J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Democratic Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton of the District of Columbia, joined at left by Democratic Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, arrives for a news conference ahead of the House vote on H.R. 51 on Capitol Hill in Washington, April 21, 2021.

Eleanor Holmes Norton’s family has been fighting for equality since the 1800s, when her great-grandfather escaped slavery to come work in Washington, D.C., but – as she puts it – “didn’t quite find his freedom.” 

She grew up in segregated neighborhoods, went on to Yale Law School, and has represented the District of Columbia in Congress for 30 years. Yet as a delegate, she has never been allowed to vote on a piece of legislation – not even her recent bill to grant the district statehood, which would give the district a representative with full voting rights and two senators. 

“I have every reason to press for full equality for the residents of my hometown,” on both a personal and professional level, she said in a phone interview after the House of Representatives passed the bill, H.R. 51, by a vote of 216-208 on April 22. 

The push for Washington, D.C., to become its own state, with only a small enclave remaining a federal district, has waxed and waned over the years. In a partial nod toward the desire for representation, Congress granted the city three electoral votes through the 23rd Amendment in 1961.

But lately, the drive to achieve full statehood has been gathering new momentum. It won overwhelming approval from district voters in a 2016 referendum. And although the bill passed by the House has little chance of becoming law unless the Senate gets rid of the filibuster, Democrats are seizing on District of Columbia statehood as part of a broader push to adjust the balance of power in American government. 

Specifically, Democrats see it as a way to address a demographic imbalance in the Senate, where Republicans make up half the members but represent 42 million fewer people than the Democrats plus two independents who caucus with them. Although the Framers designed the Senate to give each state equal influence – unlike the House, where representation is proportional to population – the growing correlation between partisanship and geography has meant that Republicans from rural, largely white states have gained outsize clout. Adding two senators from an urban Democratic stronghold like Washington, D.C., which voted 92% in favor of Joe Biden and has a far higher percentage of African Americans than any U.S. state, would help alleviate what they see as the Senate’s deeply undemocratic tilt. 

“There’s a national political logic for [District of Columbia statehood], too, because the Senate has become the principal obstacle to social progress across a whole range of issues,” said Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, cited Representative Raskin’s comment as evidence of a larger agenda behind the longtime push to give Washington, D.C., residents representation in Congress. “Make no mistake about it, H.R. 51 is just Democrats’ latest attempt at a power grab,” he said at an April 22 press conference.

If successful, he warned, Democrats could potentially pass “socialist” policies like the Green New Deal and defunding the police, as well as increase the number of justices on the Supreme Court to give it a more liberal tilt. “They are not even denying this is their objective.”

Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Local clergy hold a rally calling for "emancipation through D.C. statehood" to mark the anniversary of Emancipation Day in Washington, D.C., April 16, 2021. Emancipation Day commemorates an 1862 act, signed by Abraham Lincoln, which abolished slavery in the District of Columbia. A bill to make the district a state was recently supported by a majority of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Why the Framers wanted a federal capital

With just over 700,000 residents, Washington, D.C., would be the third smallest state by population, after Wyoming and Vermont. But according to Representative Norton, it punches above its weight in other areas. Its residents pay more federal taxes per person than taxpayers in any other state, its gross domestic product is larger than that of 17 states, and its bond rating is higher than that of 32 states. 

“Congress has both the moral obligation and the constitutional authority to pass H.R. 51,” said Representative Norton in her speech on the House floor ahead of last week’s vote.

The statehood bill is also seen by many advocates as a matter of racial justice and voting rights in a city that has an African American population of close to 50% – far higher than any state.

“Critics continue to ignore the essential argument in favor of statehood: ending the continued disenfranchisement of a non-minority Black jurisdiction that has left hundreds of thousands of Americans without representation in Congress,” wrote Adriel I. Cepeda Derieux, senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, in an article last summer.

But conservatives say that carving a new state out of the District of Columbia would require a constitutional amendment.

