PROPOSAL TYPE
Traditional Panel
SEEKING
- Seeking General Feedback and Interest
- Seeking Additional Presenters
RELATED TOPICS
- Archives
- Memory
- Public Engagement
ABSTRACT
In 1995, a local history buff in Hamilton County, Indiana discovered and donated a trunk full of records from the local 1920s Ku Klux Klan chapter in a barn. The Hamilton County Historical Society made a controversial, urgent, and internationally-followed decision: they only made them available to serious researchers and genealogists and limited publication ability. In 2019, there was a reconsideration of that decision based on community feedback and a renewed look at the context of Hamilton County’s uncomfortable history. Learn about developing community-based partnerships for reconciliation with the past, considering uncomfortable history in the archives, and challenging collective memory in controversial collections.
DESCRIPTION
Learning Goals for the session:
Jumping in when you’re there at the “right place and right time”
Considering “ownership” of records and their legacy
Dealing with controversial records and handling “what ifs”
Thoughts on developing community-based reconciliation with the past
Working through uncomfortable history within an established collective memory
Responding to urgency – and inheriting problematic collections
I am primarily searching for folks with similar stories – a dramatic, controversial, or news-worthy archives acquisition or donation that requires an urgent response and then a necessary reconsideration or recontextualization. Or, a collection that an institution deemed benign or valued when donated, but becomes controversial or uncomfortable perhaps when “rediscovered.” Also interested in how this intersects with a community or collective memory that differs between groups and what role community partners and institutions can play with reconciling those differences.
If you have a direct offer of assistance, sensitive criticism, or wish to pass along someone’s contact information confidentially, please get in contact directly: Jessica Layman, Hamilton East Public Library, [email protected]
ALL FEEDBACK AND OFFERS OF ASSISTANCE SHOULD BE SUBMITTED BY JULY 7, 2023. If you have general ideas or feedback to share, please feel free to use the comments feature below.
In December of 2020 in the city of Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University acknowledged that its founder was an enslaver, a fact readily accessible in the public record nearly since the banker/financier/railroad tycoon’s death in 1873.
It took the Black Lives Matter movement after the on-camera murder of George Floyd for the noted research institution to reveal what most public historians (and the collective memory of Black Baltimoreans) had already surmised – Johns Hopkins not just benefited from generational enslavement on his family’s tobacco plantation, but he actively participated in the subjugation of Blacks mostly to maintain his mansions.
The group charged with exploring Hopkins’ past is called “Hard Histories” further demonstrating a willful centering of the billion-dollar endowed institution’s discomfort and not those harmed. Since the reveal, members of the Hopkins community have splintered on the interpretation of census documents with the other group insisting that Johns Hopkins (born of a Quaker family) was a staunch abolitionist and benevolently kept enslaved people in his household to avert the stresses of living as a Black person in the city of Baltimore.
As a private institution, many of Hopkins’ personal records are not part of the public record. Community engagement on this matter has been orchestrated by Hopkins faculty with a mere nod towards inclusivity towards activists and public historians. Without adequate urgency of reconciling its past, Hopkins was able to wrangle state policing power to expand presence in the city in a with a horrid past with unconstitutional policing.
I propose to present how John Hopkins Hospital became commonly known as the “Body Snatcher Hospital” that stemmed from medical students seeking cadavers in the 19th century to predatorial lead paint studies of the 1990s that mirrored the Tuskegee-era syphilis experiments.
In 1923 a thriving Black community in Denton, texas was forcibly removed for several reasons, but a park replaced their community. And then a wave of silence about this fell over the community. In 1989 while digging in the park for repairs artifacts were uncovered and everyone wondered where they came from. Whispers from the past began, but it wasn’t until a graduate student began searching that the truth emerged. I recently had the honor of working with her to catalogue her research materials and participate in an oral history interview with her. Her experiences finding the historical records, and what to do with them, is compelling and may work well with your presentation.
Christina! Thanks for this! Please reach out to me at [email protected]
Keesha and I are working on a potential panel.
You probably already know about History Colorado’s project to digitize their KKK membership ledgers, make them fully available online, and create an interactive map of the addresses of the members: https://www.historycolorado.org/kkkledgers
Their decisions about how to manage this information could provide an interesting counterpoint.
Jessica, while not “exactly” down your topic’s road, Historic Wendover Airfield in Wendover, Utah has a large collection of atomic bomb history and artifacts from the training and weapon development that took place there. The museum has been visited by media from Hiroshima, veterans, and bomb survivors.
They might be able to provide an interesting take of how to deal with “uncomfortable” history
This is clearly an interesting case. I think focussing in on your goals 1, 2, and 6 and perhaps going for a different type of session other than traditional panel could help this stand out further from recent past conference sessions and could be both engaging and instructive. Maybe a roundtable or a structured conversation so that attendees could either ask questions about similar issues they’re facing (roundtable) or brainstorm more solutions/possible paths forward (structured conversation)