The Northern Hemisphere is hot this week. Very hot. 

In London, temperatures climbed above 104 degrees Fahrenheit for the first time in recorded history. It was enough to melt the runway at a British air force base.

In southwestern France, wildfires fueled by the hot, dry weather burned through pine forests and forced the evacuation of some 14,000 residents. In Portugal, temperatures reached 117 F, and the Portuguese health ministry reported that this heat was responsible for some 700 deaths. Hundreds of people died in Spain’s heat wave, as well, according to officials there. 

In the U.S., residents across the Great Plains braced for what meteorologists were predicting could be the hottest days anyone has ever experienced there, while in China, officials warned that temperatures of up to 107 F could last for 40 days in the southern part of the country.

All of this prompted United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres to urge more concrete action on climate change, saying to international leaders in Berlin this week that the world could either take “collective action or collective suicide.”

For many climate advocates – and many in the general public – the widespread heat wave has been yet another reminder of how governments have failed to address climate change or move away from fossil fuels, a grim harbinger of a global warming future. Scientists are unequivocal in saying that climate change has made heat waves like this one much more likely, and hotter, in a way they say will increase as long as greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere keep rising.

But some also see a kernel of hope in the blistering heat. Among all extreme weather events, heat waves are the ones most likely to push people toward climate action, according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and other researchers.

“With heat, the range and scope is so significant,” says Christopher Borick, a political science professor at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, who directs the school’s Institute of Public Opinion. “Its ability to remind folks of the underlying issue is pretty key.”

That doesn’t mean climate change rises to the top of the policy priority list, Dr. Borick cautions. Indeed, when it comes to what academics call “relative saliency” – or the perceived importance of one issue compared to others – climate still falls short in both the U.S. and Europe, regardless of extreme weather events over past years, and despite a growing public consensus about the science of global warming.

Liu Chan/Xinhua/AP

Chen Huanwen, right, chats with customers in his cafe that opened in an air raid shelter in Chongqing, southwestern China, on July 11, 2022. High temperatures have prompted cites in China to open former air raid shelters as a relief from the heat.

“We have multiple crises and challenges that are significant to people and politicians at the same time,” says Annika Hedberg, head of the sustainable prosperity for Europe program at European Policy Centre, an independent think tank based in Brussels. “The Russian war in Ukraine, and the fact that Russia is weaponizing food and energy … we are looking at populations facing cost-of-living crises. There are these pressures on people’s minds.”

In the U.S., that list of other challenges includes inflation, gun violence, and sharp partisan divisions. But as political maneuvering even this week shows, there is at least some growing pressure for lawmakers to respond to three-digit temperatures. Democrats have started pressuring President Joe Biden to declare a “national climate emergency.”

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NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies

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NASA, Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Climate experts are quick to point out that the Global North is not the first part of the world to feel the heat – or other impacts – of climate change. This spring, a weekslong heat wave in India and Pakistan sent temperatures soaring to 115 F, making for the hottest March ever recorded there. Meanwhile, power shortages left swaths of the country without air conditioning.

“Europe on a global scale is much richer than most other regions of the world. And so we have the means to protect ourselves more,” says Stephen Fisher, a professor of political sociology at Oxford University. “So you wouldn’t say that Europeans of whatever age are particularly vulnerable. You would say that people in sub-Saharan Africa [and] large parts of Asia are particularly vulnerable.”

In Europe, where climate change has triggered protest movements and boosted the fortunes of Green parties, climate change is widely seen as a priority concern. In Italy, the collapse of an Alpine glacier killed 11 people early this month, and rivers like the Po are running low; water rationing measures are the new summer norm. The heat wave has also exacerbated projected drought-related losses for farmers, particularly in southern Europe.

Temperatures were so intense by United Kingdom standards on Tuesday that Edward Gryspeerdt covered the windows of his home in London with aluminum foil and reflective blankets. Homes in Britain are ill-equipped to cope with heat waves, he notes, tending to boast large windows to let the sun in during cold winters and lacking shutters prevalent in warmer parts of Europe. 

Shelby Tauber/Reuters

Charles Clark drinks water after a boxing workout during a heat advisory that was prompted by scorching weather in Dallas on July 12, 2022. Climate change has been rising as a priority in U.S. public thought, and some Democrats have been pushing for President Joe Biden to declare a national climate emergency.

“It is more extreme than any heat wave we’ve had in the past,” says Dr. Gryspeerdt, a research fellow at the Imperial College’s Grantham Institute for Climate Change in London. “A lot of the things in the U.K. are just not designed for high temperatures. So for example, the railway station near where I live has pretty much no trains running out of it today. One of the airports closed yesterday because the runway had melted.”

The country’s hottest day on record also sparked fires in and around London. 

If the intensity of the heat wave has captured attention, so has the breadth of it. 

