Renew Forsyth: The Evolution of Activism by M.C. Armstrong
My mother, Mary K. Armstrong, was an educator and an activist who was rather unorthodox in her methods. Back in the 1990s, with the help of a unique community she developed, my mother blocked a corporation from setting up shop in our hometown of Winchester, Virginia. Fast forward thirty years and now I, too, am now an educator and an activist living in Greensboro, North Carolina. As we confront our dire climate crisis, to say nothing of how traumatically divided we are as Americans right now, I’d like to take a moment to tell a story about my mother’s activism in the twentieth century and perhaps shine a light on how we can evolve into a model of pro-activism here in the twenty-first.
As a boy, I remember my mother involved in countless organizations (the Women’s Shelter, Kids Are Our Concern, Historic Preservation Society, etc.) and I remember her fury over this corporation called Cardinal Glass. My mother, nicknamed "Wild Mary K" by my friends, indeed went wild when she heard that a company with a history of polluting the lands, lakes, and rivers of its home bases, was about to do the same near the Shenandoah River. So "Wild Mary K" did what she did best. She rallied her friends. She talked to strangers. She got into some good trouble.
"Friendship is a way of life," a French philosopher once said, and to my mom it was the secret of life. When I asked her for wisdom shortly before she died, here was her one-word answer: "Friends."
My mother combed the town. In the twentieth century, before social media, Wild Mary K. made friends at the speed of Facebook. My father said my mother even went to the nursing homes of Frederick County to recruit folks to pack the city council meeting for the big upcoming vote on Cardinal Glass. But after all the speeches the night of the vote, my mother’s seat-of-the-pants team of environmentalists appeared to be one vote short. The head of the city council, a man whose first name was Richard (I won’t say his last name because I’m not interested in callout culture), told our town that he sided with the corporation, the job creators. Only then, at the last second, did one of the old ladies Mom had shepherded to the event stand up and speak.
This elderly woman had once been an educator herself. In fact, she had been the teacher of the city councilman. She called him "Dickie" because that's what he'd been called as a boy. She said, "Dickie! I am ashamed of you. What would your mother think of you if she could see you now?"
The auditorium went quiet. The city councilman suddenly seemed to remember his mother and his younger self. Dickie changed his vote. That community of Winchester, Virginia activists prevented that corporation from setting up shop on the Shenandoah River and our town was better for it. But as we now turn to the twenty-first century down here in North Carolina, I’d like to invite everyone into a new kind of story.
One thing I’ve noticed as an educator these past twenty-one years I’ve been teaching is that many of my students are against racism, misogyny, capitalism, communism, fascism, socialism, imperialism, torture, surveillance, greenwashing, Republicans, Democrats, whiteness, war, men, immigrants, the police—the list goes on and on. As the faculty advisor for the Guilford College Green Society, what I’ve been trying to figure out through conversations with my activist-students is WHAT ARE WE FOR? Is activism only an expression of antipathy? Where is the pro-activism?
Where are the solutions?
I feel so grateful to have found Dream.org and the Institute for Regenerative Design and Innovation. Renew Forsyth, their current campaign to address poverty, intergenerational trauma, climate and educational gaps through regenerative agriculture is a vision for a restorative economy and a new America. What is the gist of the vision? Change the soil and you change your food. Save the soil and you save the city. Change the microbiome of your community’s soil and you start to change the macrobiome of the planet. Studying that soil microbiome is one of the great frontiers of twenty-first century science and the Renew Forsyth team is out on that frontier, putting theory into practice, using regenerative agriculture and urban gardening to create food innovation districts with low carbon footprint local supply chains. My mother would’ve recognized this community of agropreneurs as “the good guys.” But as I think about the story IRDI is writing and inviting us into, what seems so utterly distinctive about this visionary organization is that they have not called out the business community of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Greensboro’s neighbor. They have called them in. They have called all of us in.
