and turnout and vote in large numbers and to set things right.

And this is how our nation has always worked, over 244 years, and how we have survived those other trials. We can and should do so again. I believe we will. In just four months time, when comes the day.

© Keel Hunt, 2020

The Stories We Tell

My newspaper column on Sunday – about Civil War history and Confederate monuments – drew lots of reader responses from Memphis, Nashville, Oak Ridge, Knoxville, and other points east. (Read it over on the Columns page.) By a wide margin, most of the comments were positive.

Notes like these from readers are not only nice for a columnist to see but, at this particular moment and on this issue, were also deeply encouraging to me about our society. Here are some of the “candles in the darkness” I’ve found in my inbox since Sunday morning...

• “I applaud your suggestion to reintroduce civics and history to our classrooms.”

• “Your column this morning was perfect…well deserved outrage without going over the top in enmity.”

• “One of the most thoughtful editorials I have ever read from anyone. It is timely and stated a perspective I had not previously considered.”

• “For too long, southern devotees have hidden behind the mantra of preserving American history through the maintenance of these revered icons. Statues do more than preserve; they perpetuate the southern myth, and you were spot-on to call out the irony of such a fallacious argument.”

But a handful of readers took issue with my stand on what the Civil War was about.

For these few, the rebellion wasn’t about slavery but how some southern states just wanted to do whatever they wanted. (This is the old “states’ rights” view. It’s not a new argument, of course, just a tired one.) Frankly, it’s a point of view that had no longer interested me much – not until this current moment of national rancor, in which race figures so prominently.

Hear them now…

• “While abolishing slavery was a by-product, the overriding reason for the Civil War was the over-reach of the Federal Government over States rights. The industrial minded North was attempting to bully the much more agrarian Southern States. They attempted to tax and legislate the South into being subservient to the more aggressive minded North.”

• “Revisionist history has stripped away the actual reasons for the Civil War to make it all about slavery, which was not the case. And a majority of Confederate soldiers came from families who did not own slaves… They were fighting to defend their country which had been attacked. The statues were erected to honor these soldiers.”

• “It was never the goal of the Confederacy to topple the U.S. government. The former states composing the Confederacy simply wanted to withdraw from the Union.  The reason for the withdrawal may have been the continuation of the plantation slave economy, but it could have been for countless other reasons as well… Abraham Lincoln essentially declared martial law, raised an army, and militarily forced the withdrawn states back into the Union.”

I don’t question these readers on their shared beliefs nor the durability of this view. But comments like these do strike me as current examples of what Dr. W.E.B. DuBois once called “lies agreed upon.” They still survive by way of the stories we tell ourselves, as they have been across our defeated region for a long century.

Here I will quote from just one more note from another reader, this one in Sumner County, who wrote in on Sunday. The words stopped me in my tracks.

He shared with me what he had seen while doing family genealogy research, at the courthouse up in Gallatin. They were from an old county ledger book of commercial transactions, back in 1811. (This was long before the start of hostilities that split the Union, but not before the heartache of slavery was already splitting families at the auction blocks.) These pages recorded two sales of four enslaved children:

• Negro boy Stephen 8, for $275. 24 Jul 1811. p. 218.

• Three Negro girls, Pheba 8, Matilda 6, Milly 3, for $325. p. 219-20.

None of them was older than eight. Milly was only three.

Each of us now living inside the old boundaries of the Old South must reach our own reckoning with these matters. And to that monument question, I say: Don’t erase any history at all - just, please, remember the rest of it. Don’t ignore what human bondage did to its victims, how it scattered enslaved families to the four winds in the day, and all that that legacy has left us to deal with here in our day.

Remember the Generals and laud them even now, if you must, but remember little Stephen, Pheba, Matilda, and Milly, too. None of our history should be ignored.

None of it.

© Keel Hunt, 2020

Last Sunday in June

Two quick notes of personal thanks on this last Sunday morning in June…

1. I am grateful for all the positive responses from subscribers in the past week about my “How You Erase History” post of last Sunday. Many readers kindly said you hoped it could have a much broader circulation in this time of stress around the issues of racial history and public memory.

   Well, my friend David Plazas, the editorial director for the USA Today Network Tennessee, agreed. Today wasn’t my normal turn on the editorial pages, but David made it so. (Find it on Page 4H in The Tennessean this morning. Our friend Mike Cody, in Memphis, also dropped me a note just now saying it’s running in the Sunday Commercial Appeal.)

2. Speaking of growing circulation… I am also grateful to each of you who responded to our recent “Invite a Friend” appeal, asking if you would reach out to someone you know who might also subscribe to these Field Notes. Boy, did that work! Yesterday we learned our new subscriber count now stands at 484. As we approach the 500 mark, I’m humbled by this acceptance of the new platform. My thanks to all subscribers, old and new.

Today we Americans, in each of our communities and across the nation, are feeling our way forward now through an unprecedented collision of dizzying crises. All this is testing our public citizenship, our sense of the common good, and also our leadership choices. I feel it’s essential now that we stay in touch, building new bridges where we can, comparing notes on what it means for our democracy, and of course the best way to proceed.

I thank you for staying in touch with me.

My thanks to you all, with my best wishes for good health, new friends, and much healing across our country.

-Keel

How You Erase History

As more Confederate statuary comes tumbling down across the South, the most fevered objection I hear is that the activists who want them gone “want to erase our history.”

Where to begin with this.

First, the basic impulse behind removal is precisely the opposite: It’s to restore some balance to our remembered history, to make it complete by correcting a distorted, partial understanding of what came before.

This charge of “erasing history” flatly ignores much of our actual U.S. history and elevates only one aspect of it – the part that isn’t noble and never was. The legacy of enslavement of other peoples, being America’s original sin, has caused the greatest disruptions to our law and civil order and has oppressed the most people.

That’s why maintaining a skewed, one-sided symbolism in our public squares, courthouses, and capitols offends not only the Black Lives Matter activists. It offends me.

The other tired objection to removal rises from the alleged permanence of our public art: That once these physical tributes to Lee, Davis, Forrest, and the rest go up, they must never come down, as if it were sacrilege.

Yes, the bitter-enders say, it’s true that Jeff Davis and General Lee worked hard to overthrow the U.S. government, but they were otherwise fine men. Take Forrest, whose likeness still sits this morning in its bitterly argued place of honor on the vaulted second floor our Tennessee capitol; he was after all a brilliant tactician, they insist, and they believe he was actually kind to the human chattel he owned. (Don’t worry yourself then about all that Ku Klux Klan business, nor with what really happened at Fort Pillow.) So goes their recollection.

The people who believe all that are usually the same folks who insist the Civil War was not about slavery but about the South defending “states’ rights” with its bullets and blood. 

Wrong. The Civil War was a war to set humans free, with the South on the wrong side of it. The failed rebellion’s true purpose was to preserve an economic system based on forced farm labor, ignoring the bondage, trafficking, and brutality that sustained it but also blew apart families and ripped up lives.

So remind me, who is trying to erase history? I cannot abide this selective memory that wishes the past were different and less brutal than it was.

If your goal is to erase history, there are more efficient ways to do it than toppling statues. For real instruction in this, look to some current governments. Here are five sure-fire ways to make history go away:

1.    Start by cutting school budgets, withholding teachers’ raises to the point they don’t have proper salaries and enough supplies. Make it all but impossible for trained educators to teach our history in full. Make it more likely, in fact, that our best of them will leave the profession.

2.    Discard any sustained commitment to the arts and humanities. Ignore how these are the preservers of our history and culture. They will save us, whereas selective memory will not, so be sure to treat arts and humanities education as cost-savings opportunities of first resort, not last.

3.    Elect a governor and legislature who will defend the narrowest view, and will move fast to enact dubious priorities of a screwball national administration. Do not be distracted by the views of people who have no power.

4.    Divert as much school funding as possible from public to private schools. And when that won’t fly, target the urban school districts with the most to lose – Memphis and Nashville – then try to defy any court that says you cannot.

5.    And refuse to have full discussion with open public hearings on hair-brained bills. Don’t answer inconvenient, impertinent questions. This is how narrow-gauged laws get passed, bills that please only the special interests.

At our state capitol today, the powers-that-be have taken much of this anti-history work to a new level of daily practice. Most of the ruling majority get along with each other, dressed in their handsome suits, enjoying the jocularity, never causing commotion for the comfortable. It’s easier that way.

This is how you erase history, not by shoving over a few statues (or even a few hundred) that revere dead generals of a misbegotten, lost cause. They are artifacts and the symbolic reminders of an unbalanced history, not the full one.

They don’t help anybody anymore, and are truthfully the least of our worries now.

© Keel Hunt, 2020

Open Records

Wednesday was the 48th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, and that is actually a hopeful memory for what coincidentally erupted this week with the pre-publication clamor over John Bolton’s book.

Of course Watergate became, in time, a watershed case for freedom of the press in a democratic society, just as the Pentagon Papers case had become in the year prior. Like him or not, whatever we think of Bolton himself, his case now - with the White House desperately trying to smother his manuscript, under layers of “national security” review and a clearly partisan shroud - is about much the same thing.

This time, the kudos in our current episode of official censorship, so far, belong to Bolton’s publisher, Simon & Schuster. Its president Jonathan Karp reminded The New York Times yesterday that his house has published histories critical of presidents of both parties (you can look it up) and that his sense of the S&S mission is to publish “the best first draft of history.”

The official publication date for Bolton’s book is not until next week. But long excerpts were published yesterday in The Wall Street Journal, and were picked up this morning all over creation. Funny how that happens.

Truth will out.

© Keel Hunt, 2020

Cover Story

I hope you will check out Page 1 of The Tennessean’s “Insight” section - in the print edition - this Sunday morning. There, my column is paired with an important op-ed message by Dr. Fallon Wilson, the founder of Black in Tech Nashville. It’s an honor to appear alongside her.

