Although Yellow Springs may currently be getting noticed as the small Ohio town where Michelle Obama and her brother, Craig Robinson, recently interviewed Dave Chappelle for their podcast “IMO (In My Opinion),” at the new offices of WYSO in the now renovated Union Schoolhouse, I remember the schoolhouse as the place where my husband and I got married in the late 20th century — which sounds really funny now, like something that happened in another world.

At that time, because the building housed the Village municipal offices and the police department, it was a community hub, and one that was especially welcoming on cold Halloween nights. There was always a warm, crackling bonfire that was lit after dark behind the building on Union Street, replete with hotdogs, buns and oh, so many marshmallows for toasting.

But if we go even further back, to 1872, it was another kind of community hub, because it was then the village’s first integrated school, a place of coming together in defiance of segregation long before the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. the Board of Education that outlawed separate but equal facilities.

What made Yellow Springs such a place during the late 19th-century’s failed Reconstruction, when all across America efforts to live up to the democratic ideals manifested in the Declaration of Independence were in escalating disarray, was its legacy as an Owenite intentional community begun in 1825, a spinoff of the Welsh industrialist Robert Owen’s New Harmony, Indiana. But even before the late 19th century, Yellow Springs’ proximity to the Ohio River — a critical dividing line between slavery and freedom — linked the village to Underground Railroad routes as countless exhausted fugitives made their way to new lives. Even before that, there was the Yellow Spring itself, bringing many to what had been thought were the healing properties of its iron-rich water.

None of this is to say that Yellow Springs did not have its own troubles with racial prejudice, but over time, these circumstances brought more and more progressive-minded individuals who actively fought any such tendencies. And all of this is what lay behind the town’s signal contributions to civil rights in the 1960s, with the 1964 Gegner’s Barbershop protest, which garnered national attention; the activism of Antioch students and professors, notably William Chappelle III (the father of Dave Chappelle) who, with Jim Dunn and Glynna Garrett, co-founded the civil rights organization H.U.M.A.N. (Help Us Make A Nation); and the 1965 Antioch College commencement speech given by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was brought there by his wife, Coretta, an Antioch graduate.

That the Union Schoolhouse school was integrated despite the custom of the time was largely due to the influence of the abolitionist and education reformer Horace Mann, who had been the first president of Antioch when it opened its doors in Yellow Springs in 1852. Known as the father of American public education, Mann believed that bringing the children of individuals from all walks of life together offered a common learning experience that would foster equality and justice. For Mann, this was also about building character, by instilling the moral values that are the foundation of human dignity and love.

It would not be going too far to say that these values were also reinforced by Mann’s close relationship with that cadre of 19th-century New England intellectuals and progressive reformers known as the American Transcendentalists, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, George Ripley and others strongly associated with their ideas, including American literary greats Walt Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Though philosophically engaged with Transcendentalist views, Mann was also very much involved with them domestically, as his wife, Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, was the sister of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who was a Transcendentalist educational reformer. She was also the sister of Sophia Peabody, who was heavily involved with the Transcendentalist movement and the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had spent time at Brook Farm — another intentional community that had been founded in 1841 by George Ripley in West Roxbury, Massachusetts.

Of course, most of us already know much, if not all, of this, but it’s worth reiterating because it underscores the importance of recognizing that WYSO’s move is not just about getting a new office, but about keeping the station in Yellow Springs and maintaining and strengthening its ongoing bonds with the community.

Given this significance, then, it is more than fitting that Mrs. Obama and her brother should have been celebrating community in Ohio, when on that same day, April 12, 2026, they were simultaneously celebrating community in absentia at EXPO Chicago, where I saw a wonderful preview exhibit of the Obama Presidential Center Museum, due to open on Chicago’s South Side on June 19. As Dr. Louise Bernard, founding director of the Obama Center Museum and curator of the EXPO exhibit stated in a recent Chicago Sun-Times interview, the preview was about “humanism and … empathy and how we are all connected.” A connection that powerfully resonates between Chicago and Yellow Springs is that between the Underground Railroad and the Great Migration.

And if we can understand that, it’s also possible to see Mrs. Obama’s visit to Yellow Springs in exactly that light — working to build new bonds that strengthen communities. Why? Because the podcast “IMO” is about reaching out, getting others’ views on life and its issues, connecting on a human level and engaging in a completely different kind of sharing than what we do when we share on our phones.

The fact that Mrs. Obama and her brother are purposefully focusing on personal interaction as opposed to any audience expectation of politics is subtly and exactly right for where we are in America today. But more productively, we can also think about it in terms of what Harvard scholar Danielle Allen has called “democracy renovation,” or the urgent need to repair our civic infrastructure and political institutions, an essential part of which is simply going back to the fundamental skill of re-learning how to talk to each other — in search of a new beloved community, transformed.

*Cyraina Johnson-Roullier is Associate Professor of Modern Literature and Literature of the Americas at the University of Notre Dame, and a former Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow.