Ardra Whitney: Week 6 @ The HistoryMakers

On Friday, July 13^th and Saturday, July 14^th, IMLS Fellows participated in a two-day oral history training seminar with  professor of journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and former reporter for the Washington Post, Leon Dash. Also in attendance for the oral history training were The HistoryMakers’ NEH Summer Institute Scholars, twenty five teachers chosen from across the country to study the subject of African American political history from Reconstruction to the present.  During Mr. Dash’s seminar we listened to him speak about his time as a reporter in Angola, where he lived with and reported on guerrilla fighters in the mid-1970s; his conversations with Washington, D.C.’s  inner city teens as research for his book on teenage pregnancy among black youths, When Children Want Children: The Urban Crisis of Teenage Childbearing; and “Rosa Lee’s Story”, the eight-part Washington Post series about an urban family living in crisis-- for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995. He and Julieanna Richardson, Founder/Executive Director of The HistoryMakers also discussed oral history methodology; relationships in interviewing and interpreting oral histories. Moreover, seminar participants had the opportunity to split into groups of two and illustrate what we learned at the seminar by conducting oral history interviews on one another.

This week I completed EAD/EAC-CPF finding aids for doll artist, Zenobia Washington and television news correspondent, Suzanne Malveaux. I edited web clips for their interviews, as well as for interviews with Frank Lumpkin and Russ Mitchell.  I also continued working on my interview evaluation for chef/restaurateur, Leah “Dookie” Chase and received back several of the finding aids I submitted to Ms. Richardson for review. In addition, I proofread and provided feedback for four interview evaluations completed by IMLS Fellows, Chaitra Powell and Skyla Hearn. I also e-mailed them two of my own evaluations for review. I found this process of peer review to be both enjoyable and informative. I received great feedback from Ms. Powell on aspects of my writing to be aware of and reviewed a wonderfully concise and well written evaluation from Ms. Hearn.

On July 12^th, fellows met with Ms. Richardson; volunteers, Ms. Alonzo and Ms. Foster; production assistant, Bradley Morgan and science researcher, Julia Wagner to discuss the Special Collections Processing Project. Throughout the week, I continued to work on my assigned collection as part of the project, “An Evening with B.B. King”. I am glad to be working with IMLS Fellow, Alex Champion on the Special Collections Processing Project because I can refer to him with questions about proper classification of the records and documents I am processing.

On Tuesday, July 10^th, fellows attended Dr. Cecilia Salvatore’s archives seminar on collective memory. We discussed assigned readings and focused much of our discussion on identifying examples of potential dilemmas of competing collective memories for persons and events in our lifetimes. At Dr. Christopher Reed’s African American history lecture on Wednesday, July 11^th, fellows learned about impediments to African American advancement following their emancipation from slavery; the role of education and religion in shaping black life in the early 20th century; and black southerners' migration to the North in response to political and racial injustice. We also talked about early 20^thcentury African-American leadership from the likes of Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Dubois.

Ardra Whitney
IMLS Fellow
Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture