Society of American Archivists: New Orleans, August 2013
Memory and Power:
Why diversifying the archives can help us welcome the future
Abdul Alkalimat, University of Illinois
Thank you.
First I would like to thank Bergis Jules and his committee for inviting me
to make this presentation. I was greatly inspired by his work in Chicago
and his hard work to make the archives of Black intellectual history in
Chicago come alive. I see myself as a living continuation of that
tradition as a graduate of Jenner Elementary School (on the north side),
and an alumnus of Marshal high school (on the west side) and the
University of Chicago (on the south side).
It is a pleasure to speak with you about the important topic of caring for
the records and documentation of whom and what constitutes the
historical experience of this country. First, a disclaimer – I am not a
professional archivist, so I come to you without the standard intertextuality that holds your profession to a common literature and
framework. On the other hand I hope that it is useful for you to hear
from someone who is clearly out of the box of archival studies because
I have never been in it. However we share a common interest – what
does the past have to do with the future of this country. You can tell
from the title of this talk what I think.
This talk is based on my experience as a 50 year veteran professor of
Black Studies and recently a cross-over into Library and information
science. As a scholar activist fighting for Black liberation and social
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justice for all, my life has been as much a struggle about the past as it
has been a struggle about the future.
So first some biographical comments by way of introduction and then a
discussion of what we can call cyber resurrection vs. being born digital
and how archival work in these two ways is helping us reinvent Black
Studies into eBlack Studies. I hope to share with you some thoughts
that can be used in the trenches of both Black Studies and archives.
I was born on the north side of Chicago in 1942. We lived in the Francis
Cabrini Projects, a war workers housing development that was
subsidized housing for industrial workers supporting WWII. My father
worked in a steel mill producing armaments for the war effort. This
housing project was a hub for political and cultural activity as a base of
operations for the Chicago Communist Party because it contained
industrial workers and was integrated. On the other hand we spent lots
of time at my aunt’s house on the south side. Thelma had four
children, taught school, and was a community activist. She had
graduated from Fisk University and was part of the Black art scene in
Chicago working with such luminaries as Margaret Burroughs, Alice
Browning, Marion Perkins, and Gwendolyn Brooks. It is this rich
cultural dynamic that kept our family history alive, and much of the
credit goes to Thelma.
While our family has a documented link to Africa via oral history, our
fully documented African American history begins with Frank McWorter
(1777 – 1854), known as “Free Frank.” He was born into slavery from
an African mother and a non-African father. His father took him from
South Carolina to Kentucky where he ended up being able to hire
himself out and begin an almost dual existence, he was a slave, but
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lived with important degrees of freedom. He accumulated enough
resources to buy himself and 16 other family members out of slavery.
After buying land and settling in Pike County Illinois, and being the first
African American in the US to legally found a town he named New
Philadelphia. His real distinction was to lead his family to fight for
freedom in five specific ways:
1. His first son Frank Jr. ran to Canada from Kentucky on the Under
Ground Railroad
2. He purchase his family out of slavery
3. He turned his town into a safe haven and his sons escorted people
to Canada as part of the Underground railroad
4. His grandsons fought in the not so Civil War
5. His family lived free in this integrated town, including some
integrated families with Black men who owned land and had guns.
This was 20 miles east of the Mississippi River and the slave state
of Missouri.
But this has not been in the record until relatively recently. Let’s put
this in context. In the 19th century we celebrate the moral and physical
struggle against slavery in this part of the country the Midwest,
meaning Illinois and Missouri, by targeting the accomplishments of four
white men: Elijah Lovejoy, Richard Eells, Samuel Clemons (Mark
Twain), and Abraham Lincoln.
1. Elijah Lovejoy was a courageous abolitionist printer. He was
murdered in 1837 in Alton, Illinois. This is a town just to the south
of New Philadelphia.
2. Richard Eells was an abolitionist connected to the Underground
Railroad. He was involved in a famous escape from slavery in
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1842. He lived in Quincy Illinois just to the north of New
Philadelphia.
3. Sam Clemons/Mark Twain (1835 – 1910) became the more
conscience of the nation through his novels and essays. He was in
Hannibal Missouri, on the Mississippi River 20 miles west of New
Philadelphia.
4. Abraham Lincoln (1809 – 1865) reluctantly led the US into the
Civil War to end slavery. He practiced law in Jacksonville Illinois in
Morgan county bordering with Pike County on the east where
New Philadelphia is located.
