By Bethany Kohoutek

Those who believe the civil-rights struggle is a thing of the past need only to peruse recent headlines in Iowa newspapers. The past year has seen numerous examples of immigrants, women, and religious and ethnic minorities standing up for their rights in hopes of making the state a more culturally diverse and tolerant place to live.

There are the Hispanic workers who took to city streets throughout Iowa in protest of alleged discriminatory and biased federal immigration policies. There is Iowa's increasingly visible gay community, which is refusing to keep quiet about its perception of glaring injustices in the legal and healthcare arenas. And there are progressive and passionate women, who feel they are still forced to fight for equal access in the workplace and in local government systems.

Their courage comes not without personal sacrifice. Iowa can be slow to change, and these activists routinely find themselves in the public spotlight - and sometimes in personal danger - when they attempt to shift forward the status quo. At a time when many Americans are more interested in the next "American Idol" than the next Martin Luther King Jr., that road can be a difficult one, indeed.

However, Friends of Iowa Civil Rights, Inc., a nonprofit group that recognizes people and organizations that dedicate themselves to these causes, is helping lead the civil-rights movement in Central Iowa. This year, the group recognizes five award winners during its annual "Iowa's Mosaic" diversity conference held at Iowa State University.

The conference itself, which runs Oct. 16-17 at ISU's Scheman Center and Memorial Union, is a testament to Friends' desire to increase Iowa's diversity. Stedman Graham, a bestselling author and renowned speaker on issues of inclusivity (and also Oprah Winfrey's boyfriend), is the featured speaker. The conference will include exhibitors, workshops and lectures on topics that range from welcoming Hurricane Katrina survivors, to helping disabled preschoolers, to incorporating businesses owned by immigrants and refugees into Iowa communities.

At 11:45 a.m. on Oct. 16, the winners of the 2006 Friends Award for civil rights will be recognized at a luncheon at the Scheman Center. The public is invited and tickets cost $25. Call 225-1051 for more information.

Cityview spoke with each of the five award winners about what they are doing to make Iowa a more progressive place.

Sam Carbajal

Nine years ago, Sam Carbajal was moving his family from Los Angeles to Marshalltown where a job at the Swift meatpacking plant awaited him. With his family, a full truck and trailer in tow, Carbajal had just crossed the Nebraska state line into Iowa when he realized the family needed to stop for the night. They pulled into a small, rural town - Carbajal can't remember the name of it anymore - and found a motel. When Carbajal, a native of Mexico, went inside to check in, the desk clerk greeted him warmly.

"She said, 'Are you visiting Iowa or are you staying?'" Carbajal recalls. "And I told her that I am coming to find a place to live in Iowa." The clerk welcomed him to Iowa and gave him a discount on the room.

Since then, Carbajal says, he's been impressed by the hospitality of the community in Marshalltown, despite the fact that he has witnessed some of the town's - and the nation's - most volatile times, in terms of the debate about immigration.

"People have been very receptive," he says, "and very few experiences of a little rejection. In the workplace, I was well accepted, as well as my family in the schools. Our Catholic church has been very receptive."

Carbajal went out of his way to get involved when he arrived in 1997. He joined a diversity awareness task force, where he offered his opinions and experiences as a recent immigrant to the United States. While working nights at the meatpacking plant, he would spend several days at a local public middle school, working with special-education children.

After a year and a half at Swift, Carbajal quit in order to work for Youth Shelter Services, where he currently serves as an Hispanic outreach worker. One of his key goals is substance-abuse prevention among at-risk Hispanic children.

Hispanic kids tend to get marginalized when they arrive in the U.S. with their parents, speaking little or no English, Carbajal says. They may grow frustrated when they can't keep up with their peers in school or fall behind in other areas. Legislation like Iowa's English-only laws, he says, hasn't helped them to feel welcome, either.