Dr. Wilson’s is an important voice in our community. Today, she addresses an essential aspect of our culture that deserves much more attention from all leaders in the city and across our state and nation.

The many issues of race that have been raised over the past three weeks are not only about policing and brutality. They are about much more: human relations, history, reconciliation, and how communities will insist on justice in many spheres. This constitutes an essential conversation I believe we need to have as Americans. I am grateful for the many emails and other responses to my suggestion that we attempt soon to undertake this conversation in a structured way, city by city.

On this Sunday morning, I am wishing us all peace through a deeper understanding of each other, and the resolve to do something about all this.

© Keel Hunt, 2020

Last Note from Anna

This morning I am grieving the death of Anna Shepherd.

She was the long-time member of the Metro Nashville Board of Education, representing the McGavock High School territory. Most recently she was the board chair.  She was an important leader in our city, an elected official, and an enthusiastic advocate for public schools.

She was also a good person, and she was my friend.

I spoke with Anna many times over the years – about schools, family, and life. She was an accessible public official. The last time we spoke was a couple of weeks ago. I was working on a column about how MNPS is approaching the re-opening of schools at the end of the summer. That’s a complicated subject, with many moving parts and some big unknowns, and frankly my first thought was to just talk with Anna. She helped me see the big picture, as usual.

Last Friday, I posted on Field Notes my comment on a very different subject: What can our community do, constructively, in response to the nationwide demonstrations against racism and brutality? I wrote that white folks like me need to understand the lives that our black and brown neighbors live, always in the enduring long shadow of racism’s history. I suggested we might start with organized, intentional conversations across our city.

Anna was a subscriber to the Field Notes from the beginning. She was kind to share her thoughts with me, most often in a direct email message. The last note from Anna came on Friday, the same day I suggested the community conversations. It was only four words but I will cherish them. They sort of summed up her long-suffering zeal for making Nashville the best it can be:

“Count me in, Keel.”

© Keel Hunt, 2020

The Fire This Time - Part 2

‘If we do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.’ -James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 1962 

We need to talk. And soon.

The anti-brutality protests across America over the past week, sparked by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, have broadly challenged police violence against civilians. They have also made a couple of other things quite clear:

1. Racial differences still keep us from knowing each other as well as we should, especially considering the effects of discrimination that still persist in the lives of many Americans of color.

2. Moving past that will take a higher level of engagement with each other for a deeper understanding by more white folks of what life is like for black and brown folks in our country.

The social legacy of human slavery over 400-plus years still abides in a hundred ways. That’s a lot of history, and it makes for a different burden for people living under its lingering shadow. It’s no wonder that in 2020 we don’t even speak the same language on issues like fair housing and body cams, or why a young black man will not go out and jog. 

None of us can expect to live in peace until we know each other better across a racial divide that persists in the year 2020.

Before we can hope to bridge our divisions of racial experience – before we can imagine together how to combat, with new policy, the procedures that permit police misconduct – we need to know each other better. Without that, most of us cannot even acknowledge what the activists are talking about. And this is not just the responsibility of municipal governments, but deeper understanding among fellow citizens will also inform the work for better schools, good health, and responsible development.

I am not referring here to the thugs who burned and defaced property, but to the larger body of citizens who demonstrated peacefully in the classic way. The responsible demonstrators were loud and insistent, but they have made a valuable point. In fact, I cannot imagine anyone devising a more effective public message, unified over so many U.S. cities in the same week. It was a profound national statement against brutality.

But what now? Communities should continue the discussion that these activists have started. The first goal should be to try hard to hear one another about the very different lives we live. We should all look for opportunities, large and small, to listen to other citizens whose lives have unfolded differently than our own.

Turn the demonstrations into conversations, in a dozen places across the city.

We need this broader conversation with each other now. I cannot hope to understand someone in another demographic group until we know each other better as humans – and then, hopefully, as friends. And only then can communities effectively work on making policies better with new laws, procedures, and a common will to respect all people.

This work will not be easy. But here in Nashville we know how beneficial such communication can be to a city. We have seen it; some even call it “the Nashville Way.” Over time, the process details have been different in every decade, of course, but going this way now could be a model that helps the whole nation heal.

There will be complications: How do we have a public conversations in the time of coronavirus? That’s a technical challenge, but if enough of us are willing we can find a way to talk AND distance. All this only requires, as it always does, good organization and able leaders.

Who should lead this? I see lots of potential leaders in our city, bright women and men who are capable of designing and running such a process. Some of these are leaders in the Equity Alliance, Emerge Tennessee, the service clubs, the “Millions of Conversations” initiative, the clergy, our universities. To do this, leaders will need training, but that starts with a willing heart.

This is not about the aftermath of one demonstration but the longer term of our lives together. It’s about the survival of our city - our community - and how to give our children and theirs a better life. This is about social salvation.