While it is not unusual for the Northern Hemisphere to experience its top temperatures in the summer months, says Rachel Licker, principal climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists in the U.S., it’s not typical for so many different areas to have extreme heat at once.

“What’s really striking is how many places are setting records around the Northern Hemisphere at the same time,” she says.

Still, Dr. Fisher says there is mixed evidence on whether heat waves create a greater sense of urgency around climate action. Already, most surveys in northern European countries, particularly Scandinavian ones, report high levels of concern about climate change and enthusiasm for climate action. It’s a mixed story in Southern Europe. Italy, Spain, and Portugal all report very high levels of climate concern, less so Greece and others. There is also widespread skepticism over whether governments can deliver on their net-zero greenhouse emission goals by 2050 amid disagreements on how to get there. Those debates are now heightened by anxieties over how the war in Ukraine has affected energy prices.

Michael Probst/AP

A man uses cool morning hours for a run on a small road in the outskirts of Frankfurt, Germany, July 18, 2022, during a heat wave. Climate change is already a high priority in Germany and many other European nations, but there are other priorities that compete for political attention including high energy prices due to the Ukraine war and sanctions against Russia, traditionally a top fuel exporter to Europe.

“A lot of people in Europe are very well aware of climate change and have been aware of it for a long time and have had a settled view,” he says. “So it doesn’t change too much when extreme weather events come along.” 

The awareness of climate change in the U.S., meanwhile, has grown significantly. As of last year, according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 71% of Americans believed climate change was happening; other polls find that number to be even higher.

“When it comes to accepting the reality of climate change, Americans are in a new place,” says Dr. Borick. “Most Americans now agree it’s a reality. What isn’t as clear is: Have these beliefs and experiences changed the priorities for Americans?”

Only 42% of Americans say that “dealing with climate change” should be a top concern for lawmakers, according to a Pew Research Center survey from earlier this year. That ranks lower than strengthening the economy, reducing health care costs, improving education, and dealing with immigration, among other issues.

But at the same time, Pew researchers have also found that 65% of Americans – an overwhelming majority of Democrats and more than half of Republicans – believe the government should be doing more to address climate change. 

Meanwhile, researchers say the hot days will just get hotter – and more frequent - as long as the world continues to send heat-trapping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

At the end of a full day of gardening in Italy’s heat-stricken town of Piacenza, Angela Acerbi says she is exhausted. “It’s too hot,” she says, noting that temperatures feel even higher out in the sun and that she lacks water to do her work.

Climate change, to her, is an obvious reality. The heat wave is just one reminder. 

“Before, you had spring and you worked in a T-shirt,” she says. “Then summer would come and you’d switch to a tank top. Then a shirt in the fall. Instead now you go from cold. There are no in-between seasons.”

Editor’s note: The timing of a glacier collapse mentioned in this article has been corrected; it occurred early in July.

Savannah Police Department Capt. Michelle Halford recalls perfectly the moment she decided to become a police officer.

As a 20-something student at a local university, her apartment was burgled. As if the humiliation of the intrusion wasn’t enough, the police response was, at best, dismissive.

“There’s nothing worse than having someone violate your space,” says Captain Halford. “It just didn’t feel like they recognized that.”  

That gut punch led to a life-changing decision: She switched her major to criminal justice, and later became one of the first women to hit the streets for the Savannah Police Department.

Captain Halford’s career rides the arc of a new reality in American policing – the emergence of policewomen as commonplace. 

The U.S. policing profession has been rocked by shootings, violence, and massive civil rights protests. National political chasms – defund the police versus “refund” the police – barb debate in the midst of a rise in violent crime during the pandemic. Meanwhile, cities from Seattle to Atlanta have seen ranks thin out as officers retire or decamp to smaller departments. Altogether, it has created a unique opportunity for women – launching a cultural shift anchored in the value of equality.

Public demands for reform and a tough recruiting environment are giving female police officers a new foothold – albeit during a time of crisis in the profession. Even so, having more women in the ranks is improving policing practices and community relations. 

Some of the growth in female officers is organic. It’s the same process that “happened for generations with men, which is that a cop has personal relationships with other people and encourages them to consider policing as a career,” says former Madison, Wisconsin, police officer Michael Scott, director of the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing at Arizona State University in Tempe. 

“Now women can increasingly say: ‘This is getting to be a pretty comfortable place to work,’ where you can be yourself and a police officer at the same time – you don’t have to adopt somebody else’s persona.”

Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Police officers stand outside the home of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito as abortion activists march in the justice's neighborhood in Alexandria, Virginia, June 27, 2022. A growing number of U.S. police departments are hiring women as officers, despite a recruiting crisis.

Savannah’s 22% female force

Women have been involved in policing in the U.S. since 1845, when two police matrons were responsible for female prisoners at the so-called Tombs prison in New York City. But the real push to hire women as officers began in the 1970s. Like many cultural shifts at the time, that development was driven more by litigation than encouragement. By the end of that decade, 3% of officers were women, according to 30x30, an initiative with the goal of achieving “30% women recruits by 2030.”