Carbajal is working to reduce the high school dropout rate, which negatively affects more Hispanic students than their Caucasian peers, and to keep kids from turning to alcohol or drugs as a coping mechanism. One of the outlets he's provided for his students is the Hispanic Folk Dance Troup, composed of teenagers and adults, which performs traditional Mexican dances for audiences throughout Iowa. Carbajal says artistic expression of one's cultural origins is essential to preserving Hispanic culture in the U.S. And while learning English is essential for Hispanic young people, says, it's equally important for immigrants to retain their own languages.

"My advice for my students is: Keep your language, keep your art, keep your culture - the positive things - because we can make something good, a new culture, and contribute to our new communities," he says.

In an era of polarization over immigration, both at the federal and local levels, Carbajal says, Hispanic immigrants are often demonized by those with political agendas - and by members of the public, who may have been taught by the government to fear those of other cultures.

"Just because you are from another country, there are some people, like politicians, who are trying to magnetize the situation, and they think you are criminals because they need the votes of those who are hardliners," Carbajal says. "Of course, that is creating a really hurtful situation for our community and for our migrant people who have no documents, because they are always thinking that somebody is going to capture them and deport them.

"We are going to struggle much more, but we have to succeed as a migrant people. We have to show that we have positive things to share with this community and with this country."

Planned Parenthood of Greater Iowa

Iowa is number one in a lot of areas. Corn growing, egg production, soybean harvesting, as well as our first-in-the-nation caucuses. But who knew that Iowa's transgendered population also puts the state on the map?

In March, Planned Parenthood of Greater Iowa (PPGI) received a national award for paving the way for "innovative," "sensitive" and "knowledgeable" medical service for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered individuals. Under the guidance of Dr. Joseph Freund, a physician and outreach worker, Planned Parenthood has made GLBT healthcare a priority in Central Iowa and a model for the rest of the country.

And Freund's tireless campaign to provide adequate health services to the transgendered community - traditionally, an underserved population - has sparked a national effort toward the same end.

"This program we are doing with PPGI is kind of unique," Freund says. "Other Planned Parenthoods are doing gay, lesbian, bi and trans outreach, but because of PPGI, they are creating national standards for healthcare, especially for trans folk."

PPGI's award-winning approach is three-pronged. The first component is education, not only for doctors, nurses and the public, but also for the GLBT community itself.

From childhood, Freund says, people are taught about their bodies, their sexuality and their health from a heterosexual vantage point. Freund, who is the area's only openly gay primary-care provider, says he began to notice this phenomenon engrained into his own education.

"I had basically gotten no [GLBT] training from medical school or my residency," he says. "I began to realize that gay, lesbian, bi and trans folk have been left out of things."

As an example, Freund points to abstinence-only education, which preaches abstention from sex until marriage. Because gays and lesbians are prohibited by law from marriage, Freund says, such a message excludes them, which can contribute to feelings of depression and anxiety - conditions that affect GLBT youth at higher rates than heterosexual kids.

The second piece of PPGI's approach is adoption. Gays and lesbians who wish to adopt, historically, have had a difficult time overcoming alleged heterosexist adoption agencies that refuse to place kids in homes with gay parents. PPGI has partnered with the Avalon Center, a pro-choice, gay-friendly agency that gives gay parents the same access to services as heterosexual would-be adopters.

Healthcare itself is the final piece of PPGI's slate of GLBT programming. Freund says it is essential that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered patients feel comfortable talking with a medical provider about their concerns. Some clients drive for hours to see Freund, and many have told him that he is the first doctor with whom they've felt comfortable.

"If people are afraid of being discriminated against or rejected, they may delay or not seek medical attention," Freund says. "Especially, transgendered folk can be very, very fearful of any medical attention. People tell me horror stories about physicians running from the room, refusing to address them by their name or by the right pronoun."

Freund says there are still many places in Iowa where it is dangerous for gays and lesbians to come out, whether in school, the workplace or to their medical providers. Although Freund says he's never felt personally threatened in Des Moines, he knows that harassment and bigotry contribute to stress and medical problems among the GLBT community.

But for those who do come out and tap into a network of caring people, including 16 gay-friendly Planned Parenthood locations throughout Iowa, the experience can be wonderful, he says. Freund sings in the Des Moines Gay Men's Chorus, and he's a member at Plymouth Congregational Church - two venues where he feels acceptance from his peers.

"Lots of people are wonderfully integrated into our community," he says, adding that access to healthcare is key to that integration. "People are going about their everyday lives, in spite of some inequalities that are still happening."

Des Moines Choral Society

Throughout history, music and song have been an integral part of human-rights struggles, from the ancient Hebrews, detailed in the biblical book of Psalms, using song to sustain themselves against the oppression of their captors, to the rich musical heritage woven by African American slaves in 1800s America, to the punk bands of the 1980s, who penned protest tunes against the policies of the Ronald Reagan administration.

The Des Moines Choral Society, in its own way, is a part of this tradition. Through song, the Society educates audiences about Iowa's vibrant history - a history that would be incomplete if not for the contributions of minorities and women.

The Choral Society is comprised of adult, volunteer singers from Central Iowa, who perform several concerts per year. In 2003, the group commissioned a script from noted local author Cynthia Mercati for a piece about the Battle of Milliken, the first Civil War battle in which blacks and whites fought together, side by side. It took place on Iowa soil. Titled "Battle Cry for Freedom: Iowa in the Civil War," the resulting performance attracted an audience of more than 1,300 people it drew critical acclaim from National Public Radio, and a rave review from Gov. Tom Vilsack, who remarked that every Iowa school child should see the performance.

And this past May, the society performed "Mother Iowa," a piece (also by Mercati) detailing women's roles in Iowa's growth as a state.

James Rodde, artistic director for the Choral Society, says he is drawn to the power of music's ability to unite diverse groups of people. Recently Rodde traveled to Estonia with one of his choirs (he directs three others in addition to the Des Moines Choral Society), where he learned about Estonia's struggle for freedom against the Soviet Union.

"They said the one thing they couldn't take away from them was their song," Rodde recalls. "They literally sang their way to freedom."

The experience had an affect on Rodde, and such themes carry over into his work in Iowa. The Choral Society has made education a key component of its outreach. Choral Society members work with elementary students in local public schools to get kids interested in, as Rodde puts it, "the power of song."

"We want this to be a true choral treasure, not only in Des Moines, but in the Greater Des Moines region and throughout the state," he says, "and to attain that goal, we need to be diversified."

Judy Haley Giesen

As chairperson of the Dubuque Human Rights Commission, Judy Haley Giesen would often listen to phone messages left at the group's office. The calls would come from a variety of people, often minorities, seeking help in discrimination and injustice cases, but one type of caller particularly nagged at her.

"Gay and lesbian individuals would call the human rights office saying they'd been discriminated against, and there was this sadness... in having to say, 'There is nothing we can do unless you've been assaulted, which would be a hate crime,'" Giesen says. "If you lost you job because you were gay, you had no recourse."

Recently, however, that changed, thanks to the diligence of Giesen and other Dubuque-area activists. In February, Dubuque City Council members voted 6-1 to include sexual orientation among the protected demographics in the city's human rights ordinance.

"Those of us who either had gay children or knew that our children's friends were gay - in my case, my son's best friend in high school - we worked hard in their names to get this through. ... All of a sudden, parents that did not have gay children could relate to parents who did."

Giesen says it took years to persuade local government leaders and the public that Dubuque needed to be more welcoming to its GLBT community. Then again, Giesen is no stranger to digging her heels in for causes she believes in. She's been active in issues of racial diversity, Spanish-language advocacy, women's rights and cultural awareness for years.

In 2001, Giesen served as the key liaison for Sisters Dorothy and Gwen Hennessey, two Franciscan nuns from Dubuque who earned international attention after their arrests for protesting at the Army School of the Americas (now known as Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) in Fort Benning, Ga.

The School of the Americas (SOA) a U.S.-taxpayer-funded institution that is notorious for training Latin American military personnel, many of whom have gone on become dictators in their home countries, and to instigate massacres in countries like Colombia and El Salvador, using the tactics they learned at SOA.