True, Congress has admitted 37 other states, but none of them had a constitutionally mandated purpose to serve as a federal enclave. In the nation’s early days, Philadelphia served as the capital. When hundreds of angry soldiers surrounded the building where the Continental Congress met, demanding back pay, and Pennsylvania’s government refused to call in the militia to disperse them, the Congress decided a special federal district was needed to give it full authority over its own protection.

The Capitol experienced a reverse of the Philadelphia standoff on Jan. 6 this year, when President Donald Trump and Pentagon officials did not deploy National Guard troops for hours after rioters entered the building, while District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser was powerless to activate them. Democrats have cited that clash as further justification for granting the district statehood, which Representative Norton says would give the district its own National Guard that could be called upon to protect the Capitol in addition to any federally deployed National Guard forces. 

A second key reason for an independent federal district was to ensure that it was not beholden to any one state government in a way that would allow it to exercise “awe or influence” over the national government, as James Madison put it. 

Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gave Congress the power to establish a federal district that would not exceed 100 square miles. George Washington selected an area straddling the Potomac River, which marked the dividing line between Northern and Southern states, for that purpose in 1790. Both Virginia and Maryland ceded land for its creation, including the port cities of Alexandria and Georgetown, creating a 100-square-mile district that had fewer than 11,000 residents at the time. In the mid-1800s, Virginia took back its portion, which constituted about a third of the district’s land. Today the district comprises 68 square miles and has 712,000 residents. 

Avenues for representation

An alternative way to give district residents full representation in Congress would be “retrocession” – giving the land back to Maryland, as was done with Virginia. But the constitutionality of Virginia’s retrocession has never been tested, and in 1963, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy said that retroceding the land to Maryland would require a constitutional amendment. Such an amendment would require two-thirds majorities in the House and Senate, and three-quarters of states would have to ratify it.

Representative Norton says retrocession is a nonstarter, noting that Maryland’s full congressional delegation supports district statehood. Her bill outlines a 2-square-mile federal enclave that would encompass the White House, the Capitol, and the Supreme Court.

But with federal control limited to such a small area, Congress may not be able to exercise full authority over its security as intended, says Zack Smith, a legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. He adds that, according to his calculations, some of the security fence erected around the Capitol after Jan. 6 looks like it would have fallen outside the boundaries of the new enclave. 

In addition, under the revised boundaries the district’s three electoral votes granted under the 23rd Amendment would likely be determined by only a handful of residents – such as those living at the White House. 

H.R. 51 calls for repealing the 23rd Amendment, and essentially preventing it from being exercised in the interim, but Heritage’s Mr. Smith says that raises concerns about whether and when the amendment would actually be repealed and would lower the bar for annulling constitutional amendments.

“You would have a Congress trying to nullify a constitutional amendment by simple legislation. That would set a very troubling precedent,” he says. 

“There’s certainly no doubt this is part of a larger push to fundamentally alter our system of government,” he adds, citing other Democratic initiatives being pushed on the left, like eliminating the filibuster and expanding the size of the Supreme Court.

Representative Norton welcomes the additional momentum her statehood push is getting as Democrats look to adjust the balance of power in the Senate. She says conservatives’ concerns about the 23rd Amendment not getting repealed first are groundless.

“It’s just another reason Republicans put forward to obstruct the bill,” she says. 

When the first lockdown of the pandemic came, driving countries to hunker down and close their airspace, many Europeans were forced into a hard decision: stay put in their adopted nations, where they had jobs, or return to their homelands, where they had family.

For Flavia Brunetti, the choice was clear. She sped out of Tunisia on one of the last Alitalia flights still wearing a pajama top so she could reach her Aunt Letizia, now 95. It was inconceivable to let the person who raised her confront the logistics of a lockdown alone. “All of a sudden I realized that I could become cut off from my family,” says Ms. Brunetti. “I grabbed my laptop and that was it.”