In many departments, the percentages remain far below that goal. Only 2% of Georgia State Patrol officers are female. A 2019 special report by the National Institute of Justice found that fewer than 13% of law enforcement officers in the U.S. are female.

But here in Savannah, one of the oldest police departments in the country, 22% of the force is now female – 89 of 400. That is a higher percentage than New Zealand, a global front-runner when it comes to hiring female officers.

Three of the city’s four precincts are now captained by women. At one recent incident in downtown Savannah, all four responding cruisers were helmed by women.

“A woman today can look at a police force and see women at every level: detectives, chiefs, captains, drug interdiction, sex crimes – everywhere,” says Savannah Capt. Tonya Reid, who runs the department’s training center.

Capt. David Barefield chuckles that “I’m now the minority” among precinct captains, but he knows there was resistance to female officers before he came on the force 21 years ago.

“When officers arrive on the scene,” he says, “whether an officer has a female backup or there’s a female primary – having that dynamic is beneficial, at least in my personal opinion, because females can often be more approachable.”

“It’s about team building and working together,” Captain Barefield says. “We’re glad to have variety that is largely due to this career path [being] more open to female officers.”

Tierra Hayes/Chattanooga Times Free Press/AP

Chattanooga Police Chief Celeste Murphy addresses the media at the downtown precinct after an early morning shooting on June 5, 2022. There are few female police chiefs, but other leadership roles include more women in their ranks. Three of Savannah's four precincts are now captained by women.

Help wanted

That openness to women is happening as a recruiting crisis not only drags on, but also may be getting worse. 

Based on a survey of departments last year, the Police Executive Research Forum found that retirements across the country increased 44%; resignations increased 18%. Meanwhile, the recruiting pipeline has dwindled to a trickle.

Seattle, for one, usually sees about 70 officers a year leave the department. In the past two years, 356 officers have left. Savannah is not immune. The city is short 121 out of a budgeted 517 officers. That has hurt response times, morale, and case resolution. Meanwhile, violent crime has risen by 24% in the city over the past two years. Nationally, the homicide rate posted a 30% year-on-year increase in 2020.

The influx of women during a crisis in the profession begs the question whether these recruits are facing a glass cliff. Are they being asked to fix a broken system they had little, if any, part in breaking? And if so, what are their chances of success?

At the very least, it seems certain that simply increasing the percentage of female officers won’t be a panacea.    

“There’s a pretty robust system – even if it’s just informal – that ... guarantees whoever is making it to [police academy] graduation is going to fit in with the institution pretty well,” Samantha Simon, an assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, told her school’s news service last year. “So this idea that if we just hire more ... women officers, that this will somehow change the institution – I’m now fairly pessimistic about that.” 

Carlos Avila Gonzalez/San Francisco Chronicle/AP/File

A Santa Cruz County sheriff's deputy controls traffic on Miller Avenue in Gilroy, California, on July 29, 2019, the day after a gunman killed three at the Gilroy Garlic Festival. Maureen McGough, co-founder of 30x30, says, “Women officers use less excessive force [and] they have a better relationship with their communities."

A noticeable impact

Yet women’s presence is making a difference, most notably in conflict resolution and de-escalation.

Here in Georgia, while the Brunswick Police Department has posted a recruiting video that shows a SWAT team busting down a drug dealer’s door, the Savannah Police Department is taking a different approach. They launched a Ladies of Law Enforcement campaign. Instead of war scenery, one officer pets a dog; another smiles broadly into the camera.

“Imagine what it looks like to the community in an era when people say cops are overmilitarized and then you see a group of women officers petting dogs – that alone could lessen the feelings of an occupying force,” says Natalie Todak, an associate professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “A lot of especially women motorcycle officers always get those kinds of comments from citizens – ‘Look at that badass woman!’ – when they see cops coming down in a parade and one of them has a braid. That’s calming. That changes perceptions.”

Savannah Officer Jolisa Lewis has one trademark tactic when she hits the streets: a big, broad smile.

Her father spent his police career in Savannah. Some veterans have known Officer Lewis since she was a baby. She started in a ride-along program when she was 21. After she was hired, she worked at the city jail, but her inspiration came from the female leaders in the department.

Her first supervisor, a precinct captain, was a woman. “She wouldn’t back down from anyone,” says Officer Lewis. “I admired that.”

“We tend to get more answers than men,” she adds. “Men come off as strong, and they do have empathy, but people don’t see it. As a young, small, petite officer, I’m always smiling, even at a serious moment. So they feel more comfortable talking to me – especially juveniles who sometimes don’t react well to big men. It’s all about your interpersonal skills.”

