“The last house in Ukraine” stands along a swampy dirt road 30 yards from a military checkpoint fortified with machine gun nests draped in camouflage netting. Less than a quarter-mile south lies a river dividing government-controlled land from territory that pro-Russian separatists occupy in this rural enclave of the Luhansk region.

The house belongs to Vladimir and Liliya Shvets, whose sardonic description of their home traces to 2014, when war ruptured southeastern Ukraine. The large swaths of Luhansk and the neighboring Donetsk region seized by Russian-backed forces that spring included Trokhizbenka, a farming village clustered beneath the gleaming golden domes of a Russian Orthodox church.

Ukrainian troops drove out enemy fighters from the town four months later. But the decision Monday by Russian President Vladimir Putin to assert the independence of the breakaway territories casts the fragile status quo of residents along the 250-mile front line into deeper uncertainty.

“It’s almost like we don’t exist,” says Mr. Shvets, a retired truck driver. “A nowhere place.”

For Ukrainians in the east, who already inhabit a perilous limbo, Mr. Putin’s order for more Russian troops to deploy to Luhansk and Donetsk portends a life further constricted, disrupted, deprived. Shorn of a sense of possibility after eight years of war, they endure their circumstance with subdued fatalism.

The checkpoint outside Mr. and Mrs. Shvets’ home marks Trokhizbenka as a border town some 75 miles from Ukraine’s true southern boundary with Russia. The closed road leads to the city of Luhansk, where they once sold their homegrown produce at a popular street market. Since 2014, the city has served as the capital of the self-declared Luhansk People’s Republic.

Martin Kuz

Vladimir and Liliya Shvets sit in their home in the village of Trokhizbenka in southeastern Ukraine, Feb. 12, 2022. "It's almost like we don't exist," says Mr. Shvets of people living near the front line of a war that began in 2014.

“We are people caught somewhere between Ukraine and Russia,” says Mr. Shvets. “Sometimes I ask, ‘Why must it be this way?’”

An inflamed “frozen conflict”

The collective alienation of residents mired in the country’s frontline purgatory has sharpened as Western leaders warn of Russia launching a full-scale invasion following Monday’s events.

Mr. Putin’s formal recognition of the Luhansk People’s Republic and its Donetsk counterpart drew a swift rebuke from the United States and several other countries at a meeting of the United Nations Security Council. U.S. and European Union officials announced an initial round of economic sanctions against Russia and threatened subsequent penalties if Mr. Putin fails to reverse course. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he would suspend the approval process for Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.

The Russian military has positioned up to 190,000 troops on Ukraine’s border in recent months, and shelling of Ukrainian army and civilian targets in Luhansk and Donetsk has intensified in the past week. Defense officials in Kyiv have reported hundreds of rocket attacks across the front line, with two soldiers and a civilian killed.

Political observers suggest that Mr. Putin’s recognition of separatists’ claims to the two-thirds of Donbass under Ukrainian control could inflame the country’s “frozen conflict” beyond its existing dimensions.

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, his latest gambit reaffirms his disregard for Ukraine’s territorial integrity, says Olexiy Haran, a professor of comparative politics at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. He contends that deterring Russia will require Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to redouble his appeals for international support and possibly signal a willingness to consider military force.

“I expect a Russian escalation in all of Donbass – not just the parts under occupation – and potentially beyond that,” Mr. Haran says. “So Ukraine may have to show now instead of later that there are options in addition to diplomacy and sanctions.”

“We have been forgotten”

The war in the southeast has killed 14,000 people and displaced 1.5 million residents, splitting families and gutting local economies. Those living in Luhansk and Donetsk, an agricultural and industrial region known as Donbass, wonder why Ukrainian and Western leaders have waited until this fraught moment to respond to their plight with greater urgency.

“Where have all the politicians been?” Mrs. Shvets says. She recalls that for most of the war’s first year, as separatists continued shelling Trokhizbenka after Ukrainian troops liberated the town, she and her husband lived in the brick cellar behind their home.

Martin Kuz

A two-door Lada owned by Vladimir and Liliya Shvets that doubles as an ambulance in the town of Trokhizbenka in southeastern Ukraine is shown Feb. 12, 2022. The couple drives patients to the nearest hospital 90 minutes away.

In a space about the size of two portable toilets, they huddled beside a wood stove for warmth and offered prayers to a palm-sized icon of Jesus. If the day brought a reprieve from chaos, they climbed the cellar’s ladder and picked fruits and vegetables from their backyard plot or slipped inside the house to bathe, then returned to their underground shelter.

“We have been forgotten,” says Mrs. Shvets, the lone nurse in the village’s dim, drafty health clinic, which has lacked a full-time doctor since the war began. The couple drives patients to the nearest hospital 90 minutes away in the clinic’s ambulance – their own two-door Lada topped with a blue siren. “People are remembering us now, but what can they do to help? It is too late.”

The dark prospect of bloodshed has hovered over daily life in Luhansk and Donetsk since separatist forces arrived. Anatoliy and Halyna Korzhensky abandoned their home in the city of Luhansk when war broke out in 2014. They resettled in Trokhizbenka and run a small grocery, sleeping in an adjacent room a few inches wider than their double bed.

The upheaval in Luhansk cleaved their family. Mr. Korzhensky’s father and several of the couple’s relatives still live in the city, and the complicated process of crossing to and from the occupied side has limited father and son to one or two visits a year. Mr. Korzhensky spoke with him earlier this week and heard distress in his voice.

“He can’t sleep – he’s too worried about what Putin may do,” Mr. Korzhensky says. He and his wife channel their own unease into work. They greet customers and restock shelves as they seek distraction from thoughts of needing to flee again.

Nodding with each word for emphasis, Mrs. Korzhensky says, “We will survive.” She stands in her kitchen, a converted storage closet, with a pot of goat stew simmering on a hot plate. Her stove, like most everything else the couple owned in Luhansk, was lost to the war. “We don’t know how, but we have survived and we will survive.”

“This is all political”

Anastasia Kozachek pulls down her T-shirt's neckline to reveal a large red scar on her left collarbone. The summer day in 2014 when she endured the injury marked the start of her war in Donbass.

Russian-backed forces had taken control of the southern portions of Luhansk and Donetsk a few months earlier. But the conflict remained abstract to Ms. Kozachek, a Kyiv native, until she made the long drive to visit relatives in Schastya, an industrial town in the shadow of the front line.

Martin Kuz

Anatoliy Korzhensky stands outside the grocery he and his wife run in the town of Trokhizbenka in southeastern Ukraine, Feb. 12, 2022. The couple resettled in the village after fleeing their home in the city of Luhansk when war erupted in the region in 2014.

As she reached the city’s outskirts, a mortar shell exploded beside the road, sending her car spinning. A jagged piece of shrapnel pierced her collarbone. “In that second, everything changed,” she says, sitting in her kitchen in Shchastia, the scent of baked whitefish lingering from dinner. “I would fight for Ukraine.”

Ms. Kozachek enlisted in the military after recovering and served four years in its medical corps in the combat zone. She settled in Shchastia after her discharge to raise Kyrylo, her preschool son, with the help of family. Yet in recent months, with the sounds of war swelling, she had begun mulling a return to Kyiv. Mr. Putin’s actions this week tipped her thinking.

“I’m moving back,” she says. Separatists shelled part of the town’s massive power plant Tuesday, and from her kitchen window she could see thick clouds of black smoke. “I’m a mother, and I have to do what is right for my child.”

The language, religious rituals, and cultural traditions of Russia prevail in Donbass, and the region’s people regard the governments of Kyiv and Moscow with equal skepticism. At the same time, when discussing the war and the threat to Ukraine’s independence, they voice little doubt about the culprit.

“I don’t have a lot of trust in the Verkhovna Rada,” says Larisa Bonderchuk, referring to Ukraine’s parliament. “But what’s happening is happening because of Putin.”

A Schastya native and Ms. Kozachek’s aunt, she lost her financial services job in Luhansk after separatists occupied the city. She now earns less than half her former salary as the manager of a street market. “I don’t blame the Russian people for what Ukraine is going through,” she says. “Like Ukrainians, I don’t think most of them want war. This is all political.”

An expectation of war

Trokhizbenka’s prewar population of 3,000 has dropped by about half. The echo of artillery fire, at once familiar and unwelcome to the residents who remain, has returned to the village, where a statue of Kondraty Bulavin stands outside the Russian Orthodox church. The Ukrainian Cossack led a revolt against Peter the Great in the early 18th century in reaction to the Russian czar infringing on Cossack autonomy and territory.

Mr. and Mrs. Shvets, who speak at length of their allegiance to Ukraine and disdain for Mr. Putin, admit to sporadic nostalgia for the Soviet Union. Mr. Shvets, the retired trucker, remembers logging 60,000 miles a year behind the wheel, crossing from one Soviet republic to another without needing to ease off the accelerator. Now the road beside their house ends almost at their property line at a Ukrainian military checkpoint.

