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JANUARY 2021


** SWEET LAND OF LIBERTY
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As a child, singer Marian Anderson (1887-1993) showed remarkable talent, but she was turned away from the Philadelphia Music Academy because she was Black. Her church raised money for her to take private lessons. In 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow Anderson, by then a world renowned opera star, to perform at Constitution Hall in segregated Washington, D.C., leading First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to resign from the group in protest. Mrs. Roosevelt arranged for Anderson to perform on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial instead. More than 75,000 people gathered to hear Anderson sing. Millions listened on the radio. In 2009, as millions watched around the world, Aretha Franklin performed at the inauguration of Barack Obama ([link removed]) , the nation’s first Black president. She sang “My Country Tis of Thee.” It was the song Anderson had memorably performed on the National Mall 70 years before. Watch: "Marian Anderson at the Lincoln
Memorial" Newsreel ([link removed]) (2 minutes)


** The Ghosts Among Us ([link removed])
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** by Jonathan Shipley
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The New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project’s Slave Narratives; A Folk History of Slavery in the United States was an enormous effort to collect the untold stories of Black Americans who had been enslaved. In addition to recording oral histories, the FWP also documented African-American culture of that era, including songs, games and more.
READ MORE ([link removed])


** A New Deal for Birds ([link removed])
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** By Susan Ives
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When FDR took office in 1933, drought had displaced not only many farmers from the land, but also millions of migratory birds. Of the 120 million acres of marsh and wetlands originally found in the US, only 30 million acres remained. The waterfowl population had reached its lowest point in recorded history. An avid birder since childhood, the president responded by appointing three respected conservationists to a blue-ribbon Committee on Wildlife Restoration. READ MORE ([link removed])
HAPPENINGS
The Living New Deal Online
“Art and Activism: Posters for Social Change"
with Ennis Carter, Lincoln Cushing and Max Slavkin
Thursday, Jan 7, 2021, 5pm-6:30pm PST

Social movements have used posters to spread the word, build solidarity and demand change. During the New Deal, the WPA employed artists, graphic designers and printers to promote public health, tourism, education, the arts and more. In the digital age, a new generation of activists is harnessing the power of the poster to demand a Green New Deal. Free. Click here to register for this Zoom presentation. ([link removed])

Chicago Announces Plans for National Housing Museum
In 2006, a diverse group of Chicagoans came together to preserve and transform the only remaining building of the historic Jane Addams Homes on the Near West Side. The three-story brick building at1322-24 West Taylor Street opened in 1938 as the first federal government housing project in Chicago. It housed hundreds of families over six decades and has been vacant since 2002. A National Housing Museum ([link removed]) will bring it to life. LEARN MORE ([link removed])
THE NEW DEAL IN THE NEWS


** Some links may limit access for nonsubscribers. Please support local journalism, if you can.
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Theaters Seek a New Deal ([link removed])
Theatermakers want a modern-day version of the Great Depression’s Federal Theatre Project.
By Soraya Nadia McDonald
The Undefeated, December 30, 2020

UCSF makes an about-face to save New Deal-era murals from destruction ([link removed])
In a surprise reversal, UCSF announced it will save and store artist Bernard Zakheim’s famous series of murals in medical school building slated for demolition.
By Sam Whiting
San Francisco Chronicle, December 21, 2020

Enduring lessons of a New Deal writers’ project ([link removed])
At its peak, the WPA’s Federal Writers’ Project employed more than six thousand people. Some of its hires—Zora Neale Hurston, John Cheever, Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, and Studs Terkel, among others—were celebrated, or would become so, but most qualified by dint of their economic circumstances. The result was an eclectic staff—as Time magazine put it, of “unemployed newspapermen, poets, graduates of schools of journalism who had never had jobs, authors of unpublished novels, high-school teachers, people who had always wanted to write.”
By Jon Allsop
Columbia Journalism Review, December 22, 2020

The Green New Deal Is What Realistic Environmental Policy Looks Like ([link removed])
In the 21st century, environmental policy is economic policy. Our carbon emissions are not mainly about the price of gasoline or electricity. They’re about infrastructure. You cannot change the climate impact of Americans without changing the built American landscape.
By Jedediah Britton-Purdy
The New York Times, February 14, 2019
“Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or
softened the fiber of a free people.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt
October 13, 1940

In Case You Missed It
When the Roosevelt administration rolled out funding for artists, musicians, writers and actors during the Great Depression, it helped create a new vision of American culture.

Listen: How New Deal Art Redefined America ([link removed]) (4 minutes)
By Neda Ulaby, NPR, All Things Considered, May 25, 2020

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