Part Two: An Idea Takes Shape
This section traces the develop of the idea of Lamplight to two road trips in 2017.
The Long Haul
Daniel Waid Marshall
Daniel is in the Core Working Group at Lamplight. To the right, he describes the importance of Myles Horton's book The Long Haul to his teaching and the project.
Anyone who has seen me get excited about a book knows that I make everyone around me feel like they are reading it too. It was that way with Myles Horton’s autobiography The Long Haul on the road trip. Every other page I would insist that everyone stop what they were doing to hear what Myles had to say next (by that point, we were all on a first name basis with him). The Long Haul radically shifted the way I had been thinking about teaching and learning.
The view from Highlander today, reminiscent of the book.
I had always thought that the exciting part of teaching was the ideas. I wanted to share that moment of understanding with the kids — specifically, I wanted them to have all of the same moments of understanding that I once had. Basically, I wanted them to become little versions of me. While reading The Long Haul, things kind of flipped.
Myles insisted on people's right to come to their own understandings. He believed in everyone's innate ability to figure out the solutions to their problems; the job of the teacher is most of all to create an environment where people can come together and feel comfortable enough to struggle through their differences toward a common, workable solution. I began to realize that teaching wasn't about making up fake problems with ready-made answers, but about joining with students to come up with real, practical solutions to the real problems they and their communities are facing. The point of teaching was actually to set up a place where people could develop the capacity to not only have ideas, but to put those ideas into practice, to make them a real part of the world.
The Global South and the American South
Bassem Elbendary
"Bendary" was one of the four teachers on the first road trip that led to the idea for Lamplight. To the right, he describes his impressions of the South as an Egyptian.
I remember when Daniel first mentioned the idea of joining him on a trip to the South, how intrigued I was. As an Egyptian living in the US as a teacher at the time, my only exposure to American culture was merely within the confines of New York. I had always heard of how New York was not representative of America — “the real America” — and boy, what an experience that was, traveling through various Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama towns on our way to Birmingham.
Bendary walks the banks of the Mississippi in New Orleans.
I could write so much about Southern hospitality, the friendliness and the beauty I was exposed to, “both natural and humane.” But what struck me the most was grappling with the term poverty and what poverty really means. Egypt’s poverty (like any other global south country for that matter) strikes you in the face, it’s visible and very tangible ... it’s just there. You can see it in the unpainted informal settlements’ red muddy bricks around Cairo. You can see it in people’s worn out clothes that seem to have been exhausted by the enormous amounts of direct sunlight desiccating them... its marks are basically everywhere. If you’re poor, you can never own a car nor can you ever own a house.
These realities had defined poverty for me, but I soon realized that they also limited my understanding of it. While I would never claim to capture the real complexities of the South, I did come away from our trip with a few uncooked ideas about the appearance and lived reality of poverty.
Bendary inspects the infamous window at the Pickens County Courthouse.
Having a car doesn’t necessarily mean you can afford a house to sleep in. A car could be your only asset in the American south, which brought up many thoughts about the role of cars in forming American identity and culture.
Having a painted house doesn’t necessarily mean you can feed those who are underneath its roof.
In the South, racism does not save white people from poverty. Being white doesn’t necessarily mean that you live comfortably. Not to dismiss its realities, but it seemed like race existed as a last surviving social marker between the sons and daughters of the same socio-economic class. I know this might sound obvious but that’s not what the Northeastern discourse on race-politics has slowly embedded in me.
The Summer Road Trip
In the following months, a group of 5-8 interested people began meeting to figure out what this project could look like. We did the same things that we plan to have our student-organizers do: we told each other our dreams for the future, we did research to learn the facts on the ground, we began building relationships with people in the community, and adjusted our vision according to each new piece of information we gathered. On a whim, we decided on another road trip, this time from New York City to Birmingham and back in 5 days.
Time in the Car Together: >35 hrs in 5 Days.
(~30% of all time spent on the trip was in the car)
Notable Stops: Highlander, Birmingham, Guntersville, Asheville.
From left; Kevin, Barbara (our gracious tour guide/host from Highlander), Sally, and Zakiya.