Gail Rosenthal: Welcome Dr. Mary Johnson.
Dr. Mary Johnson: By calling us from the bush of northern Nigeria to start with, I hope
you have some idea what that word "bush" refers to. How many of you sort of used
or heard that term of the "bush?" This happens to be the rural area in northern
Nigeria, which is a very Muslim area of Nigeria. And so part of what I talked
about today will be about my experience with that. So there's three big things
that I want to share with you and then we'll hopefully have time to share
together that I think are important. One is whatever opportunities are made
available to you. We'll talk about that. Two is the people you meet that make an
impact on you and three is finding something to do with whatever job it is
that you love. And so that's what I'm going to go through. So it all
started for me when I started out my first summer after being a senior in
high school. I went to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. I don't know if any
of you've heard of Antioch (pretty progressive area) and in the early 60s
Antioch College was where students went if they really wanted to get involved,
whether it was in the civil rights movement or whether it was
trying to free Cuba or whatever. Activists were involved there, so yes there
were courses (and very good courses) but there was also this constant effort to
get people active. And part of that was the part of your year was interning at
some place. So my first year of interning was in Washington DC and I was working
for the Department of Health Education and Welfare (used to be called that, I
don't know what they call it now). I was in charge of directing. It was my big
job there and I was probably the lowest level you could be in a government job
but there I was in Washington, which was exciting to me and got me
really interested and involved in things. So, anyhow, it also had and (and still has) this
place called Glen Helen, which is a great big sort of Forest Preserve area and
this is where all the singing and all the various activist groups would come
together. Sometimes we skipped classes to do it, but it was in this area where many
of us sort of began to feel like this is what we want to do, right? This is what we want to
get involved with. If you had a place like that at Stockton, would you go to that?Where you
sort of like talk about things that you want to do and where you want to go with
your life? I'm sure you have places that you meet and think about that. This is
Glen Helen, now they have a fancy (oh, they'd never had that there when we were
there) but that's where we congregated and plotted and planned things that
we were going to do. And one of the big things that we did the first year (I was
there), once that there was a barbershop in Yellow Springs, Ohio and the barber
would not cut the hair of African Americans. So guess what? What do you
supposed we had to do? We boycotted this barber shop to his dismay
and finally we did get it changed. That showed us that we
could do something with it. We had all sorts of various causes that we stood up
for. We would go on these "not eating" kinds of campaigns
to call attention to the fact that people were starving in the world. There's
all this activist activity: this is the early 60s. I don't know how to convey what the early
60s was like but you began to feel like you could make a difference. And that
it's very much like today, that you are involved in this.
So my father kept saying to me," you know what? You're spending a lot of time being
an activist. When are you ever going to go and
get your learning in," so forth so I went to Skidmore College for the
last year and a half of college which was a little bit more traditional and
while I was at Skidmore...Skidmore was in Saratoga Springs, New York - a
little different from yellow Springs, Ohio but Saratoga Springs all
winter long is snow and cold. How many of you know Saratoga Springs?
Any of you know that area, up a little bit beyond Albany? It's cold and snowy
and I had gotten this dream while I was in Antioch that I was going to go into
the Peace Corps. Somehow that just excited me that idea. So here
I am on a cold afternoon in Saratoga filling out my application for Peace
Corps. Now this was dangerous at Skidmore because the first batch of Peace Corps
volunteers had a Skidmore girl who wrote a postcard home saying there are rats in
the streets of Lagos (the capital city). This was a
international incident so anybody from Skidmore who sent an application was
immediately suspect. So anyhow. but I did make it through and I said, "please send
me any place warm. I really don't want to be cold anymore." And they did. They sent
me to a really hot, dry climate in northern Nigeria. And all this was
inspired with me by hearing Kennedy when I was in Washington DC that first year
at Antioch. Hearing Kennedy talk about the Peace Corps, not only is it to help
those countries but it's to allow for Americans to learn about themselves and
to be able to share our culture and hear their cultures and so forth. And these
were the objectives he put out. I can't convey how absolutely exciting it
was to think about this. Have you ever had something that really got you
excited and you really wanted to do it? That's where I was and in addition to
that, I went to this area. This is that northern area, it is a Hausa and Fulani
country- very much the heart of Muslim Nigeria. And it's in that area that did
not have a lot of development there at that point in time
when I arrived, the plane came down in a cow pasture
and dumped me off. And the prince will pick me up with Schnapps. Does anybody know
what Schnapps is? You ever tried Schnapps?" I don't drink anyhow but this guy
wanted me to drink the Schnapps with him and everything else and that
was my introduction: picked up at the cow pasture and taken to this school in
northern Nigeria. This is what I had dreamed of now for several
years, to be in the Peace Corps, to go here. And here I was in this area. This is
the particular area of northern Nigeria I was in and the heart of it is Sokoto.
