Bernard Clay, a middle-aged black data analyst and poet from Louisville, Kentucky, felt uneasy when he was forced into the company of Shaylin Bishop, a shy, white young biologist who had grown up on a family farm in rural Greene County, Kentucky, 15 minutes from the nearest town.
But during a planning brainstorming session during a weekend retreat with the Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange Association in 2022, something sparked an idea. Mr. Clay, 47, had a side business documenting black Civil War veterans in Kentucky. Mr. Bishop, 34, had been thinking about old stones that might mark the burial sites of formerly enslaved people, forgotten memorials to a hidden past, during a quiet moment alone studying the ecosystem of Clay Hill Memorial Forest in Taylor County, Kentucky.
An effort to officially recognize the cemetery, The Slaves of Clay Hill, or EPOCH Legacy Project, was born. And connections were made across divisions of race, age and geography.
Many have lamented the nation’s toxic divisions, exacerbated by politicians, cable news, and social media, collectively known as the “anger-industrial complex.” Less noticed is its counterpart: a constellation of nonprofits and other organizations like the Kentucky Rural Urban Exchange dedicated to bridging the divides between urban and rural, black and white, LGBTQ and straight, left and right. Let’s call it the “Kumbaya-Industrial Complex.”
The problem is that the most glaring divide between Trump administration conservatism and the rising political left may be that no one is interested in reconciliation.
“We need to focus on what’s called the exhausted majority: 65 percent of Americans,” said Steven B. Heintz, president and CEO of the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, a major donor to a burgeoning group that seeks to promote common ground. “Convincing real ideologues to compromise is not an efficient use of time.”
On June 17, a new organization called the Trust for Civic Life, backed by the Rockefeller brothers, the MacArthur Foundation, the Emerson Collective and others, will award an initial $8 million to 20 civic organizations it judges most promising for rebuilding communities and strengthening democratic values. Another $2 million will be provided later this year to fulfill the trust’s pledge to donate $10 million a year to community-level democracy efforts. In this case, “democracy” is written with a lowercase “d,” highlighting efforts to strengthen values needed to promote democratic pluralism, without any explicit reference to Republicans or Democrats.
The first Trust grants, selected from more than 60 organizations, will be announced at the Democracy Fund’s Strategic Summit to Combat Authoritarianism in Boulder, Colorado, further evidence that bridge building is becoming a hot new concept in a country hungry for hope.
In Minnesota, an emerging rural-urban network modeled on Kentucky is taking root. The national organization, Braver Angels, explicitly aims to foster dialogue and respect across political divides. Echoing early 19th-century efforts to build community in the new nation, the Lyceum Movement holds meetings and lectures in towns large and small in Iowa, Michigan and Minnesota, seeking to replace the local organizations such as churches, newspapers and service groups that have declined and been replaced by national tribalism.
New Ground has expanded from its Los Angeles base to train facilitators to promote dialogue between Muslims and Jews during one of the most tense periods in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while Bridge USA has established 65 chapters at sharply partisan-riven colleges, trying to turn pro-dialogue people into true campus radicals and cultivate sympathizers on the left and right, said Manu Mir, the organization’s chief executive.
“If you’re a student, you need to feel like the way to gain credibility is to be a bridge builder, not a confrontational entrepreneur,” Mir said.
Scaling up such efforts to effect a noticeable shift in the political discourse may seem like a pipe dream, especially with powerhouses like Fox News, MSNBC, TikTok and YouTube, and the tone of the nation’s leaders pulling in opposing directions. Organizers have struggled whenever one of the dominant political forces is unwilling to find middle ground.
For the University of California, Berkeley chapter of Bridge USA, the dominant force is the left. The organization launched at Berkeley in 2017 after an attempted visit by alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos at the school led to violent clashes. Lucy Cox, a 20-year-old junior who is now the chapter’s president, said holes in the group’s outreach come from the left. Bridge Berkeley’s debates, discussions and social events attract conservative student groups.
“But we couldn’t get the California Democratic Party or the Young Democratic Socialists of America, the largest political groups in Berkeley, to participate in these events,” she acknowledged.
Cox added that these groups see even listening to conservatives who support Trump as an evil form of “platforming.”
“I wish there were more people willing to listen to everyone’s opinions,” she said. “I think that’s possible, but right now there are some groups on campus that are hard to reach.”
At the progressive University of Colorado at Boulder, Bridge USA’s chapter faces the opposite problem: “Conservatives aren’t coming,” said chapter president Abigail Schaller, 21. She wants to bring Republican speakers to campus next year to assure that side of the divide that the conversation is a powerful one.
“This is a problem that’s been going on for 50 years,” said Heinz, the Rockefeller brothers’ chief executive. “It’s not going to turn around overnight.”
Even with the limitations, those involved say it’s worth the effort, if only to preserve their own sanity.
