Civic Arts Talk with Dr. Imani Perry
On October 31, 2025, SWF hosted a Civic Arts Talk featuring Dr. Imani Perry, during the final Neighborhood Market of the season on the Communiversity Campus at the Common|Wealth. Building upon the momentum of her Civic Arts Talk and Workshop last August 2024 in collaboration with Dr. Robin D. G. Kelley, Dr. Perry drew a profound historical connection between the groundbreaking educational efforts of the late 19th and early 20th-century innovators Virginia Estelle Randolph, Clinton Calloway, and George Washington Carver and SWF’s practice of [Re]Generative Education and Regenerative Neighborhood Development. We invite you to read more about the event below.
Dr. Imani Perry’s Connection to Sweet Water Foundation
A MacArthur Fellow and National Book Award recipient, Dr. Perry is a distinguished writer and interdisciplinary scholar focused on race, law, literature, history, and African American culture. Her work provides essential historical and cultural grounding. This grounding ensures that future generations, in honor of Sankofa, are imbued with the knowledge of ancestral leaders whose creative, deeply rooted solutions and their context created the foundation upon which future generations stand.
The October 2025 Civic Arts Talk with Dr. Perry was attended by local residents, elders, members of the SWF Academy, and SWF Fellows who joined in-person in the Thought Barn, as well as SWF Values-Based Partners who dialed into the hybrid talk from Chicago, Boston, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Pittsburgh. Building upon the success of the 2024 Civic Arts Talk and Workshop series along the themes of Re-membering, Re-generation, and Re-mediation, Dr. Perry shared her research on the constellation of community leaders — Virginia Estelle Randolph, George Washington Carver, and Clinton Calloway — detailing the intentional care, discipline, and rigor they used to form the cornerstone of education in many rural Black communities from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s. Dr. Perry’s research detailed how these three educators, both despite and also in response to the substantial adversity they faced, modeled a holistic approach to human and community development, rooted in education, by targeting specific points of stress and imbalance with integrated, practical solutions.
About Calloway, Carver, and Randolph
In 1895, Clinton Calloway joined the Extension Department of Tuskegee University as a faculty member, working with older students in rural communities on literacy and math skills, building and the trades. He recognized the critical need for elementary and high schools throughout the Black Belt. With support from Booker T. Washington, he fundraised and facilitated the development of a network of over 5,000 Negro Rural Schoolhouses across 15 states. Leveraging community contributions and external funding from the Rosenwald family, these schools served as key anchor points within the communities, while also helping to close literacy and opportunity gaps for the African American Community. Beyond academics, these spaces became focal points for community celebrations, social gatherings, and civic life, fostering a strong sense of local identity and connectedness.
After receiving an honorable mention for his painting, Yucca and Cactus, at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition (World’s Fair), George Washington Carver left teaching at Iowa State University to join Tuskegee. Tasked with building an agricultural department with few resources and little money, Carver and his students turned “wastes” into resources, collecting broken glass and transforming it into test tubes for their laboratory. He shared the latest agricultural knowledge gained from Iowa State with local farmers. As a lifelong scientist, artist, and teacher, Carter’s deep connection with nature guided his scientific and artistic innovations and helped him prepare and share critical medicines. When the boll weevil ruined cotton crops, he suggested crop rotation between peanuts and cotton to heal the soil and provide diverse nutritional needs. Simultaneously, he fostered beauty, painting incredibly dynamic flowers and making his own paints. For instance, he created a rich blue color he called "oxidation number nine," which he championed as "rich colors for poor people."
Virginia Estelle Randolph was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1874, and began working at age 8 in rural Virginia. She completed her teacher’s training at the Richmond Colored Normal School by age 16. The first school she taught at was in Henrico County, VA, where she faced “barren land on red clay” surrounding the schoolhouse, inspiring her to transform the grounds with the community’s "willing workers." Her leadership and vision transformed rural education by integrating skills and techniques that generated work products—from bed frames and mattresses to rugs and dolls—that directly responded to immediate community needs. She transformed the land around the schoolhouse, the school curriculum, and the impact on the students and their families.
Randolph’s influence as an educator extended beyond her Henrico County, Virginia classroom: she was the first countywide Jeanes Supervising Industrial Teacher, a position developed by Booker T. Washington and others in 1908 and initially funded by the Quaker philanthropist Anna T. Jeanes to support Black teachers in the rural South. As a Jeanes teacher, Randolph traveled to over twenty elementary schools in Henrico County, sharing her teaching methods, establishing school improvement leagues, and encouraging greater community involvement in the classroom. Randolph’s students learned science and math through the study of agriculture, architecture, and design, and applied those skills to the development of their neighborhoods and homes. Her school, and those which developed under her oversight, became essential places for the community to gather for celebrations, social and political organizing, and adult education.
Dr. Perry championed these individuals who, often operating at the intersection of various disciplines, modeled resourcefulness, self-determination, and a holistic approach to human and community development. She challenged the traditional, bifurcated understanding of education, advocating instead for a more integrated, practical, and community-centered learning experience.
Their collective efforts demonstrate a tradition of "doing the next needed thing," using imagination, and valuing "imperishables" like community well-being over material accumulation.
Bridging History | Sweet Water Communiversity
Dr. Perry established a deep historical connection between the contemporary practice of Sweet Water Foundation and the historical context of Randolph, Calloway, and Carver as a way to frame the historical arc and significance of SWF’s practice of Regenerative Neighborhood Development. Throughout the presentation, both Dr. Perry and Sweet Water Foundation Executive Director Emmanuel Pratt discussed the collective emphasis on education, healing, and the holistic transformation of communities as the root focus for the work.
Attendees at the Civic Arts Talk included a diverse group: local residents, market-goers, SWF Neighborhood Academy participants, members of the SWF Core Team and fellows, a teacher from Beasley Academic Center, along with Values-Based Partners calling in from across the United States. The talk, featuring Dr. Perry's research, was so well-received that Neighborhood Academy participants who attended in August 2024 returned for the October 2025 event. One SWF team member, diligently taking notes throughout, expressed her appreciation for learning about the real-life historical experiences embedded in the stories of Randolph, Calloway, and Carver, as well as the clear parallels between their work and SWF’s practice. An elder visiting Neighborhood Market for the first time (introduced to SWF by another Neighborhood Academy participant) was invited to stay for the presentation and was amazed by the information presented and the experience that SWF had curated. She thanked Sweet Water Foundation for hosting the event, for establishing The Common|Wealth, and requested links to Dr. Perry’s research to help spread the word about both Dr. Perry's work and SWF's work.
Following the Civic Arts Talk, in-person participants were invited to the Civic Arts Church to view the second exhibit: Poiesis: Coming Into Being at The Common|Wealth. The exhibit brings to life SWF’s Portfolio of Possibilities, showcasing the designs, spaces, and places across The Common|Wealth that SWF has designed and activated over the last decade. It serves as a living, breathing translation of the models championed by Randolph, Carver, and Calloway, highlighting the real-life actions and people whose collective work regenerates the neighborhood and community today.
