This month’s recommendations include a documentary about Freedom House, America’s first EMT service composed of Black men and women recruited from the Pittsburgh’s Hill District neighborhood; an interview with poet, best-selling author, and NAACP Image Award finalist Clint Smith; and an article about Bessie Coleman, the first African American woman and first woman of Native-American descent to hold a pilot’s license.
Shamira Underwood
Mathematics Fellow
Shamira says, “My father and aunt worked for the Freedom House program for several years. In the early 1960s, Dr. Peter Safar, also known as the ‘Father of CPR’ moved to the Hill District area of Pittsburgh and was looking for a way to implement his CPR method in the field. In partnership with the University of Pittsburgh, he began the Freedom House program. At a time when the area’s Black unemployment rate was 14%, recruitment efforts focused on unemployed Black men and women from the Hill District. Freedom House answered 6,000 calls in its first year, which was a drastic improvement to the previous system of police response to health emergencies in the area. As the program expanded under the leadership of Dr. Nancy Caroline, it became the first nationally recognized paramedic training program in the country. If you look on the side of any city of Pittsburgh ambulance today, you will see a placard honoring Freedom House. Watch this WQED documentary to learn more about the original Freedom House Program.
Freedom House Ambulance:
The FIRST Responders
WQED Pittsburgh
“By the time the ambulances hit the street, these men had become the most highly trained, literally they were the only trained EMTs in the country.”
Pete Compitello
Project Manager
Pete says, “Winter break was the perfect time to get back to reading things for pleasure, so I started with some poetry and stumbled on this Here & Now interview with one of my favorite contemporary poets, Clint Smith. The interview web page includes a selection of poems from his book Counting Descent, an additional audio recording of the poet reading one of his poems aloud, and two of his TED Talks. Here is one of my favorite quotes from the TED Talk, “The danger of silence”: “…because who has to have a soap box when all you’ve ever needed is your voice?”
Through Poetry and TED Talks, Clint Smith Probes Racism in America
“But the thing is that amid all of that, amid a history in which black people have been subjected to an onslaught of incessant violence, we have still so remarkably embedded ourselves into the social and the cultural fabric of this country. And to me that’s remarkable. I grew up in a home full of joy, affirmation, laughter, and I wanted to capture that as well.”
– Clint Smith, poet, author, and former educator
Denise Collier
District and School Leadership and English Language Arts Fellow
Denise says, “This biographical text about pilot Bessie Coleman, and others in this American Experience series, reflects the IFL mission and beliefs regarding access to relevant and cognitively demanding content. It is part of the PBS African American Experience series, which I found inspiring and informative.”
Bessie Coleman
From PBS’s American Experience Collection
“Over the following years, Coleman used her position of prominence to encourage other African Americans to fly. She also made a point of refusing to perform at locations that wouldn’t admit Blacks.” – From PBS’s American Experience Collection Read more here