Tag Archives: Kyle Criminger
Want to up your activist game? Apply for the spring session of the Modjeska Simkins School
The public is invited to apply for the spring session of the Modjeska Simkins School for Human Rights, which begins March 18 and runs through June 24. The school, a project of the SC Progressive Network, was launched in 2015 as a leadership institute for activists to learn a people’s history of South Carolina, hone their organizing skills, and help grow a movement for social justice in the Palmetto State. This will be the school’s fourth session.
“The school is exceeding even our most hopeful expectations,” said Network Director Brett Bursey. “The students have been deeply engaged in class discussions, and graduates have gone on to do impressive things, from serving on the boards of nonprofits, to researching and crafting a campaign to end gerrymandering in South Carolina, to starting a podcast for young activists, to staging tours of the State House grounds and offering a more honest historical narrative about who the monuments memorialize, and when and why they were erected.”
One of the creators of the monument tours is USC’s Student Services Manager Dr. Sarah Keeling, who attended the Modjeska School in 2017. An activist with the Columbia group Standing Up For Racial Justice, Keeling said, “At the Modjeska School, I learned South Carolina history that I was never taught in school and how that history impacts the lives of South Carolinians today. The school gave me a solid foundation from which to build my organizing skills.”
Kyle Criminger, a graduate of the school’s inaugural class in 2015, now serves as a Network co-chair and is the lead organizer for the organization’s Fair Maps campaign to allow citizens rather than politicians to draw district maps. “The Modjeska School took us on a haunted, enthralling trek through South Carolina’s stolen and denied history, giving me a long view and a wide perspective on the problems here,” Criminger said. “The ongoing practicum I am working on with fellow graduates allows us to carry out a shared commitment to the values and principles that South Carolinians like Modjeska Simkins herself have held and lived by. That’s why I say that the School is a complete program and national model for community organizing.”
Graduates Daniel Deweese and Wayne Borders cofounded the New Legacy Project, the Network’s youth coordinating body, which meets twice a month in Columbia.
The school has attracted students of all ages, backgrounds, and interests. The youngest was Rose, the 10-year-old daughter of Graham Duncan, a historian at USC’s Caroliniana Library and Modjeska School faculty member, who helped run PowerPoint presentations. The oldest was 85-year-old Mary Bolden, a former Army officer and Vietnam War veteran.
Classes are held 6-8pm on alternate Monday evenings at the Network’s building at 2015 Marion St., downtown Columbia. The session also includes Sunday Socials, guest lectures on various historical and political topics that are free and open to the public.
Students of all ages, backgrounds, and interests are welcome to attend the Modjeska School. They must fill out an application, complete a brief telephone interview, and commit to attending all classes – barring emergencies or illness. This is a course for serious students, and includes lengthy reading assignments. The deadline to apply is March 1. Some scholarships are available.
Classes are held 6:30-8:30pm on alternate Monday evenings at the Network’s building at 2015 Marion St., downtown Columbia. Tuition is $210, which includes class materials and a copy of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. The session also includes Sunday Socials, guest lectures on various historical and political topics that are free and open to the public.
Anyone interested in attending is asked to call the Network’s office at 803-808-3384 for an application. Visit the web site for the class schedule, more about the school, and a list of faculty and advisors.
The graduating class of 2017
Modjeska School graduate talks about lessons learned
Rep. Joe Neal congratulations Kyle Criminger at the 2015 graduation ceremony for the inaugural class of the Modjeska Simkins School.
As the Modjeska Simkins School prepares for its upcoming session, we thought it timely to share Kyle’s thoughts about the school and lessons learned there.
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We got perspective at the Modjeska Simkins School: a big-picture analysis—a Modjeska Simkins analysis—of South Carolina’s history.
We learned that there is a direct line of malice from John C. Calhoun, who defended slavery as “a positive good,” to Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman’s white supremacist state Constitution of 1895 (under which our state continues to operate to this day), to the coded racism of Harry Dent and Lee Atwater’s Southern Strategy. Always the substance of South Carolina public policies has shown that black lives don’t matter here.
The imbalance of power in South Carolina is no accident. Because of unprecedented partisan gerrymandering, we have the least competitive legislative elections in the United States. Three out of four representatives faced no major party competition in the 2014 general election.
“Most of our legislators in South Carolina are winning with 99% of the vote,” said Brett Bursey, Executive Director of the SC Progressive Network. “The old Soviet elections we used to make fun of? Well, we now have that here.”
South Carolinians have the lowest combined state and federal tax burden in the country, yet our legislature tells that us we’re broke when we’re not. In fact, we leave more money on the table in special interest tax exemptions than we take in. We get immoral budgets and refused Medicaid Expansion for 250,000 of us because of petty partisan politics.
It’s maddening, but our problems aren’t new. “The names and faces have changed,” notes Progressive Network Communications Director Becci Robbins in Modjeska Monteith Simkins—A South Carolina Revolutionary, “but the political and social dynamics of exclusion, extremism and institutional racism remain stubbornly intact in South Carolina. We share Modjeska Simkins’ frustration and sense of urgency.”
Time and again, South Carolina history shows us how Modjeska Simkins and so many others have resisted. We are not alone, you see. Have you heard of the Yemassee War, or the Stono Rebellion? Denmark Vesey, or the Grimké sisters? What about Robert Smalls and our state’s Reconstruction legislature, which was the only majority black House of Representatives in the nation? The Lighthouse and Informer newspaper, Judge J. Waties Waring, or the Rev. J.A. Delaine?