As they take turns petting Kuzya, a mellow calico cat, Mr. and Mrs. Shvets sit in their kitchen below a ceiling several shades whiter than elsewhere in the one-bedroom home. The couple repaired and repainted this section after rocket shrapnel shredded part of the rooftop in 2017.

They expect more war to come. They will stay.

“We are old, we have little money,” Mrs. Shvets says. “Where else do we go?”

The foreman, the sole Black man on the panel, wept when the verdict was read.

The evidence in the federal hate crime trial was plain. The men who chased and killed a Black jogger named Ahmaud Arbery in a coastal Georgia suburb two years ago today had a long history of bigoted comments that suggested a simmering hatred for Black people. 

“I wish they’d all die,” one of them said, according to testimony.

All three men were found guilty Tuesday of violating Mr. Arbery’s right to use a public street. They had already been convicted in state court of first-degree murder and were sentenced to life in prison, without the possibility of parole for two of them.

The state trial barely mentioned racist motivations, as prosecutors stuck to the stark details of the murder.

Yet “it is motive that strikes fear into people throughout the entire community, because it means that it could have been any of us,” says Justin Hansford, director of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center. “It’s a flaw in the system, really, that you have to go back to a second whole trial to talk about motive.”

But some prosecutors today are willing to have that second trial, precisely to plumb motive. In the past, they were loath to risk losing a conviction and sought “just the facts, ma’am”-style trials. Accepted wisdom said it was more important to concentrate on the murder case itself, rather than prove that a hate crime had been committed.

Recent hate crime trials, like the one for the killers of Mr. Arbery, show a determination by not just courts, but also victims and juries, to push back, sometimes in profound ways, on a troubling proliferation of hate both online and on the streets. Call them acts of judicial history.

The murder of Mr. Arbery was “an extreme crime,” says Indiana University law professor Jeannine Bell, author of “Hate Thy Neighbor.” “But what the Justice Department did in bringing charges and ultimately winning is they said to state prosecutors around the country that when someone does something lesser – burns a cross; scrawls ‘[N-word], go home’ on someone’s home; assaults someone while screaming slurs at them – then you can bring that as a hate crime. In fact, you should bring that as a hate crime.” 

President Lyndon Johnson signed the first federal hate crime statute into law in 1968. But the Department of Justice has worked since after the Civil War to root out racist crimes in response to the Ku Klux Klan and other domestic terror organizations.

In 2020, law enforcement agencies reported 7,759 hate crime incidents to the FBI. That’s defined as a crime motivated by bias toward someone’s race, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, sexual orientation, disability, gender, or gender identity in 2020. It was the highest number reported since 2008.

Federal prosecutors completed investigations into a total of 1,878 hate crime suspects from 2005 to 2019. Of those, only 17% of suspects were prosecuted by U.S. attorneys, according to Bureau of Justice Statistics.

“Think of all the hate crimes that are left on the table, where prosecutors find it so difficult to prove motivation that it’s almost like, what’s the use?” says Professor Hansford, who teaches law at Howard University in Washington, D.C.

Eric Miller/Reuters

Protesters stand outside the U.S. Courthouse in St. Paul, Minnesota, before opening arguments of the civil trial of three former Minneapolis police officers Jan. 24, 2022. Tou Thao, J. Alexander Kueng, and Thomas Lane are charged with violating George Floyd's civil rights when they took part in his deadly arrest in 2020.

Indeed, hate crime prosecutions are down in the United States. Conviction rates have risen, however, from 83% between 2005 and 2009 to 94% between 2015 and 2019.

That’s in part the result of the proliferation of online speech, which investigators have grown more adept at unearthing and using as evidence.

Moreover, hate crimes are “getting more violent and person directed,” writes Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, in an email.

Researchers saw a 32% increase in hate crimes across 18 U.S. cites – with anti-Black hate crimes up by 18% – in 2021 over the previous year. 

Weapons-related hate crimes have also grown in recent years.

“Historically, hate crimes have been committed with fists and rocks and bats ... because offenders wanted to see the victim suffer,” says Jack McDevitt, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston. “That has now started to shift. We are seeing more and more guns used in these kinds of crimes. That changes the whole character of [this problem] dramatically.” 

Those dynamics have put pressure on prosecutors to address murkier ideas of motive. 

The federal civil rights trial of three former officers in Minneapolis who declined to come to the aid of George Floyd as he was pinned to the ground by ex-officer Derek Chauvin is centered on the mindset of the officers. The jury began deliberations in that case on Wednesday.

Under Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Department of Justice has renewed efforts to prosecute hate crimes. Several trials in recent months in Texas, Ohio, Maine, and Oregon resulted in guilty verdicts.