That area today it's Boko Haram country, if you've heard about that. So I was
at a teacher training college (didn't look like this, believe me). It was
really kind of a lot of the little huts and so forth and where they sent me to teach
was... They'd had a Peace Corps volunteer there before me who was a girl and in
this area of the world, women are kind of seen as like you're not supposed to
learn anything. You're certainly not supposed to be out public teaching or
anything like that, and so they chase this one Peace Corps volunteer away. They
literally got her scared. So I came into the classroom. It was all sort of benches
like this (theoretically, they're supposed to face you when you come into the
classroom) but they didn't want a woman teaching them. These are all boys,
now these are big boys I mean, these are 17, 18 year olds. All sons
are very prominent men in their communities who were going to go back
and run their communities. But they didn't need to study or anything, they just needed
to be there and they took one look at me as I walked into the classroom and they
all turned the opposite way on their benches. So they were looking at me
right, so what would you do here? You are so excited to come
to the place you wanted to come to. It is hot. You're going to fulfill
that dream of Peace Corps and be there and here they all turn the
opposite way. Are you gonna let them get away with it? What would you do,
what do you think you would do? They all turn the other way. How many of you are going into
teaching? Any of you going into teaching? I mean, you need students to look
at you a little bit. They're all looking the opposite way and
so what would you do? What you think I did? I wanted to work so I actually
walked around the other side and faced them. And actually, after a while they got
used to me. It took a little time, both ways, getting to know them but it was
quite an experience to teach in that area because there was there are no
books. There was no paper, there was no Xerox machine, there was nothing.
I had to teach books (like old British literature books,
like Treasure Island in the middle of desert country where they never
seen the sea and they don't drink), so you know you have yo-ho-ho and
a bottle of rum in this book. What are they going to do with that? But how they
can understand that? So I figured out, I brought in a bottle and I wrote "rum" on
it and we sang stuff like that. But there was certainly
none of the technology that Nick has and things that you can use. You had to use
yourself and maybe some paper some magazines from USAID,
which was one of the organizations that was in Nigeria at the time. But
none of the technology we have today. Not even a blackboard, think about that.
Interesting, huh? So it allowed me to to learn, first of all I never really
wanted to teach until I started doing it and I loved it and then I have to figure
out how do you teach in a place that has no materials for you to teach? So, you
figure it out. And while I was there, this is a nearby town and here is a
larger town (call Lasol) which is a sort of trading complex area but I lived
mainly (for the first year) at the
school. I had really great accommodations. I did have a steward who
boiled my water but pretty much like everybody else's, but no
sooner...late sixties, no sooner I get there and
guess what happened? Now I had studied a little about
the Holocaust. You didn't study as much about the Holocaust in the early 60s in
college. It wasn't a big topic that everybody said but I knew something
about it. I get there and all of a sudden civil
war breaks out between where I was in the north and the south where the Igbo
people were. The Igbo's wanted to break away from Nigeria. They were more
Christian. They were very Western oriented and had oil and they want to be
separate. The North didn't want them to secede so they had a civil war, which
deteriorated into one of the early genocides. Very few people had really
studied this genocide as much as it should be and hundreds of thousands of
people were killed, especially Bifrans. During the situation I was there. I was
in it. My own steward was killed because an Igbo Stewart was killed. One
Sunday morning I was in the Catholic Church in Lasol (nearby town) and
some house who - they didn't really know what they were doing, they were just
killing because everybody was killing. They started killing people in the church and
so the priest took me and a couple of the nuns that were there up to his
quarters with a shotgun and said, "If you come come near me ,I'm gonna shoot you" so
he saved us from this but what we witnessed was bodies just piled on one
another. I mean, I no idea what was going on. I didn't know what the
word "genocide" was really. It was just happening to me and amidst this kind of
camp nobody knew even what the aims were, but we knew that that democracy
that had been in Nigeria for about four or five years before was disappearing.
