Today's Segments
Educator, activist, and community builder Fred Edwards, a Bush Fellow, visits with Ashley Thornberg to discuss his various programs aimed at engaging young people from marginalized communities. Edwards runs Umoja, a writing workshop, and Fred's Dissonance, an events company. Holding a master's degree in Educational Leadership, he plans to use his fellowship to pursue a PhD. He shares insights on how he works to uplift voices of the Global Majority.
The Maddock Opera House Association exists to enrich the Maddock community through outreach, restoration, historical preservation, entertainment, and the arts. Opera isn't confined to European traditions—it can be more local than you think, possibly even in our own backyard as we learn in an excerpt from the Great American Folk Show.
Studio 47: Host Patrick Hicks presents three powerful poems from the classroom at Augustana University, which he describes as pieces that "knock the socks off" the listeners.
Transcript of interview with Busch Fellow Fred Edwards
Note: The following transcript contains a racial slur, which will not be spelled out.
Ashley Thornberg
Congratulations on getting this fellowship.
Fred Edwards Jr.
Woo, woo, right? Like that is such a big, big, big accomplishment.
Ashley Thornberg
It is. Why did you want to go for a Bush fellowship? What was it that drew you to this one specifically?
Fred Edwards Jr.
Yeah, to be honest, I think it's the idea of applying for something and not getting it, or applying for something and being like, oh, maybe next year. And so the feedback that I got from the two years that I did apply for the Bush fellowship was not that my leadership wasn't something that needed to be worked on, but my idea or my plan or vision for the future was something that needed to be worked on. And so it wasn't until this year that I actually wanted to pursue an educational doctorate or a PhD, if you will.
And so I think that also gave me a little bit of push of like helping my leadership journey.
Ashley Thornberg
So you applied in the past and didn't get it?
Fred Edwards Jr.
Yes, for sure.
Ashley Thornberg
So that's a very nice way of saying you failed the first time. Let's talk about how failure fuels future successes for you.
Fred Edwards Jr.
Yeah, to be honest, I think I've always been somebody with a chip on my shoulder, growing up on the north side of Minneapolis, losing a lot of my friends, going to college, not necessarily seeing a whole lot of people go to college, become very successful in doing so and continue to do community work. I think for me in failing and not being able to get the opportunity to get the Bush Fellowship in the first place, it gave me more reason to work in my community. It gave me more reason to work amongst youth and do sober fun activities and cultural events.
And so because I didn't get the Bush Fellowship the first two years that I applied, which also a lot of people apply like four or five, six times. So I just want to be very grateful that I got it in the first place. And I'm super young.
And so knowing that I missed that those two years, the people who I know got it, deserved it and deserved it at the time that they got it. And so I'm happy that I didn't get it, honestly, because the people who got it the first year that I applied, COVID messed that up for them pretty badly. And last year, there were some phenomenal people who applied, and I'm just happy that they got it.
And so like now that I have it, I'm like, oh, I know people who apply and didn't get it who I think are like very much deserving. But my cohort is like the most deserving, right? And so it's really cool to be around change makers and see different people who have applied multitudes of different times.
Some people was their first time, some people was their eighth time.
Ashley Thornberg
So have you always been that kind of person who didn't give up despite this major stumbling block of, you know, a lot of people would say, OK, they didn't want me. I guess I'm not good enough.
Fred Edwards Jr.
It's funny because I applied on the last day. I had no desire to apply for the Bush Fellowship, primarily because I knew we had started a nonprofit. We were trying to make impacts with youth.
We got our program accredited in Fargo Public Schools. So I was helping other people apply for the Bush Fellowship. And then right when I was helping somebody like submit theirs, they're like, all right, I'm not submitting my application unless you apply.
Ashley Thornberg
Whoa.
Fred Edwards Jr.
And I was like, whoa, whoa, right? And so this person like texts me all the time, like, dang, like imagine if like I hadn't done that. And I'm like, all glory to God, but also glory to you as well for like pushing me.
And so I think oftentimes we like have these self-fulfilling prophecies. And mine was like, I might not actually get the Bush Fellowship. So I apply anyway.