I am willing to join in. Are you?

© Keel Hunt, 2020

The Fire This Time - Part 1

This morning in Nashville we are angry at last night’s destruction in our downtown. We are also deeply curious.

We wonder who these vandals are, where their controllers live, and who instilled in them the provocative purpose of their senseless rampage at City Hall, the State Capitol, and along the storefronts of Lower Broadway. To provoke whom, to what end?

The bad actors were not the people who spoke out and demonstrated civilly against police violence, in the sunshine of the afternoon on our Memorial Plaza. The citizens there were loud, but not lawbreakers. No, what happened after the sun went down, and that turned our streets mean, seems the work of wanton vandals, of low and lawless minds.

It is good to ask, therefore, whether these actions were just senseless or purposeful? On the senseless agenda:

·      If you want to attack symbols that represent the work of the devil, you don’t set flames to Nashville’s City Hall, of all places. For sixty years, that front door has been an important symbol of reconciliation, which is the opposite of racism, and of our city’s progressivism. In April 1960, this was the spot where Nashville began to change for the better. On the day after Councilman Z. Alexander Looby’s home was bombed, Diane Nash and her fellow activists marched peacefully from campuses on the north and west sides, and they spoke civilly with Mayor Ben West on these steps. Here, the mayor famously agreed with Nash that segregated lunch counters were wrong.

·      And you don’t smash the engraved plaque, installed 35 years later by Mayor Phil Bredesen, who hoped to mark the spot forever. (To this day I never enter our City Hall without stopping to re-read its solemn message: “May we continue to live together as one God-fearing community forever.”) This morning those words of a city’s hope lay in shards. No, the fire-setters and spray-painters and rock-throwers of last night were not of soul of our town.

·      If you don’t care for Tennessee’s record of glorifying murders of black folk, and of celebrating the memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest inside the Capitol, fine. But you don’t redress that by toppling the statue of E.W. Carmack outside.

Carmack’s story – how the editor championed temperance back in the day, how he was murdered by his political enemies on a street nearby - is an obscure one now. He is all but lost to history. The destruction of his statue was nothing more than street vandalism of convenience, not of principle. The miscreants sent us no understandable message with that act. (UPDATE: After this was posted, early Sunday, an alert reader pointed out that Carmack used his editor’s position to attack the journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett for her writing and speaking out against lynching across the South. Possibly that was the motive behind tearing down his likeness on the capitol grounds. Just last month, she was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her courageous advocacy journalism. I stand corrected.)

But also on the “purposeful” side (which is my own view this morning) consider…

·      It’s the essence of terrorism (which is often guided remotely) to intentionally jar the senses, upset norms and civil order, in order to sow confusion and fear and political instability.

·      Too many events like this were happening in too many U.S. cities this weekend to think bad actors in Nashville were not put up to this. How far does this reach?

·      And plenty of folks watching what unfolded downtown on screens at home were immediately curious – and well we should be – about where these bad actors came from, and who was manipulating them. How far does this reach, in either its sources or its outcomes? Sorting that out should be high on the FBI’s to-do list today. But will it be?

Disruptive uncivil acts like these can be fodder for demagogues, in any age. The timing of Nashville’s disorder is also curious, coming on the last weekend of May, so close to national elections in such an angry and divided summer. These are the kind of events, that can sway elections. (Have a look at Twitter this morning. See how quickly Rudy Giuliani put the blame on certain cities having Democratic mayors. “This is the future,” he tweeted, “if you elect Democrats.”)

One also wonders this morning why there were not more arrests the vandals in downtown Nashville last night on charges of destruction of property, not just for violating a new curfew. Plenty of the acts of vandalism – smashing windows, tossing firebombs, damage to commercial businesses – were caught on countless cellphones and news cameras.

On that point, I for one am eager to hear more today and tomorrow about why MNPD’s policy of restraint may not have done justice to anything or anyone on this weekend of flame and shattered glass.

© Keel Hunt, 2020

Two Places, Two Realities

Last night in Memphis, at the corner of Union and South McLean, citizens and police confronted one another over the issue of gun violence against black Americans.

“Hands up! Don’t Shoot!” went the chant of those who demonstrated. By now, that is not a new slogan. Memphis is by no means the only place this has happened in our divided nation. Far from it. The trigger for this particular demonstration was the death of a black man - George Floyd - while he was held in police custody, far away in Minneapolis.

This week in Nashville, near the intersection of Charlotte and Fifth, a legislative subcommittee gave its blessing to a strange new bill making it just fine to carry a gun without even a traditional firearm permit anymore. Governor Bill Lee had proposed this extreme policy. On the day he announced it, Republican members of the legislature could not gather around him fast enough for the photo op. It was important, you see, for the NRA representative (who also attended) to see them there and take note of their support.

