Righting Civil Wrongs

If those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it, Andrea Blackman may have found one way to inspire learning. As division manager for the Nashville Public Library (NPL) Special Collections and director of the library’s Civil Rights Room—in charge of documenting the local history of the civil rights movement in one of its key cities—she has initiated an ambitious effort to meld the library’s unique holdings into a curriculum for change.

Not content merely to curate and conserve the past, she began “Civil Rights and a Civil Society” in 2015 to educate members of local law enforcement about the context that informs and shapes their relationship with the community. Yet while police training will always be part of the program, according to Blackman, what she calls “version 3.0,” rebranded as “Civil Rights and a Civil Society: Critical Dialogues in Equity, Race, and Identity,” reflects the much broader audience it has evolved to serve. There are distinct curricula for higher education, third through 12th graders, corporations, and the community at large, as well as officers.

Blackman is also focused on working in-depth with the many communities that have contacted her looking to adapt the program to their own locale: these include not only U.S. destinations such as Springfield, MO, and Huntsville, AL, but even Belfast, Ireland, and the Nelson Mandela University in South Africa.

The program has touched 4,150 participants and counting. About 1,052 of these are members of law enforcement; the rest include 1,237 K–12 students, 1,340 community members, 282 college students, and 239 corporate employees. The program has seen a 136 percent increase in the number of new community members reached, says Blackman, many of whom are nonwhite and under the age of 50.

The program has changed what it means to be a librarian in Nashville’s special collections. “When we started this, I thought I could do it 25 percent of the time,” says Blackman. “This is 90 percent of what I do now.” The demand keeps growing. “The intensity that goes into replicating the program has changed a lot,” says Blackman. “Mirroring our country, the landscape has become more contentious.” It is programs like hers that create common ground.