interviews
When Voting Fails
by Dr. Martha Jones
July 9, 2020
This interview with Dr. Martha Jones, a Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Hi! I’m curious to know what’s on your mind right now.
Dr. Martha Jones | I live in Baltimore, Maryland. It's where I teach and where I live. When the spring 2020 protests began, for a moment my city was of interest to the national media. As uprising began to break out in other places across the country, the country recalled that we had had a major uprising here in 2015 after the killing of Freddie Gray. And still, in 2020 national gaze quickly turned away when Baltimore didn't comport, somehow, with expectations. The demonstrations here didn't look like Minneapolis. They didn't look like Louisville. They didn't look like LA or New York.
Media is essential to amplifying and projecting the voices of the disenfranchised. At the same time, the media is moved by the sensational.
There is something untenable for me about the view that we must rise to the sensational in order to be heard.
It's not just that we have to raise our voices. We have to raise them, and that spectacle must be sensational before journalists will deeply partner and become embedded in the scene.
What did Baltimore teach itself in the time between Freddie Gray in 2015 and George Floyd in 2020?
It's important to say I didn't live here in 2015, so I'm learning in real-time about my city.
The city had not only its own sense of outrage but its own vision for how to be. This comes in part from the roles played by seasoned community activists, folks who were part of the 2015 uprising who are still here and have remained deeply committed. In 2020, they have helped to shape an extraordinary series of demonstrations here in Baltimore.
In Baltimore, we were also getting ready to elect a new mayor in June, though with a limited capacity to get to the polls. Maryland had committed to mail-in voting without much debate or objection. But there were troubles with getting the ballots into people's hands and getting the right ballots into people's hands, so in-person polling places had to be opened up. People, in the midst of protests, in the midst of a pandemic, showed up here in Baltimore to cast their ballots. That evidenced another side of the civic culture here. People were tuned in to the fact that there was an election, and people came out for that.
Participating in democracy need not be an either-or proposition. We can simultaneously be in the streets, engaged in direct protest, a democratic tradition in this country, and we can show up to the polls.
That is what I saw happening in Baltimore, and it happened in the midst of a pandemic that encouraged us to stay home and to do nothing at all. Of course, that is complicated by important public health concerns. But I think an insistence that democracy is a participatory culture and not simply a set of principles or a structure, is an important part of what I play out here in real-time.
How does civil unrest and protest lend itself to more civic participation?
The story of the 1960s is instructive for me. It was simultaneously the scene of voting rights and the scene of uprisings. The two facets of that time may not often be told together. But they were not wholly antithetical to one another at all. Immediately in the wake of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the number of African American voters grew importantly and significantly. It is that context that we move into an era of uprisings in cities like Detroit and Los Angeles and New York. Part of what can be learned by voting, are the limits of the ballot. Yes, political power is embodied in casting a ballot and in electing a candidate. At the same time, harnessing political power requires more than showing up at the polls. Demonstrations are another way of being heard and influencing law and policy. I am an historian of Black politics in 19th century Baltimore, which may seem like a very long time ago. Still, that history includes important lessons in how people created their own power in an era, time, and place when they could not vote at all.
I'm interested in what we do when voting fails us, which it almost certainly will.
On this, I draw from the lessons of African American women in history. African American women have been engaged with politics for a long time, and for most of that time, they could not vote. They organized, they lobbied, they used men as surrogates. And when by a state constitution, or the 19th Amendment, or the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they received legally sanctioned political power, they were ready. When African American women got the vote, they were ready to use it as fully formed political actors because they had been constructing their own power for a very long time.
I want to talk more about the prominence of Black women through the history of protest and civil unrest in America.
One of the moments most well known to people during the civil rights movement is the march in Selma, Alabama. Among the best remembered of those marchers, is a young man who is today among our most venerated members of Congress, John Lewis. Lewis was among the scores who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in the name of winning voting rights, only to be met with brutal police violence.
Behind the scenes was a Black woman named Diane Nash. She cut her political teeth organizing sit-ins in Nashville, Tennessee as a student at Fisk University. She played a critical role in the work of the Freedom Rides in 1961 by sending young people from Tennessee further South to replenish the ranks of the Riders after many had been brutally attacked. It was Diane Nash who, long before Martin King and the SCLC assented to the strategy, came to Selma to wage a voting rights campaign.
Nash was an organizer, planner, and orchestrator, but we don’t see her photo as folks make that fateful march across the bridge. In those long moments, she was back in Selma making sure that there would be medics available when people are brutalized. To me, this is an example of a woman who taught us how leadership takes many forms. She taught that political leadership must embrace many forms of action. Nash never took the stage as a charismatic, upfront character. Still, she was someone who, when we look closely at the scenes in Selma, becomes critical to that story.