The Memphis Crime Commission and the Memphis chief of police separately have spoken out forcefully against this loosening of standard civil controls of firearms. So have other law enforcement professionals. But the central issue on Capitol Hill is never about gun safety. It’s about politics and elections, and everybody knows it.

Are these two scenes, in two very different circumstances, technically about the same thing? No, the hair-splitters will say. Will the supermajority point that out? Of course, they will, if anyone has the temerity to ask them to explain.

But are the two somehow connected nonetheless? Yes. Of course, yes.

Our nation is long overdue a thorough review of the causes of violence, along the lines of the Kerner Commission of 1968. That report concluded, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal.” Observing the fraught intersection in Memphis last night, and how policy is nowadays made up in Nashville, you might conclude the Kerner Report got it right.

I suggest it’s time for a new look - at our country - and a new conversation that takes in the big picture of the culture of violence, what causes it, and the culture of too many guns. The only questions in my mind this morning are who ought to convene it and how quickly can it begin.

© Keel Hunt, 2020

The Riddles of Re-Opening Schools

A school is a complicated place.

Consider the children, who come in a wide variety of sizes, behaviors, gifts, talents, and needs. Then the teachers, who lead the learning. Now, stir into that mix all the basics of running essentially a small business enterprise – the staffing, scheduling, and human resources - plus food service and transportation.

No wonder our best teachers and principals are seen as heroes, if not saints.

And now, into this mix of tasks, came the Covid-19 scourge that closed down all our schools, and the expectation they can re-open safely and soon. It is a ponderous planning challenge for school administrators - and with no time to spare before the summer ends.

o

It’s one thing for politicians to say our schools must re-open. It’s another matter entirely for school boards and teachers and families to know how to accomplish such a feat, and to systematically work through all the moving parts that this involves.

Of course it’s vital to us all, young and old, that schooling resume as soon as possible. Child development cannot be paused for long, and most young parents need to get back to work themselves - without a daily scramble arranging childcare for out-of-school kids.

As summer begins, and the pandemic marches on, our schools are facing layers of connected issues and choices to make ready for the fall. It is a giant Rubik’s Cube of a brain-twister, a daunting decision-tree in which nearly all aspects of the school day must get a fresh look and fast. Consider these:

Distancing: How do you separate a couple of dozen active children in a typical tiny classroom? What other facilities should be considered now so that more capacity is brought into play?

Grade Levels: First-graders and high-schoolers being very different people, what are the respective needs of elementary, middle and upper schools? All kids are social creatures, with kindergartners and early graders especially accustomed to piling on. How will age-related social behaviors be taken into account?

Nutrition, PE, Social Development: How will cafeterias and gyms work? Will the children need to remain in their classrooms through lunchtime? For younger children especially, how will recess and playground time work? How and when can inter-school athletics be re-engaged?

The School Day: To spread students out, how will school schedules be designed? Will different grade levels attend on alternating days? Or will each day be divided somehow, with grades K-6 attending in the morning and 7-12 in the afternoon?

Getting There: How will those adjustments complicate school bus routes and schedules system-wide? What must parents know to support this?

Staffing: The educators will need separation, too, and some may need to work from home. This planning must be done building by building.

Distance Learning: This may seem a simple answer, but it isn’t. It’s easy for some adults to assume all homes have a computer and convenient broadband. A lot don’t.

An estimated 44 percent of homes in Middle Tennessee lack either computers, internet connections, or both. (Smartphones alone won’t suffice for some study packs.) Remote instruction means extra duty for everyone involved – teachers and their planning time, parents and their own jobs, and students with their differing needs.

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Across Tennessee, the status of 140-plus local school systems statewide appears uneven. Decisions are being made by some county executives and local legislative bodies to reduce school spending, not raise it.

This presents a perfect storm for schools and their administrators hoping to re-open, and it adds urgency to how those federal Covid-19 relief funds are best shared across governments. Schools should be at the top of the list. School leaders (and parents) should not be shy about saying so.

Communities at large can address these issues, but decision-makers ought to steer by four stars in their planning:

1.   Embrace the Complexity: Teachers know best what their students can do and where they need help. Communities should make the system work for every child, regardless of abilities. This is most clearly seen with struggles that families have experienced with distance learning. Every child counts.

2.   Think Outside the Box: Some districts across the U.S. are devising new types of scheduling, adjusting the traditional notion of the school day and week. Nontraditional facilities should be on the table – just as cities and states have recently turned hotels and convention centers into hospitals.

3.   Ask Others to Help: Principals and their superintendents cannot do this alone. Draw in the broader community, creativity and spirit of innovation. This ought to include your neighbors in business. Much can be learned – about technology, space utilization, even scheduling – from the expertise so common in the private sector.

4. Good Communication: Let parents and teachers know what’s going on through these summer months. Be open to feedback, then let folks know what has to change.

None of this is easy. But we should all keep in mind that the true job of schools is to make discerning citizens of our children and grandchildren. Even those adults who may think they aren’t connected to schools do indeed have a stake in their success. The well-being of a community requires this.

