Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom with Bill Ayers

Join me for a classic American road trip with the legendary photographer, photo-journalist, writer, and film-maker Danny Lyon. Danny left the University of Chicago in the 1960s and headed South to join the great Civil Rights Movement, where he became the official photographer of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. We will visit the Black Freedom Movement together, but we will also revisit his groundbreaking documentary photographs of prison life in Texas, the gripping story of a friend of his who was also one of America’s Ten Most Wanted fugitives, and his involvement with the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club, which he documented in The Bikeriders (1968), a collection of black and white photographs with accompanying interviews that was released the year before the classic “Easy Rider.” That work of photojournalism is the inspiration for Jeff Nichols’ contemporary film of the same name. His memoir, This is My Life I’m Talking About, was just released. Danny Lyon’s website is bleakbeauty.com where you can read his blog, and view his films for free on Vimeo.

Patriotism can never express a common human aspiration nor a universal moral code—if everyone on earth claimed to be a fierce and focused patriot today, 20 % of the world’s people would be Chinese patriots, and only 4.4 % patriotic Americans. Patriotism promises a steady anchor, but it is, in reality, entirely unstable. We note that every human being is indigenous to planet Earth, and that there is, therefore, no such thing as a foreigner. We might work, then, to replace national patriotism with human solidarity—sin fronteras—in the spirit of Chicago’s poet laureate Gwendolyn Brooks: “We are each other’s harvest: / we are each other’s / business: / we are each other’s / magnitude and bond.”We’re excited to be joined in discussion with two influential Chicago artist/activists Aaron Hughes and Amber Ginsburg,  authors and co-editors of two extraordinary books, Remaking the Exceptional which highlights the connections between policing in Chicago and human rights violations abroad, and Invitation to Tea which compiles 48 tea recipes, stories, and traditions, one for each of the countries that have had citizens held at the US military prison in Guantánamo. Amber and Aaron will be at our home base, Pilsen Community Books, at 7:00 pm on June 26, which is International Day in Support of Torture Survivors, and we hope you’ll come out that night and build community with us.

This centennial episode of Under the Tree features an enlightening conversation with Stanley Howard, the legendary jailhouse lawyer and founder of the Death Row 10, a group of African American men on Illinois' death row who organized a powerful campaign from their prison cells to save their lives and to spark a new abolitionist movement decades ago. The Death Row Ten and their mothers linked up with courageous activists, intrepid lawyers, relentless journalists, and a growing wave of social protest against police violence to demand justice in their cases, and an end to the barbaric practice of capital punishment. Stanley Howard is an organizer/activist, a fighter, and the author of Tortured by Blue: The Chicago Police Torture Story.

Every aspect of life in our society is lived on the hard-edge of racial hierarchy and class division—and the American way of birth is no exception. Black maternal mortality is 69.9 per 100,000  live births, nearly 3 times the rate of white women—and that’s only part of the story. We’re delighted to be meeting up at Pilsen Community Books with my magnificent sister-in-law, Jennifer Dohrn—a legendary midwife in New York, and a professor and Assistant Dean of the Office of Global Initiatives at Columbia University School of Nursing—for a discussion focused on her new book Mothers, Midwives and Reimagining Birthing in the Bronx. Jennifer initiated the first freestanding maternity center in an inner-city in the US, and she has been extensively involved in women’s health issues both here and internationally, notably in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Global South. Her book is an oral history of her ground-breaking center, as well as a deep dive into the racialized nature of maternal health care and a rousing cry for change.

Precarious times, phenomenal times. As protests for peace and freedom explode across the country and around the world, we’re searching for and finding democracy in the streets and in the campus encampments, in prison study groups and collectives of artists and writers. We’re honored tonight to be meeting up at our beloved Pilsen Community Books with Zeke Caligiuri, co-editor with a unique collective of incarcerated writers, for a discussion of their dazzling collection, American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion. While the class of people whose lives lack stability and security, and are increasingly dominated by uncertainty about our jobs and our incomes, our housing and our safety—about our futures—grows steadily and exponentially, it’s particularly illuminating to explore this political moment with the unseen and the unheard, the excluded and the marginalized, those deemed by power the leastwise of the land.

You may already know that 15 US governors recently  rejected federal funds available for families who qualify for free school lunches that would provide $120 per child per month through the summer. If you forgot, I get it—your cruelty/stupidity quotient may have reached capacity, and your brain simply couldn’t accommodate one more item. We’re joined in conversation with Mark Nowak, an innovative and influential political poet, author of Social Poetics and Coal Mountain Elementary.  His latest book, Again, takes its title from the last word in MAGA, and works its way through the four seasons, naming this political moment and urgently asking us to consider what the known demands of us now.

Prison and police abolitionists, rebels and radicals, peace activists and environmental warriors, freedom fighters and dissidents, political prisoners of every type—the voices of dissent and defiance—are gathered together in a dazzling collection from AK Press called Rattling the Cages: Oral Histories of North American Political Prisoners. Join us as we discuss the meaning of “political prisoners” with Eric King and Josh Davidson, and explore the challenges ahead for those of us fighting for a world without prisons.

As the savagery in Gaza continues unabated, we’re deeply honored to be joined from Jerusalem by the brilliant writer Nathan Thrall for a conversation about his latest book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy. Here in one family facing one heartbreaking moment, we experience Israeli apartheid up-close and personal—its everyday humiliations and its banal cruelty, its dehumanizing impact on victims and perpetrators alike.

For voters in Chicago it’s been a strenuous non-stop election cycle for the last couple of years. We're all tired and burned out – but as always, we must carry on! So as we head into the last weekend before the election, we offer up this incentive to get those among us motivated and informed about why this election, while not changing the world - does still matter.In conversation with us are our old friends Stephanie Skora of the "Girl, I Guess" progressive voter guide and Charles Preston of Injustice Watch. We discuss the drive to write-in Gaza at the top of the ballot, the Bring Chicago Home initiative and we're reminded of the outsized power of the judiciary on our daily lives and why we need to be an informed voter when filling out the ballot in those races. If you’ve already voted, be sure to share this episode with those in your lives who still need a little push to the polls! And we remember voting is just one tool at our disposal, after we leave the voting booth, we still head out to the protests, to our mutual aid programs, our reading groups, or whatever it is that helps us to continue building power in our communities.

Chicagoland area is home to more Palestinians than anywhere else in the U.S., with over 18,000 living in Cook County alone. The Palestinian community has led powerful protests that have led to Chicago becoming the largest city in the country to endorse a ceasefire resolution. It is in the midst of this atmosphere that we gathered for an urgent exchange with Rashid Khalidi, the preeminent historian of the Palestinian national struggle, and the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University in conversation with activists Ricardo Gamboa of the Hoodoisie and Latinxs for Palestine, and Bill Ayers from Under the Tree. The event served to not only raise awareness but to also raise funds for Palestine Legal. The energy was fierce, the mood determined, the spirit razor-sharp. We left that gathering a little wiser, more resolute, and fixed on turning our anger into action and our dreams of a world at peace into reality.