Nigeria became really a military dictatorship. The state,
several decades to try to stabilize it since then.
So already living through that, later on when I came back I was very
interested in how something like that can happen and how people can look at other
people and start killing like that (just massive killing) and how few
people get involved or try to stop it, which was another thing that scared me.
And women couldn't do anything because we weren't supported. We weren't players in
all of this. So that was one big sort of experience for me. There, the
other with women in this area (the very prominent men have four or five wives,
that's what you do, that's your social welfare system) and they all live
together, kind of like friends and they all have their children all play and
each night he picks the one he's going to sleep with but they
act like a community together. This one Alhaji thought I'd like to join the crew
and I said okay. We had slightly different customs in our country but he
could take me to visit with them. It's really interesting and it was that
experience and seeing this constantly that got me really asking the question
(this is now late sixties, just on the nib of the women's
movement in this country) and I'm thinking separately, "how can women do this? How can
they put up with this? How can they just not want to be themselves and just have
this control of their lives?" And so it got me interested with and
something that's become a lifelong passion with me in women's studies, which
I did when I was doing my graduate work. So both living through this early genocidal
experience and seeing what was happening to the women and the
experience of teaching in an area where there are not a lot of resources and
finding out how much fun it can be to try to create without all this
wonderful curricular material and so forth, you just figure out how to create
it. This experience I had before I went to graduate school at
Washington University and it was there that I decided two things. Can you can
you imagine what that would be? I just talked about one. I was going to
learn more about the Holocaust. Now at that time (early 70s), it was not a subject
taught in a great deal of universities. There weren't survivors that went out and
spoke. There were a couple of books out on the subject. It was not (I know you've
all had lots of courses and studied
it both in high school and in college) that wasn't the experience then and it
was, in a way, kind of exciting because you were finding things that nobody had
really talked about before. I taught the first course on Holocaust at
Washington University in 1973. No survivors to come speak to you. We had
very few books, we were making it up as we went along. I did it with another
professor. It was a very interesting experience. At the same time, I was doing
that and my interest in women's studies
was also maturing. I decided (almost in the first course I took) that I found
on the French Revolution very interesting. How many of you taken
classes in the French Revolution? Any of these taken? Is revolution in now or not?
Sometimes it's in and sometimes it isn't. But anyhow, at that time it was kind of in
and I took this course where I started to ask a question: why are those women in
the bread lines? Why are they there?What are they doing? Why are
they getting involved? Why are they so angry at everything and what do they
want? And so I did my dissertation on the women in the bread line and it was
hard to get a lot of documentation on this because they didn't write and most
of the police documents about them (in the crowds and the rioting and so forth),
we're talking about they were misdirected by the men that they were
with. So you know who these women were. I'm still seeking it out but it got me
interested at a time when women's studies (just as with genocide studies) was just
beginning. Not a lot of formal ways to study it or anything, it was just
beginning and people had all sorts of ideas and we're sharing at the time, so
that was my experience at Wash U was going into that. And then after what I've
taught in universities (in Temple and then in East
Tennessee), I just thought I was teaching history. I was teaching women's studies
and I had the opportunity to go to what's called the Wealthy College
Center for Research on Women where you can spend a year doing nothing but
researching what you're interested in. So at that point in time, I decided to study.
How do you study women through the artifacts in the household?So their
butter churns and their stoves and all the ways that they make things work in
the household never got much attention in more formal history and while I was
doing this, there was three people that I think really influenced me to go
on and look and do much more in curriculum. I was getting more and
more interested in how do you design courses to get people interested in
history? The first woman here, Peggy MacIntosh, she says that she was at the
Wealthy College Center for Research on Women (and she ran that that Center) and
she encouraged me to go on and really look at this issuances and do more
curriculum stuff. She sent me on to a woman at Harvard woman named Eleanor
Duckworth. Any of you do science? Anybody study science? She
writes the most incredible curriculum on how to have wonderful ideas. She's
studying science. So I went down to her. I'm so excited to meet her, I went
down to her and I said, "well, I'd rather take some courses and learn about writing
curriculum like you do."She said, "well, if you're any good at this stuff, then don't
take courses." Did you ever have anyone say that to you? So she said no, don't do
it. She sent me to this woman. That's a little bit,
here's a picture of Margot. but Margot Stern Strom was just starting an
organization called Facing History and Ourselves. And when she was starting this
organization, she had this dream that you would study
history within sort of the context of human behavior. How do people think? Today,
and in the past: how do people make their decisions? How do you decide what's
right to do?How do you know when it's wrong to do
something? She had studied with Lawrence Kohlberg and Terrell Gilligan,
all these people talk about moral development. How many of you had courses
like this in psychology? Talk about that - some of you, yes. I guess Kohlberg and
Gilligan are a little bit dated now but they were in when this program
started. So, Margot had all of these ideas. Well, when I came in there was nobody. She had two
people working with her at the time. Now, there are several hundred people
working at Facing History. It's a little different today but I walked into her
office, which was a slanted floor at the top of the school (it really was slanted)
and I walked in I said I'd like to volunteer.