And so I just push anybody who believes that they're not worthy or cool enough or leadership-licious enough to have the Bush Fellowship to apply because you'd be surprised.
Ashley Thornberg
Leadership-licious. I've never heard that before.
Fred Edwards Jr.
Shout out to Rachel Stone. That's a P's and Q's etiquette, leader-licious. They got all of that.
Ashley Thornberg
How do you describe your work?
Fred Edwards Jr.
I always tell people I wear two hats. My primary hat is Umoja writing workshops.
Ashley Thornberg
And Umoja means unity.
Fred Edwards Jr.
It does in Swahili. So Umoja is a word that means to be one or unity. What we do is we activate spaces inside of schools to create problems that students create solutions for.
Or we just look at problems in schools or outside of schools and students create solutions with writing, with leadership, with development, and most importantly, with the opportunity to perform.
Ashley Thornberg
You know, it's such an intriguing concept to be the educator in that situation because so often the teacher, the educator, is the authority figure in the room and the students are just there to learn from the person. Sounds like you are like, hey, these people are leaders and it's my job actually to get out of their way.
Fred Edwards Jr.
Yeah, to be honest, I think that's a very colonized way of teaching, right? Is that the teacher is the authority figure. It's almost like you do yoga, right?
And so there's people who have done yoga their entire lives who would never be able to go to any part of India and be like, I'm a yoga instructor because those people may have done it in a permanent sense where it's a lifestyle, it's something that they live. And so me as a teacher, what I'm teaching students is like, don't fumble the ball like when you have the time to run with it. Don't go through my mishaps when I can tell you those mishaps and mistakes.
And I think oftentimes school is set up in a way that is so hierarchical that we don't know if our teachers are human or not. And so in my classroom, I am very much human. We break the hierarchy.
I'll let students know if I'm having a bad day. I let my students know when my father had a stroke and it allowed us to go through the classroom in a realistic way that is very decolonized. And so we take out the hierarchy so then students could also teach us.
There's so much room for us to be like learners, adult learners, like lifelong learners. And so for our classroom, I think the way that it works is it's culturally relevant pedagogy mixed with breaking out the hierarchy. So Janelle Gibson is the other co-founder of Umoja.
We developed this concept of like, how do we teach but also move out the way when it's time for students to teach? And so for us, there is no like authority figure in the room. And most times you'll hear students say like, oh, blank was there.
This adult figure was there. This principal was there. We could feel it in the room, how it changed the environment and the structure.
Ashley Thornberg
Freda, I'm gonna have our listeners hear a little bit more about your background because part of what led to these writing workshops is an experience that you had with poetry and turning grief into poetry. And this is something you alluded to earlier in the interview here is that you grew up in a neighborhood that was awfully tough here. So we're gonna play an excerpt from a TEDx presentation that you gave at NDSU about your background and how it informs how you move through the world.
Fred Edwards Jr.
Let's talk about those days at my friend's house hearing. Why is this [racial slur] in my house? Let's talk about my first best friend having to stop hanging out with me in fifth grade because hanging out with black kids will lead him to trouble.
Let's talk about how I have to take my hands out of my pockets before I go to any store just so I won't be convicted of suspicion. Let's talk about how to walk across the street if I see a woman on the same side of the street as me in fear that she is in fear. Let's talk about the accidental mason that happened to me when I sneezed walking past a woman and maybe she was trying to bless me but the only substitute she had for holy water was mace.
I wrote that when I was 13 years old like doing black box theater. The number changed of course when I was 18 at that time. I was 18 years old, 45 of my friends.
I think I'm at like 53 right now and I don't say that number to like be nonchalant about it but I say that the things happening in my community are happening all over the United States of America. I think people are just choosing to ignore these things. I think people are like, I call it like voluntarily ignorant like where because you live in a bubble, because you are safe, because you don't have to think about certain things like it doesn't matter and so I think at that age in my life I was prepared to have those conversations with people.
