Ryan ChartrandTeacher and award recipient. Historian and documentarian. Journalist, activist and humanist. All of these words have been used to describe Lani Silver. However, there is one word that can be used as a modifier or just stand on its own that effectively completes the picture.
Dedicated.
Lani Silver has seen and done many amazing things in her lifetime. On Tuesday night, Silver related some of those experiences to a standing-room-only crowd in building 52. Silver weaved a blend of rhetoric, anecdote and experience into a coherent tapestry that mirrored the lives of all who have a story to tell.
Silver spoke about topics that included her work with obtaining oral accounts from the Holocaust, genocide accounts worldwide, social injustices involving ethnicity and class and racism across the globe.
Silver said her life was forever changed during a trip she took with her family to South Africa.
She explained that she thought of herself as just any other teenager. They had taken a brief tour in a neighborhood of South Africa that had around 10 homes on the block, one of which belonged to Winnie Mandela, Nelson Mandela’s wife.
“We entered in one gate and drove down the street past the houses, ” Silver said. “They showed me the Mandela house and I thought ‘Well, this isn’t so bad’ and then we drove out the other gate.”
Later, Silver said they returned to the place where her family was staying and she was given a dose of true reality. She said that they took her on that drive and showed her everything real.
“Their (grown) children came to me and told me they were going to show me the other side, the whole side, of that city,” Silver said.
They took her out and Silver said she was stunned at what she witnessed.
“I saw corrugated steel roofs and naked children in the streets,” Silver said. “There was trash and dirt roads and other things things that opened my eyes.”
After returning to her parents, Silver said she shared with them her decision to make that instant change in her actions and thoughts.
“Both my mom and dad were there,” Silver said. “I turned to them and said what I had to say: Today I was a conservative, tonight I am a liberal.”
Silver’s life had taken a dramatic turn – and she went willingly along for the ride.
Between 1972 and 1986, while at San Francisco State University, Silver became the co-founder of the Department for Women’s Studies. In addition to becoming the department co-founder, she also taught courses that focused on violence against women.
Silver was responsible for founding the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project, which came into existence in 1981. She served as the Executive Director of the Holocaust Project from 1981 until 1997.
Silver gathered and recorded the oral accounts of Holocaust survivors, second generation survivors and witnesses throughout the entire Bay Area. She gathered more than 1,700 accounts from 1,400 individuals associated with Holocaust devastation.
Silver has also been responsible for bringing public awareness to the deeds of a true World War II hero, Chiune Sugihara.
Sugihara was responsible, with the help of his wife, Yukiko, for helping several thousand Jews escape Europe during the war. Due to his unselfish acts of compassion, Sugihara was given the affectionate nickname of the “Japanese Schindler.”
Silver was approached by director Steven Spielberg around 1994 to teach interviewers the most effective way of conducting interviews with Holocaust subjects for his project, The Shoah Foundation for Visual History.
In conjunction with Silver’s assistance, The Shoah Foundation managed to conduct interviews, both audio as well as visual, with 54,000-plus Holocaust survivors.
Silver said that she has been able to track her life according to various divided segments: The first part was co-founding the Women’s Studies Department in San Francisco and teaching against violence of women. The second part was the Holocaust project. And the third is the “non-ending battle over racism.”
Cal Poly Professor Daniel Krieger and Director of the Newman Center, Father John Ulrich, were responsible for bringing Sliver to speak at Cal Poly.
Silver possesses two masters degrees in Political Science, the first from the University of San Francisco and the second from the University of Chicago.
She has also won numerous awards. In 2003, Silver became one of five “Woman of the Year” award recipients from KQED radio in San Francisco.
“I didn’t believe it,” Silver said. “They called me up and I thought they were going to tell me that I lost.”
Upon receiving the award, Silver said that she was put into a humbled state of emotion.
“Activism is hard work and it felt wonderful to be appreciated,” she said. “It was the most beautiful award in the world.”
In 2004, Silver was presented with the coveted “Ally Civil Rights Achievement Award” from the Center for Healing Racism in Houston.
Silver continues to remain active in the fight against racism. Her most current undertaking revolves around the brutal 1998 murder of James Byrd, Jr in Jasper, Texas.
Aptly titled The James Byrd Jr. Racism Oral History Project, Silver springboards the dilemma of global racism issues, and seeks to find a solution to this never ending problem.
Silver works tirelessly to solve worldwide problems, while simultaneously attempting to bring knowledge and awareness at grassroots levels.
Peter Bjorklund, an agriculture senior, said that Silver’s lecture really had an impact on him. He said that he has experienced the dilemma of racism firsthand – not towards him, but rather he was the one dispensing the negative sentiments.
“I was talking to my mom and she pointed out that I was making a racist comment,” Bjorklung said. “I didn’t even really realize that I was doing it at the time.”
Bjorklund said that people can easily change the negative ways they think and act. He said the key to change comes first from realization.
“It’s hard at first to make that change,” Bjorklund said. “First you say that thing that’s wrong, you say it and you know you have to change it, and you do change it.Changing the wrong is the key.”