History as Power

Riley Jones IV, Ed.L.D.’26, sees the nation’s upcoming 250th anniversary as an opportunity — a generational opportunity to “envision a United States that our young people, present and future, can be proud of,” he wrote in his capstone dissertation, “in spite of the tenor of our national discourse.”

But how can we do this?

Riley’s answer for the past year was to work with high school students who were training as museum tour guides at the Paul Robeson House and Museum in Philadelphia, the city where the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776. As part of his Ed.L.D. residency with the museum and the Netter Center for Community Partnerships at the University of Pennsylvania, Riley wanted to investigate how young people were processing the current discourse. As guides, the students were learning about history and educating the public on the life, art, and civil rights legacy of Paul Robeson, a blacklisted Broadway actor and activist during the 1940s and 50s who refused to perform for segregated audiences. 

The goal, Riley says, was to help students take what they were learning and use that narrative history to “build power” with their peers while also making connections to their own lives. This summer, Riley will expand the work by launching the People’s 250 Youth Docents Program to train five students to give community walks in West Philadelphia, highlighting cultural institutions. He says helping young people connect with social change and how history shapes the present, while encouraging them to help others make that same connection, is especially critical during America’s semi quincentennial year.

“This is important at the country's 250th anniversary because it’s an inflection point to evaluate whether or not the systems that have gotten us to this point are the systems we want to carry us forward,” he says. “Honing young people's agency and decision-making power is not decorative, but fundamental to the design of a functioning democratic society.”

During his residency, Riley also developed a second, related project: planning, financing, and producing an event called the People’s 250 Assembly that will take place in Philadelphia later this summer. The event will use music, dance, and art to frame a conversation on how people envision the divided country's future at this milestone. “Participants will be responding to and designing around the questions: How do we think about narrative infrastructure in a local context?” he says, “and what can we build to make it easier for place-based collaboration to produce change?”

Initially, Riley wasn’t sure how the assembly would go over. At two information-gathering dinners he hosted, he asked students and local leaders if they wanted to take part in 250th celebrations.

“At first, people were like, we don’t want to participate. We feel that we're so divided in this moment. I don’t want to engage with it,” Riley says. But by the end of the dinners, people started offering ideas on who could give a talk or who might donate. “And when everybody does that together, that’s when the magic happens.”

As Riley was doing this work and moving through the Ed.L.D. Program, he started to wonder if history was simply his passion or a vocation, and the answer ended up being both. He has traced his own family’s history, including to his paternal granddad who was a sharecropper through his teen years in Covington, Tennessee, before attending Lane College and then moving to the south side of Chicago, where Riley grew up and where his grandparents still live.

“And on my maternal side, my great, great, great-grandfather Samuel Wynn fought in the Civil War until 1866 in Mississippi. He was 17 years old when he started and mustered out at about 21 or 22,” he says. Wynn used his Civil War earnings to purchase more than a hundred acres in Mississippi, allowing his family to bypass sharecropping. His descendants still own the land.

For Riley, who will begin a tenure track role as assistant professor of interdisciplinary leadership at Governors State University in Chicago teaching social entrepreneurship to doctoral students, it’s not enough to just know history — your own or the nation’s.

“For me, getting people to use history as a tool of social change really means helping them engage with the past through museums, archives, materials, rare books, those kinds of things where people can actually put their hands on things to understand what happened in the past so that in the present moment they can say, ‘Oh, this is how we've survived attacks on democracy before,’” he says. “We can look to the past for solutions that we can transpose into the current moment. I think a lot of people focus on the history part of it without focusing on the action part of it. For me, the action part is the more important part. What do we do now? And how does history tell us what is the morally, ethically, and values-aligned way to move forward?”