I really wanted to dig into why people didn't know about these incidents or these neighborhoods and as I get older I realized like it isn't that these people didn't know, like they are choosing to be ignorant. Like it feels safe and comfortable to do those things and so like now even in talking about race relations, unity, equity or at that point in my life like my testimony of why it's important to even talk about these atrocious like situations like if you listen to that whole TED Talk which almost has like 90,000 views, I was very hopeful that racism was going to end in my lifetime like if you hear that TED Talk you can hear like this young man who is like super not jaded, super like we're going to take over the world with love like and I sincerely at that time believe that and so I think it's very incredible to just hear that testimony because it just it gives me chills to hear that young man who had like such a high hope for his United States of America and this is post like all the things that happened with COVID with people.
Ashley Thornberg
George Floyd.
Fred Edwards Jr.
Right like and to be completely honest like for a lot of people who are not from Minnesota, George Floyd was George Floyd but for me, Jamar Clark was George Floyd. Jamar Clark was killed five years before George Floyd by the police officers in which he called and so it isn't a different story for us. I think it George Floyd made like white people uncomfortable but it didn't change anything for like I think a lot of other people like even with Donald Trump in office, I don't think that changed a whole lot of the world for us like I hear a lot of people talk about like divisiveness or like COVID was the most divisive time and to me, I don't think I agree with that.
I think it was just the first time that other people had to feel just even like a whiff of what it means to feel uncomfortable in your own skin, in your own environment, in your own neighborhood but to say the least, the reason why I even do a lot of this work, like the reason why I believe equity work is so important that youth get an opportunity to get paid is so important is because people gave me an opportunity and a platform and so I just wanna highlight a few people like Young Life Minnesota from the north side to the south side, they had some amazing mentors who pushed me. I think about Black Box Theater at Washburn High School, having a poetry social justice coach, having people come from Penumbra Theater like all these different theaters, the Guthrie Theater and teach us young kids how to expose our emotions and our trauma in a way that was like in our control and I think oftentimes in spaces and places like North Dakota not only do we not care about the arts but we frown on art that is exposing of oneself or like vulnerable because we're supposed to work hard and we're supposed to get over it and I think we are about to come to a space in North Dakota where those boundaries are about to shift because more people are going to wanna open up and be vulnerable about the situations or the restrictions that they've had on their lives for such a long time and so I love living here in North Dakota for one reason, it's like a slingshot. You have to pull it far, far, far, far back and that's where I feel like we are.
Like I feel like we're in like the 1970s the way that we talk about diversity, equity, inclusion. I feel like we're in the 70s the way we talk about women's rights or reproductive rights or understandings. I feel like we're in the 70s when we talk about youth access to understandings of like equity, racial justice or any of those things like we're super far back but as soon as you let us go and you let people like run ragged with these cool ideas that they have I've seen so many community members like fling us forward with our like forward thinking and our way of experiencing different things and so that's why I think Umoja is one of those like futuristic programs.
It's a preventative program that doesn't say I wanna wait until you go to jail. I wanna wait until you fail. I wanna wait until you don't feel validated.
We do these things like prior to that.
Ashley Thornberg
It's interesting that you used a futuristic look and then also said preventative.
Fred Edwards Jr.
I think duality is such an important thing. Spectrums are such an important thing like to be preventative and to be futuristic I think are like you need one to be the other, right? Like if we don't have preventative programs fentanyl is gonna run rampant for the next 10 years in Fargo and we're gonna do nothing about it but keep on pointing at homeless people for the issues that drugs are creating in this environment but if we have preventative measures that help people with the fentanyl usage right now we have places and spaces that are safe downtown for homeless people to go and ways in which they can get programs that can invest into them so they can become greater people.
Those people can create solutions for fentanyl happening in Fargo but that's futuristic and preventative coming together.
Ashley Thornberg
Fred, you are also running Fred's Dissonance and the term dissonance specifically cognitive dissonance it's the mental discomfort that results from holding two conflicting beliefs values or attitudes particularly Western society but more broadly human nature discomfort is like I'm out of here. Why are you like no, no, no, no, no this is where we stay?
Fred Edwards Jr.