“No one in this country should have to fear the threat of hate-fueled violence, [or being attacked] because of what they look like, where they are from, whom they love, or how they worship,” Mr. Garland said Tuesday.

But when it comes to Mr. Arbery’s murder, the strongest voice has belonged to Wanda Cooper-Jones, his mother.

With the help of a local newspaper, she rallied a wide cross section of Brunswick, Georgia, to pressure authorities to investigate her son’s death, when local authorities initially failed to prosecute the three men. Ms. Cooper-Jones saw such injustice at play again and again.

In January, when federal prosecutors agreed to a plea deal that would have sent the men to an arguably more hospitable federal prison, she pleaded with the judge to refuse that deal. The judge did.

“They were made to do their job today,” Ms. Cooper-Jones said Tuesday about the Justice Department.

Her clarity of purpose in seeking justice for her son reflects a growing push by Americans to hear and understand what motivates people to hate and hurt each other.

“The people who do this ... hate everybody who is different,” says Mr. McDevitt, author of “Hate Crimes.” “The strength of response is, how do we build the strongest coalition to say, ‘This is wrong. We won’t tolerate it. We will hold you accountable’?”

Courtesy of Olena Bilozerska

Olena Bilozerska and her husband in the village of Vodyane near Mariupol, Ukraine, in 2017. She is a sniper who helped lead successful lobbying for women to be allowed in combat.

Nadia Babych stands watch at a checkpoint near the town of Zolote in eastern Ukraine – a volatile region locked in conflict with Russia. The front-line trenches lie less than a quarter of a mile away.

The mother of two is clear on what is at stake should Russia unleash a fresh invasion against Ukraine, a scenario that has the entire world on edge.

“We are here to protect our country, our families,” she says.

Women – in uniform and not – have been central to efforts to counter Russian aggression since 2014, when Moscow decided to annex Crimea and threw its support behind separatists in the Donbass region. Women now make up almost 10% of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, serve alongside men in combat positions, and are ensured “equal rights” with their male counterparts under a 2018 law. Since 2019, they have been able to study in military colleges to achieve higher ranks.

Gone are the days when a woman would operate a rocket launcher but be listed as a doctor on her papers because Soviet-era rules prevented a woman from performing roles that could compromise her reproductive health.

Traditional gender norms in the former Soviet nation have been shaken up thanks to young women who have fought, often as volunteers, against Russia. So much so, that even LGBT war veterans came forward demanding recognition and support for those who still serve.

The ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine has forced some 1.5 million people to flee their homes and hollowed out the economy in cities and villages that skirt the front lines. In Zolote, where Russian-backed separatists control a portion of the town of 13,000 residents, the military is one of the few reliable employers. Ms. Babych enlisted in 2017.

She describes her male comrades with the border guard service as “absolutely accepting” of her. “It’s a comfortable situation here,” she says. She wears her engagement and wedding bands on her right hand, the same she uses to fire a weapon. “The guys treat me normally, like they treat themselves. There’s no difference.”

“The same reasons as men”

Over the past five years, Ms. Babych has reached the rank of junior sergeant and welcomed a second daughter. She views her motivation for serving as no different than that of male soldiers. “Women have the same reasons as men for joining,” she says. “We want to keep Ukraine free.” 

Martin Kuz

Nadia Babych, a junior sergeant with the Ukrainian border guard service, stands at a military checkpoint in the eastern town of Zolote, Ukraine, Feb. 17, 2022. "I want to show that women have the same reasons as men for joining" the military, she says.

Ukraine’s army granted women the right to fight in combat positions in 2016. Before that, they could work as nurses, secretaries, seamstresses, and cooks, although in reality they often undertook responsibilities reserved for men without getting the relevant benefits. The policy change came thanks to lobbying efforts by female veterans such as Olena Bilozerska, a sniper who served as a volunteer in many of the hotspots of eastern Ukraine between 2014 and 2016. 

“In the very first two years of the war, fighters on the front line were very surprised when they saw a female fighter,” says Ms. Bilozerska, a protagonist in a documentary film, “Invisible Battalion,” that triggered a broader conversation about the role of women in the army and the needs of female veterans.

Ms. Bilozerska learned her sharpshooter skills in the woods of Kyiv. She was taught by her husband, an army veteran who foresaw conflict with Russia a decade in advance. The first time she showed up on the front, her male colleagues wondered if she was a doctor. Today her reputation precedes her and makes her a regular target of Russian trolls online. 

