‘Shanta’

In honor of Independence Day, we’ve created a special Fourth of July showcase, featuring 40 original stories from Americans of diverse backgrounds, faiths and colors. We invite you to celebrate the 4th of July with these rarely told stories recalling the contributions and the struggles, the successes and hopes in search of the amazing identity that is America.

Each year, the Fourth of July gives us all a wonderful chance to celebrate America’s deeply prized values—liberty, freedom and equality. We mark the occasion with picnics, parades and BBQs, and we express our patriotism with flags and songs. Amid the fanfare and fireworks, however, we don’t always have the opportunity to reflect more deeply on the ideals on which our nation was founded. We don’t often have the chance to consider our progress toward equality for all men and women, and to explore the diversity that is the hallmark of the American identity.

Lucky for us: artists have been doing just that for centuries. From Thoreau to Springsteen, writers, artists and storytellers have shared their perspectives on America’s promise and inspired their countrymen to keep working toward the attainment of a truly free country for all. With that in mind, we’ve created this special Fourth of July video showcase to celebrate America’s independence, its promise of equality for all, and the beauty and challenge of diversity.

We invite you to visit our Showcase Page where our artists of the spoken word — professional storytellers –tell their stories for the 4th July — or for any time.

April is National Fair Housing Month, marking successes and failures in the law of the land mandating fair housing for all.

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It’s been more than 40 years since the Fair Housing Act was passed, just one week after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968. This was on April 11, 1968.

President Johnson signed the act into law to combat widespread discrimination in the renting and selling of homes—discrimination that had been rampant for decades. Since then, our society has made good progress, but we still have a long way to go. According to the National Fair Housing Alliance, there are at least four million acts of housing discrimination every year. And the collapse of the housing market was fueled by subprime lending practices, a market built primarily on borrowers and neighborhoods of color.

So even though we’ve moved away from the strict residential segregation that marred the 50s and ‘60s, the fact remains that most Americans still live in communities largely divided by race and ethnicity.

In recognition of the work that has yet to be done, and in commemoration of National Fair Housing Month in April, this month’s videos feature two of Chicago’s most engaging storytellers talking about growing up in changing neighborhoods. Both women—one Irish-American, one African-American—remember growing up on the south side in the 1960s. While their experiences were very different, they both observed racial transformations that challenged the powerful notion of “home” for blacks and whites alike. Some of the changes were amusing, but others were charged with hostility and hatred. Both stories deal with issues of segregation, racism and the human desire to simply belong.

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Changing Neighborhoods: High School

Yearbooks and White Flight.

Storyteller Shanta remembers her fascination with school yearbooks.
She was a nine-year-old on the south side of Chicago in the 1960s,
and people were moving out of her neighborhood…
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(Please be patient as the video may take a few moments to load.)

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Changing Neighborhoods: The Friday Nights TV

Fights, Driving Across the Color Line, and White Flight.

Storyteller Susan O’Halloran remembers as a young girl
the southwest side of Chicago in the sixties.
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(Please be patient as the video may take a few moments to load.)

CHICAGO (March 1, 2010) – The JustStories initiative, an 8 year-old Chicago area festival that explores diversity through the performances of professional storytellers, is expanding its outreach with a new video web site, racebridgesvideos.com

Debuting on March 1, racebridgesvideos.com features high-quality digital videos of professional storytellers, such as Michael McCarty, Susan O’Halloran and Arif Choudhury, as they share original and personal stories about race, identity and family. By sharing these engaging stories through video, this project seeks to promote understanding and to bridge racial divides.

“These stories are not just about race. They speak of belonging, resilience, the desire for inclusion, and hope—things we all feel as humans, regardless of race,“ says Derek Simons, creative director of Angels Studio, a Chicago-based communications agency devoted to bringing the races together and building bridges of cooperation between different faith groups using the digital and expressive arts. “With the videos, we hope to share these messages with all kinds of people, young and old, whether individually, in classrooms, faith communities or even businesses.”

The storytellers featured on racebridgesvideos.com are both male and female, and represent the wide fabric of American diversity; they are African-American, Jewish, Hindu, Native American, Cuban, Irish, and so on. Their stories are often very personal, such as Syd Lieberman’s “Aunt Helen,” while others are dramatizations of historical people and events, such as Linda Gorham’s “Rosa,” which describes Rosa Parks’ famous stand against segregation.

Simons and the Angels Studio team have been organizing the JustStories Storytelling Festival and other live events around Chicago for the last eight years. They are also responsible for the educators’ resource,RaceBridgesForSchools.com, which provides teachers with lesson plans and other classroom materials to help students explore differences and build inclusive, welcoming communities.

About Angels Studio, JustStories and RaceBridges

Angels Studio is a communications ministry of the Roman Catholic Order – the Society of The Divine Word. This community serves people of faith, or without faith, around the world, in the belief that there is a rightful and just place for all God’s Children at the table of life. Angels Studio produces the RaceBridges and JustStories initiatives. The universal mission of these projects is to unite people of all faiths, people of no particular religious faith, and all people of goodwill to work at the unfinished business of building bridges across racial and class division.