Note none of this narrative involves the self-determination agency of
Black people themselves. We must remember that the
accomplishments of these men and Frank McWorter were in the
middle of the 19th century. The good news is that the story of “Free
Frank” is now moving into the national narrative. My aunt (Thelma)
and her daughter (Juliet Walker, PhD in History, University of Chicago,
whose dissertation under John Hope Franklin resulted in the University
of Kentucky Press book titled “Free Frank” in 1983) began this journey.
The first book was published by Helen McWorter Simpson in 1981
called The Makers of History.
1. 1988 The grave of Free Frank was placed on the National Register
of Historic Place
2. 1990 A portion of Interstate Highway was named the “Frank
McWorter Memorial Highway.”
3. 2005 The town of New Philadelphia was placed on the National
Register of Historic Places
4. 2009 The town became a National Historic Landmark
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5. 2013 National Park Service recognizes New Philadelphia as station
of Under Ground Railroad
6. 2013 A bill has been introduced into Congress for a National Park
designation to preserve and develop New Philadelphia as an
important site of US history.
We are slowly correcting the record. There are archival collections on
the McWorter family now in the following institutions:
1. The local library and museum of Barry Illinois, the closest town to
New Philadelphia where Frank McWorter was a member of the
First Baptist Church
2. The Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield Illinois
3. The Vivian Harsh Collection of the Chicago Public Library
4. The National Afro-American Museum & Cultural Center in
Wilberforce Ohio
5. And soon to be in the new Smithsonian institution, The National
Museum of African American History and Culture
This makes me think about the recent story about southern cooking.
This white woman named Paula Deen had become a great renowned,
and I might add wealthy cook, had been pimping Black women for their
recipes and kitchen production work, paying them minimum wage – for
decades! She maintained racist practices as part of the Southern
tradition. She was exposed and driven off TV. Whether in cooking or
the freedom struggle we have not been telling the truth in this country,
and this generalization is part of my message – it’s time to start telling
the truth about ourselves and the experiences that make up the actual
history of this country.
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But, boy oh boy, do we have a job to do. Fundamentally the reason is
that we are a country that can serve as a good example of the historical
crisis of memory we face on a global level. We have at least five basic
dichotomies we have to confront, understand, and transform in
consciousness and in repairing the barbaric impact of generations of
exploitation and oppression at the highest level of any society on earth!
1. The US started a settler colony that practice genocide against the
indigenous population
2. The US practiced slavery against mainly Africans
3. The US imposed its imperial domination on South and Central
America (and Mexico) and the Caribbean with the Monroe
Doctrine, extending to the Philippines and Hawaii.
4. The Civil War and subsequent developments left the South as a
backward region run by a legacy of racism from the traitorous
Confederacy
5. The capitalism in this country has murdered and starved workers
while capitalists “live large”
And there are many other dialectics of marginalization based on
gender, generation, and being physically and mentally challenged.
In each case we have a crisis of memory? Do we really remember what
the indigenous population experienced? How about the slaves? And
those dominated by US imperialism (like Cuba from 1890’s to 1959)?
What about the working class and poor people everywhere, but
especially the South where Black people are concentrated? Power
remembers history that serves it needs to remain in power, but that
must come to an end. This is the crisis of the practice of building and
using archives. Power has the money to have archives and they require
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them to be constructed as apology for their power, and not to attack
and reconstruct the historical polarities that I have just mentioned.
We can turn to the history of Black Studies and review the great 20th
century uprising that helped us begin to change, a process we have to
continue in this 21st century. We have had to struggle for a new
historiography from a Black perspective. We have had to focus on
voice, agency, ideology, and the legitimacy of oral history.
1. One of the great contradictions of historical evidence about
slavery is the distinction between the diary accounts of slave
holding families or their European guests versus the slave
narratives and autobiographies
2. Another of course is the practice of emphasizing white innovation
while silencing innovative Black Self Determination. An example
of this is to anoint Melville Herskovits as the father of African
Studies at Northwestern University when his work had been
preceded by scholars at Fisk University and Howard University.
Then Black scholars had to go through him to get legitimacy and
financial support for their research.
3. Black Nationalism has been marginalized as un-American while
white nationalism has been embraced as the American way – thus
creating a love it or leave it syndrome, and of course these
options are clarified by the names Clarence Thomas and Malcolm
X.