How volunteers change commanders’ priorities

“Everyone got used to female fighters on the front line,” says Ms. Bilozerska, who went on to train as a military officer and commanded a self-propelled artillery platoon in Donetsk for two years. “It’s normal.” 

She credits the important participation of volunteers in the war effort against Russia for setting in motion a shift in culture within the Ukrainian army. Volunteer fighters, unlike soldiers serving under contract, served on the front lines by choice, and commanders were keen to keep those who showed high skill and motivation, regardless of their gender.

“In the volunteer battalions, every fighter is free,” she says. “Every commander knew, that if he has a female fighter who wants to fight on the front line and he doesn’t allow it, he will lose a very motivated fighter, and she will go to another unit. If a girl or a woman wants to fight, she will fight.”

Daria, nicknamed “Dasha,” is one of six women among 30 men stationed at a military training center in Desna, in northern Ukraine. She is pushing her superiors for a front-line rotation but getting nowhere. “We still have problems with this,” she says on a video call. “Sometimes we meet protest from our commanders.”

Stereotypes persist even though women exert great efforts to break them.

Courtesy of Olena Bilozerska

Olena Bilozerska holds a cat in the village of Pisky near the Donetsk airport, in eastern Ukraine, 2015. “Everyone got used to female fighters on the frontline,” says Ms. Bilozerska, who trained as a military officer and commanded a self-propelled artillery platoon in Donetsk for two years.

“The most common stereotype is that women are weak and require special treatment,” adds Daria, who asked her last name not be used to protect her privacy. “When you are a woman, you cannot be weak. There is a stereotype that if a man gives up, he gives up because it is really hard, and really difficult for him. If a woman gives up it is because she is a woman.”

Mindsets changing – but slowly

Changing such attitudes in the army – as in society – takes time. 

“The army is still not an acceptable environment for women because of sexist attitudes, sexual harassment, and rape,” says human rights activist Olena Shevchenko. “[For] LGBTI [people] it is still not possible to come out during their service time. Mainly they do it afterwards, after they quit. And they need to be prepared that all those people who were your family during service time refuse you.”

Viktor Pylypenko, who fought in the Donbass battalion, came out in a 2018 photo exhibit. He hails from a military family and heads a veteran organization for members of the LGBT community boasting about 2,000 members on Facebook. “Military people in Soviet times were not used to gay people so it was a shock to my father when I came out,” says Mr. Pylypenko who demobilized in 2016. “In the communist era, being a homosexual was a criminal breach. They could put you in jail for that.” 

The Ukrainian Armed Forces does not ban gays or lesbians from serving, he notes, but trans individuals are shut out on psychological grounds.

“Overall, society’s attitude toward us has become softer,” says Victoria Didukh, a trans veteran woman who came out after serving. “But of course there are people who call us sick. It feels very painful and sad. When I signed a contract with the army, I had the idea that I have to protect my land – not just square meters, also the population. Now some of these very people would be ready to kill me just because I am like this.” 

Married couples serving on front lines

Andrei Vitaliovych and his wife, Paulina, the parents of a young daughter, have both logged time in the trenches with separate units during the eight-year war. The rising numbers of Ukrainian women in uniform has meant more married couples serving on the front lines. “It’s no problem to have women in the army,” says Mr. Vitaliovych, a junior sergeant with the 24th Mechanized Brigade deployed to Zolote. “We need them.”

That need has come into sharp focus in recent days, with separatist forces shelling dozens of Ukrainian military positions and civilian targets along the front – a possible portent of wider Russian aggression against Ukraine. 

“If we were in a peaceful situation, I would say maybe women don’t need to be in the military because there are enough men who could take care of everything,” Sergeant Vitaliovych says, incoming rocket fire punctuating his words. “But we have a war, so it is important for all Ukrainians – men, women, everyone – to make sure our country is defended.”

Nick Roll

The remnants of a building are seen in Mayfield, Kentucky, Feb. 2, 2022. Between a December tornado and the subsequent demolitions of damaged structures that were left standing, much of the town has been reduced to flattened lots.

The drive along Route 121 looks like anywhere else in rural Kentucky this time of year. Under a flat gray sky, the highway cuts through rolling farmland, lying empty except for yellowing grass and crop stubble left over from the fall’s harvest.

Pulling into Mayfield, visitors are greeted with the quotidian trappings seen near any off-ramp: Chain restaurants, a Walmart, a Mexican spot, a chiropractor. Nothing seems amiss, until roofs suddenly start to turn blue: Shingles have been replaced by tarps. Heading toward downtown, more and more buildings appear to have chunks bitten out of them: a bite of the American Legion, a nibble out of the FNB Bank – and a mouthful of the First United Methodist Church.