Contrast Nash with someone like Mississippi’s Fannie Lou Hamer. The two were peers but worked very differently. Hamer not only understood, she deliberately looked to exploit the cameras to propel her image, and her message, and project efforts to win voting rights in her home state and transform Democratic Party politics nationally. The two women worked by way of different philosophies and differing styles. They adopted divergent tactics even. Taking the work of Nash and Hamer as two parts of a whole during the Modern Civil Rights Movement helps us think in expansive ways about how political power can be won and how it can be wielded.
Looking back is one style more effective than the other?
It's difficult to say, because they are parts of a whole. The thing that knits them together, in some sense, is violence. Nash is deeply committed to nonviolent direct action, the sit-in, the march – but she still sees violence as essential. There's an often-quoted moment when she speaks with federal officials from Washington who tell her to desist from sending young people to join the freedom riders: “You know, we understand that we are walking into a brutal scene. The young people had made their wills the night before they left.” Hamer also knew violence and had a defining moment early in her career when she was stopped, detained, jailed, brutally beaten and sexually assaulted by police after attempting to register to vote.
The women I write about are all, each in their own way, wrestling with the violence that is woven into American politics. They know that violence will be directed unashamedly at their very bodies.
That core insight, one that sits at the foundation of Black women’s political consciousness, extends back to confrontations between enslaved women and their enslavers. In our own moment, the tragic killing of Breonna Taylor is the latest example of how Black women's bodies remain the targets of a brutal politics of violence. This thread runs through Black women's political philosophy and their practice, across time.
African American women have always been plagued by a specific form of violence: sexual violence. So many of the Black woman activists who I write about eventually explain their confrontations with either sexual violence or the threat of sexual violence. This not only informs their tactics, but sets the goals for political power must accomplish. When Tarana Burke gave us the Me Too movement in the 21st century, she was echoing a long-standing critique. Black women aim to use their power to end the scourge of sexual violence, a story that has an origin in the history of slavery but doesn't end with emancipation. It continues until this day.
Thank you for your time, I appreciate having this conversation.
One of the dangers of a conversation like this is to leave the impression either that nothing changes or nothing can change. I struggle with that. History is a tough endeavor in that regard. It is possible to look across two centuries and recognize what hasn't changed.
And still, I am inspired. Black women have been the conscience of this nation since its inception. They have studied the lay of the land. They have thought very hard about our founding ideals. They have also set the bar when it comes to what liberty, equality, and dignity mean. They have shared their ideas, pointing us where the bar is. Listen and Black women will remind you of the ideals that we all should aspire to, individually and collectively. The women I write about say no racism, and no sexism. Period. They say that in 1820 and have waited ever since for us to catch up as a nation. I've watched Breonna Taylor's mother, Tamika Palmer, speak, and I think I recognize something familiar in that act. She is an African American woman, representing her deceased daughter, and at the same time speaking to all of us about the violence which, as a nation, we must not, cannot, and should not allow.
There is nothing enviable about this position in body politic. And it's not enough. Still, voices that speak fundamental truths, that hold up indelible principles, that insist upon equality and dignity for all are absolutely essential. Someone has to set the bar high in a nation that has been built upon countless indignities and injustices.
Someone has to remind us that ideals animate this country, not interests, convenience, or pragmatism.
Someone has to do that. Black women took up that mantle in the earliest days of this republic and they continue to bear that burden even today, in the 21st century.
interviews
In Conversation with LANDING STUDIO, Part 2
by LANDING STUDIO
May 12, 2018
This interview with Marie Law Adams and Dan Adams, the founding principals of LANDING STUDIO, was conducted and condensed by frank news. This is part two of an ongoing conversation between frank and LANDING STUDIO.
I heard you guys just won an award at APA.
MARIE: Yes, that’s our first recognition by a planning group.
You’re in the planning department at MIT, Dan directs the architecture department at Northeastern, your firm is winning planning awards. What does the tension mean to you? What does it mean to be in the middle of it?
MARIE: It's exactly what has defined our practice. Everything we're working on is at a moment of disconnect between something happening on the ground and something in policy.
We appreciate the pressures of environmental policy on infrastructure to push new ways of thinking about how these sites work.
I think that failure happens when the policy appears as a hurdle to industries. They hold off on improvements for as long as possible.
What the moment of departure for you in architecture school? When did you realize that your interest was beyond buildings?
MARIE: We both come from architecture programs that discouraged us from making buildings. It was more of a design-focused education. I think we took that to heart and never really invested in thinking much about buildings. Rather, what are bigger pictures that can be solved or addressed through design in some way.