Moving up the battering ram

Whether such a shift is powerful enough to overcome the tectonic forces tearing at the profession is far from certain. But getting this piece of the puzzle into place could be key to improving the overall picture, policing experts say.

“The growing research base around the unique value of women officers is hard to ignore,” says Maureen McGough, an attorney and chief of strategic initiatives at New York University’s School of Law Policing Project.”

Departments are taking notice. Efforts to make women feel welcome range from accommodations such as adding breastfeeding pods to  squad rooms to abolishing long-standing tactics designed to make women feel they didn’t belong, such as mandating they wear men’s exercise shorts during training.

“Women officers use less excessive force, they have a better relationship with their communities, they have better outcomes for crime victims, they fire their service weapon less, and they are named less in community complaints and lawsuits. If there was training out there that promised those outcomes, [police departments] would be clamoring for it,” says Ms. McGough, co-founder of 30x30.

Back in Savannah, as Captain Halford moved up the ranks, at one point she joined the drug interdiction SWAT force. Though slightly miffed about being placed at the end of the column, she took up her position. By the time she ended her stint on the unit, she was at the front of the battering ram.

It took nearly 100 days of subsistence in a dank basement while mechanized armies clashed back-and-forth in the streets above them before Alyona Lyashova fled the devastated city of Mariupol with her husband and two children.

For them, the final straw was news, in early June, that the bodies of over 200 of their neighbors had been pulled from the ruins of a nearby building. “Our city smelled of death, and all around were the graves of our neighbors,” she says. “The buildings were blackened and ruined. There was no water, electricity, or phone service. Nothing for us. Even though the fighting seemed to be over, it was impossible to even think of staying there.”

Ms. Lyashova and her family left for the nearby Russian city of Rostov, using an evacuation service organized by the Russians, where they joined thousands of other Mariupol residents who were promised accommodation, food, temporary documents, and distribution to more permanent places around the country that would grant jobs, homes, and, if they wished, a fast-track to Russian citizenship.

While precise figures are difficult to come by, about 12 million Ukrainians are thought to have been displaced by the war, and as many as 5 million have left the country. Most have headed west, to European countries that have flung open their doors to take them in.

But about 2.3 million Ukrainians, mostly from the war-torn and Russian-speaking east, have arrived in Russia since late February, according to the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations. Though the Ukrainian government, backed by the United States, alleges that many Ukrainians have been “forcibly deported” to Russia and subjected to various kinds of abuse, several war refugees, including Ms. Lyashova, and the volunteers who work with them, offered different accounts at an aid center run by the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow in mid-July.

Although most of those who seek refuge in Russia hail from the Russian-speaking parts of eastern Ukraine, it would probably be a mistake to view their choice as “voting with their feet” in some neo-Cold War sense, experts say. For many, Russia is just an enduring fact, familiar and relatively safe, and it’s possible for them to blend in easily.

“Almost every family in Ukraine has close friends or relatives in Russia. So many come to Russia because they have people here who can help,” says Mikhail Chernysh, an expert with the official Institute of Sociology in Moscow. “It’s not ideological. There can be political disagreements within families, even quite bitter ones, but they still help each other. ... Russia is big, it has demographic problems, and many regions have serious labor shortages. I know the logic sounds strange, but an influx of friendly population is welcome in many parts of the country. Russia has the capacity to receive them, offer opportunities, and it’s nothing to do with politics.”

“It’s just where they perceive safety lies”

Ms. Lyashova and her family actually wanted to go to Germany, where her godmother lives, and they heard conditions for Ukrainian refugees are optimal. But they headed east, not west, for one simple reason.

“My husband, Eduard, is of military age. Under present Ukrainian laws, he would not have been allowed to leave the country, and might have been drafted,” she says. “Our top priority is to stay together as a family, no matter what. So, we came to Russia. We still hope, maybe, to go to Europe, but for now we’ve found good conditions. We’re swimming with the current.”

But it was rough to start. Arriving at the border, Ms. Lyashova and her husband were aggressively questioned by Russian FSB security police for about 20 minutes, she says, before being allowed to proceed.

“Everyone was getting interrogated. It was 2 a.m. My children couldn’t sleep. We were met by volunteers who were helpful, but it was not a pleasant experience,” says Ms. Lyashova. “I think the FSB were trying to find out my attitude toward Ukrainian nationalism. But I’m not political. I’m a mother. I’m against the war. I want peace, and I told them so. My husband, Eduard, was a railway worker for 15 years and never had anything to do with the military. So, they let us go.”

The family stayed with distant relatives in Rostov for several days before heading on to Moscow, where church volunteers helped them to get temporary documents, and Eduard found a job in his profession as a mechanic. Ms. Lyashova says she has seen no help from Russian state institutions, but that most people they’ve met along the way have been very kind.