“Relationships are the root and the flower. They are the foundation from which everything else happens,” said Savannah Barrett, who co-founded the Kentucky Urban-Rural Interaction Institute in 2014. “You can find common ground if you look for it, but conversation doesn’t create change.”
Every year since then, a group of about 60 people from around the state, selected to represent as wide a range of perspectives as possible, have met for two three-day weekends in urban and rural areas, followed by a voluntary weekend.
A weekend in Campbellsville, Kentucky, in May highlighted the promise and shortcomings of this effort. The diversity of the group is undeniable: Jody Dahmer, a gay urban gardener running for Louisville City Council; Belle Townsend, a queer rural poet and recent college graduate; Mohammed Ahmad, a young, devout Muslim and Palestinian-American from the outskirts of Cincinnati; Darryl Dee Parker, a Black community and racial justice activist from Hazard, Kentucky; and LaToya Drake, a Black woman from the small town of Glasgow, Kentucky, who wonders if her love for rural Kentucky is reciprocated.
Missing from this self-selected band of pro-peace advocates are the ardent supporters of former President Donald J. Trump, who dominate Kentucky politics and seem to have little interest in reaching out to RUX supporters.
Bob Foshee, a 71-year-old retired teacher from Louisville and a 2024 generation bigot, published a handwritten breakdown of the 2020 votes for Trump and Biden in the counties surrounding Campbellsville University, where RUX Weekend was held. In Taylor County, it was 75% for Trump and 24% for Biden. In Greene County, it was 83-16, and in Casey County, it was 87-13.
But amid discussions of unrecognized Black history, gratitude for the safety RUX has provided to Kentucky’s queer community, and methodical brainstorming sessions on encouraging leadership and entrepreneurship, politics, which clearly weighed heavily on Foshee, seemed off-limits.
“The program’s gentle approach is not to stab people in the root,” Foshee said.
For Townsend, 23, Campbellsville University holds special meaning because of its alumnus and former professor, Max Wise, the town’s state senator and author of Kentucky’s sweeping anti-transgender law that passed last year and sought to outlaw diversity, equity and inclusion programs in public schools, colleges and universities this year.
But his name wasn’t even mentioned over the weekend in Campbellsville.
Ms. Townsend, a baker and former tracker for the Kentucky Democratic Party, also has a fiery temper. She said her hometown of Robards, a town of 500 in western Kentucky, wasn’t particularly open about her feelings about her gender and sexual orientation.
Still, she didn’t lament the lack of dialogue about the Kentucky Republican Party’s anti-LGBTQ policies.
“That way they can drive the narrative,” she said.
It seems to be a recurring problem in the bridge-building movement.
Under the fluorescent lights of a third-floor conference room at the Kalamazoo Public Library on a Saturday afternoon in late April, about 40 West Michigan residents gathered for a meeting at the Kalamazoo Lyceum, including some unlikely names from Michigan’s well-known far-right circles.
Lyceums began in the early 19th century as a way to bring the best and the brightest minds together in small-town and rural auditoriums in the hope of engaging all citizens of the emerging American democracy in community dialogue. By the outbreak of the Civil War, some 3,000 lyceums dotted the nation.
“There are certainly problems, but I don’t think there’s any point in lamenting,” said Revival Movement executive director Nathan Beacom, who was in Kalamazoo that afternoon. He lamented how the Little Leagues that were plentiful in Des Moines during his childhood had dwindled to just one as kids signed up for fee-paying traveling leagues that valued performance on the ballpark over community in the stands.
But, he added, “I don’t think the answer is to talk more about politics. I think the answer is to talk less about politics.”
The congregation then broke into small groups to discuss community, belonging and collective accountability.
“To me, it’s just a fun activity. I prefer it to golf,” said Reid Williams, a writer and editor for Naukalamazoo, a new nonprofit local news outlet.
Ben Tillinghast, a young law student at the University of Notre Dame who drove up from South Bend, Indiana, to experience the Kalamazoo Lyceum, was realistic: Lyceum gatherings “are not a magic elixir that will solve society’s problems,” he said.
It’s not a societal problem, but perhaps a personal failing. For Bishop, a young woman who participated in the rural-urban exchange in Kentucky, the work has been a source of personal strength. When she first began working with Clay, she said she doubted she was the person to shed light on forgotten slave burial sites. But Clay was adamant, and she said, “Shaylin, we can do this.”
He’s been combing through the pre-Civil War records from the Sanders plantation to record the names of slaves, and the couple has hired an archaeologist to do an initial investigation of the burial grounds. She has joined the board of trustees of Clay Hill Memorial Forest and is eager to have a small corner of the forest preserve cleaned, marked and carved out in honor of the remains.
“I feel more comfortable being alone in the woods than talking to people,” she admitted. “But that’s the power of RUX. It was a life-changing experience for me.”