4. Finally the autobiography and oral history is the traditional way
that Black people have told their truths to the world. The
subjectivity of Black people is as much a vital and legitimate
gateway to the past as any other set of documents. This is one of
my basic contentions.
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Black Studies has been based on accepting the challenge to create a
Black perspective on historical experience via a new approach to voice,
agency, ideology, and oral history. Now I would like to discuss our
experience with two approaches to archiving the past, present, and
future. We face two data dynamics. The cyber resurrection of all actual
existing collections, the artifacts and hard copies that fill libraries,
archives and museums on the one hand, and all that is born digital, on
the other.
Cyber Resurrection of actual existing collections
Our major application of digital technology to Black Studies led us to
coin the term “eBlack Studies.” At the heart of this digital
transformation of our discipline we summed up our guiding principles
as Cyberdemocracy, Collective Intelligence, and Information Freedom.
1. Cyberdemocracy is about ending the digital divide in terms of
access, skill, and use of digital technology
2. Collective intelligence is accepting the new reality of big data, but
on our terms so that the community and listen to every voice and
make sure every major point of view is factored into all discourse,
ending the many silences that afflict the society
3. Information freedom is about ending the commodification of our
intellectual and cultural heritage
The main way our scholarship can embrace these values is to use the
methodology of what we call the Seven D’s:
Definition of the research question and related literature
Data collection that is both qualitative and quantitative
Digitization of all data
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Discovery of patterns in the data to confirm or reject hypotheses
Design of presenting the scholarship from posters to articles or books
Dissemination to audiences of interest
Differences that the research can make for individuals and communities
This is the framework for our work. One of our major projects has been
eBlack CU, a digital online archive of the Black experience in
Champaign-Urbana Illinois, including the University of Illinois.
Champaign-Urbana (twin cities) are located in east central Illinois. The
2010 census reports a combined population of 122,305 with nearly
19,405 African American residents, roughly 16% of the population.
African Americans have lived in the cities since 1850, and while there
are many neighborhoods that have been integrated a number of census
tracts in North Champaign are over 50% Black. Black people identify
this as the Black community and call it “the North End.”
Champaign is home to the University of Illinois, the largest employer in
the county. We got BTOP funding to build high speed Internet capacity,
combining Federal, state, and local funds of over $30 million. Our
project was initiated with this new capacity in mind.
During our initial field work we discovered that large amounts of
cultural heritage information were placed online by community
members, primarily through Facebook. For example, a middle aged
woman in her late fifties on her own latched onto Facebook as a vehicle
to make digital content on the community and its history available to
everyone. She loaded 8,951 images to Facebook, including both
documentation of present community events (including digitized
programs, photographs, and newsletters) and historical photographs.
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There are also Facebook groups that have developed “You know you
grew up in..(a place)..if..(something to remember). These pages
aggregate people together who remember living in a certain place.
One Champaign-Urbana page has 4,000 members of all ethnicities.
Two African Americans got involved and each set up such a page for
Black memories, and one got 500 members, the other 250. These sites
are about an organic process of memory production, a form of digital
oral history.
At the start of the project, our team had weak ties to the local African
American community, making it imperative in the first phase of the
project to spend time at community sites to build trust, one of the
dimensions of social capital. Field work carried out at a historic African
American church and then also at a historic center of business and
culture, and both of these experiences enabled the project to build
stronger connections to the community. Further, we organized a
campus community symposium that brought together over 200 people.
In two years we had digitized over 75,000 pages and 200 hours of
multimedia.
Our project – eBlack CU – uses the Omeka software package. This
requires a high level of digital skill that is not the norm in community
informatics, and requires specialized skill. We are dealing with people
who find it practical to use Face book pages to build online
compilations or what might call community based archival digital
libraries. These local community archives are about family, church,
community groups, and school class reunions. So spontaneously,
people are grabbing the low hanging fruit, easy to use social media, in
order to digitize, store, and make available archival documents. The
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archival crisis is about time and sustainability – how long will the digital
files be preserved and what will happen to the original hard copy
documents?
We had to do something that would have the content capacity of the
Omeka site, and the ease of use as a Facebook page. Furthermore, the
outsourcing of the archival process (from Omeka to Facebook) back
into the hand of the community is a critical part of how we have been
successful in our project thus far.