DAN: I think it was revelatory to start our practice with this Salt Pile. To see a landscape that operates at one scale. But then witness this constant state of kinetics to realize that the landscape is overtly connected to the rest of the world.
Who is designing those urban relationships? What are the mediums through which to do it?
DAN: We always run into this scenario. We talk about our work and people reference projects like the High Line that New York. It's a very post-industrial. I think often that's where people see the role of designers: how to literally convert former industrial operations into a domesticated program for the city, for recreation. Rather than thinking about situating their work within the design of industrial operations themselves.
MARIE: A highway or bridge is filled with design constraints. They have different types of opportunities around them. Our design evolved as soon as we talked to the bridge inspectors. We understood how to support what they do but also allow public access to the community.
How do you define the community?
DAN: the definition of community is a difficult question on a lot of these sites. I think a lot of times there is some default conception that the community is the people who live within a specific proximity.
MARIE: Which it is…
DAN: It certainly is. But more and more we're coming to understand that these things are part of a broader, regional, and in fact global community, particularly when you're talking at the scale of infrastructure and industrial systems.
When you put it at the scale of the environment, a decision made in Boston must keep in mind the people in perhaps Yemen, where the natural gas is actually produced before it gets here.
MARIE: I think that comes into play through policy. The question becomes, how does that process work out on the ground? The communities that we do have access to are super local. But the policy advocates for the more regional impacts of these spaces. We try to negotiate those interests in the project.
How did the light installation change attention to the area from the community?
MARIE: We wanted the installation to start a conversation, and then see what happens. It led to some strange —
DAN: Observations…
MARIE: Mainly through newspaper articles. Local newspaper articles would poke fun at the project. And criticize the industry for trying to communicate back to the community.
DAN: But it also unveiled certain things. They interviewed people in the city. Different people had different responses, they would say things like “Oh I think this is great because I don't care about the lighting in this salt pile, but it brings more light onto the street. The street’s normally creepy and dark and it kind of helps address that issue.”
MARIE: Or “oh can we propose here?”
DAN: That's the weird irony. People used it as a platform to criticize the industry. And yet in the same article someone asked if they could propose on the salt pile. It immediately shows the conflicted nature of these things. Why people feel the way they feel.
This question of being part of a community, one way to do that is to hold meetings where people come and talk.
MARIE: And we do that.
DAN: Another type is to to actually work with people who are changing the light fixtures on the highway. We have spent nights talking with them about their job and what they do, and by getting to know them we learn about issues in the area.
MARIE: That's how we started our work with the MASS DOT [Department of Transportation]. They asked us to do a two week, temporary light installation under the Southeast Expressway in Boston. We ended up doing it for two years. Every two weeks to a month we'd go out there at night for six hours or so, changing the lights. We got to be intimately familiar with the light and the nightlife of the space. We saw it change dramatically in the few years that we were there.
DAN: That's a funny thing in the design world. How removed people are from the things they design. Our approach is to try and be engaged with the communities we're designing for.
MARIE: It’s challenging. It does take a lot of time to do that. The Charlesgate project is the first that was initiated from a community group. It feels like a different context for us because they've already got their own organizational structure around the place. They're doing tours and trying to bring people into the site. In some ways there is less burden on us to stir up activity, as we did in other projects. The more abandoned, industrial or infrastructural ones.
Can you talk about the dinosaurs?
MARIE: The dinosaurs are part of the Underground at Ink Block Project. The highway changes form—
DAN: We call one side the Fray. Like a fraying rope. All the strands of the highway spread apart. Water and light get down under the highway, and the area has no surface roads. It’s important to point out. People look at a highway and just call it a highway. But there are radically different architectures. The other side is what we call the Bundle, where all of the ramps compress into a really tight strand, about 15 lanes wide. It’s a 200-foot wide viaduct. There is no water or light. It has surface roads, so huge amounts of sound get trapped. Whereas in in the Fray, no sound traps. It emanates into the atmosphere.
Via Landing Studio. Boston, MA | 2016
The dinosaurs are an effort to make the experience of passing through that cave more pleasant. Essentially through lighting and art installation. But it is not a space to encourage people to spend time in. It's not really a pleasant environment.
But it is a route.
DAN: It's a route that's heavily travelled. The dinosaurs are meant to make passage less threatening. The other parts of the landscape address ecosystem performance and recreation. They encourage people to spend time. The design differences come from physical differences in the infrastructure itself.
Via Landing Studio. Boston, MA | 2016
Olmsted was trying to mask these ecosystem operations. Maybe now we’re more open to seeing how things work. How do you deal with people who call it ugly?