The success and the safety of those who attend them are important to us all.

© Keel Hunt, 2020

Time and the TVA

On Saturday morning my friend Kenneth Jost, in Washington, sent a note letting me know that S. David Freeman had died. He passed away last Tuesday, at 94, at his home in the DC suburb of Reston, Virginia.

David was an extraordinary, accomplished man. Born in Chattanooga, he lived a large life in a big world. He worked for the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations on issues of energy, public power, and conservation. President Carter put him on the TVA Board, in 1977, and named him its chairman. I knew David during his TVA chairman years (1978-81).

His career later took him across America. Ever a champion of public power, David became the top administrator of other large utilities. (TVA is the largest.) He ran the Lower Colorado River Authority, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, as well as the New York Power Authority. Before he retired David was also the chief energy adviser to former California Gov. Gray Davis.

In person, David could be engaging, even charming, and his advocacy especially of conservation and alternative energy sources was compelling and persuasive. But he certainly rocked the status quo, and especially in Knoxville; he is remembered there, in part, as the TVA chairman that even the TVA Caucus in Congress sometimes found hard to love.

Since 1933, the senators and congressmen from the Tennessee Valley have been the agency’s steadiest friends in Washington, though some of them have been critical of its debt load, nuclear program, its commitment to environmental quality, its rocky relationship with the states in its territory, and how it pays its top-most echelon of managers. During the early 1980s, David regarded Senator Howard Baker Jr. and Governor Lamar Alexander as TVA’s most influential and best friends.

That period was an in-between time for TVA, bringing notable transitions for the agency, especially in Knoxville and Chattanooga. David’s chairmanship came after the agency’s early years when it was broadly celebrated as an institutional savior of the South. Then came the expensive nuclear power program that promised to lessen pollution from coal, but its construction and regulatory costs drove electric rates higher, chilling some long-term alliances within the region.

Local power distributors, like the Knoxville Utilities Board, complained loud and long about the higher rates. Further, David’s questioning of TVA’s nuclear expansion was a new tone in the chairman’s office. That caused much grumbling among the pro-development leaders of the region, especially among the business elite of Knoxville.

David did push back against the nuclear program, at first, then he embraced it when President Reagan took office in January 1981. By then it was too late; not even Baker could save David’s chairmanship. Before that year ended, the new president had named a new TVA chairman, Charles H. (Chili) Dean, the folksy manager of the KUB. David would continue to serve on the TVA Board, but only until his original term expired in 1984.

TVA is now in its 87th year. Like other octogenarians, approaching 90, its age is showing.

The agency has grown long past the heady exuberance of its founding in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, when it introduced the cheap public hydropower that famously lifted the Tennessee valley out of the mud. It was long the darling of politicians and economic development boosters across this region.

Then came the years of environmental challenges that eroded much of the grassroots support TVA had enjoyed over its early and middle decades. (The legacy of that 2008 coal-ash disaster, at Kingston, continues to be in the news.) TVA has also faced, and largely withstood, recurring political challenges from Republican administrations over the years – and is facing another now from a very different kind of president.

In later years, David would be followed by other TVA chairmen with different gifts. I think, in particular, of Bill Sansom and of the late Marvin Runyon. These two brought not so much their political connections as their hard-nosed business savvy and management skills from their very different careers in the private sector.

Over nearly nine decades, TVA has aged into a different creature today, in both form and spirit, from its founding in the New Deal. But its rates for electric power are still lower than what most people pay around the U.S. Its jobs are still important, especially now. And so, still, is the work of its friends in Congress.

For further reading on David Freeman’s years at TVA, I recommend Erwin C. Hargrove’s Prisoners of Myth: The Leadership of the Tennessee Valley Authority, 1933-1990 (Princeton University Press, 1994). See also the obituary by Georgiana Vines in the Knoxville News Sentinel here: https://www.knoxnews.com/story/news/2020/05/13/s-davied-freeman-former-tva-chairman-dies-94/5184311002/

How Not to Reform Education

The vitally important issue of K-12 school funding in Tennessee has, for the past 16 months, been caught in a closed loop of limited discussion about private-school vouchers. This is what you get with one-party government at the state capitol.

Until this month, that is. When the third branch of government called foul. Chancellor Anne C. Martin, one of Tennessee’s newest judges, declared the program that Gov. Bill Lee calls “Education Savings Accounts” unconstitutional.

You can read my new Sunday column on this development (online now at Tennessean.com) here: https://www.tennessean.com/story/opinion/columnists/2020/05/15/tennessee-education-savings-account-governor-bill-lee-keel-hunt/3120962001/

Before this development, the voucher conversation had been pretty much restricted to two kinds of advocates: the people who love vouchers and the people who love them a lot. Almost nobody else could get heard - not teachers, not local school boards, and certainly not Democrats.