In the space of a quarter mile, residential sprawl gives way to a flattened wasteland – entire city blocks without a standing structure, traffic lights replaced by ad-hoc stop signs.

But a true wasteland, devoid of life, would not have Shelia Reynolds or her home-cooked chicken soup. In a lot taken over by local and out-of-town volunteers, she’s holding court amid “Free Food” signs, a grill, and pallets of water bottles. “If you’re not here to serve people, why are we alive?” she asks, stirring a pot under a tent.

Nick Roll

Graves County resident Shelia Reynolds stirs a pot of chicken soup being distributed for free to residents displaced by a December tornado, in Mayfield, Kentucky, Feb. 2, 2022. Both local and out-of-town volunteers have been aiding displaced Kentuckians for two months.

When a spate of rare December tornados hit the Midwest and Southeast, Mayfield was ground zero. The tornado that leveled much of the historic downtown only needed a few minutes to do so. By contrast, volunteer efforts like those of Ms. Reynolds are stretching into month two or more. As of late January, more than 350 displaced Kentuckians were being housed in state parks. Gov. Andy Beshear has said the cleanup could take two years.

An electronic billboard flickers between ads, though many aren’t selling anything. “FREE HOT MEALS” are available at a Baptist church, one panel declares. Then, an ad for a flower shop. A few ads later, residents are advised of yet another food and water distribution point. Months after the devastation, the tornado’s intensity is being matched by local volunteers and networks. But just what, exactly, residents are rebuilding remains less clear. Between the scores of lives lost, the physical destruction, and the rebuilding effort, the tornado has shaken up Mayfield’s identity as a picturesque country town.

“There’s going to be change,” says Ms. Reynolds. She looks over mounds of rubble, at a battered church a few blocks away – an impossible view if the city’s buildings were still standing. “But my grandmother told me one time – and she lived to be 94 – life is change.”

Angel Ruelas’ home was part of a second wave of destruction now altering the remnants of Mayfield. Severely damaged by the tornado, the house was deemed unsalvageable and was taken down by the army of backhoes and demolition crews razing much of what’s left. 

“I’m used to seeing buildings,” the sanitation worker says, gesturing to the empty blocks stretching before him, as he waits to pick up water bottles from St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, where groceries and clothing are available for free six days a week. “It’s – I don’t know. Time will tell, I guess.”

It’s not the first time change has come to Mayfield. A General Tire plant came along in 1960, transforming an economy dominated by agriculture and bringing in solid-paying union jobs. Then it closed in 2007. Malls and big-box stores had long chipped away at local businesses in a place that at one point was close to a real life “Mayberry,” says Jill Celaya, the owner of a local photography studio.  

Nick Roll

Jill Celaya poses in her photo studio in Mayfield, Kentucky, Feb. 2, 2022. She hopes to reprint old photos and negatives from her photography studio – first established in 1938 – for residents who lost their family photos when a December tornado leveled the town.

The town had tried doubling down on charm and nostalgia in recent years, with antique shops occupying its historic downtown buildings. Still, the lack of good-paying jobs had weighed on Lee Cole, who grew up just outside of Mayfield. “It’s hard for me to imagine if you’re … a young person, what your opportunities would really be in Graves County,” says Mr. Cole, a writer who traded Western Kentucky for New York City. The tornado’s destruction was “an acceleration, or a hastening of a process that’s already been going on for a long time.” 

But between the way the community has rallied and the amount of physical change needed to rebuild the town, others wonder if there might be brighter days ahead. 

“We could come out of this better than we’ve ever been,” says Ms. Celaya, who previously served on a committee to preserve historic buildings downtown. “I think we also have an opportunity that we probably never would have had. I’ve owned one of those old buildings on the Court Square; I know what it takes to keep those up. The ones that were left – I hate to say it, but I’m not sure that we ever could have brought them back to their splendor.”

For decades, Main Streets in small towns across the U.S. have been grappling with the effects of deindustrialization, big-box stores, and more recently Amazon and online shopping. But there are ways to adapt – or in Mayfield’s case, rebuild – with resilient economic strategies in mind, says Hanna Love, a research associate at the Brookings Institution who has studied urban planning and small-town economics.

“The success that we’ve seen is [from towns] really trying to move away from this idea of ‘How do we rebuild in a way that attracts outsiders, or outside businesses?’” Ms. Love says. “And more toward, ‘How do we rebuild in a way that is really about investing in and uplifting what is unique about our place?’”