Knowledge Commons Born Digital – CU local wiki
The masterpiece of software for the public uploading content for public
use is Wikipedia. What is Wikipedia? The short answer is that it is a
new online encyclopedia outsourced to all of us. We write it and
update it on a daily basis; hence it is a new democratic format for
creating knowledge. It is the new logic of from all of us to all of us, and
that’s why the corporations and the elites are dissing it so much. If the
people can do things on their own, then we can begin to reorganize the
rest of society around this logic of bottom up to replace what we have
now which is top down.
Our needs led us to how the wiki software can be used to create a living
encyclopedia for a local community, the local wiki. Now we had what
we needed, a place for maximum storage space for digital files, and
easy to learn software with great potential for public participation.
There were local wiki projects popping up all over in this country as well
as around the world. Every community wants to remember itself and
people started to look to wiki as the platform for remembering.
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We followed our practice with eBlack CU. A group of campus and
community activists called a meeting at the local library and about 20
people showed up and expressed interest. This was a diverse group,
hence had a good community feel. More meetings were called, a
couple of classes got involved and the students had assignments to add
wiki entries, and a couple of grad students became unofficial local wiki
staff.
Concluding thoughts
Ok, so now let’s return to our main theme and begin to sum up. We set
out to argue that diversifying the archives, that is rethinking the past
and making adjustments in the records of data that define the past, will
help us welcome the future. This is a fundamental question.
First, the very people who have been the most marginalized and
impoverished are the ethnic flavors that are going to be a majority of
the US population. This is already true for new-born children in the US
(meaning everyone less than one year of age) where there is already a
Black-Latino majority. So the future of this country is clearly in the
direction of non-European descendants from Asia, Africa and Latin
America.
This is the key question – what will the archives tell this new majority
emerging in the near future about their legitimacy as citizens of this
country based on the experiences of their ancestors?
Again, our practice leads us to emphasize these four factors: voice,
agency, ideology, and orality.
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People have to be heard in their own voice, have to have their actions
respected, have to have their views respected, and have to hear the
memory of remembering codified in the orality of the culture.
We have learned that the community has to be given authorial rights to
their own history. This first and foremost means the silenced ones have
to be mobilized trained and respected as partners in rebuilding the
archives, in rethinking the history of this country. Actually that’s the
point, to rewrite American history, which is of course the logical
outcome of rebuilding the archives and revealing the actual multicultural founders and innovators, the true history of what actually
happened.
The recreation of the archives is one half of the process. The other half
involves who uses these archives. In the final analysis this is what we
have learned, that the new archives have to be by and about all of the
people or these archives will not be respected, nor protected, nor
studied, and certainly not rank at the top of the list for budget
allocation.
If people have been excluded, then they in turn will act like it and turn
on those who have done wrong in the past, wrongs always lead to more
wrongs unless a critical generation puts a final end to the crisis by
welcoming every voice, and by so doing challenge all of us to face up to
the historical process and find ways to move beyond it.
There has been a great bias in how we remember the past, and we
have to keep it there and not let such forms of racism and societal
exclusion creep into the future. But more than that, the real crisis is
where we are now in the present, because that is where the presentpast confronts the present future.
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We must face up to civilizational task to kill racism in the minds, hearts,
and spirits of everyone in society. We are not in a post-racist society as
long as we can kill the Trayvon Martins and practice ethnic cleansing
such as was carried out after Katrina in New Orleans.
My guess is that it is the memory of the oppressed that needs to be
brought into the main narrative. This is the hope we have for the new
Smithsonian Museum of history and culture on the African American
people.
We should all embrace the digital revolution taking place in society and
realize that archives can now be integrated into the functional
knowledge of every day society
African American have been patient and morally forgiving, willing to
embrace being part of this society, following such great visionaries as
Martin Luther King. But remember, he was killed to stop his dream
from becoming a reality. Malcolm X saw a nightmare and not a dream,
but he was killed as well. Back people have paid attention and many
don’t feel they are even now not part of this country, certainly not an
equal part.
So, while archivist gather and preserve artifacts and texts of the past,
we must understand that at all times we connect the past with the
present in preparation for the future.
I can end my comments no better than to read this poem by Langston
Hughes:
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Let America Be America Again
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
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I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."
The free?
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
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For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that's almost dead today.
O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine—the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!
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