She was not the only one racing to get home before the borders closed. As Italian newspapers have noted, where the tears of Italian “mamas” failed, the COVID-19 crisis has succeeded in bringing back home youngsters working and studying abroad. Nations across Europe that had seen an exodus of their best and brightest in the years before the pandemic have welcomed the return of young professionals like Ms. Brunetti. Remote working has allowed high-income Romanians to return. Poland, Latvia, and Bulgaria are also drawing back top talent.

And if countries like Italy and Romania want to keep their returned people home – if simply as a way to help get out of the pandemic-spurred economic crisis – the challenge now is to figure out how.

“It is a priority for every country to bring back talented people, because if not the disparities in the European Union will only grow,” says Marius Bostan, a former Romanian communications minister now spearheading RePatriot, a platform focused on fostering the return of Romanian entrepreneurs. Romania has the largest share of working-age mobile citizens in the European Union, with millions of Romanians working across the bloc. “We have a lot of business opportunity but we do not have enough entrepreneurs in our opinion, not enough competition.”

Family over jobs

Southern European nations were already on the economic back foot before the pandemic struck, but now they face the worst economic crisis to hit Europe since World War II. As such, many countries boosted tax incentives for returnees: Italy, with a diaspora of 5.5 million, a third of whom hold university degrees, did it before the pandemic struck Europe, while Greece rolled their plans out last year.

But for many, the decision to return came from a desire to put family first, particularly older and younger relatives. Ms. Brunetti, a humanitarian worker and novelist, continued her job remotely before shifting to a position in Rome in December. The pandemic, she says over Zoom, shifted priorities and sparked an instinct to protect vulnerable people. “Everybody wants to go back to normal, but I think the world will be different,” she says. “We will have to be kinder.”

Ornella Leone lives in Palermo but works for a German company. She chose Italy over Swiss financial hub Zurich because in Palermo, she enjoys the support of her mother and three sisters in raising her baby daughter. Day care is a fraction of the cost of that in Switzerland. All this, plus the proximity of beautiful beaches, adds up to a better work-life balance.


The Italian government, she notes, offers tax discounts for Italians who return after living at least two years abroad. That tax break is even greater for those who choose to be based in southern Italy, where poverty is highest and professional opportunities scarce. The fiscal incentives run from five to 10 years, depending on whether you have children or purchase property.

“I am not entirely convinced about my decision to live here and not entirely convinced to move abroad,” she admits, noting that better educational opportunities for her child might persuade her to leave Italy again.

Courtesy of Ornella Leone

Ornella Leone works remotely from her home in Palermo on the Italian island of Sicily. She chose to relocate to Palermo during the pandemic because there she enjoys the support of her mother and three sisters in raising her baby daughter.

Women like Ms. Leone and Ms. Brunetti are not alone in prioritizing family. A survey by an Italian think tank in Milan and consulting firm PwC found 1 in 5 Italians abroad want to return for family reasons over professional considerations. The pandemic leveled the playing field because it meant job losses and lockdowns everywhere.

At the same time, the Italian government was perceived as handling the pandemic effectively, especially initially when other nations were downplaying the severity of the virus. Despite the economic and infrastructural challenges, there is a strong perception in Italy of a better quality of life and a high level of trust in the health care system.

“A lot of young managers who have come back to Italy want to remain in Italy,” says Patrizia Fontana, president of corporate headhunters Talents in Motions in Milan. “This is happening now, after September, October. ... On the other end, there are a lot of Italian companies that are taking this period to improve their programs to attract new managers, even though this is a very hard moment in Italy.”

Even so, Nicola Nobile, lead economist at Oxford Economics, is skeptical those who returned in 2020 will stay. “It has yet to be seen if this is something that will help in the margins or whether it will be something more substantial,” he says. “Trying to come up with a definite conclusion now is a bit too soon because we don’t know literally what will happen next month.”

He believes despite the sharp rise in remote work – which some companies and individuals will maintain – the majority will go back to the office when the crisis passes. Italy, which is tentatively easing restrictions on a region-by-region basis, will have to offer more than fiscal incentives to win back its brains; a million Italians left in the past decade due to lack of opportunities.

