The Nerve! Conversations with Movement Elders The National Council of Elders

Candie Carawan is a folk singer, educator, and cultural worker who has been based at the Highlander Research and Education Center in east Tennessee for many years. Candie and her late husband Guy Carawan (1927-2015) worked together as cultural organizers and educators for 50 years. Their workshops and documentary projects took them throughout the South, including the South Carolina Sea Islands, and the southern Appalachian mountains. Their particular interest was how cultural traditions and expression can strengthen and support movements for justice and progressive change. Their website provides a brief overview of this work. They also traveled widely offering music in support of many movements for peace, labor, the environment, immigration rights and gender issues. 
In this episode Candie talks with FJ Johnson about how she found her way to Nashville from California in the spring of 1960 and quickly became involved in the sit-in movement that was underway. She describes learning from Jim Lawson and C.T. Vivian and meeting her future husband Guy at Highlander that same spring. FJ and Candie talk about the importance of reaching into our deep cultural histories in organizing work, the role of white people in multiracial movement work, the importance of being flexible and knowing when it's time to change course, and how music, food, storytelling, and humor help remind us of our power.
 
 

Elder Kathy ‘Wan Povi’ Sanchez is an Indigenous community activist from San Ildefonso Pueblo, New Mexico. Kathy has worked on women’s issues related to culture, the environment, and social change for most of her life. She was among the co-founding mothers of Tewa Women United, a group that raises awareness about issues relating to colonization.
In this episode Kathy talks with Heather Bryan about growing up in close proximity to the Los Alamos National Laboratory which was built in her community's sacred mountains and where nuclear waste was stored in traditional ceremonial kivas. Kathy tells stories about growing up in close community with her Indigenous elders and in deep connection with traditional practices and wisdom, while also navigating colonial Euro-American systems and frameworks during the "Age of the Atomic Bomb."  Kathy describes her ongoing work supporting younger leaders as "a grandmother's role" where she and other elders and ancestors are watching, supporting, guarding, and protecting younger Indigenous organizers in their work.  And Kathy 'Wan Povi' Sanchez teaches us that: "There's such a disconnect within a culture of violence that doesn't give space for a language of love to to help mend the world or to help grow a soul."
 
 
 
 

Reverend John Fife is the co-founder of the Sanctuary Movement which protected Central American refugees from deportation in the 1980’s. He is a founding volunteer with No More Deaths, which provides humanitarian aid to migrants in the Sonoran Desert borderlands. In 1992 Fife was elected Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA). He lives in Tuscon, Arizona and is a member of the National Council of Elders.
In this episode John Fife talks with Yezmin Villarreal about growing up in southwestern Pennsylvania, moving to Arizona as a young newly ordained minister for an internship on the O'odham Reservation, and falling in love with the border and the rich legacies of organizing and resistance there. John tells Yezmin how learning from African American Churches and Pastors during the Civil Rights Movement fundamentally changed everything he believed about the role and responsibility of the church in movements for social change. And he describes his role in the accidental creation of the Santcuary Movement. John also reminds us that the struggle for liberation is long haul work: "You get a lifetime, but that's never the end of the struggle and you don't change the whole world in five years. You just get a chance and opportunity to do a part of what is a long and endless struggle. And you take each day and year as a gift, and you try to do your best with the time you got."

Dr. Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons , Ph.D. is Professor Emerita from the University of Florida. She is a Veteran of the Black Freedom, Peace, and Social Justice Movements from the 1960s until today. She was a student activist in the 1960s Sit-In Movement, a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and she worked for the National Council of Negro Women and the American Friends Service Committee. In this episode, Dr. Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons talks with younger organizer DeMonte Alford about the importance of organizing from a position of love, care, and compassion - and with an understanding that communities know what they need.
Raised by her grandmother in segregated Memphis, TN - Zoharah tells DeMonte about her path into organizing work. From refusing to move to the back of the bus for white passengers as a teenager in Memphis, to learning about the Student Nonviolent Coordiating Committee while a student at Spellman College in Atlanta. She shares stories of the years she spent working with SNCC in rural Mississippi, the constant threat of violence while doing this work, and how SNCC workers sang and danced in their free time to cope with the intense stress of the work. She also shares wisdom on how to enter into organizing with communities from a place of humility, collaboration, and respect. 

Aljosie Aldrich Harding talks with young organizer Destiny Hemphill about the importance of inner heart work and healing justice, the power of great teachers, and how community is essential to organizing. Reared in segregated North Carolina, Aljosie Aldrich Harding began learning, teaching, and building social justice skills along with organizing in the 1960s as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Lome, Togo, West Africa.  She has been a servant-leader at the Institute of the Black World (Atlanta), a think tank and advocacy organization, and the Learning House (Atlanta) an independent Afrocentric freedom school.  She has worked in community organizing in several southern and northern cities and in empowerment building with women’s circles, organizations, and colleges.  With her co-worker, partner, and late husband, Vincent Harding she built intergenerational relationships with social justice and peace organizations across the United States and abroad. As a spiritual guide (director) she shares healing justice practices in all her organizational work.

Tune-in as we share highlights from a recorded intergenerational zoom chat with 4 young organizers and 4 elders from the Council.