"I really think I'd like what you're doing I want to volunteer," so she brought
this out and this out and this out. I had so much to do and I was supposed to also
be doing other work at the same time, but she got me interested and involved.
Finally, I went to work with her and she remained the same throughout by the way:
totally involved and chaotic at the same time, fabulous person. I
worked with her for over 30 years of Facing History where all of the things
that I've been talking about (in terms of having an interest in, a passion in,
trying to understand why people do what they do) came together in working with
this program. And this is how it works. It's very active here at Stockton,
thanks to Gail. Gail is the one that encouraged to have
some of these materials brought into courses but to start out, the study of
history by asking "who are you?" If I went around the room and asked, "well what is it
that makes... how do you make your decisions? Who are you? Who are the people
that influence your lives?" One of the things that you know when you have to
make a decision, is it your parents? Is it the media? Is it the social media? What is
it that influences you as you make - just who are you? So don't start with the
formal facts of history, but "who are you?" first? because you are a building block
of history. You are history. And also part of human behavior, is you're in one
group. You think you're part of the in-group, right? Who is the out-group?
Who are they? And are we seeing a lot of that right now
in our political landscape of the "we" and the "they." You don't need to go into
history so much. Just look at your own world about and who you care about and
who do you care less about and how do you think about that? How do you think
about various groups and so forth? Those are the kinds of building blocks
and then to look at the history and to study it but bringing in that human
behavior all the time. So everything that I had been influenced by (in terms of
women, in terms of looking at genocide, in terms of teaching, so forth) all figured
into this kind of pattern. And certainly looking at... First we started
with Holocaust history, now we do civil rights. We do the Nanjing atrocities and
a number of other topics. There are all these case studies but every one of them,
you're looking at the aspects of human behavior. Then you're always asking when
you study history and something bad happens, who is responsible? Don't
you ask that question? So when I first came to Facing History, Margot (I'll
just call her by her first name, she would like that, I should have had
her pop in to say hi to you guys), she said, you know I want
a conference about the Nuremberg trials. She said that
was the most important event at the end of World War II and nobody pays enough
attention to it. So she and I put together a conference in 1985 where we
brought together many of those people that had been involved with that
Nuremberg trial. Many of them are no longer with us so it was exciting to do
it then. And while I was doing that, I cannot explain this to you enough, while I
was so involved with this and meeting these people and getting the conference
pulled together, my mother says, "You know, your father was at Nuremberg. He never
talked about it." Yes, he had been at Nuremberg as one of the young
researchers. They had lots of American researchers and so forth. Then I
got even more hooked on it and so another one of my passions have become
studying about not just Nuremberg but other international trials and what
they have meant to our post World War II rule and how much the international
law has influenced those. That's sort of the final part of this course is the
choosing to participate. This is where Gail started out today. Once you
found out how things sort of went wrong in the past (where you've had problems and
so forth), then what are you going to do about it yourself? How are you going to
choose to get involved?Gail just suggested maybe going to work
at one of the conventions. I mean there are so many ways that you can get involved
but to not just say, "Oh it's all...you know, everything's terrible. I'm not gonna do
anything about it" or "I can't do anything about it." Yes, you can, alright?
That's the way we try to end this kind of study. This way,
the only problem with all this is you can't do this in one day. How many of you
took Holocaust and had about two days to do it? Any of you take or study
Holocaust? Some of you, yeah. I know you've had more than one day but
in some schools, you have like what? A day or two to do it or a period or a
couple periods to do it. To really do it so that you can get a sense of then what
to do to make a difference, you should take a little bit more time.
That's where we have the biggest sort of challenge is to help people get the time
to really reflect on the importance of these lessons and so forth. So that's
where I want to stop. Thank you.
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