Yeah so the idea of like cognitive dissonance came from me getting my bachelor's in psychology at NDSU and I had heard this term cognitive dissonance and it really kind of reflected on like my favorite leaders growing up like I think about Gil Scott Heron I think about Octavia Butler I think about like these different people who wanted like they saw America like if you think about like Sojourner Truth right you think about Harriet Tubman they saw America for what it is now like years ago right like they had this futuristic perspective and so like to live in dissonance is like to be enslaved but still wish that your ancestors and the people who oppressed you like live safely together like that is an insane imagination and like an insane amount of like courage right and so when I look at dissonance I think about and this is just me being very transparent there are so many young European white kids who love me as their teacher they enjoy and learn from me in a way that they have not experienced before and I always go it's not even that our kids are missing out because they don't get black teachers other kids are missing out because they don't get black teachers like we're talking about 0.3 teachers are black and of that 0.41 are black men like we are missing out on educators and that's due to a lot of different systems that took place specifically Brown versus Board of Education and all the teachers being fired right after that but what I'm saying is like we have an ability to make a change and I love seeing going to rural communities like Mormont schools or different places in Bismarck or all over North Dakota and people's eyes get different because they never saw a teacher who looks like me but then they leave the classroom learning something and so it's just that ability to see a possibility model like that's cognitive dissonance happening for that kid who has been taught that I might not be blank or I shouldn't be blank and so I come in that classroom I disrupt their thinking and then on the flip side of that if you look at our events right Fred's dissonance events are very diverse in terms of like a very micro level looking at diversity from disability, sexual orientation, the different age groups that are there and then race and ethnicity like all of those things are hit because we think about it on a micro level and I love to see that in Fargo we had 2,000 people out on Broadway Square who look very different than the normal people who might be there on a normal Saturday and so for me I like to show people like this is what we can work towards this is what we can be sometimes people just got to get out of their thinking models right like it was a safe event nobody got hurt nobody got harmed these different stereotypes that people place on people I think we're shattering those and so that dissonance is literally me saying hey I want to work in these schools that might not value me all the times me saying hey I want to get degrees that will allow me to find equitable ways of teaching education to students hey I also want to become somebody who learns about the grief in which I'm dealing with and find a way to navigate that and so dissonance is all of these things but that's where the Bush Fellowship allows you to like process that
Ashley Thornberg
Using so many of the words that you just did like grief and processing and you've used words like healing and vulnerability throughout this conversation already I'm really struck by one of the last sentences in the press release about the Bush Fellowship that you want to find the time to heal as fully as possible what does that mean to you?
Fred Edwards Jr.
Yeah I think about healing on a molecular level right I think about if everything in this room has energy like everything has an energy frequency like what am I doing to allow my frequency to be aligned to like where I am and so like I think on a metaphysical level I want to be aligned with my family I want to be aligned with my blood lineage I want to be aligned with the different people I consider to be chosen people but then on the caveat of that I also want to figure out what things are stopping me from being aligned like grief like boundaries like holding walls up like having different barriers like I could do yoga with my wife but I can't do it with other people and why is that? You know and just starting to have conversations about different things that I have developed over time that I view as normal right and not just de-shackling myself from those mental traps but finding out what will allow me to be the best person that I can be so then when I am building a community in two years or three years when the Bush Fellowship is over I'm a whole nother healed person and so like if I'm able to do all of this and leave with love with all of this baggage I imagine what would a lighter bag look like and what would these events feel like what would kids being taught feel like what would my experiences of the world look like and so one of the things they ask you in the Bush Fellowship is like where do you see yourself after the fellowship and I talked about walking down the street downtown Fargo and seeing young women with hijabs walking past seeing young people who had never been downtown before because they heard it was quote unquote so dangerous coming downtown and I talked about being with my wife and my daughter and not being stared at like a spectacle just being stared at like a normal citizen who lives here and most importantly us having our chins held up high because our validation comes from the learning and growing and which we have with one another and I think for me when you say like what does healing look like I have to exemplify the healing that I want this world to feel and so when my TED talk right like let's talk about it me hoping that people could either even understand like a speck of what it means to be a young black man moving from the north side of Minneapolis to North Dakota and like pursuing through regardless of what has come through my way not on a bootstrap story but just in a resilient story and just showcasing to people like it is possible to still lead with love even through all of this and so I'm just grateful for certain people in the community because they always said like if you need support if you need help like ask for it and you don't always get it but like at the end of the day you can still ask for it and so when I think about healing I think for the most part it's like working on inner self on a molecular level working on things around you that's around your environment but then lastly like after two years I'll be able to ask for a certain level of help that I never could if I hadn't slowed down my workload right like I'm working average like 80, 70, 80 hours when we're talking about equity work it's a lot more than just planning an event it's talking about intentions it's talking about harm reduction it's talking about making sure people feel safe if you have trans people performing in your neighborhood and they've been told that they don't matter and that they don't exist like creating certain things for them and so like making sure that people know about intentional work and then the secondary trauma that you have to process with working with different marginalized communities
Ashley Thornberg
yeah rest is a political act
Fred Edwards Jr.
