On Moral Imagination and Courage

On May 31, I had the privilege of presenting the first Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance Award for Moral Imagination and Courage at the Calfee Community and Cultural Center (CCCC) Legends of Excellence dinner and program. A group from the Institute began interacting with Dr. Mickey Hickman, current chair of the Board of the initiative, and Jill Williams, its executive director, approximately two years ago. Our involvement was occasioned by our continuing interest in the Calfee Training School’s (Pulaski’s Black elementary school during the segregation era) storied history and its ongoing reimagination to serve that community and its region in a new way as the CCCC. All our work concerning Calfee to date has featured the role of forms of imagination its leaders and faculty have manifest in conceiving of alternate possibilities, or in education philosopher Maxine Greene’s phrase, “imagining things being otherwise.”¹ We have explored the role that the Training School played for its Black students and their families during segregation in these terms and have been fascinated that it will continue to play a like role in the facility’s new life as a broad-gauged community resource. We have interviewed a wide range of individuals associated with the school and the present center, and we have completed two academic articles concerning Calfee and are working on a third. We also began working to advise the Calfee Community and Cultural Center governing board some months ago.

        Our research prompted us to admire the singular courage and moral commitment of several of those we interviewed, as well as many others, who now deceased, shaped an arc of possibility for the lives of the Black youngsters (and their families) the school served. They did so while also playing historically significant roles in the pursuit of equality and civil rights in Virginia and the nation despite the manifestly unjust conditions in which they were living.  We decided during our inquiry that we would develop an annual award celebrating a community partner with whom we have worked, and given the character, poignancy and power of the history of Calfee, and of its faculty, staff and leaders, we soon chose to honor an individual associated with that institution who exhibited moral imagination and courage.

        The philosopher Mark Johnson has argued that exercising moral imagination means envisioning the full range of possibilities in a particular situation to address an ethical challenge.² He has likewise suggested that acting in this way often requires more than strength of character; it demands empathy and a disciplined self-conscious capacity to discern what is morally relevant in each context. As we considered whom we might honor, we quickly settled on Dorothy Deberry Venable, now 93, and the last surviving Calfee Training School faculty member, for our first award recipient. We had interviewed her for our research and learned she had served as a second-grade teacher at Calfee for two decades. She is remembered fondly by her former students and is routinely lauded for her often life-shaping efforts on their behalf. We learned that Ms. Venable consistently exhibited the characteristics Johnson has associated with moral imagination across her career and touched hundreds of children and their families deeply as she did so. Just as significantly, we discovered that she often persevered in her chosen ethical course even when, or perhaps especially when, that path proved professionally or personally fraught. That is, she pursued the possibility of helping her students imagine otherwise in a morally disciplined way. In so doing, she daily modeled for those children, and for their families and her colleagues, a profound belief in their innate dignity and human rights and the possibility their lives represented. Our interviews with alumni suggested that they never forgot how she persistently sought to encourage each of them to develop their talents and pursue their dreams. We learned that her mark on their lives has proven indelible.

        In my view, and particularly as one of the country’s major political parties and its leader attack the basic premises on which the United States is predicated, now is an especially fitting moment for a major university research center devoted to studying democratic governance and policy-making to highlight those who exemplify such ideals and who remind all of their origins, significance and portent. Our new award symbolizes that commitment and the long-standing national aspiration it salutes. We hope it will serve as a reminder that democracy, equality and individual freedom for all are hard won and must continually be pursued and reenforced by morally courageous individuals to be secure. Surely, matters have ever been so, but our nation’s current time of peril has just as certainly underscored the urgency implied by that fact. 

Notes

¹ Greene, Maxine. Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts and Social Change.       San Francisco: Jossey Bass/John Wiley and Sons, 1995, 22.

² Johnson, Mark. Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.