At a table read of a working draft of a play based on Better Homes of South Bend, a book about the lengths a couple of dozen families in South Bend had to go to, in secret and in alliance, to get decent housing here in the 1950s, when redlining placed many black families in a swampy district of substandard housing, if we can even call it that . . . in the audience were elderly people who grew up in the neighborhood that they managed to build while white folks weren't looking...and in the discussion after they expressed a familiar sort of gratitude, which I phrase this way: the gratitude of being treated with dignity that comes from caring about the story of your struggles and your accomplishments, spoken on your own terms. You know that feeling yourself, or you've seen it in others at very special moments. Everybody deserves it, of course, but it's like a rare old coin when it should be our common currency.#

Another element of the play was that it made clear that there is no small or large part of daily life that racism and enforced poverty cannot reshape into something demeaning.#

You have a. meal with folks you haven't seen for a while, and they've noticed different facets of the unfolding catastrophe than you've noticed, say, and they have different skills than you have, and you get to thinking that all together the knowledge and skills start to add up. With others, the activist tools and skills accumulate, and the solidarity could be good for morale, and the larger group might be harder to ignore. The possibilities start to seem undeniable as the evening unfolds.#