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In just over three months, Mastery Charter Schools, the local nonprofit that has received national recognition for success in turning around formerly troubled middle schools, has doubled its schools to six.

Mastery’s goal is to prepare students for college with a strict behavior code, a longer school day and a longer school year. Tutoring and Saturday sessions are required for those who struggle and students must show “mastery” by earning a grade of at least 76 percent before advancing.

Mastery is one of four charter operators converting seven low-performing district schools into Renaissance schools this school season as part of Superintendent Arlene Ackerman’s Imagine 2014 initiative. This year promises to be Mastery’s biggest test yet.

Philadelphia Inquirer

photo: Charles Fox/Inquirer

Comic Madness
Ages 9-12
Tuesdays, 6-7:30pm: Oct. 5, 12, 19, 26 and Nov. 9, 16,
Learn techniques for crafting a narrative—pacing, story-boarding, page layout and cover art. By the end of these six sessions, you’ll have produced your very own comic book individually (or collectively in a small group). Come join the ranks of our Mighty Comic Artists.

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Girl Power Poetry
Ages 13-15
Sundays, 6-8pm, Oct. 17, 24, 31 and Nov. 7, 14, 21
Jaime Hunter and Sheena Strawter-Anthony introduce young teenage girls to a variety of female African-American and Latina modern poets. Discussions on gender equality, motherhood and urban life will be explored. This workshop seeks to inspire literacy—reading, writing, listening, speaking, an appreciation and understanding of poetry and a sense of self-accomplishment.

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Hot News Now
Ages 13-15
Mondays, 6-8pm: Oct. 18, 25 and Nov. 1, 8, 15 and 22
Get bylines in local publications while working with top-notch journalist and Temple prof George Miller, returning for his second Mighty Writers workshop. We’ll talk about the kind of news that matters to us and then make sure that people in Philadelphia get to read it.

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Sportswriting Is Back!
Ages 15-17
Tuesdays, 6-8pm: Oct. 5, 12, 19, 26 and Nov. 9, 16
With Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Annette John-Hall, we’ll discuss the hottest topics in sports and learn what makes a sports story POP! Learn trade secrets about how to get pro athletes to open up in an interview and to write a sports story with flair and style.

To sign up for any workshop, call or email
Program Director Rachel Loeper:
267.239.0899
rloeper@mightywriters.org

P.S. More to come!

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Yes, I know, this is a little on the frothy side. It’s the last week of summer! Serious Mightiness will start next week, promise. —The Management

Today, in the New York Times, book critic Janet Maslin calls Isabel Wlkerson’s new nonfiction book—“The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration”—”a landmark piece of nonfiction.”

That kind of praise is hard to come by in the NYT.

The New Yorker weighed in, too, suggesting the author became “something of a one-woman W.P.A. project” while researching her book.

Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former Chicago bureau chief for The New York Times, documents the 55-year-long migration of black Americans across the United States.

Writes NYT critic Maslin (bold is MW’s): “Ms. Wilkerson makes a case that people who left the South only to create hometown-based communities in new places are more like refugees than migrants: more closely tied to their old friends and families, more apt to form tight expatriate groups, more enduringly attached to the areas they left behind. She argues that these people, among them her Georgia-born mother and Virginia-born father who raised Ms. Wilkerson in Washington, D.C., were better educated and more closely tied to their families than other scholars have assumed. She works on a grand, panoramic scale but also on a very intimate one, since this work of living history boils down to the tenderly told stories of three rural Southerners who immigrated to big cities from their hometowns.”

New York Times
New Yorker

photo (top)/Farm Bureau Administration

We’ve painted, brought in new furniture, hung art, bought lots of writing supplies… and, uh, now we’re just realizing that we sure could use a few more computers: three, in fact, would be really, really fab.

We’re looking for less than three-year-old iMacs, MacBooks or Powerbooks.

So… if you happen to know someone who might want to donate a Mac (hey, we’re writers!) to a program that will put it to super-duper use, just give us a call at 267.239.0899 and we promise to be your bff!

The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism is offering a series of workshops on the coverage of urban education as part of its initiative to prioritize urban education reporting.

The free program will open with a major workshop, from Sept. 29 to Oct. 2, at the Journalism School in New York as part of the New York Times Institute project being co-sponsored by the Atlantic Philanthropies and the Spencer Foundation for Education Research.

Applications are due Sept. 3.

New York Times/Columbia University

Emmy Winners for Writing, Drama Series:
Matthew Weiner and Erin Levy, “Mad Men.”

Emmy Winners for Writing, Comedy Series:
Steven Levitan, Christopher Lloyd, “Modern Family.”

“All good writing is swimming under water and holding
your breath.”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

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“I Have A Dream”

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

August 28, 1963

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

•••••••••••
“… we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.”
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In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

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“… we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.”
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But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

We cannot walk alone.

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.

We cannot turn back.

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: “For Whites Only.” We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until “justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. And some of you have come from areas where your quest—quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

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“… one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low.”

•••••••••

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of “interposition” and “nullification”—one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and t the crooked places will be made straight; “and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.”

This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with.

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

And this will be the day—this will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning:

My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.

Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride,

From every mountainside, let freedom ring!

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.

And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.

Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.

Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.

But not only that:

Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.

From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! Free at last!

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!