The Russian Orthodox Church is one of many organizations, public and private, that have recruited volunteers, collected donations, and set up facilities to aid the new flood of refugees. The Russian Red Cross says it has set up 130 reception points in 57 regions, and mobilized hundreds of volunteers to help refugees with everything from immediate needs to long-term settlement. As for the latter problem, the Kremlin appears to have turned implementation over to regional governments, who are obliged to take in a certain quota of refugees and put them up in hotels, sanitariums, and summer camps, until more permanent arrangements can be made.

Fred Weir

Nina Milovidova, head of the Russian Orthodox Church's Moscow refugee aid center, has 500 volunteers working to assist the approximately 250 new refugees the organization greets each day.

Danil Makhnitsky, a political activist associated with the liberal-nationalist New People party whose mother’s family lives in Ukraine, has set up a volunteer organization that now works in 16 Russian regions and claims to have helped 15,000 new arrivals with food, clothing, temporary accommodation, and transportation.

“We have no connection with government, it’s all person to person. And we are just one of many groups doing this,” he says. “There are so many people coming from the war zone, and they all need help of every possible kind. Once they get past the border process, it’s mainly volunteer groups like ours who are there to help them. The federal government still doesn’t have a single central agency to coordinate this work.”

(Experts and volunteers do note that many of the problems encountered by more than a million refugees from the troubled Donbas who poured into Russia when the conflict first erupted eight years ago, including difficulties obtaining documents and legal status, have since been addressed by the Russian government.)

Mr. Makhnitsky says it’s not a mystery that many, especially in eastern Ukraine, would choose to flee to Russia. Three decades of independent Ukraine did little to instill a Ukrainian identity among people who had lived in Russian-led states for three centuries, he says. Of course large numbers of Ukrainian-minded people have headed westward to escape the danger, but lots of others opt for Russia, which is nearby and – he insists – welcoming.

“These are basically Russian people,” he says of the refugees he works with. “They may carry Ukrainian passports and even be ethnically Ukrainian, but they are culturally and linguistically indistinguishable from Russians. It’s not a political choice, it’s just where they perceive safety lies.”

“People with broken destinies”

Nina Milovidova, the head of the church-run Moscow refugee center, says that when they started in early March they were seeing about 15 people per day, mostly from the separatist republics of Luhansk and Donetsk, many of whom already had Russian passports. Now the flow has swollen to around 250 daily, and they are mostly people with Ukrainian passports from places like Kharkiv, Kherson, and the Donbas war zone.

She says the center has about 500 volunteers working with Moscow-area arrivals, and since March they have raised over 200 million rubles ($3.6 million) to cover costs of everything they provide, including translation, legal assistance, psychological support, job-seeking, and other services.

“We try to greet each person with warmth. It’s very painful. These people are in trouble. They don’t seem angry – at least I have not encountered aggression – but they are people with broken destinies, who are in distress. We try our best to help,” she says.

Ms. Milovidova believes the majority would prefer to return to their homes one day. But some, especially those with close relatives, are planning to stay in Russia. Mr. Makhnitsky says his impression is that about half the refugees he meets would rather remain in Russia, while a quarter – mainly older people – hope to return to their native places if there is a prospect for peaceful life, while another quarter want to move to Europe or beyond.

For those who plan to remain in Russia, President Vladimir Putin made things much simpler in early July by issuing a decree that entitles any Ukrainian to apply for Russian citizenship and receive it within three months.

“It’s becoming really easy,” says Rimma Mulkidzhanyan, a Moscow lawyer who works pro bono with refugees. “A Ukrainian citizen need only obtain temporary residence in Russia, which is a fairly simple procedure, then apply for citizenship. ... The government seems quite serious about expediting this, and it looks like it can work quickly in most cases.”

Several of the refugees interviewed for this story said prospects for returning depend upon whether the Russians will rebuild the shattered towns and cities they have fled from, and create prospects for a decent life. Few seem to care whether the government will be Russian or Ukrainian.

“Who am I? Well, I was born in Ukraine, so I am Ukrainian. But I am from the Donbas, and we’ve always been something different, not Russian, not Ukrainian,” says Ms. Lyashova. “I don’t know. I want to live in peace, with my family, to see my children grow up. If Mariupol is restored, of course we’ll go back there. It’s so hard to say anything right now. We just want to survive.”

Xander Peters

Beverly Steele and her husband, Cliff Hughes, stand in front of the ancestors' wall in the community center in Royal, Florida, June 21, 2022. Locals must live past age 100 to make it onto the wall. Their portraits are symbols of the community's history, dating back more than 150 years.

“Right here!” Beverly Steele exclaims as she points to the floor beneath her chair in Royal’s small community center. The town is home to one of Florida’s oldest African American communities. She then points to the ceiling and adds, “My building would be under the loop.” 

The building, a former cafeteria, is the last relic of Royal’s segregated school. It was restored after the unincorporated community of 1,200 earned historical recognition from the state in 2010. 