Small, rural towns that have been able to successfully revitalize in recent years, she says, “have done so through sort of investing in and reinventing the commercial corridors … and really focusing on trying to foster a sense of place, and a more experience-based economy.”

That means pursuing policies that support local businesses rather than chasing large chains, and constructing public spaces like parks or plazas – all while soliciting input from residents. There’s also an opportunity to evaluate who was on the losing end of Mayfield’s old economy, Ms. Love notes. At Mayfield Consumer Products, for example – the candle factory that attracted national scrutiny after nine workers died when the complex was struck by the tornado – hourly wages started at $8.

Ms. Celaya spent the early days of the recovery organizing and distributing food and clothing donations coming into the airport, arriving on small private planes. When a band with ties to Mayfield wrote a song to drum up donations, they shot their music video in her photo studio.

But even with her focus on the future, she’s keeping her eyes on the past. The studio she owns was founded in 1938. She’s hoping to find physical negatives from its early days, and help families replace their own lost photographs – once they have walls to hang them on.

“Don’t expect it to be what it was, because it’s not ever going to be what it was,” she says, citing a principle that helped her after her husband died. “But that doesn’t mean it can’t be great.”

One by one, children pop into the Zoom room, tuning in from desks, couches, and bedroom floors across three states. It’s Saturday morning, and these fourth-through-eighth graders are welcomed with wide-open arms. 

“Who’s that beautiful girl in the corner?” asks one of the group’s elders, prompting a shy grin from the girl in the flowered shirt. “I used to wear my hair just like that in plaits!” 

The mentors running the show are elders from the Griots’ Circle of Maryland, an affiliate of the National Association of Black Storytellers. Rooted in the African oral tradition, these storytellers command a powerful presence, even on Zoom. 

Once all the video cameras have been coaxed on, “instructor-mentor” Deborah Pierce-Fakunle leads everyone in a chant: 

Remember, rekindle, reclaim, and restore. It’s what we do and we do a lot more. 
Remember the things our fathers could not do, like learning to read, and voting, too. 
The light of knowledge, rekindle for yourself, and build a mountain of educational wealth. 
Reclaim the traditions of warriors and kings, the courage, honesty, and respect it brings. 
Restore the achievements of our ancestors. It’s what we do and we do a lot more.

Heads nod along in support.

Griots takes shape

Baltimore’s Growing Griots Literacy Learning Program began in 2007. The organizing griots (pronounced “gree-ohs” and named after the traditional West African oral history tellers) had lived through the hopes – and disappointments – of the civil rights movement. And they were becoming increasingly frustrated with the education Black students were receiving in the United States.

“Our kids were in a learning environment where many of them were leaving school functionally illiterate,” says co-director S. Bunjo Butler. Worse, he says, schools weren’t giving Black children an accurate or complete picture of themselves, their history, or their potential. 

Recent statistics indicate schools have yet to bridge educational divides. A 2019 assessment of America’s public schools shows only 15% of Black eighth graders scored “proficient” or higher in reading, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The same was true for 42% of white eighth graders. 

The Growing Griots program aims to fill in the gaps. By immersing children in the art of storytelling and offering robust conversations about Black history, it offers students a deeper understanding of themselves while building skills they need to succeed. 

“They’re strengthening their Blackness,” says David Fakunle, who teaches storytelling at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. He’s also Ms. Pierce-Fakunle’s son, and grew up as a Growing Griot in Baltimore. “[Growing Griots] acknowledges their voice and strengthens it. It acknowledges their intelligence and strengthens it. It acknowledges their creativity and strengthens it.”

As the program helps young people appreciate their roots, it creates an intergenerational dialogue of mutual respect. 

“For the older adults, they know that they’re sharing and passing on a very rich oral tradition and art form as well as their stories,” says Donna Butts, executive director of the nonprofit Generations United, which supports intergenerational collaboration. “It’s a reciprocal relationship that engages and values the strengths of each generation.”

Erika Page/The Christian Science Monitor

Members of Growing Griots gather at the Sankofa Children’s Museum of African Cultures in Baltimore, June 24, 2021, to discuss African history and storytelling.

Lessons from Anansi 

One of the stories Mr. Butler tells is how he was drafted into the Army in the 1960s. He explains what it felt like to be asked to kill, or to be killed, for his country at a time when he couldn’t drink out of a “whites-only” water fountain at home. 

“We teach them that their mothers, fathers, grandparents, they are the heroes and sheroes, not just Harriet Tubman or Martin Luther King,” he says. 

Janice Curtis Greene likes to use the example of Anansi the spider. The cunning West African folklore character is often depicted as either a tiny creature or a weak, old man, she says. So when she tells the story of Anansi – as she does at another Growing Griots event, this one in person – she makes sure they understand the power he represents.

