Making Civic Connections

Community groups that joined the conversation conducted a Prologue Conversation in their own settings, where the first task was to express and briefly document their own ethnic, religious, historical and cultural identity. In the second session, called Conversation #1, two or three communities shared their expressions with one another, typically in a local library.

Even the first conversations turned to the question of a larger societal identity now shared by diverse communities in this nation and city. Community leaders gave consideration in preliminary workshops to the most relevant national documents as well as to group facilitation methods. The reader began, accordingly, with two founding national documents, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution (Preamble and Bill of Rights). To these were added a predecessor statement to the First Amendment, the Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty. Since some new communities see themselves as religiously defined and we confront an increasing plurality of religions in our society, practical attention was given to the Constitutional invention which combines "non-establishment" of any religion by government with "free exercise" of all religions by their adherents.

In subsequent conversations, these original community groups, while maintaining their special identities, were joined by the general public. Conversation #2, convened on October 15, 1996 at the Chicago Historical Society, featured a special year-long exhibit of the work of Abraham Lincoln. This conversation addressed major unresolved questions arising from the founding documents that produced profound struggles in American history, including a tragic and pivotal civil war. Included in these readings were Abraham Lincoln's historic interpretations (perhaps reformulation) of the American identity in his Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address.

For this conversation Abraham Lincoln himself visited, where he was heard in the Chicago Historical Society galleries repeating his speech on "The Last Best Hope of Earth". He gave answers once again to questions raised by almost every term in the chief sentence of the Declaration: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal" - and concerning continuities between the revolutionary Declaration and continuing Constitution. The audience, both as communities and general public, took over this conversation at crucial stages along the way, raising questions from their own experiences.

Conversation #3, held at Harold Washington Library on October 22, 1996, turned attention to the special tests of democracy in the modern city. (Cities were not mentioned in U.S. founding documents). Participants heard voices of previous newcomers to this city, reviewed strategies devised by Jane Addams at Hull House with working immigrants from Europe, and remembered the struggles of community organizations, the freedom movement and Martin Luther King, Jr. against the exclusion of people on the basis of race and poverty. Included in this collection, in addition to very revealing firsthand expressions by earlier immigrants and migrants, were selections from Jane Addams's Twenty Years at Hull House, and from two books of Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can't Wait and Where Do We Go from Here: Community or Chaos?

The final conversation, at Truman College in Uptown on November 12, 1996, treated practical questions for the future that arose in the course of the program. These included problems of civic education, and of preserving spaces for continuing communication and cooperative action in the future. No documents were included for this final conversation. Young participants from the conversation series working with Pegasus Players wrote short reflections on their questions about cultural and national identity. This gave "the future" the final word.

Imagine Chicago pays tribute to scholarly workers who selected the documents for these conversations, who served as mentors to community discussion leaders, and who made contributions as requested to the public discussions. George Anastaplo of Loyola University Law School and the University of Chicago's Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults conducted preparatory workshops with community leaders on the national founding documents and the speeches of Abraham Lincoln. Jean Bethke Elshtain, who works in social and political ethics at the University of Chicago, chose the writings and contributed a voice for Jane Addams. James Grossman, who administers a center for family and community history at the Newberry Library, selected the expressions by previous immigrants and migrants as well as the passages by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Thanks also to Michael Krebbs for lending a living voice to Abraham Lincoln in Conversation #2. Also to Congressman Danny K. Davis, for bringing a rich voice and experience to the presentation of Martin Luther King, Jr.

These conversations were facilitated by the cooperation of allied civic agencies: Metropolitan Chicago Interreligious Initiative opened communications with newer religious communities in the city and considered ways of preserving and publishing their self-identifying expressions and materials. The Institute for Cultural Affairs assisted community leaders in their task of fostering appreciative and productive discussions. For the broader public discussions, Chicago Historical Society and Chicago Public Library provided spaces which themselves prompted civic memories, passions and communicative actions.



Outline of the Readings
and Frameworks Conversations
Introduction to the Readings

Prologue Conversation:
Declaring our Community Identity and Considering the American Declaration.

• The Declaration of Independence (1776)
  

I. Conversation #1:
We the People - Sharing our Distinct Perspectives and the Way We Decide Things Together.

• The Preamble to the Constitution of the United States (1787)
  
• The Bill of Rights (1791)
  
• The Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty (1785)

• Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (1863)
• Second Inaugural Address (1865)

• Norwegian Emigrant Songs and Ballads
• The Polish Peasant in Europe and America
• Bintel Briefs in the Jewish Daily Forward
• The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz
• Journal of Negro History
• The Negro in Chicago
• Jane Addams, "Problems of Poverty" and "Immigrants and Their Children" in Twenty Years at Hull House (1910)
• Martin Luther King Jr., "The Days to Come" in Why We Can't Wait (1963) and "Where are We?" in Where Do We Go from Here:  Chaos or Community? (1967)

1. To describe our own community as we would like to be known in the city. Deciding what to show and tell.
   
   
2. To ask how this society describes itself. Discovering in its first Declaration a "revolutionary identity" which we all now have in common.