“Romania has a lot to offer”

Romania, which is the No. 1 exporter of labor in the European Union, faces a similar challenge, despite having one of the fastest-growing economies in the EU in the years leading up to the pandemic.

Half a million Romanians left to work in other parts of Europe when the country joined the bloc in 2007. Millions more have followed. At the same time, the pandemic has highlighted the absence of more than 39,000 Romanian-educated nurses and 20,000 doctors practicing abroad.

When Bogdan left the Eastern European nation, he was earning $500 per month. An international career took him to Asia and London, where he was a top taxpayer, earning more than £150,000 ($208,000). The pandemic put a stop to international commuting and he relocated to Romania, where his children attend school. (He asked that his full name not be used because he is not authorized to talk to the press by his employer.)

Where he is physically “really makes very little difference to the actual work,” he points out. “If you’re working for a foreign company from here, Romania has a lot to offer. The nature is beautiful; the purchasing power of the money is still OK. It’s a good lifestyle.”

Lisa Stoica left a job in preschool education in Sweden to be closer to her aging parents in Bucharest. She is now exploring opportunities to create early education projects with EU funds. “I’m at a point in my life where a salary is not as important as my own peace of mind,” she says, but she doesn’t exclude leaving again if things don’t work out.

Some estimate the Romania returnees over 2020 to be as high as 1.3 million, although experts caution that figure is misleading as it includes those who come and go for seasonal jobs in areas like agriculture and care work. But even a fraction of that number, especially if they are highly skilled, could have an impact in a country with fewer than 20 million people, which is why Mr. Bostan is so keen to bring more of them back.

“In Romania, we have free education including university. If you count all the Romanians who leave, and you add up the cost of education and so on, it’s a huge amount of money,” he says. “The people who leave, they have a little bit more risk-appetite; they are more entrepreneurial in mindset.”

[Editor’s note: The original version misstated which members of Ms. Leone’s family are in Palermo.]

When Daniel Bleakney-Formby moved to Petaluma, California, over a decade ago, he knew he had found his place. 

“It’s a group of people that feel the same way about resources that I do – that the small daily actions and choices that I make and others like me make have an effect on not only my own circle, but then that creates a ripple effect going outwards,” says Mr. Bleakney-Formby, who runs a produce stand in downtown Petaluma.  

That’s the spirit, he says, behind Petaluma’s decision on March 1 to ban the construction of any new gas stations in the town. 

The initiative is one example of momentum around a movement that activists call a “keep it in the ground” strategy aimed at moving away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible. Several other cities, such as Minneapolis, Baltimore, and Los Angeles, have proposed similar ideas.

Neither the activists nor the people of Petaluma are under any delusions that forbidding new gas stations will turn the tide. But the fight against climate change is mental, too – changing attitudes and habits to begin making more balanced choices. And signaling a move away from reliance on petroleum at least begins to shift expectations.

The ban helps residents understand how urgent the situation is, says Pete Gang, a local architect and climate activist. “It helps change the public perception of what’s happening,” he says. “As we collectively have tried to come to terms with the climate crisis, we have to change people’s perceptions of the world that they’re living in and their habits and expectations, because a carbon neutral world looks radically different from the world that we live in now.”

The fight began when Safeway announced plans to build Petaluma’s 17th gas station. Residents pushed back, given the site’s proximity to a school, playground, and day care center. When the City Council approved Safeway’s plans, opponents filed a lawsuit. The lawsuit is ongoing, but the opposition prompted the city to implement a moratorium on new gas station construction in 2019. The moratorium became permanent on March 1.  

Courtesy of Victoria Webb

Daniel Bleakney-Formby (right), his husband, and Petaluma City Council member D'Lynda Fischer hold out organic apples and quince at Mr. Bleakney-Formby's produce stand outside his shop, Jupiter Foods, in downtown Petaluma, California, November 2020. Ms. Fischer, who frequently helps out at the produce stand, spearheaded Petaluma's ban on new gas stations.

