Iowa City's Teach Truth Day of Action 2024

greg wickencamp is a lifelong Iowan.

Community members from across the state took part in the national Teach Truth Day of Action on Saturday, June 8. The gathering responded to a national call from the Zinn Education Project and other nonprofit organizations, with more than 160 cities across the United States participating. Educators and social workers organized the event, with help from local nonprofits like the Antelope Lending Library, Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, Corridor Community Action Network, Great Plains Action Society, and the Human Restoration Project. Organizers and attendees advocated for public access to a robust and critical education—something conservative lawmakers have recently sought to ban in Iowa and across the country.

Once a leader in education, Iowa now faces teacher shortages, shuttering of districts and gutted libraries, and reduced access to crucial support services for children in poverty or with disabilities. Iowa’s GOP has been a nationwide leader in effectively banning books and critical histories, criminalizing LGBTQ+ youth, and funneling public money to private, unaccountable religious schools. This has earned the Reynolds’ administration kudos from anti-democratic moneyed networks and anti-student extremist groups.

The June 8 event took place at the historic College Green Park, blocks away from where John Brown and his band were once chased out of town by those advocating law and order. Brown and his raid on Harper’s Ferry would be a major catalyst for the Civil War and the end of slavery. In addition to training for the raid in West Branch, Iowa, he returned to Iowa many times, carefully navigating the divided political landscape.

In Iowa today, teaching about Brown is illegal if it touches on systemic racism or makes students feel any discomfort attached to their race. These histories are also powerful—they help us see past the law and order of our day to a future of new possibilities. They reveal that it is only through action that better possibilities can be realized. For those who wish to maintain firm social hierarchies, it follows that powerful histories be banned.

In contrast to Iowa’s recent political landscape, Saturday’s gathering offered a vision of public support for young people and Iowa’s collective future. According to national organizers, the “right has declared war on teaching the truth about structural racism and sexism and on LGBTQ+ youth.” While Iowa’s politicians continue to target teachers and students, Iowans at the Teach Truth Day of Action stood in support of educators and students.

(photo by greg wickenkamp)

Speakers and performers shared personal stories on the importance of an inclusive and critical education, and how public support for public education might be reimagined and reinvigorated. Many touched on the importance of democracy, community, justice, and care. Attendees were encouraged to register to vote, write postcards to teachers and policymakers, exchange and read banned books, and learn more about nonprofit initiatives around the state. 

(photo by greg wickenkamp)

The first musicians to take the stage were Adrian Gronseth, graduate history student and award-winning songwriter, and Juli Smith, local social worker. Gronseth said they were glad to attend the event and to “stand up for teachers and students, and their right to teach truth. It shouldn’t be a radical idea,” Gronseth continued, “but unfortunately, in this context it can seem radical.”

Smith followed, sharing how important Black Studies was to her own growth and development, and accompanied Gronseth as they sang historically-informed original songs. 

Following their performance, an undergraduate who works in Multicultural and International Student Support and Engagement for the University of Iowa spoke about the importance of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. The student said she’s seeing professionals at the university who feel pushed to leave the state on account of the GOP’s policies. Despite the detrimental priorities of the state, the student encouraged perseverance and mutual aid.

Continuing on this theme, University of Iowa Archivist Emeritus David McCartney recounted a job interview from years ago which he chose to walk out of rather than be complicit in anti-gay bigotry. He too encouraged Iowans to be more vocal, “While it’s easier said than done, speak up when you can, even if your voice falters. Perhaps especially if your voice falters.” Despite policymakers’ tearing down the voices of marginalized youth and authors, McCartney urged attendees to “create circles of friends that will lift you up,” and to, “Create a life for yourself in which you can be fully human.” McCartney was of many Iowans featured in a book available at the event, From Here to Queer: A Love Letter to LGBTQIA+ Youth.

greg wickenkamp (left) with David McCartney (photo by Tim Glaza)

A rousing performance from longtime local musician Nikki Lunden Trotter kept the energy high and set the stage for more young Iowans. The first was Dani Misyuk, a Jewish Ukrainian American who is active with Jewish Voice for Peace. Misyuk, the descendant of Holocaust survivors, connected the book burning of Nazis during WWII with Israel’s current violence against Palestinians. Misyuk described the destruction of books, people, and culture, in both cases, as “culturcide.”

In Iowa, Maus, the award-winning graphic novel by Art Spiegelman, himself a descendant of Holocaust survivors, was one of more than 3,000 books pulled from school bookshelves in Iowa. Misyuk offered that “Education can be a powerful tool of resistance and liberation,” but only “if we fight for it.” 

Another undergraduate studying to become a teacher spoke on the tension between doing what is best for students, and complying with the laws in Iowa. “Children grow up by learning about the importance of identity. How can we convey the power of identities when those conversations are banned from the classroom? How can we teach them to respect their peers’ identities, when those identities are tied to histories that are forbidden from being taught?”