“He’s the most vulnerable, insignificant entity,” says Ms. Greene. “But that character, through his mental ability, his gift of articulation, can talk his way in and out of any situation where the foe is much bigger, stronger, and supposedly more intelligent.” 

Erika Page/The Christian Science Monitor

Deborah Pierce-Fakunle (right) says Growing Griots gave her children a foundation for life. She and S. Bunjo Butler (left) are co-directors of the group, which explores Black history through traditional African storytelling.

History comes to life

As she turns to the three children next to her, Ms. Greene warmly cautions, “People are going to think that you are insignificant. ... But your gift of speech, quick thinking, and ability to strategize make you as strong as Harriet Tubman.” 

The children’s parents first brought them to Growing Griots to supplement the family’s home-school program. Now, the kids say Growing Griots has helped them come into their own voices. 

“When I first joined, I was a bit more shy. I was a bit more nervous. I kind of kept to myself a bit,” says 14-year-old Naomi Reid. 

In one activity, a mentor tells an African folktale to a student. The student then tells the same story back, focusing on getting the beginning, middle, and end right, but entirely in their own words. 

“Over time, I got more comfortable standing up and speaking,” Naomi says. Since joining four years ago, she and her siblings have performed at The National Great Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore and shared African oral history on local news programs. “It just makes me feel more confident to be around people and be able to express my opinions without worrying too much about what other people think.”

For Mr. Butler, that’s the point. “When you come in here, we love you,” he says. “You are here with us. Oh, you can sing? Sing! Oh, you can write? Share with us!” 

Dr. Fakunle, who recently published an academic paper titled “What Anansi Did for Us: Storytelling’s Value in Equitably Exploring Public Health,” says that kind of honest storytelling helps bridge the gaps that would seem to divide us.

“When we have those moments to tell a story, honestly, openly, in a space of trust ... we’re reminded of the totality of our journey,” he says. “And it becomes ... not necessarily easy, but easier to at least acknowledge and appreciate the perspective that other people come from.”

AP

Black and white pastors in Brunswick, Georgia, set up a tent and asked for prayers during last year's state trial over the death of Ahmaud Arbery.

Many public conversations in the United States not only revolve around race; they often are contentious – from school board meetings over how race is taught in classrooms to the rapper Eminem taking a knee at the Super Bowl’s halftime show. Yet a Feb. 22 guilty verdict against three white men for hate crimes hints that such debates on race need not be a source of division.

The three men had already been convicted in a state court for the 2020 murder of a young Black man named Ahmaud Arbery while he was jogging through a neighborhood in Georgia. With the additional verdict by a federal jury on the motive for the killing, the national conversation was able to turn to the deeper issue of racist thinking, not just white-on-Black violence itself.

The reason is that hate crime convictions are rare. Between 2005 and 2019, the U.S. Justice Department prosecuted only 17% of the suspects it investigated for hate crimes. Proving hatred is difficult and the price of failure can be high. As Benjamin Wagner, a former U.S. attorney, told The Washington Post last week, losing a hate crimes case can stoke civil unrest. “You need to be thoughtful and cautious before bringing it,” he said.

High-profile fatal encounters between Black people and either police or vigilantes in recent years have led to a greater understanding of a problem once largely ignored. A survey last year by Stanford University found that Black and white people saw a more urgent need to seek understanding across racial groups despite their fears of being misunderstood.

“What was striking [in the results] was that even though both sides felt these concerns, they also wanted to have these conversations,” said Kiara Sanchez, one of the researchers. “They saw the risks but they also saw the benefits.”

Recent incidents of violence against Black people have also had a galvanizing effect on local communities. In the Georgia city of Brunswick where Mr. Arbery was killed, for example, residents formed a new organization called A Better Glynn (named after the county) to promote civic engagement. During the two trials, Black and Jewish clergy formed a tighter bond of support, not just around the family, but around each other.

These groups seized the moment to repair society. “I wonder, if we move too quickly, will we miss the precious and essential work of change?” Rabbi Rachael Bregman wrote in an essay in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution after the state trial. “If we avoid the discomfort of this time, if we turn back to what was, we will not have made good on the prayer many have whispered repeatedly; please God, do not let this happen again.”

The jury that came down with the hate crime verdict was itself an example of a different kind of conversation. It consisted of one Hispanic juror, three Black, and eight white jurors.. In shared purpose, they found a common humanity in probing for the underlying thought behind race-related violence. Their conversation helped stimulate a wider and deeper one in the U.S.