Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom with Bill Ayers

This is our last Episode for 2022—we look forward to being back in mid-January. For this Special Episode, we’re joined in conversation with the legendary activist and organizer Helen Shiller at the 57th Street Bookstore in Hyde Park, Chicago. In her new autobiography, Daring to Struggle, Daring to Win, Shiller captures a sense of what it means to engage in decades of justice work from anti-war and international solidarity to anti-racist organizing in Uptown, from the fight for affordable housing and against police violence to a 24-year career as an elected city councilor. With Justice and Freedom on our minds, Helen Shiller exemplifies the potential of an insider/outsider approach to social change. We wish you and your Beloveds a year of joy, justice, peace and love. 

Authentic learning requires free thought—curiosity, inquiry, imagination, initiative, problem-posing, question-asking. Learning is undermined when students are inspected, spied upon, regulated, appraised, censured, measured, registered, counted, admonished, checked off, prevented, and sermonized. In this episode, we visit a unique college commencement ceremony—filled with joy and pain—and explore with the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project and University Without Walls what it means to stay all the way human inside an institution built on dehumanization, and to face fully the contradiction of teaching for freedom in spaces that demand passivity and obedience.

An authentic education rests on the twin pillars of enlightenment and liberation—it’s about opening doors, opening minds, and opening possibilities; the principal message to students is straight forward: you can explore, interrogate, and understand your world, and, working together, you can change it. Schooling is too often about judging and sorting students into a hierarchy of winners and losers. We explore this fundamental contradiction with the acclaimed activist and teacher Brian Jones, the Director of the New York Public Library’s Center for Educators and Schools, and author of The Tuskegee Student Uprising: A History.

We are a few days away from election day across the country and many of us here in Chicago are looking at our mail-in or early ballots, and are overwhelmed with the incredible number of offices, ballot measures, and judges about whom we are expected to make informed decisions.So who are all these people on the ballot, and does it even matter who we vote for anymore? Let’s talk about it!

Americans want to think of ourselves as peace-loving people, but the facts contradict the myth: US military bases stretch around the globe; nuclear weapons poised to strike from flying fortresses circle the earth; the US is the top global arms dealer as well as Number One in the world in terms of military spending; and we live in a permanent war economy with the largest corporate welfare program in world history—hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars flowing into private companies, almost half going to no-bid contracts with Halliburton, Lockheed Martin, and Northrup Grumman. The war in Ukraine has been a boon to war-mongers and war-profiteers everywhere, and it could have been avoided. We’re joined in conversation with Medea Benjamin, a leading antiwar activist, and author of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict. BONUS!Stay tuned, because we will shortly drop a brief, bonus episode this week — a voting guide of sorts, and a conversation with Maya Dukmasova and Charles Preston of Injustice Watch, a different kind of newsroom with a focus on serious, sustained inquiry, and journalism as an educational project—you know, the Fourth (or Fifth) Estate.

We want our children to face the world fearlessly, but we also want them to be careful. We want them to embrace all the joy and ecstasy life has to offer them, and also to be aware of the unnecessary suffering human beings endure. We want our children to know the truth, and we want to protect them from the horrors. We talk about all of this and more with Anastasia Higginbotham, author, artist, and activist who created the Ordinary Terrible Things children’s book series. Higginbotham collages her books by hand, and she helps us make meaning out of whatever broken, ragged, unraveling life circumstances we face.

We’re joined in conversation with Dave Zirin, the sports editor for the Nation magazine and the creator of the blog, the Edge of Sports. Dave is a ground-breaking sportswriter who brings radical politics, deep critical analysis, and side-splitting humor to a field sorely lacking all three qualities. The author or co-author of a dozen books, including What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States; Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics, and Promise of Sports, and A People’s History of Sports in the United States, Dave is also a long-distance runner in the ongoing fight for more democracy, more justice, more freedom.

Love and imagination, potentially the most powerful weapons in the arsenal of the oppressed, the marginalized, and the exploited, are frequently unappreciated, too often underutilized—and yet still within reach and entirely available.  Robin D.G. Kelley foregrounds love, imagination, and generosity in all of his work, including the groundbreaking Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, an original history of Black radicalism and a powerful vision of a revolutionary future. Kelley describes himself as a "Marxist surrealist feminist who is not just anti something, but pro-emancipation, pro-liberation.” We met up with Robin Kelley recently at the Socialism 2022 conference in Chicago where we released our radical imaginations in a generative and wide-ranging conversation.

What history do you stand on? What future do you stand for? Robert Shetterly’s dazzling series of portraits—“Americans Who Tell the Truth”—cuts through the cotton wool that entangles us, shakes us awake from the deep American sleep of denial, and invites us to move beyond the United States of Amnesia. Here are the peace-makers and the freedom fighters, the dissidents and dissenters, the loving rebels and the justice-seeking radicals—a gathering of citizens from a country that does not yet exist. These are our people, this is a powerful legacy we can all hope to build on. Robert Shetterly joins us to discuss the brilliant work and steady activism of Americans Who Tell the Truth.

More than a destination, freedom is a constant struggle, a verb as well as a noun. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous assertion that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice may be true, but only if, as he demonstrated with his entire being, we organize and fight to make it so. We’re honored to be joined in conversation with Heather Booth, a Civil Rights pioneer, peace and justice activist, feminist icon, and legendary community organizer. She was an early leader of Students for a Democratic Society, participated in Freedom Summer in Mississippi in 1964, and was one of the founders of the pioneering clandestine abortion network, the Janes. We talk about Organizing 101, what it takes to commit to the Freedom Struggle for the long haul, and why our organizing has to be built on a moral vision—“with love at the center.”