And then its handling in the House became scandalous, caught up in the Speaker Glen Casada sorriness. It was a process that still smells to this day; most Republican House members got their own districts excluded, so desperate were its sponsors for “Aye” votes - and only then did it pass, by only a one-vote margin. (Make that “former” Speaker Casada by the way. In August his own GOP caucus stripped him of his speakership, for reasons unrelated to education.)

Gov. Lee has vowed to appeal Martin’s ruling. Fair enough. But then he mentioned his administration meanwhile would certainly continue to stir up applications for the voucher program. Chancellor Martin stopped that, too.

What she has also done has been to remind us all of an important civics lesson: Three branches of government are better than a supermajority of two.

The World to Come

What will our lives be like when this pandemic passes?

When this scourge is finally over, how long will it really take for life to return to pre-Covid conditions, to the way we lived only four months ago? Will it ever? And, if not, what will our “new normal” be?

Please note: I am not referring here to the uneven performances of some of our governments to date. Some seem afraid of their own responsibilities, and these have lagged behind brave families doing their best to be smart and stay healthy. When public officials point fingers at each other on afternoon TV, that helps nobody. But you know all that, and we will deal with it on Election Day.

No, what I wonder about most now are not decisions at the White House but at your house. As our cities and towns re-open, how will your family and mine navigate a new terrain? Governments can only decide so much; for the rest we’re on our own. I don’t remember being here before.

The more we learn – considering the science, putting aside the politics – the more it feels we should anticipate altered lifestyles. Already we have seen what Covid-19 is revealing about our society, and some of its structural faults. Turns out, for instance, that homeless shelters, nursing homes and prisons are places where infection races remorselessly and fast. We see also how the virus and quarantines affect economic groups differently, and how this plays out unevenly among racial groups.

Of course, we can’t know all that the future will bring. But a clear-eyed look at how our daily lives used to work, sector by sector, suggests that “normal” may not return anytime soon. Many aspects of our old lives – from childcare to churches, from high-rise towers to assembly lines on factory floors – will present new complexities for keeping healthy.

Three examples:

Schools

Young parents, trying to manage through this disruption of schooling, have now seen what an uneven struggle “distance learning” can be. Many teachers have sent home good lessons and recommended reading, yes, but we know that not all homes have essential tools like computers, tablets, or internet service. Some school administrators and associated charities have provided devices and even arranged temporary Wi-Fi hot spots where possible, but lots of children in poorer quarters don’t have what others of us consider basic and take for granted.

For many thousands of Nashville families, the boastful “It City” was always a mirage. The poor never lived there. They dwell instead in the “Invisible City” where living isn’t easy. As my late friend, the Rev. Bill Barnes, used to remind me, “That’s where the most people do most of the living, and most of the dying.”

Can’t we finally figure out, in a time of great tech talent and generous philanthropy, how to help all the children?

Work

Some of us have been able to work “remotely” from home over these past few months, using our own computers and online access to do meetings. Now, as proper offices re-open, what aspects will have to change at our work sites compared to the old way – and for how long?

How will healthy offices be operated now? Will building managers, in order to provide for social distancing, need to announce new procedures for the use of elevators, restrooms, cafeterias? Will the workday change?

Restaurants

Think of your favorite place to eat out: If the intimate dining tables must now be newly separated, reducing their number and therefore that restaurant’s capacity and customer traffic, how will the management compensate for the lower revenue? Will prices unavoidably go up? That might work for some places, but for your favorite meat-and-three? Maybe not.

Will many restaurant patrons continue to choose take-out and dine at home? Will they have a bottle of wine at home? That will cut into the restaurant bar’s mark-up on liquor, part of how restaurants make it all work. Will fewer dine-in customers mean different staffing and jobs lost?

More questions than answers this weekend.

We all may wish for a quick return to the way things were. But on this weekend of scattered re-openings it already feels that may not be possible, maybe for a long while. Just as 9/11 changed forever how we travel, Covid-19 is likely to leave behind necessary shifts in how we live and work. For anyone to promise you otherwise is like thinking the coal mines of Kentucky and Ohio will magically re-open and all those mineworkers’ jobs will re-appear. Just because some politician promised they would doesn’t make it so.

Getting ready for this new world is timely thinking for us all now. It will take clear heads and stout hearts, smart cities and sound planning – and no time given over to wishing thinking.

A New Voice

Yesterday I caught up with my friend Holly McCall, whom I have known through several lives. Her latest is a new online newspaper, called the Tennessee Lookout.

The Lookout is the latest twist on an old trade in Tennessee – the trade being journalism, the twist being presentation on the internet only. It is not the first news outlet to live exclusively online and with a non-for-profit business model – the Daily Memphian was that – but the Lookout is the newest. It began “publication” just this week, with a standard mix of news and opinion.

The staff is small but superb. Anita Wadhwani and Nate Rau established their chops at The Tennessean, where they were award-winning reporters. A third Lookout staffer is Dulce Torres, whose by-line has appeared in the Nashville Scene (and at MTSU she was named the John Seigenthaler Outstanding Graduate in Print Journalism). McCall is the editor-in-chief.

