I live near Pittsburgh and I'm really fond of the place. Something about this place is that it seems everyone is only separated by one degree if you're not already friends. Because of this closeness it's almost a habit when meeting someone new to identify the way you're already connected. This habit takes newcommers by surprise and can lead them to feeling clostrophobic when there's no need to feel that way; oh well maybe there is. People here do have an interest in what neighborhoods you're from, who your people are, it's the essense of provencial.

In today's paper there's a review of a television documentary called "Torchbearers" www.post-gazette.com/pg/06056/660892.stm which deals with the lives of Pittsburghers influential during the Civil Rights Movement. The local public television station, WQED produces some fine documentaries about Pittsburgh history www.wqed.org/tv/pghist/index.shtml Here's the page on the new show to be shown on Thursday www.wqed.org/tv/specials/torchbearers/

Among the people whose stories are told in the documentary is Helen Faison. A few years back the Pittsburgh School Board sort of melted down. The superintendent was black and the disputes with the board definately had a racial component but the story is convoluted. Mainly it was a story about disfunctional local politics with race thrown in as part of the mess. What really tipped the apple cart was that local foundations said they were going to withdraw funding unless the board cleaned house and in the process the superintendent was asked to leave. The foundations didn't have a problem with the superintendent rather with the board, his dismissal was just part of the politics of it all. The city was in a real fix and needed to get somebody in the position of superintendent as a quick fix, and in an interim position until new school board elections and a search for a superintendent. They needed somebody beyond reproach and that person was Helen Faison.

Quite remarkably she came in and with a no-nonsense manner picked up the broken pieces and quite neatly stuck them back together again. Faison was the first female principal of a Pittsburgh school and also the first black principal. Being first like that sometimes seems like a back-handed compliment. It isn't the same as being "first in the class" or the best, but even if the first is the best what's remembered is being the first black or first woman. Something Faison said in the newspaper review impressed me about her career in the fifties:

"I didn't feel I was a heroine or anything," she said. "I was just doing what was my responsibility."

The list of people covered in the documentary are all well-known and clearly establishment figures locally. A friend complained recently about "Urban League" types being so out of touch. I guess because I'm older I recognise that many of the people he's thinking about expereinced more hardship than he assumes.

Faison's coment reminded me of Wangari Maathai en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wangari_Maathai , ha, and in Pittsburgh style I'll point out she studied at the University of Pittsburgh. Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to champion the Green Belt Movement in Kenya. I saw her interviewed on TV and she remarked that it is important to understand that when they began planting trees they had no vision of creating a movement. They were planting trees to respond in what way they could to a need. Faison is saying something like that too. She's a champion for civil rights, but of the local, right here and now sort.

Others in the list are known for their local accomplishments. I'm looking forward to seeing the documentary to see how they tell the story. Another person featured is Robert Lavelle. A realtor, he understood red-lining and set up a savings and loan so black people could get mortages. His influence on the community for the better was huge, but hard to explain in a dramatic fashion. Or at least it seems like that to me, I'll see how the filmmakers do on Thursday. Local action in the present doesn't seem very glamorous and history probably even less so, but right at the local level is where the greatest changes take place.

The picture is of a march in Selma a couple of weeks before Martain King's murder. The guy in the beard is Abraham Heschel, a Conservative Rabbi. I'm not sure why I'm using this picture. Partly because my search for local Pittsburgh pictures, while very interesting didn't turn up one I wanted to use. The local Carnegie Library has a wonderful colleciton of photos www.carnegielibrary.org/exhibit/ and it was fun learning a bit about that. Photo searching on the Web turns up such interesting results.

What made me pause with this photo was that it brought home the ways in which the morality, with a foundation in religion, in the Civil Rights Movement has a different character than the current religiousity. I'm not particularly religious, and while local religious leaders were important to the movement in many ways, I was impressed to see that "Torchbearers" chronicles the lives of civic leaders. They all might be personally religious, but the figures in this film were not advancing religious stands, rather civic ones. Nowadays it seems most talk of morality has a religious bent to it but Heshel's conviciton that social responsibility was a necessary part of his religious faith was not a popular position at the time. Indeed it seems that the connection between spiritual and religous matters to social and civic action was something movement participants were quite thoughtful about; whereas today's religious expressions so often seem careless, rote, knee jerk reactions writ large.

Here www.aril.org/king.html is a wonderful essay by theologian and social scholar Vincent Harding about Martin King and Abraham Heschel. Harding was an advisor to King and the first director of the King Center. I suppose if more religious people talked like Vincent Harding I'd be more disposed towards religion. Harding speaks of creativity and about being human, that those are the most important things. LIkewise Heschel draws attention to our essential human condition. Here's www.chosunjournal.com/heschel.html something Heschel wrote:

"To think of God is not to find Him as an object of our minds, but to find ourselves in Him."

Maybe the masculine pronoun gives me pause, but the underlying idea is so different than the religiousity that's fueling imperial ambitions and religious authoritarianism of today. Here's www.pbs.org/wnet/religio.../harding.html an interview with the Drs. Harding from the PBS show "Religion and Ethics Newsweekly." Dr. Vincent Harding is a Christian theologian and yet in this interview doesn't invoke the name of Jesus. This passage from the interview moved me:

"I have long been very moved by one of the songs that was used in the movement, "This Little Light of Mine," which a lot of people knew from Sunday school and other settings, but which took on a whole meaning. I'm moved by what happened in Selma when they used that song in the midst of tremendous dangers and misuse and abuse by the authorities there. The young people sang, "I'm gonna let it shine. This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine." Then they said, "Tell Governor Wallace..." But what they said was not, "Tell Governor Wallace he's a white honky and he's no good"; they simply used the song to say, "Tell Governor Wallace I'm gonna let it shine. ... Tell Chief Clark I'm gonna let it shine." They didn't need to attack those people; what they needed to do was powerfully, through the song, affirm that they had a spirit in them that they were going to share with the world, and no one in the world was going to stop them from doing it."

The expression of religious faith was important to the Civil Rights Movement. But I think it a mistake not to remember the dead-eye focus on civil matters. And that's what's so interesting to me about the local documentary coming up. almost all of the pricinpals in the local documentary are known for their civic contributions in education, housing, law and community issues. Religious faith, perhaps, informed their convictions, but their actions were toward practical and daily life issues.

Helen Faison came out of retirement to become interim school superintendent. The rhetoric that had caused the melt down was overheated. From day one she made it plain she wasn't going to listen to nonsense, but stick to the important day to day affairs of running the schools. No one dared to cross her or get in her way, yet she was always polite and unassuming in manner. At the time I hadn't known about her role in the contentious history of the Civil Rights struggle and racial politics. I see now that her brilliant performance in the this interim position came out of a lifetime of struggle for civil rights and the civic good.