The loop is the Northern Florida Extension – a turnpike construction project authorized under a 2019 bill approved by state lawmakers to construct three new toll roads. The bill was repealed, but the goal of paving through rural central Florida was revived last year, when lawmakers commissioned a study of potential turnpike extension routes. 

Royal is in the proposed path. Residents say churches, homes, and a cemetery containing the remains of formerly enslaved people could all be impacted.

The community learned of the proposal in December. Warning letters from lawyers about possible eminent domain arrived soon after, and residents have been protesting ever since. The state historical designation gets them a step closer to being recognized on the National Register of Historic Places, which could provide protection from the turnpike, but that’s just one of the strategies they’re trying in an all-out effort to keep their neighborhood intact. In the face of racial hostility in the past, silence kept the community alive. But this time, residents are giving voice to their determination, educating the public about Royal’s history and its role in the development of Black American society. 

Ms. Steele looks across the room to her husband, Cliff Hughes, speaking to him with her eyes. Ms. Steele’s mother turned 100 in December. Royal has always been her home. Their family was among the community’s founders when formerly enslaved people settled it nearly two centuries ago.

“If I have to move her from this community, I’m going to look her in the eyes and tell her, ‘I did everything in my power, my will,’” Ms. Steele says of their effort to stop the turnpike extension.

“We’re not going to lay down,” she says.

Unlimited travel, uneven costs

The turnpike project is currently in its planning phase and will follow the Florida Department of Transportation’s alternative corridors evaluation, says FDOT spokesperson Angela Starke. The evaluation process will narrow potential corridors to one. FDOT hopes to “minimize the impacts” to Royal. 

A status report is due to the governor’s office in December. Public information meetings will begin early next year. But the deadline for the study itself has been extended from this year to the end of 2023 – a result of the Royal community’s organizing efforts. 

Ms. Steele doesn’t believe the state intentionally targeted their community. 

“But I do believe that once they found out that it was mostly people of color that live around here, it didn’t make a difference,” she says. 

Floridians across the state claim that their leaders are consumed by the ambition to expand, as the state develops rural and urban areas alike at an unprecedented pace. That’s due in large part to a population that’s grown by nearly 3 million since 2010, according to census data. 

But highway development and its attendant disruption to communities are not unique to Florida.  

The U.S. Interstate Highway System’s establishment in 1956 was a hallmark of 20th-century innovation, signaling a future in which America’s ability to travel was limitless within its borders.

But on the road to that future, transportation leaders made decisions that still echo loudly today.

Nationally, more than 1 million people lost their homes due to the interstate system’s construction, according to U.S. Department of Transportation estimates. But the agency’s 2017 “Beyond Traffic: 2045” report also notes that it was Black and Latino neighborhoods across the nation that bore the brunt of the highway system’s achievement.

In central Florida’s Orlando, the initial plan was to construct Interstate 4 from the city’s downtown through the high-income, mostly white suburb of Winter Park. But Winter Park residents bucked that idea, and instead pushed the route through Orlando’s historically diverse Parramore neighborhood, creating a physical barrier between the now-segregated and low-income neighborhood and downtown Orlando. By the time the highway was completed in the 1960s, hundreds of Parramore properties had been seized in the process.

Development eventually trickled beyond the Orlando area. 

Xander Peters

State officials have ambitions to build a turnpike extension through rural central Florida. In Royal, it would cut through the countryside, impacting homes and parts of the community's history, including graves where, residents say, formerly enslaved people are buried.

In the early 1970s, construction of Interstate 75 split Royal in half, but residents remained quiet about it. They did so out of modesty, Royal residents say, but also for the sake of safety, since, even a century after Reconstruction, Black landownership was still perceived as a threat.

Building – and maintaining – a community

Officially, what’s known today as Royal was founded in 1865, but the community’s oral history can be traced back for decades prior to the Civil War, residents say.

Spain ruled Florida before the territory joined the United States in 1845. For the Spanish crown, the spread of Roman Catholicism outweighed the need to enforce bondage. 

Many enslaved people across the U.S. knew this, and some managed to escape to freedom in Florida. Settlers first spotted free Black people where Royal is today in 1848. The community’s oral history states that its earliest settlers were descended from noble dynasties before their livelihoods were stolen through enslavement. They named the community “Royalsville” early on to remind their children whom they come from.

Now, it’s the community’s turn to remind the state who they are.

“This is really an environmental justice issue,” says Michael McGrath, an organizer with Sierra Club Florida and No Roads to Ruin, a coalition opposing toll road expansion. The state’s latest highway proposals “will really be disruptive towards the legacy, culture, and fabric of an entire rural community.”  

Upon learning of the turnpike extension project, Royal organizers provided the state with their own proposed routes, which they say were declined. Royal community members also requested a meeting with Gov. Ron DeSantis, and say his office declined.

