Evaluations: Alex Champion's Week 3

Monday: Foray into processing THM's programming archives

The IMLS Fellows did not have any field trips this week. We had our typical lectures from Dr. “call me Mr.” Reed on black history and archives from Cecelia Salvatore of Dominican but we mainly caught up on HistoryMaker interview evaluations.

I’m starting to wonder at what point residents become Chicagoans. My best answer so far is when cross streets are less for navigation but more of a short-hand clueing others into your mentality. My latest oral history interview is for Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett circa 2006. Speaking of community redevelopment in north Kenwood, she remarked that she grew up one block from my sublet and “always remembered looking south.” Why was there an “invisible line” at 47^th Street and what could the city of Chicago do to make other people transcend that line, too?

Community was important to all of the HistoryMakers I evaluated this week. A Milwaukee publisher closed her interview with mournful words on the state of investment by local businesses who do not advertise,  allow paper racks in their stores, nor sponsor kids to camp; corporations like Miller and the community Perkins franchisees “get it” whereas small-time convenience stores saw no obligation to invest in the community from which they take so much. As we would hope from a presidential adviser, Ms. Jarrett saw the big picture of community development. She was very frank that some social policies of the 1960s—like aid to single mothers on the condition they never marry and high-rise housing projects like the one named after her grandfather Robert Taylor—contributed to poverty and high black male incarceration. She claimed community input inevitably improved redevelopment projects but I suspect that was partly because its members chafe less if they felt they had a say in the inevitable. Still, mixed income development is a bold idea.

Another HistoryMaker talked about community but in a different sense. He spoke glowingly about his time at Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio and the lifelong friends he made there; he spoke about minority owned businesses and black entrepreneurs taking the initiative and advocating for themselves; he also spoke about the value of funding scholarships and sitting on education boards.

Looking back at all of my HistoryMakers I realized a pattern: They valued education because their parents stressed it; whether their father worked in a steel mill his entire adult life or the HistoryMaker was raised in a middle class family where even homemakers had a college education, education was stressed above all else. Typical to my sense of humor, I asked a fellow Fellow if they had evaluated any HistoryMakers whose parents told them education was a pointless exercise. It turned out the answer was no! 

Chiming in, officemate Ashley Howard took a break from her lesson planning and assumed a teacher-like tone of condescension. “And what does that tell you about how these people were able to achieve?” My hand rose and waved furiously as I shouted “ooh, ooh, Ms. Howard I know!” Ashley dutifully called on me but my answer was cautious. “Um…” I began, “because these people had parents who were supportive of them going to college, and, um…” my eyes searched her face to see if I was on the right track, “[often] paid for them, they were more likely to achieve good things?” Ashley praised me for my answer. “And class,” she spoke to our office mates who may or may not have been listening, “wouldn’t it also mean that if your family didn’t have money and didn’t value education that you would less likely achieve?”

“No!” I said disingenuously, breaking my character. I told her about an argument I had with a friend’s father many years ago about economic mobility and starting gate equality. After minutes of unproductive discussion, I posed what I thought to be an iron clad scenario that would make him admit he was wrong: Twins separated at birth and given to families on the opposite end of the economic spectrum. One gets a nanny, prep-school, and legacy enrollment with business connections upon graduation while the other is a latchkey kid, goes to a 35 student-per- room public school, and gets an Associate’s degree in business administration. Assuming they are just as intelligent and have the same degree of ambition, who will do better economically? My friend’s father insisted they would be equal. I called him a social Darwinist—a charge he denied. I suspect the amount of brain power necessary to sustain that degree of cognitive dissonance could power a small city.

Ashley’s response was probably the best response to that story to date: “Well then why doesn’t he send his kids to Compton schools?”

Indeed. Many of the HistoryMakers bemoaned their poor ambition. Valerie Jarrett admitted attending law school simply because she could think of nothing better to do. Because she had financially and emotionally supportive parents she bided her time long enough to find a place she could make a difference.