Backing this Nashville venture is the States Newsroom organization, based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. (The Lookout is their 16th property.) On its website, States Newsroom identifies itself as “a national 501(c)(3) nonprofit.”

McCall’s most recent online venture in Nashville was one she co-founded with Justin Kanew, called the Tennessee Holler. The Holler is straight-up partisan Democrat in its running commentary on Tennessee’s ruling GOP supermajority. (McCall and Kanew parted company in December.) Most recently, McCall was one of Mike Bloomberg’s presidential campaign organizers in Tennessee.

In the States Newsroom universe, editors are a variation of “progressive” – call them left-leaning – but McCall promises news coverage that will be balanced. She promises a new voice and fresh coverage of Tennessee’s state and local governments and their policy choices.

“We’re going to cover a lot of state news that doesn’t get covered the way it should be, and we’ll share with local papers,” she told me. “The States News model is more what I had in mind. I really wanted to get into policy. I wanted to educate people to what’s going on and how it affects them. I am a Democrat but I don’t think that will change anybody’s mind.”

There will be no ads and no paywalls on the Lookout site. Its revenues comes from States News. McCall says she does not know who their donors are. She said she’s confident there’s no influence or pressure on coverage from the parent organization or donors.

My own take is that there’s room in Tennessee for more news coverage, especially at our state capitol, and for good analysis of policy choices.

The Lookout is welcome – to show us what they can do.

'Four Dead in Ohio'

It was 50 years ago today that shots from National Guard rifles rang out in Ohio. When the gunsmoke cleared, four students lay dead at Kent State University.

I was a student then myself, though on a more placid Tennessee campus far away from the scene of chaos that noon in Ohio, but I clearly remember the feelings of shock, revulsion and anger at the news reports. How could this have happened? Had all the antiwar emotions of the Vietnam war – dividing Americans by generation, class, politics, and race – come to this murderous extremity in our nation?

Yes, it had.

“Four Dead in Ohio” were the words in headlines that night and for days long after. The words also became the angry refrain of Crosby, Stills Nash & Young’s iconic “Ohio.” 

The punishing, spirit-crushing losses in Vietnam would stagger on for five more years, but four deaths at Kent State put a period to any airs of moral ascendancy the Nixon administration could claim about the doomed war.

Soon, the Pentagon Papers would make crystal clear how our own government, over several administrations, had been lying in their official promises of victory in Vietnam. Further unraveling would come with Watergate two years later, but also the voting age would soon be lowered from 21 to 18, opening participation in the government to younger voices.

Something died that day in our country’s soul. But something of a new America, from the ashes of a rending calamity, was also being born.

Jimmy Davy’s Generation

In my own ten years of toil at The Tennessean newspaper - working nights and weekends through my college years and after - the one job I never got to do was sportswriter.

There were probably lots of good reasons for this gap in my journalism resume, but one of them must have been this: In our Hall of Fame sports department down on the second floor, there was simply no room for ordinary.

In that day the Tennessean sports department was a riot of large personalities: John Bibb, F.M. Williams, Jimmy Davy, Jimmy Holt, Larry Woody, Wendell Rawls (before he moved to the newsroom). Bibb was the sports editor, forever. Jimmy Davy was technically his No. 2 – but he was second to nobody in the ways that counted most.

At the college level Jimmy covered Vanderbilt and Lipscomb sports with a magnifying glass, but I remember him most for his long and faithful attention to high school athletics across the city.

He knew the Nashville Interscholastic League like the back of his hand – its coaches and players, its important match-ups on Friday nights, its standings on Saturday mornings. When we read Jimmy Davy, we knew it too. Other fine writers would follow him – Mike Organ, Mo Patton – but I’m confident they would tip a hat today to Jimmy Davy. He set the standard.

In 2014, I wrote a column about the awful fire that destroyed Hillsboro High School on Halloween night, 1952. I wrote it because, oddly enough, it turned out to be a tale of Nashville sportsmanship at the highest level. Hillsboro had lost everything, down to the uniforms in the football locker room, and the next night they were facing rival MBA. You can find the piece here: https://www.tennessean.com/story/opinion/columnists/2014/09/21/remembering-night-sportsmanship/15964545/

To do my research, the first authority I phoned was Davy. He had covered prep sports in the 1950s. Other old-timers helped me with the story – Joe Pat Breen, Billy Lynch, Bill Cochran, David Herbert, Hale Harris – but calling Jimmy was like turning on a time machine. He quickly recalled the city’s football powers of 1952 and the meaning of their legendary rivalries.

Newspaper people can be famous for their singular characters and their rough-and-tumble lives, but Jimmy Davy was also a gentleman. He was always polite and helpful to me, and each person who knew him will tell you that to this day.

There is much to lament about our current day, with sadness and a sore sense of loss on so many levels. But the deepest of these to me is how we are losing Jimmy Davy’s generation, and we are all the poorer for it.