The silence on the state’s part has been confounding for a number of reasons, Royal organizers say:

• Ms. Steele is working alongside a University of Central Florida anthropologist to get the community recognized by the National Register of Historic Places, and in April the Florida Division of Historical Resources confirmed Royal’s eligibility for federal recognition. 

• Sumter County, where Royal is located, is among the regions where statewide candidates like Governor DeSantis – a Republican currently pursuing his second term – make a habit of visiting during reelection years. In fact, in 2018, Sumter County had the state’s highest gubernatorial general-election voter turnout.

• In April, the governor visited a nearby Sumter County area – The Villages, an extensive, wealthy, largely white, and politically influential retirement community.

Mr. Hughes shakes his head at the idea that the governor would decline to hear their voices. 

Silence is no longer a solution

Nearby Florida counties – Levy and Citrus – voted against the extension in recent months. As have elected representatives in neighboring rural municipalities. 

Officials with the Southwest Florida Water Management District also objected to the state’s proposed routes in a February letter to the director of the turnpike enterprise. “Any option that would bisect District-owned conservation lands or sever District lands from other existing conservation lands would be inconsistent with the original intent behind the use of taxpayer dollars to acquire those conservation lands,” water management district representatives wrote.

Sumter County, however, hasn’t taken a clear stance against the turnpike extension, and Royal organizers say they won’t stop until their own county commissioners are listening. Part of what they want them – and the world – to know is that their community has survived the nation’s legacy of hate.  

For roughly a century after the Civil War, Southern Democrats and their opposition to racial reconciliation were the dominant force through central Florida. In 1920, an Ocoee mob of white residents massacred dozens of Black community members after Mose Norman, an African American farmer, was turned away from the ballot box earlier that afternoon. Three years later, the nearby Black community of Rosewood was burned to the ground by a mob after a white woman accused a Black man of physical and sexual assault.

And in 1956, while inside a Wildwood store one afternoon, Jesse Woods, a young Black farmer from Royal, was accused of proclaiming to a local white schoolteacher, “Hello, baby.” Even though she claimed Mr. Woods said nothing to her, he was arrested and thrown into the Wildwood jail. The door to his cell was left unlocked that night and the jail unguarded. Members of the local Ku Klux Klan chapter walked into Mr. Woods’ cell and beat him nearly to death.

Later, through negotiations with the NAACP, a trial was held, but Mr. Woods refused to completely identify the men who beat him.

“Even if he could, he did not,” Ms. Steele says. 

She believes it was Mr. Woods’ silence that saved their community from burning that night.

But silence is no longer a solution, residents say. Silence won’t keep their community intact. So their small band of community organizers will continue to speak up in ways that can’t be missed any more than their lime-green shirts reading “No Build” can be. Several Royal residents are wearing them as they trickle into the local New Life Baptist Church on a Tuesday evening in late June for an update on the turnpike fight. 

The crowd sits quietly, listening, until a groan breaks out across the audience when Mr. Hughes tells them the governor declined their meeting invitation. 

Ms. Steele steps up and takes the microphone. The crowd hushes up.

“We need to stay steadfast,” she tells the crowd.

“Amen!” several shout back.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct the spelling of Angela Starke’s last name.

Randy and Amber Scott have just experienced something akin to teleportation.

On a June afternoon in downtown Chicago, they’re visiting a new exhibition, “Prince: The Immersive Experience.” The gleeful couple tell me it’s as if they’d been whisked to Paisley Park, Prince’s private estate in Chanhassen, Minnesota. The exhibition has done an excellent job re-creating the iconic musician’s studio there, Mr. Scott says. He should know. In 1997, he was among radio contest winners treated to a performance by Prince at the place that is now a tourist attraction.

“I miss him,” says Mr. Scott, who cried when Prince died in 2016. “He was a link between me and my father. ... Every year that Prince dropped an album, Dad would take me to the record store.”

The enthusiastic attendees here in Chicago look to be predominantly baby boomers or Gen Xers, like me. As I wander through the galleries, I wonder about Prince’s impact on the world and whether the artist means anything to millennials and Gen Zers. After all, his hit “1999” is about a year many of them are too young to remember. Surveys reveal that younger generations are barely aware of Elvis Presley. If Prince’s work were to similarly fade from cultural memory, does that diminish his legacy?

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Deneen Harris sits on a replica of the bike from the film “Purple Rain."

I ask music business analyst Bob Lefsetz whether exhibitions such as this one help keep an act in the public eye. He counters that they’re aimed at existing fans. “Almost all of this is capitalizing on – I hate to use the word nostalgia that often – but a demand, or an interest, into a different era when music drove the culture,” the author of the Lefsetz Letter tells me. “The icons of today are nowhere near the size of the icons in the past. ... So [visitors] want a hint of what once was.”