MARIE: We've been doing a lot of work with the Emerald Necklace Conservancy. The president, who's a planner, is frustrated by the fact that many Bostonians don't know that the Emerald Necklace is an infrastructural system. It was designed to manage floodwater and urbanization at a time when Boston grew really quickly. It's an entirely constructed landscape but it appears to be natural and pastoral. That English, picturesque imagery. It appears as if it was always there. Whereas other, more infrastructural environments like the highways are so clearly built by humans.
Image via LANDING STUDIO. Charlesgate. Boston, MA | 2017-Present
I think it became pretty obvious early on working with salt piles. You can't try to compete with that scale, or make things go away, or mitigate their impact. You have to just work with what's there.
DAN: Over the last 10 years it has become a weird kind of marketing. Typical condominium developments now embrace an edgy, industrial aesthetic. It makes people more apt to accept actual infrastructure and industrial systems in their city. It is challenging. On a lot of our park projects, for example, we want to use habitat-rich, native plants. But people say oh it looks weedy and demand that it gets mowed down, which eliminates the habitat. You realize so much of it is about perception of things.
MARIE: I find in the communities we work with that the perception of natural-looking landscapes is more controversial than the industrial relics themselves.
DAN: Joan Iverson Nassauer wrote a great piece called Messy Ecosystems, Orderly Frames. It is about how in cities, we try to hide from ourselves the things we don't like about ourselves. That operates on so many scales. It means that the oil refinery goes far away. Sewage goes down into pipes where you can't see it. We mow the plants so that they seem controlled and orderly. We sterilize things with toxic chemicals. All so that we don't have to confront the parts of ourselves we don't like. Some of it is probably a strange fiction we've inherited over time, through market and aesthetic regimes that we think are preferable now.
We now know how much of those are premised on really bad environmental concepts, global inequity and injustice. Even toxic chemicals to make things sterilized or to make neon-green lawns. It’s the same way we have to work against 100 years of problematic infrastructure development.
MARIE: I think the communication of intent is really important in a landscape that doesn't appear manicured.
Use your design education to change the narrative so that people think this is what they want.
DAN: At I-93 for example, we diverted the highway’s train leaders into the landscape. At the end of the train leaders there are rocky deposits that catch all of the cigarette butts, styrofoam, leaves, grit, and everything else nasty that flows off of highways. So you now have to see all of those things when you go there. But it also makes maintenance very easy. You just rake it out and put in a trash bag. It used to just go into the ocean, and that was great, right? Because the tide comes in every six hours and takes that stuff away. You can pretend it no longer exists because it's just gone.
MARIE: There does have to be a shift in what you want to see in public, open space in order to do this.
There's clearly a design intention to collecting all this junk in one place. Is it also intentional to have people see it?
MARIE: I don't think that our design team knew that that was going to happen, and we didn't really know either. It was something that we started observing once the project was under construction. All of a sudden we were like, ok this is actually interesting, that it becomes legible in the landscape.
DAN: Planning is flawed with concepts of isolation. This is where planning sort of undermines the value of design. As designers we believe you can design solutions to complicated things.
MARIE: That friction is really important though.
DAN: Planning aims to separate frictions. Like, oh it's a problem to have a refinery next to a community or an elementary school.
And the truth is, yes, it is. Either you eliminate that friction or redesign it. But the idea that those frictions somehow go away, just by keeping those places physically isolated, is a problematic environmental philosophy.
MARIE: You're starting this issue with Thomas Campanella’s essay and the fear of big projects. think today we're dealing with the legacy of those big projects, but can only do small projects to react to them.
In Boston, stormwater that comes into the city goes through a whole network of green infrastructure projects. You have to just operate in the margins.
DAN: There’s no one thing that could fix it all. Which is funny with something like the LA River. It’s a bit of a sick irony that in a city that is deprived of water, the fundamental principle managing water is to get it out of the city. And in that process, contaminate and kill any habitat that could be provided by the water. That's one of the strange philosophies of the last 100 years.
This is not totally surprisingly in the petroleum era: the idea that nature and cities are antithetical. We became enemies with natural systems and the goal was to flush them from the city, put them in the ocean. Yet for thousands of years natural processes are what fueled cities. This is what I mean by a radically wrong philosophy.
The industrial revolution and the era of petroleum was fundamentally about that. A source of energy more powerful than gravity, more powerful than the wind, that could let us do things no longer contingent on natural processes. And then that became the philosophy of cities. That we don’t have to work with these systems— we could actually work in spite of them. We are seeing the consequences of that now.