Spring 2023
The equity in equality
Rolita Flores Ezeonu seeks justice and equity in higher education. » More ...
Social justice
Summer 2021
For Evers Hope
Art professor and artist Hasaan Kirkland straddles the line between art and history, weaving the two together to bring exposure to systemic racism. » More ...
Fall 2020
The building of social empowerment
Tobias Jimenez spent his childhood in the type of settlement that he and his colleague Sean Anderson are now striving to improve.
The structures “have no electricity,” Jimenez says. “None have potable water. They’re not connected to the sewer. It’s not sanitary.”
Jimenez (’17 Arch., ’19 M.Arch.) was born in Pasco but moved to Colima, Mexico, with his parents as an infant. They raised him in an informal settlement— “like a favela,” he explains—on the city’s outskirts. “You’re focusing on surviving. You’re spending most of your time and energy trying to meet your basic needs. Living there is one of the reasons I decided to … » More …
Summer 2019
Hearing the whispers
Washington State University alumna Annita Lucchesi produced a groundbreaking report that was published by the Urban Indian Health Institute that revealed the astonishing and horrifying numbers of missing and unsolved murders of indigenous women across North America. » More ...
Summer 2019
How may we help you?
The changing role of public libraries includes services for homeless people, seeds, equipment, and community involvement. » More ...
Spring 2018
Living the fighting spirit
Hunting and rodeoing, playing football and singing in the school choir. For Charles Hudson ’84, growing up in the ’60s and ’70s on the Ft. Berthold Indian Reservation in rural North Dakota also meant listening to stories from his Hidatsa mother and white rancher father. One of them was about a huge flood — and it wasn’t a myth.
Six years before Hudson was born, construction of the Garrison Dam submerged 550,000 acres of Hidatsa, Mandan, and Arikara (the Three Affiliated Tribes) land, resulting in Lake Sakakawea and forcing hundreds of families to flee, including Hudson’s. The tragedy only inspired his parents to triumph over it.
… » More …
Spring 2016
Just Mercy
Dozens of witnesses, including a police officer, saw Walter McMillian at a church fish fry when a young woman was killed in nearby Monroeville, Alabama in 1986.
Police later arrested the self-employed African-American tree trimmer anyway. A nearly all-white jury convicted him and a judge sent him to death row. That’s where Bryan Stevenson, a Harvard-educated lawyer, met McMillian.
Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, battled a hostile criminal justice system to uncover improperly concealed evidence that led to McMillian’s exoneration in 1993.
But the frightening way McMillian was so quickly condemned raises broader questions about America’s criminal justice system, which incarcerates more … » More …
Summer 2014
Hunger Immortal: The First Thirty Years of the West Seattle Food Bank, 1983–2013
Ronald F. Marshall ’71
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013
What is today the West Seattle Food Bank started as a shoestring operation in an abandoned public school building. A pair of retired grocers from South Dakota had taken on responsibility for distributing government commodities like cheese and peanut butter to needy community members.
Thirty years later, the food bank owns its own building, serves an average of 750 families a week, and … » More …
Winter 2012
No Room of Her Own: Women’s Stories of Homelessness, Life, Death, and Resistance
Desiree Hellegers
Palgrave Macmillan
2011
“As a form of social punishment, homelessness is far sterner in many respects than sentences handed out in court for most criminal offenses,” writes Desiree Hellegers, an associate professor of English and founding co-director of the Center for Social and Environmental Justice at WSU Vancouver, in her introduction. In presenting the individual stories of 15 women in Seattle collected over two decades, Hellegers offers a view … » More …
Fall 2012
Race, Class, and William Julius Wilson’s World of Opportunity
In the middle of the last century, a Tennessee preacher-turned-sociologist, Tolbert H. Kennedy, found a relatively untapped pool of doctoral students among the nation’s black college graduates. Between 1944 and 1965, when Washington State University barely had a few dozen black students, he and fellow ex-preacher Wallis Beasley helped produce more black doctors of sociology than all but two schools, the University of Chicago and Ohio State.
Among them was a young man who went from the hardscrabble coal country of western Pennsylvania to graduate first in his class at Wilberforce, the oldest black college in the country, and get a master’s degree at Bowling … » More …