The new ban prohibits the construction of additional gas stations and also bars the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure at existing gas stations. Clean energy infrastructure, such as hydrogen fueling and electric charging, is encouraged. 

California has been particularly aggressive with attempts at dialing back the effects of fossil fuels. Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order requiring that by 2035, all new vehicles sold in California have zero emissions. But the city of Petaluma went even further this January by setting itself a carbon neutrality goal for 2030. 

“We know that we need to move away from gas altogether,” says Petaluma City Council member D’Lynda Fischer, who spearheaded the initiative. “And so it doesn’t make any sense anymore to be approving gas stations or any other sort of infrastructure that’s going to be obsolete in nine years, or that doesn’t meet our goal in nine years to have a different sort of future.” 

In many ways, Petaluma’s largely like-minded and environmentally conscious residents position it to become a successful early adopter of clean energy. But the question remains: Can the ban on new gas stations make a real difference?  

Some experts are skeptical. “In the case of Petaluma, I’d say it’s underwhelming and really not impressive,” says Jason Henderson, a professor of geography and environment at San Francisco State University. “I don’t want to be a downer, but it’s not like we can just shift to electric cars and all of our problems are going to go away. There’s still going to be the proliferation of the infrastructure of private cars, and that’s the bigger problem we miss.”

For Mr. Henderson, a concrete commitment to expanding bicycle infrastructure and improving public transportation would carry more weight than a ban on new gas stations in a town that already has 16 stations for only 60,000 people. 

But local activists see the fight against new gas stations as part of a much larger movement steering the world away from harmful fossil fuels. 

“It’s not only about local impact,” says Woody Hastings of the Coalition Opposing New Gas Stations, a grassroots organization working to stop the construction of new gas stations in Sonoma County and other nearby counties. “It is high time that we begin to actually get serious about changing what we see as obsolete 20th-century permitting rules that allow gas stations to be built.”

Ann Hermes/Staff

Customers pull up to gas stations at a busy intersection on April 8, 2021, in Petaluma, California.

If Petaluma can take this step forward, he says, maybe other cities around the country will follow. 

Petaluma itself has seen attitudes change since 2019 when it adopted the original moratorium. The decision to freeze the construction of gas stations stemmed in part from the city’s adoption of a climate emergency resolution earlier that year.  

Ever since, residents are much more likely to point to the climate emergency in City Council meetings when decisions are being made, says Mr. Gang, the local activist who helped draft the resolution. “I am very keenly aware of the progress that has been made over the last 10 years – just the mood, the conversation. ... Now [climate change] is a real thing. It’s serious.”  

That shift in mindset is taking place in some quarters of the petroleum industry, too. Fossil fuel companies are also concerned about how to successfully herald a transition to cleaner energy – and they have the technology and the experience to contribute meaningfully, says Jodie Muller, a senior official at the Western States Petroleum Association. 

But a ban on new gas stations may not have the intended effect, she says. “As we move into the future, consumers are going to need stations for all types of fuels. We don’t exactly know what that fueling infrastructure is going to look like, and there could potentially be new stations needed with some sort of mixed fueling services.”

She worries that policymakers sometimes pass legislation without thoroughly considering the consequences for residents – such as potential price increases. 

For Mr. Bleakney-Formby, the ban on new gas stations is proof that Petaluma is headed in the right direction, even if it hasn’t figured everything out. “You’ve got to take some steps, and stop just talking about all of this,” he says as he bags locally grown dates, lettuce, and apples for a customer at his produce stand. 

And he doesn’t believe the momentum will stop here.  

“It’s just little things, you know – having conversations,” Mr. Bleakney-Formby says. “And all of that is just so important, like, ‘Oh, I can do that too. I’m going to start a compost pile. I’m going to plant a tree.’ And collectively, it makes a big impact.”

Taylor Luck

A pair of M102 howitzer cannons stand in the Nakheel Plaza in downtown Amman, Jordan, April 21, 2021. The guns fire blanks at sunset to signal the end of the daylong Ramadan fast, reviving a tradition that evokes a simpler time.