“Prince: The Immersive Experience” offers details about the artist’s biography and discography. The exhibition seems tailor-made for Instagram. Visitors snap pictures of a portable keyboard called a keytar that, of course, is purple. Flashes of cellphone cameras glance off glass cases of costumes that are heavy on velvet and ruffles. (Did the man ever secretly just wear jeans and a T-shirt?) 

I ask several teenagers, each tagging along with their parents, what they make of the flamboyant icon.

Layla Ayaleanos says Prince isn’t a big deal among her friends at school. But she’s excited to learn more about the musician given that her mom, Mary, named their dog after him. They adopted the pet the day after Prince died.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Gabino Saavedra takes a photo of his wife, June, in the “Diamonds and Pearls” room at “Prince: The Immersive Experience.”

The only song that high school student Lily Johnson recognizes in the exhibition is “Raspberry Beret.” “I don’t even know that much about Prince, but [the exhibition] was really cool,” she says. “His music seems really sort of, like, outside of the box.”  

Richard Gay, chief operating officer of Superfly, the entertainment company behind the show, says that younger visitors love taking selfies inside the lush “Diamonds and Pearls” lounge. 

“They may come just because, ‘Hey, I heard about this Prince guy,’” says Mr. Gay, adding that it’s easier than ever for them to do a deep dive into finding out more about the artist. “Back in my day, that meant, ‘Let me go to the record store.’ You know what it means for them? ‘Let me jump on my computer. Let me hear every song he’s ever done. Let me see every video that he’s ever done. Let me watch these movies.’ And they can do that in two nights.”

One aspect of “Prince: The Immersive Experience” that may surprise visitors is information about the artist’s secret philanthropy. By donating millions of dollars to those living in poverty, Prince helped others get through this thing called life. 

He could also be unexpected in other ways. I once saw him end a 2011 show in Los Angeles with an encore of “Purple Rain,” only to reappear after the lights went up – on a bicycle. He rode around the arena and then hopped onstage for another three encores.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Vic Rivera and Saby Roman take a selfie in front of Prince’s many ensembles.

While touring the exhibition, Sheri Lucas tells her adult son about the time she went to a Prince concert when she was using crutches. “They upgraded my seats to handicapped seats and I was in the first row,” says Ms. Lucas, who poses for a photo with her son on a replica of the motorcycle from the movie “Purple Rain.”

Of the exhibit, she says, “Best time of my life ever. Ever!”

“Prince: The Immersive Experience” helps showcase the range of Prince’s influence – on style, on music, on generosity. Mr. Lefsetz adds another Prince achievement: innovation. But for fans, it’s often the feelings that stick with them most. Millions have danced and sung along to “Kiss,” “Little Red Corvette,” and “Let’s Go Crazy.” Many have wept while listening to “When Doves Cry.”

“Prince, for me, musically can take me through every emotion that I ever want to go through,” says Mr. Scott, the fan who saw a gig at Paisley Park. “He could never be duplicated or replicated.”

“Prince: The Immersive Experience” is in Chicago through Oct. 9. 

AP

Olena Zelenska, the first lady of Ukraine, addresses members of the U.S. Congress on Capitol Hill July 20.

One of Washington’s political enigmas is why Congress shows such strong bipartisan support for Ukrainians in their war against Russia. One reason was on display Wednesday when Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, spoke on Capitol Hill. She had been invited because, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it, “many of us have heard horrific stories about the brutal treatment of women and girls by Russian forces.”

Ms. Zelenska, wife of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, did not disappoint. She highlighted the conflict’s harm to women and their daughters, example by example. “We are grateful, really grateful, that the United States stands with us in this fight for our shared values of human life and independence,” she said.

U.S. assistance to Ukraine is aimed partly at stopping Russian atrocities against civilians – including the systemic use of sexual violence as a weapon of war in areas under Russian domination. “With each day, the war crimes mount,” said Secretary of State Antony Blinken July 14. “Rape. Torture. Extrajudicial executions. Disappearances. Forced deportations. Attacks on schools, hospitals, playgrounds, apartment buildings, grain silos, water and gas facilities.”

Yet international aid to Ukraine also supports care for rape survivors. For Natalia Karbowska, co-founder of the Ukrainian Women’s Fund, sexual violence in this war is “the most hidden crime.”

The care is not so hidden. Telephone hotlines have been set up to provide assistance to victims. UNICEF has deployed mobile teams of trained counselors to support post-trauma recovery. Doctors Without Borders offers mental health consultations and psychotherapy. Most of all, Ukraine’s therapists and psychologists have volunteered their time and expertise to assist survivors of rape.

“During war, everyone has their own front, and this is ours,” one Ukrainian psychologist told The New Yorker.

Ukraine has “shown a strong desire to address the harms caused by conflict-related sexual violence,” says Esther Dingemans, executive director of the Global Survivors Fund.  Appreciation for that compassionate effort, as well as concerns about wartime rape itself, helps explain why so many countries are willing to assist Ukrainians.