"We are thrilled to welcome Roadside back to New York for this special event," said Rosalba Rolón, artistic director of Pregones. "Local audiences have been captivated by stories and music of the people of Appalachia as crafted for the stage by the artists of Roadside. Their 50th Anniversary harbors three-plus decades of sustained friendship, creative exchange, and co-creation with Pregones! The coalfields and mountains of Kentucky might be worlds away from the streets of New York, but the heart and truthfulness of our artistry keeps us together."

By Stephi Wild

This case study shares the story of the Letcher County Culture Hub, a multi-stakeholder initiative developed in a small Appalachian community that had been struggling with economic stagnation, unemployment, and drug addiction in the wake of the coal industry’s collapse in the region. This case study describes how the Culture Hub model was developed and shares it as an example of local innovation with lessons that can speak to challenges facing communities far beyond Appalachia.

Elizabeth Hoffecker, Research Scientist, Local Innovation Group Lead

This event at the School of Visual Arts featured Art in a Democracy's editor Ben Fink, who spent many years in the Roadside Theater ensemble making theater and organizing in the Kentucky coalfields and with allies across the country, and Arnaldo Lopez, managing director of Pregones Theater in the South Bronx. Roadside and Pregones collaborated together for decades, producing plays like Betsy! and, together with Junebug Productions, Promise of a Love Song. Through sharing and discussing stories from Roadside and its collaborators, as well as from our own experience, they probed the legacies of American populism, the connections between art and politics at the grassroots level, and the possibilities of making a democratic way of life.

Like conventional organizing, cultural organizing is about building power, understood as organized people plus organized money plus organized ideas. The difference is cultural organizers organize not around problems but around projects: music concerts that reflect the contributions our communities have made to world culture, plays that retell our communities’ stories in residents’ own words, community-run businesses that employ neighbors in recovery. These projects draw on and enhance a community’s shared material, its intellectual, emotional, and spiritual richness—its commonwealth. Artists, used to being treated as outside experts and gig-entrepreneurs, join this work as neighbors, with key skills to contribute. Government officials, used to steering the conversation, join this work as equals, no greater or lesser than anyone else. Youth, elders, poor folks, and others who are used to being ignored join this work as full participants, and are fully heard.

By Denise Griffin Johnson and Ben Fink

This episode is Art in a Democracy: Selected Plays of Roadside Theater. Our conversation with editor Ben Fink and contributor Arnaldo J. Lopez. explores Roadside's 50-year history of creative collaboration percolating at the crossroads of art, community, and America's struggle to craft an authentic living democracy.

Bill Cleveland

"In 1971, a janitor in North Carolina named C. P. Ellis was asked by his union to help lead a project about racism in the schools. Ellis, who at the time was president of the local Ku Klux Klan, was not expecting this invitation. Then the same union leader nominated local Black leader Ann Atwater to be Ellis’s co-chair. Ellis later told Studs Terkel he “hated” Atwater “with a purple passion.” But he took the position anyway. Mostly, he said, he did it out of “a sense of pride. . . .Here’s a chance for a low-income white man to be somethin’.” Atwater, of course, had every reason to walk away. But she didn’t. And so began the transformation of a Klansman into an anti-racist union organizer.”

Our work goes beyond making media. We work alongside partners from the Deep South to the South Bronx to turn our approach to storytelling into a new method of community-based cultural work, organizing, and wealth creation—what we call Community Cultural and Economic Development (CCED). Unlike standard approaches to development, CCED starts not with a community’s problems, but with its common values, traditions, and desires.

The solar energy project was born from this approach, demonstrating how CCED can leverage communities’ cultural strengths to address common challenges and seize new opportunities.

By Ben Fink, community organizer and series editor

In a Kentucky coalfield county that twice gave Trump 79% of its vote, volunteer fire chief Bill Meade is known as a particularly outspoken Trump supporter. When we invited him to meet with grassroots leaders at the oldest African American social organization in Baltimore, some people got nervous. But when Bill walked in the front door and saw the Narcan—the same medicine he and his fellow firefighters use to treat opioid overdoses back home—he knew he was on friendly ground. His hosts seemed to feel the same: after watching him perform in an original play about his neighbors’ struggle to survive the collapse of the coal industry, one of them commented: “We didn’t know white people had those problems, too.”

As we enter a dangerous moment in this nation’s political life, these are the kind of connections we need. We’ve been part of making them happen on a small scale in communities across the country. With the right investment, they could be happening everywhere.

By Dudley Cocke and Ben Fink

Bristol, Va.-Tenn. (Feb. 23, 2023) – The Birthplace of Country Music (BCM) and the Tennessee Department of Tourist Development are proud to announce singer-songwriter Ron Short has earned his place in the spotlight at Nashville’s famed Bluebird Cafe as the winner in the Tennessee Songwriters Week showcase round at The Down Home in Johnson City, Tenn. Wednesday night. Short was one of four songwriters out of 20 to advance from the qualifying round held at the Birthplace of Country Music Museum earlier this month where he performed his sentimental ballad entitled “France.” He competed against 17 other songwriters at The Down Home, each had advanced from qualifying rounds held in venues across Northeast Tennessee.

Ron Short is one of the editors of the series and was a key playwright, musician, and actor at Roadside Theater

"In Betsy!, secrets function as a gravitational force that pulls towards the light threads of unspoken connections between generations of racialized immigrants. The normalized history of the United States inevitably includes stories of travel, settlement, and love in mixed company. The facts are generally accepted: the people who came before us, in some cases indigenous to the land and at other times by forced or voluntary arrivals, engaged in a struggle of belonging and displacement that endures to the present day. In Betsy!, however, that familiar story bends in a different direction. Betsy! reveals a powerful and often painful secret: the ancestors we claim do not always tell the whole story of who we are."