At 7:14 on the dot, the artillery brigade officers fire the twin cannons into the sunset. The booms reverberate through the valley and up the crowded hills of the Jordanian capital.

The daylong fast is over. Iftar is served.

As Jordan marks its second Ramadan under lockdown from the coronavirus, officials are reviving a rather loud tradition. For Jordanians dealing with the stresses of pandemic-induced unemployment and uncertainty, it offers an audible celebration that all can take part in, and a bit of nostalgic comfort as well.

The familiar boom has become a balm.

“These cannons are taking me back to my childhood,” says Um Eyad, a mother of five in her late 50s. “Now this is the sound of Ramadan.”

For most Muslims, Ramadan means gatherings. 

Families, friends, and complete strangers gather together each sunset for the iftar meal – from a handful of dates and water to a multicourse feast at home.

Jordan hit hard

In ordinary years, mosques are at their fullest. Communal evening tarawih prayers see neighbors and friends pray shoulder to shoulder each night.

Throughout the holy month, the entire society is on the exact same schedule to the very second – eating, praying, and celebrating in lockstep.

But this year, after a March in which Jordan saw one of the highest numbers of COVID-19 infections and deaths per capita in the world, the government imposed a series of restrictions for Ramadan, closing mosques and imposing 7 p.m. curfews, just before the sunset iftar.

In a society of strong tribal and familial bonds, where families are accustomed to a month packed with rotating iftar invitations and endless visits till dawn, the prospect of yet another Ramadan in isolation was especially severe.

Which is what lit the fuse for the return – after a decadeslong absence – of the Ramadan cannon by the Greater Amman Municipality (GAM) and the Jordan Armed Forces.

“Although the spiritual aspects of Ramadan, praying and reflections, are still there, the social aspect and festive atmosphere have been disrupted by the pandemic,” says Nasser al Rahamneh, a GAM spokesman.

“The cannon is a reminder that there is still a Ramadan spirit, a Ramadan flavor in the air.”

Uniting cities

There are various origin stories, but historians trace the use of the Ramadan cannon across the Arab world to the 19th century, before the availability of electricity or loudspeakers to carry the call to prayer or alert sometimes widely dispersed residents to the precise astronomical sunset, the moment that Muslims can break their fast.

Muath Freij/Reuters

A vendor carries Ramadan decorations in Amman, Jordan, April 12, 2021. A 7 p.m. curfew imposed amid the pandemic has put a damper on usual observances this holy month.

Experts agree that the practice became popular in Cairo in the 1860s under the rule of Ismail Pasha, Ottoman viceroy and ruler over Egypt.

The idea of one sound uniting a city – allowing tens of thousands of people to break their fast simultaneously – caught on, and the use of iftar cannons spread across Arab cities under Ottoman control, notably Jerusalem, Amman, Damascus, and finally Baghdad in the late 19th century.

The practice reached Kuwait in 1907 and quickly spread throughout the Gulf, even reaching as far as Indonesia by the 1940s.

In the then-Emirate of Transjordan in the 1920s, authorities fired cannons from hilltops. For decades, people in surrounding villages would stand in the road or on rooftops, waiting to hear the cannon fire echo to hold iftar. Cannon men became figures beloved by children, akin to Santa Claus.

“In Jordan and much of the Islamic world, the cannon was transformed from a symbol of destruction and war to a symbol of joy,” says Nayef Nawiseh, a Jordanian historian and heritage expert.

Victim of modernity

Yet with the rise of television, radio, and mosque loudspeakers in the mid-1960s, citizens increasingly turned to their homes to check iftar time.

As of 1967, the Jordanian Ramadan cannon faded into disuse, only trotted out a few times in Amman in the early 2000s for special occasions.  

Nevertheless, iftar cannons had become so part and parcel with Jordanian Ramadan culture that today in outlying towns like Karak and Salt, people of a certain age use the phrase “when the cannon fires” to describe iftar time.

Jordan is not alone in ringing in this Ramadan with a bang.