to an extent yes rest is also a privilege
Ashley Thornberg
what do you mean by that?
Fred Edwards Jr.
the idea of rest is we're talking REM sleep right like REM sleep is something that you cannot always do if you have a post-traumatic symptom right like being somebody who has been hit by a drunk driver who has survived shootouts who has lived in a very racialized hateful town at times I think there are things that will allow you to not sleep and not rest right seeing kids that are homeless and having to think about them sleeping in a tent when you know that it's negative 24 degrees outside I think some of those things are like you're able to shut off or shut down or turn down but any officer in this world right now wouldn't tell you that they have like the privilege of just having beautiful sleeps right because of the things that they've seen and I would equate an activist a community activist who really does grassroots work to an officer in this community right who has to see that secondary trauma who has to make those first responder calls they don't neither side of those get the proper therapy that they need neither side of those properly get the rest that they need
Ashley Thornberg
It's an intriguing idea Fred to be able to build in something like rest this is a vague thing that you are telling to an organization that's giving you a lot of money Talk a little bit about how you have to find this balance between specifics like trying to pursue a PhD in educational leadership but also a little bit of freedom to explore and navigate and pivot
Fred Edwards Jr.
Absolutely That's what I think I'm most excited about you said something that I think is important is this word of pivot like what does it mean to have a lot going on that is happening very well and very successful like who you are as a leader that's what Bush always asks about it's like your track record like do you have enough success that we can believe that like you will continue your success and so for me I think I have a great track record but what does it look like to like not give up on everything happening right now but take a pause or take a slow down from it and start to really put my feet in the soil of the motherland like what does it look like to like really connect with my cultural roots and like be in an environment in a space in which the grass is the grass that my ancestors sat in like what does it look like to be in different parts of the world where they're navigating coming about civil war and so one of the parts I wrote about is like going to Germany and like figuring out how did they heal from the internment camps how did they heal from the holocaust what is educational systems look like there when you are living around the oppressed people right and so one of the things I wrote about is like just learning about how different people found ways to heal and navigate from a very like international lens but then the other part that I think is super important is typically in doing a lot of work you don't take time for your family and so like for my wife and kid I'm super excited to just go places and just be with them without work attached without anything else attached I think for the last three years they have been going to amazing places with me but it's always like work attached right it's not like a family vacation and so I'm excited to spend time with them and really just see what they are desiring to do with life in the future and so that's what I think is super important about this fellowship too it's like I'm super young I'm 28 years old but I've had enough work where they can see rest is required to do more and be more and I'm excited to see where I am at 56 my father always said like you're half of where you want to be so what are you thinking about now and so I think about what does a rested 30 year old Fred look like and how does that help a 56 year old Fred and so very grateful for the opportunity and my cohort is like phenomenal people who will be helping with the healing process too
Ashley Thornberg
Congratulations Fred once again and thank you for being on Main Street Hey, thank you so much
NOTE: Prairie Public uses Turboscribe.AI to generate some of its transcripts. The audio of the show is the official record.