Addressing laws like Iowa’s version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay,” the pre-service teacher said these types of laws, “do not protect students, they victimize them.” Iowa has faced a teacher shortage since the pandemic, with educators leaving the classroom because of anti-teacher attacks by conservative politicians, lack of funding and support, anti-union legislation, and prohibiting best teaching practices.

Commenting on the brain drain for which Iowa is sadly known, recent high school graduate Eloisa Roach spoke about her peers who are leaving the state because of concerns over safety, the low minimum wage, the cost of healthcare, and the dismantling of public education. Roach, a member of the Shawnee tribe who actively works with the Great Plains Action Society, laid bare the foundations of the state and its interest in censoring history. “The way we teach history in this state, but also in this country, is that it’s inevitable – that the way the world is now is how it had to happen. That’s completely false and very harmful.”

Rather, Roach noted in a stirring speech (one that might be illegal in a public school), “Every single state in this country was formed only through the systemic slaughter and genocide of Indigenous people through military and legal battles that cheated and scammed their way to the United States as we know it now. If we erase that history, if you don’t let us learn from it, we think that our conditions are inevitable. The reality is the world is changing and the world has always changed, and it was changed by people.” Scholars echo Roach’s remarks even as Iowa teachers are driven out of the classroom for respecting insights like hers.

Roach offered a clear understanding of history’s importance, “We can’t wait for time to change things for the better, we have to work for it to happen. That has always been how history is made.” Roach listed historical actors who rarely get mentioned in classrooms, Nat Turner, Toussaint Louverture, Audre Lorde, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the poet and scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, before continuing.

“You need to know the names of people who shaped the world that we live in now because then you can add yourself to that list. There are models and practitioners of new ways of existing, of new worlds to live in, all around us. There are ways to act out, to rehearse that practice of bringing in a new world.” Quoting Robyn Maynard, Roach encouraged attendees that “All world endings are not tragic. A new world, a better world, can replace it.” 

Because particular histories offer potential bridges to new worlds, they are dangerous to those who are privileged by today’s society. This does not mean that histories of resistance, activism, and struggles for justice only fuel guilt or anger. The event at College Green Park, while clear about the challenges facing Iowans, was full of joy. Madeline Abu-Nameh offered that care for one another can itself be an act of resistance. Abu-Nameh, a Palestinian-Irish American-born Iowan who oversees community connections for Joy the Zine, said that in a state like Iowa, joy too is an act of resistance.

(photo by Madeline Abu-Nameh)

There was joy in abundance at Iowa City’s Teach Truth Day of Action, with giant bubbles, arts, crafts, and community. One musician rewrote lyrics to John Prine’s satirical song “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore,” singing, “I went down to the capital / Kim Reynolds said to me / if you join our book burning club, we’ll give you ten flags for free. / I didn’t mess around one bit, I took her up on what she said. I slapped those stickers all over my car, and one on my wife’s forehead.”

Another, Dave Whiting, sang a chorus, “Don’t give your money to the man.” Continuing on the importance of joy and community, Mandi Remington shared that while “Advocacy is part of the work, and policy is part of the work, community building is also part of the work.” Remington is executive director of Corridor Community Action Network, one of many nonprofits that offer opportunities for those wanting to work in community toward a better world. She also was recently among the three successful candidates in the Democratic primary for Johnson County supervisor.

Other organizations represented at the event have a more specific focus, like the graduate worker union, COGS—UE Local 896. Nicole Yeager, the chapter’s current political action chair, outlined the partisan nature of Iowa’s Board of Regents, the governing body for the three state universities.

Although the Board of Regents is legally required to be nonpartisan, it nevertheless often embraces GOP policies by banning DEI initiatives or allocating less per-pupil spending than most states. Yeager, a rural psychology fellow and Ph.D. student, cited the gutting of public services like mental and rural healthcare access as a reason she is pursuing her doctorate and working with COGS.

Nick Covington, the Creative Director for the Human Restoration Project, represented another statewide education organization. Despite being beloved by students, he was driven out of the classroom two years ago by conservative politicians and administrators unwilling to stand up to their scapegoating. An administrator told Covington that “current events do not belong in a history classroom”—even though he had been making history relevant for high school students for years by connecting it to current events.

Covington was clear-eyed in his analysis, quoting cultural critic and scholar Henry Giroux, who could be describing Iowa when he wrote, “Critical thought and the imaginings of a better world present a direct threat not only to white supremacists but also to ideologues who embrace a narrow, corporate vision of the world in which the future must always replicate the present in an endless circle, in which capital and the identities that it legitimates merge into what might be called a dead zone of the imagination and pedagogies of repression.”

That context, like the ruthlessness of driving a teacher from their classroom, is not cause for total despair. Instead, Covington asked, “What kind of future do we want to build for our children?” Offering a solution based on history, Covington argued, “Solidarity and collective action are the only ways to make sustainable democratic change in the face of anti-democratic institutions and galloping authoritarianism by our political leaders.”

(photo by greg wickenkamp)