There is a place in Winston-Salem called Happy Hill Garden. Happy Hill was the first Black neighborhood in North Carolina history. Long before the Emancipation Proclamation, a slaveowner freed his enslaved workers in this Southern city and the former enslaved human beings became landowners who flourished for nearly a century as urban farmers and gardeners with fruit trees throughout the community that helped sustain their economy. These orchards disappeared during the decades my mother was coming of age, but it is the vision of Eric Mathis, Brenda Taylor, Amatullah Saleen, the Reverend Willard Bass and many others here at IRDI to restore Happy Hill and unite an entire city around the principles of collaboration and regenerative agriculture. This work begins in Happy Hill Garden and this work is already underway as the centerpiece of the Renew Forsyth urban restoration project.
As a co-founder of The Overstory Underground, a Living Lab dedicated to tree planting and storytelling, and as a member of Mathis’ dissertation committee, I wanted to understand his unique scholarly vision of activism and “restoration” and how he was grounding his scholarship in the literal earth he was restoring in his hometown of Winston-Salem. I wanted to know if he was “for real” with his vision of neo-realism and his desire to create a food innovation district and a soil-centric approach to healing our ailing planet, one community at a time. So, I visited Happy Hill Garden over the summer of 2022. I dropped to my knees and pulled weeds and huffed the rich Carolina loam, that restoring soil. I got intoxicated on that cornsweet smell and the feeling of connecting to the actual grounding of Mathis’ vision. I know little about regenerative agriculture compared to Eric and Brenda, so mainly, during my time with them in Happy Hill, I just tried listen. As the new Director of IRDI, my mission is to embody the principles of servant-leadership and to do what my mother taught me how to do: Serve the community that has given so much to you.
My mother is no longer with us. Wild Mary K. died in 2013. But her kind, creative and mischievous spirit lives on. The Renew Forsyth campaign, supported by Van Jones’ organization, Dream.org, is an opportunity for good trouble. It is a chance for anyone to lead by serving and, by serving, finding purpose in this crucial decade of the 20s as we try to mitigate the impacts of climate change and a century of fossil fuel wars and fossil fuel economies. In the coming weeks, as we launch our crowdfunding campaign to transform Winston-Salem and the North Carolina Triad, I look forward to sharing more news about our partners, like the Triad Farmers Co-op, St. Francis Springs Prayer Center, Dudley High School and Atrium Health. I look forward to visiting schools, churches, bases, bookstores, nursing homes and breweries, looking for that unorthodox community that transcends our partisan divisions. I look forward to meeting that woman who will cry out, “Dickie!” when all hope is lost. But mainly, I look forward to doing a lot less of what I’m doing now—taking up this public space—and doing a lot more of what my mother was so good at when she was on a mission: Shining a light on others. As the Director of IRDI, I view my mission as giving rise to the vision of Mathis and Taylor and their talented team of pro-activists and agropreneurs. Please join us.
Artist’s Statement
I like to branch out in weird ways like a banyan tree, but whether I’m reporting on our foreign wars, singing songs for Viva la Muerte, making the case for regenerative agriculture and planting trees, or crafting a novel, a memoir, or an essay, my practice is always rooted in storytelling. What is my bumper sticker theory for storytelling and storytellers? I could sample Eminem and say LOSE YOURSELF, but what I always tell my students is this: Write what’s missing. Mind the gap. And be kind.
Dr. M.C. Armstrong is the Director of the Institute for Regenerative Design and Innovation. Armstrong is the author of The Mysteries of Haditha, published in 2020 by Potomac Books. The Brooklyn Rail called The Mysteries of Haditha one of the “Best Books of 2020,” and Armstrong’s story was nominated for “Best Memoir” at the 2021 American Book Festival. Armstrong, who grew up in Winchester, Virginia, embedded with Joint Special Operations Forces in Al Anbar Province, Iraq, in 2008. He published extensively on the Iraq war through The Winchester Star. Armstrong is the winner of a Pushcart Prize and his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Esquire, Consequence Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, The Missouri Review, The Gettysburg Review, Mayday, Monkeybicycle, Wrath-bearing Tree, Epiphany, War, Literature, and the Arts, The Literary Review, and other journals and anthologies. He is the co-founder of The Overstory Underground (A Living Lab) and is the guitarist and lead singer-songwriter for Viva la Muerte, an original rock and roll band. His first novel, American Delphi, will be published in the fall of 2022 by MilSpeak Books. You can follow him on Twitter @mcarmystrong.