Spring(s) | Hold fast to Beloved Community
- Published: September 30, 2025
By Cyraina Johnson-Roullier
This time, I write from France, where I have been researching the French and Haitian Revolutions at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris, while helping with my elderly mother-in-law, and am now preparing to go back to Chicago.
But to what Chicago do I return?
I am not certain it will be the same city as that from which I recently departed. This is especially so as I live near several Chicago neighborhoods — including Logan Square, Bucktown and Humboldt Park, the last of which is a predominantly Hispanic area. As is top of the news, ICE is in town, following federal threats of a supplemental contingent of the National Guard.
It’s tough news to digest from afar, and also quite strange. As an American who regularly visits family in France, I have often marveled at armed personnel casually walking around Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, rifles in hand. But I could also understand why they were so visibly there, because the fear of terrorism is quite real in Europe. Yet contemplating that same sight on the streets not far from my Chicago home, or in beautiful Humboldt Park, seems completely unassimilable to my American understanding.
In this context, I cannot help but think more deeply about the deeper significance of last month’s H.U.M.A.N. coffeehouse held at the Yellow Springs Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. Bomani Moyenda, a Yellow Springs native, has been working to resurrect the group, which was co-founded in the late 1970s by Antioch professors Jim Dunn and Bill Chappelle.
With the stated goal to “end racism,” H.U.M.A.N. is an acronym for “Help Us Make A Nation,” seeking to build powerfully on the commitment of both Antioch and the Village to Martin Luther King Jr.’s approach to “beloved community” — an idea coined by the late 19th-, early 20th-century American philosopher Josiah Royce and later popularized by MLK. “Beloved community” envisions a society focused on universal love and the values of justice, equity and freedom, one where all are respected, welcomed, and invited to share in the larger human community, free of poverty and hate. This was the world in which I grew up, bound up in strong community and love in the midst of and counter to the civil strife raging outside the village throughout the 1960s and early 1970s.
This is not to say that the village was a fairyland immune to political reality. Antioch, after all, was then at the center of that strife, engaging forcefully in its own efforts to establish beloved community — such as the 1964 Gegner’s Barber Shop incident, which was written about in the New York Times — and particularly as the alma mater of Coretta Scott King. But it is this — beloved community — that represents the true meaning of last month’s H.U.M.A.N. coffeehouse. As quoted in a 2019 article written by Moyenda and then News Editor Megan Bachman, co-founder Dunn described the organization’s meaning as, “Everyone is born with the right to be human, but powerful forces in society inhibit people from acting out that human-ness.” He emphasized that there is “only one way to bring about the kind of change we want, and that’s through community.”
This human-ness is central to the village’s expression of beloved community, characterizing the interrelated connection between it and Antioch College from the inception of both. And that human-ness is what I contributed to last month’s coffeehouse, in a reflection read there and which I will share now, for any who did or could not attend:
It was 1983, and I had made the glorious transition from my first job post-college by returning to graduate school in English literature. After high school I attended Ohio University, longingly dabbling in English classes while dutifully completing my BS in journalism. Yet a year into my “dream” job, I was bored, and the “dream” had become going back to school for an MFA. The all-important problem, however, was where? It was not finding the best program that troubled me, but location — whatever that might be, it couldn’t be too far away from Yellow Springs. It’s only natural, you may think, for a young person to want to be close to home, but it was so much more than that, due to something that had hit me hard, full-on in the face like an immoveable wall of concrete once I left home.
I had since then been several years immersed in the full onslaught of American racism. But having grown up in Yellow Springs, I had never experienced the unwavering malevolence that was racism’s unrelenting theft of my humanity. I had had to learn that an invisible filter existed between myself and most individuals with whom I came into contact, created through their own imagination of who they expected me to be as an African American, not who I actually was as a person. I had learned, for example — at first painfully, and then later, defiantly — that the question “What does your father do?” was too often not the initiation of new friendship, but rather a subterranean attempt to figure out why I spoke Standard English, rather than Black English vernacular. Even if I had told the truth, that my father was an engineer who in his youth had worked closely with the well-known inventor Charles F. Kettering, my parents’ divorce would have negated it, transforming me into yet another fatherless Black child.
Because of its history, Yellow Springs offered me invaluable protection from the brutality of that social reality. So though I would have liked to attend the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, this was out of the question — much too far away from that safe harbor. Holding that lifeline above all else, then, I attended Ohio State. Thus grounded, I survived what I experienced there unscathed. When the director of creative writing refused to grade me higher than a B-minus — a failing grade in graduate school — even after seven rewrites, I went to see him, thinking surely effort alone deserved at least a “B.” Each time we discussed my work, something different was wrong. Recognition suddenly dawned.
“Are you ever going to give me anything higher than a “B-minus?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “because you can’t write.”
This certainly made clear that an Ohio State MFA wasn’t in the offing, and that I would have to re-create myself. But from this wrenching pivot, I learned the precious gift that Yellow Springs had given me. Where others might have been crushed, my Yellow Springs background enabled me to rise like a phoenix. It allowed me to scoff within, knowing — and with certainty — that this was not true. Rich memories followed: my submission to the now defunct Mademoiselle magazine’s writing contest (also won by poet Sylvia Plath), which made me a college board member; mentoring from the late Jean Hudson, a writer and Village mayor; my human interest stories published freelance in Downtown Alive!, an independent Columbus newspaper. Confronted by these experiences, and remembering my human-ness, the director’s insensitive words vanished like mist. And later, buoyed by those memories, I published my first short story in The Ohio Journal, the OSU magazine of which he was the head.
If ICE is still in town when I arrive, this is what I will strive not to forget — our human-ness, and the beloved community to which we all belong.
*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.
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