In Egypt, some 30 years after the practice was retired, tourism authorities painstakingly rehabilitated a pair of 1887 Krupp cannons to fire once again from the hilltop Salah El-Din Citadel in Cairo.

In Amman, two black M102 howitzers unveiled last week to fire daily blanks have become an instant selfie destination for capital residents passing through downtown.

“I used to be afraid of the sound of the cannon as a child,” says Ibrahim Jilani, an unemployed engineering graduate who was living across the hill from the cannon’s position when it was briefly revived.

He stopped to take a photo of the cannons.

“Now I hear it as a comfort. It’s a daily reminder of a simpler, better time.”

But more than nostalgia, the cannon is offering Jordanians something that has been rare the past year: a sense of community.

“We may be divided this year due to the pandemic; we may be suffering economically and healthwise. But when that cannon sounds,” says Um Eyad, “we are united. And we are persevering.”

Say the word abolitionist and you might think someone is about to destroy something. But that’s not what comes to mind for Jia Johnson, who describes herself as an abolitionist. For her, the word is one of hope, an expectation that something new is about to be created.

Quan Evans experienced that kind of abolition. Old habits and perspectives gave way to new, more constructive ones when he took a theological studies course Ms. Johnson co-taught during his time in jail. 

“I really got more into reading and writing because of those classes,” says Mr. Evans, who earned a certificate in theological studies from McCormick Theological Seminary while he was incarcerated. “I even read Dr. King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ on my own time. It made me think about what I was supposed to be doing here. … You don’t bring negativity into a negative place. … You think about how you can change things.”

That change in perspective is one of the outcomes Ms. Johnson hopes for in her work as director of the Solidarity Building Initiative (SBI), McCormick Theological Seminary’s liberative higher education program at an Illinois county jail. Her second, longer-term goal is to “end the harm that the current [carceral] system inflicts on individuals and, in turn, our society.”

Liberative education, Ms. Johnson explains, “is not about creating model inmates, but about providing resources for intellectual and spiritual growth to men and women on the inside and disrupting the unjust economic, social, and political barriers on the outside that have resulted in our country locking up more of its citizens than any other country in the world.”

“The ending of slavery didn’t create a new and just beginning,” Ms. Johnson adds. “We went from chattel slavery to Black Codes to convict leasing to Jim Crow to today’s system of mass incarceration that disproportionally impacts the poor and Black and brown persons.”

The ripple effect of imprisonment

This work is personal for Ms. Johnson. A native of El Paso, Texas, she first encountered the criminal legal system seven years ago when her brother spent a year and a half in jail. “The trauma was not only his, but it also impacted the entire family,” she says. “The one thing that gave me hope was watching God meet my brother and other men detained in that carceral setting. A spiritual community of support and encouragement formed that was crucial for survival and healing in an institution that’s not designed for flourishing.”

Ms. Johnson began to imagine how this kind of support could be duplicated. A couple of years later, she found herself in Chicago, working on a master’s degree in public ministry at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary and managing a nonprofit program that offered entrepreneurial training, including to those who had been incarcerated. During this time, she also co-taught the 10-week course on theological reflection that Mr. Evans took.  

As the teachers shared thoughts from theologians such as James Cone, Andrew Sung Park, and Daniel Erlander, the impact quickly became apparent. “I could see that students were connecting what they were learning … to their lived experience,” she says. “One student shared how this experience provided skills for mending fractured relationships. Another student reflected on how he saw the kingdom of God break into his daily life at the jail, creating empathy that showed up as helping a cell mate who was ill. In the past, he noted, it was not always his first thought to consider the needs of others over his own.”

Students encouraged the teachers to return, and the next session featured guest lecturers – including an adjunct faculty member at a Chicago-area university and entrepreneurs – all of whom were formerly incarcerated. “Every student referenced the profound impact these individuals had made,” says Ms. Johnson. “One student wrote, ‘I had been afraid of going to college and seeking higher learning. It turns out I was afraid of something that wasn’t to be feared.’ Another student wondered out loud how different his life might have been had he met one of these lecturers before the events that led to his pretrial detention.” 

“I was witnessing what much of the research indicates,” says Ms. Johnson. “Education, especially higher education, is a pathway to decreasing recidivism and disrupting the school-to-prison pipeline. One student lamented the reality that he had received a better education in four years of pretrial detention than he did in his four years of high school. I was realizing that academic institutions can help ensure that the right to an education includes people who are incarcerated.” 

Expanding efforts to challenge the system

Over the past year, Ms. Johnson’s role with SBI has expanded. She is now forming a collective of academic institutions, community organizers, and formerly incarcerated activists that, together, might be able to disrupt what she calls “a system of perpetual harm.”

Last summer, after learning about the initiative, a pastor who is also a trustee at an academic institution asked Ms. Johnson to partner with his Minneapolis church to offer a series of webinars – open to the public – on criminal justice, the church, and the disconnects between the two. 

“Someone at a high level within an academic institution used his power to bring this issue before not only a congregation, but anyone who wanted to learn and enter the online dialogue about what can be done,” says Ms. Johnson. “That’s how this work is moved forward.”

In that series of webinars, incarcerated students shared excerpts from their papers. “I wanted our conversations to be firmly rooted in the here and now of people who I knew and loved,” Ms. Johnson explains.

Now, she has a more extensive way to share this information. Earlier this year, she and her staff created a free online, public education curriculum that is inspiring and mobilizing people to create communities of advocacy for those who are imprisoned. “I like to think that we are grabbing hold of the baton in the struggle for survival and liberation that our Black, brown, and white abolitionist ancestors have been passing along,” Ms. Johnson says.

“We are finding our place on the time-honored Underground Railroad.” 

AP

Green Party co-leader Annalena Baerbock touches co-leader Robert Habeck after she was chosen April 19 to lead her party as candidate for German chancellor in the Bundestag federal elections in September.

Germany is in an era of firsts. For the first time since the founding of the postwar republic in 1949, an incumbent chancellor will not be up for reelection this September. 

For the first time since it was founded more than four decades ago, the Greens party is ahead in the polls. On April 19, the party settled on its first candidate to run for German chancellor, Annalena Baerbock. She is also the youngest to run for the office, not to mention a medaled trampolinist. The mother of two will often do a handstand to show her strength and agility.

Yet another first may matter more to Germans as the world’s fourth largest economy struggles with the pandemic and a desire to solve climate change. 

In a society whose politics already favor consensus building, the Greens set out in 2018 to show that a party once known for sharp disputes and chaotic politics can set an even higher model for patiently bridging disagreements, giving opponents a way to save face, and trying not to hang the future on one person. It selected Ms. Baerbock and a more senior party leader, Robert Habeck, to work together as party co-leaders. 

This ruling duumvirate generally worked. The two even shared an office. They clearly get along, complement each other, and have forged a deeper agreement among party members on finding Germany’s long-sought Mitte (middle). They showed it is possible to argue on the merits of an issue without shaming opponents.

The Greens have moved to the center on many issues, softening their eco-warrior image. When it came time to pick a candidate for chancellor this month, Mr. Habeck lost the vote but graciously gave way. Now the Greens have a shot at not only winning enough seats in the election to form a coalition with other parties, but also providing a chance for Ms. Baerbock to succeed Angela Merkel.

The Greens are still focused heavily on climate change, with a goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 70% from a 1990 baseline by 2030, far more than the country’s current goal of 55%. But they realize that the hard political work in changing lifestyles and driving innovation first requires making sure public debate does not turn to dissension and that truth can arise out of respect, listening, and civility to divergent ideas.

“If we don’t do politics clearly differently, we will be stuck in the last century,” said Ms. Baerbock. She promises a new style of leadership and, if she wins, a prominent role for Mr. Habeck in government. Their partnership stands out amid a particularly divisive contest for leadership of Ms. Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union. The party that might be first across the finish line in the next election may have already set a new first for Germany.