The Hennessey sisters were sentenced to six months in federal prison for crossing a demonstration line near the school. While they were in prison, Giesen, who then served as communications director for Dubuque's Sisters of St. Francis, worked tirelessly to get their story out to the public. She persuaded newspapers to run excerpts of Sister Gwen's prison diaries, and provided personal encouragement to both of the women.

And in 2002, Giesen made her own trip to Fort Benning. Geisen and her husband Jim traveled overnight in a packed bus to protest at SOA.

"It was quite an experience," she says. "It's democracy in action like you wouldn't believe."

As for the Hennessey sisters, Giesen says, their dedication to justice continues to provide inspiration.

"Dorothy is about 95, and as recently as two weeks ago, she was crossing the bridge between Illinois and Iowa, in a wheelchair, for immigration. And now Gwen is in Sioux City working in a Franciscan halfway house for women getting out of prison."

Not that Giesen could be accused of slacking in the activism department. Now in her early '70s, she is perhaps more focused than ever before. She's in the midst of publishing a booklet about access compliance for disabled residents in Dubuque. She teaches English-as-a-second-language courses. She sometimes stands with other protesters on a street corner in Dubuque on Saturday mornings, protesting President Bush's war in Iraq.

Despite all the injustice she sees around her, Giesen's language is still infused with optimism.

"Talking in this way might be blue sky and 'she doesn't know reality,'" Giesen says, "but it has to be my reality, and this is what I have to hope for."

Iowa EXPORT Center of Excellence on Health Disparities

African-Americans in Iowa have an infant death rate that is nearly twice the death rate for white babies. Because of cultural differences, Bosnian refugees may have higher incidences of alcoholism, depression and smoking than other Iowans. The unintentional injury rate for Hispanics is more than triple the rate for their white peers.

Such information, which is key to incorporating Iowa's minority populations into its healthcare systems, would not be available if it were not for the award-winning research of the Iowa EXPORT Center of Excellence on Health Disparities, which is housed at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls.

Michele Yehieli, director of the Center on Health Disparities, says the general public is often unaware of these discrepancies.

"A general assumption by many Americans is that we have the best healthcare system in the world," she says. "Actually, from a public health standpoint, we are not the top nation. We rank at the bottom of industrialized nations when we look at big public health indicators, like infant mortality and life expectancy, and one of the reasons for that is that we have a lot of minority healthcare barriers."

The center has produced reports about gaps in healthcare, and it works to educate doctors, nurses, nonprofit workers, even food bank operators and public safety personnel about being culturally sensitive to these differences.

It also prints and distributes "pocket guides" for doctors and nurses. The booklets are small enough to fit in a lab-coat pocket, and they contain information about cultural norms for different ethnic, racial and religious populations.

For example, Amish patients are more likely to speak an old form of High German rather than English, and doctors may need to provide a translator. Many Bosnians and other Balkan War refugees do not eat pork, or celebrate Christmas, and they prefer not to embalm their dead, but instead purify the body and place it directly into the earth. The center's guide for working with East African refugees, such as Somalis, advises healthcare providers to avoid "sitting with the soles of your feet pointing to them. It can be considered disrespectful. Also, do not call them to come with your index finger, such as when they are in your clinic lobby, as that is reserved for communication with animals."

Respecting these guidelines goes a long way in establishing inroads into migrant communities, Yehieli says. One key to integrating minorities into the healthcare system is to encourage more minorities to work in the field. Iowa hasn't done a great job of this in the past. According to Yehieli, about 30 percent of the U.S. is made up of minorities. Nine percent of nurses and 6 percent of doctors, nationwide, are minorities.

"In Iowa, it's worse than in the nation," she says. "Estimates are believed to be less than 1 or 2 percent of health providers are minorities."

That's why Yehieli and her team are working to promote scholarships that would help minority kids defray the costs of medical and nursing schools. Yehiele also emphasizes the importance of reaching children when they are young, and convincing them that a job in the medical field is within their reach.

"All of us, no matter what ethnical background, need to learn better how to interact more effectively with people of all backgrounds, and we need to make sure all Iowans ultimately have health equity. It really is a health and human rights issue." CV

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