Maybe you don’t know these names, events and institutions because the “winners” have written our textbooks. Generations of South Carolinians used Mary Simms Oliphant’s infamous history text into the 1980s. The book spoke of “happy slaves,” and was sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan. (In the 1920s, as a teacher at Booker T. Washington High School in Columbia, Modjeska Simkins refused to use the Oliphant textbook, deeming it racist.)
So we have on the one hand a state that has lived and died by the Golden Rule. Everybody knows the Golden Rule: regrettably, he who has the gold makes the rules. But beside that Rule, we also have stories of rebellion and revolutionary spirits, a South Carolina “people’s history” of organizing. And the task Modjeska Simkins and so many other South Carolinians like her have laid out before us: we must organize to form a community of shared values.
That is 24-7 work. It’s a process.
Organizing means preparing for opportunities. It entails building an organization that returns phone calls, pays staff, and fosters relationships in the community based on trust and confidence. And it is strategic, a disciplined use of collective energies on effective projects, not by simply being reactive. The best organizers leverage already-existing, well-thought-out organizing tools, and tap into the collective wisdom and experience of those who have come before, just like Modjeska Simkins did.
We must connect the dots to see that there is only one struggle, and it is for human rights. “If you have enough sense in your noggin,” Simkins once said, “you’re going to know a fight is there—and not just for black people, but for all mankind.”
The need for exploring our history has never been more critical. The Modjeska School provides an education like none other in South Carolina, one that benefits not just the students but the larger community, as well. As a graduate, I can attest to its value.
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Kyle Criminger, a Spanish-language interpreter, serves as Co-chair of the SC Progressive Network. He was one of 35 inaugural graduates of the Modjeska Simkins School for Human Rights. You can support the school by making a secure donation here, or by calling 803-808-3384 or sending an email to network@scpronet.com.
Inaugural class graduates from the Network’s Modjeska Simkins School
The students who graduated Aug. 24 from the Modjeska School’s summer session were a diverse mix: gay and straight, retired and collegiate, blue-collar, union and professional, black, Latino and white. The youngest was 2nd-grader Rose Duncan, daughter of guest lecturer Graham Duncan, and the eldest student was Eunice “Tootsie” Holland, who will turn 84 in December.
What they shared was an intense, three-month session that covered a South Carolina people’s history. The massacre at the Emanuel Church in Charleston took place just two days after we talked in class about Denmark Vesey’s 1822 slave rebellion. It was Vesey’s church that was again the chosen target of a violent racist attack. We added an extra class to talk about the tragedy, Sen. Clementa Pinckney – an ally of the SC Progressive Network – and the political maneuvering around the Confederate flag. Pressure from GOP candidates on the campaign trail forced Gov. Nikki Haley to call for the flag to come down. It was a stunning example to see how history is made, and remade.
The summer session covered South Carolina history as well as our own, teaching how the Network was created 19 years ago, and tracing its genealogy from the Grass Roots Organizing Workshop (GROW). Students also learned basic civics and organizing strategies. “You’re never too old to learn new things,” said Andy Sidden, pastor at Garden of Grace Church, “and, boy, did I!”
The school is a work in progress. “It was a privilege to have been a guinea pig for the noble experiment,” said Kyle Criminger. “We learned so much, so many stories that I had never heard. And it put the popular movement in historical context, and clarified our strategy and tactics.”
Course material will be revisited, repackaged, culled, expanded and posted to be accessible and user-friendly for students and the public. We are in the process of recording oral histories on key topics by South Carolina social justice movers and shakers, as well as uploading clips from the summer classes to share on the web site. Our goal is to see that the Modjeska School’s organizer training gets spread across the state by training up a corps of teachers and by also having on-line classes.
Students will carry what they’ve learned into the real world, starting immediately. They have signed up for at least one Network project, and will be working with other activists to expand and create Network initiatives. They are:
- Medicaid expansion. South Caorlina is on track to privatize Medicaid funding, a really bad idea that’s driven by for-profit health care and anti-government ideologues. We will update our campaign for this new reality in 2016.
- Racial profiling. Using the toolkit the Network created years ago, with a law we wrote to support it, we will teach community activists how to hold law enforcement accountable for its practices during traffic stops.
- Missing Voter Project. The Network will continue its work on voting rights and targeting under-served communities to engage them and register them to vote.
- Clean elections. Also called publicly financed, or voter-owned elections, this is the reform that can make all other reform possible. We will continue the work that Sen. Clementa Pinckney held dear, reducing the influence of money in politics.
Duncan said, “These last three months with the school have been incredible, and I feel fortunate and honored to have been included in helping develop a curriculum for the classes. Seeing a group of people come together to discuss how we can use lessons from South Carolina history to inform and influence our current efforts to organize in an attempt to enact more progressive policies gives me real hope for the future.”
Thank you to guest teachers Graham Duncan, Dr. Ed Madden, Dr. Hoyt Wheeler, Dr. Tom Terrill, Kevin Gray, Rep. Joseph Neal, and Meeghan Kane.
And congratulations to the graduates!
See more photos in our class album.
For more about the school, call 803-808-3384 or email network@scpronet.com.