Cynthia Lovett: Week 6 @ The HistoryMakers

Over the last week or so we have been looking at the process of evaluating interviews and creating web clips, finding aids, PBCore records, and EAD/EAC-CPF files at the HistoryMakers to see if we can find ways to tighten up the process.  Each of the fellows seems to approach the work differently and we've decided to time our steps to get an idea of how long it takes from start to finish.  In the meantime, the six of us have broken up into pairs and we will tackle special collections processing over the next few weeks.  I will be working with IMLS fellow, Amanda Carter, and we likely begin next Tuesday after we've wrapped up our current evaluations and finding aids.

I evaluated the interview of the Anna Langford this week.  She was the first black woman alderman for the Chicago City Council and was actively involved in Civil rights cases such as the 1964 murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Mississippi.  She relayed a fascinating story about her grandfather, Arthur J. Riggs, a Pullman porter, who found secret papers of the Benevolent Protective Order of the Elks (BPOE) on a train and copied them.  He later started the Improved Benevolent Protective Order of the Elks of the World (IBPOEW) in Cincinnati, Ohio, which was open to African Americans. He was their first Grand Exalted Ruler.

In our archives seminar with Cecilia Salvatore we discussed collective memory and the challenges of creating archival exhibitions around controversial subjects and individuals.  In our African American history class with Dr. Reed, we looked at the approaches of challenging white supremacy through the ideas of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B Dubois.  Reed also brought in some documents relating to Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association such as a chart listing the number of UNIA branches by state.

We had two full days of Oral History Training with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Leon Dash.   He is a professor of journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Dash received the Pulitzer Prize for Rosa Lee's Story, published in The Washington Post.  It examines the connections between class and poverty through generations of Rosa Lee Cunningham's family.

Dash took us step by step through his oral history methodology.  It involves a series of interviews divided into areas such as family history, church history, and growing up outside the family.  In each of these segments the first question asked is about the earliest childhood memory with regards to that specific area of the interviewee's life.  Following the first four interviews additional sessions of focused interviews would be scheduled, in which topics are revisited or traversed in greater depth.  For example, if there was a subject the interviewee found difficult to discuss it can be approached from a another angle.  Areas of contradiction can also be explored: Dash explained that each of us learns to wear a public mask and it is the task of the interviewer to slowly peel that away.  As an interviewer you look for something close to the truth, with the realization that you will almost never get it.  If an interviewer has the luxury of time, they can gain the trust of the person and start to take note of contradictions: "Contradictions are closer to the truth," Dash said.

During the workshops we witnessed volunteers from the audience working through the steps. Chairs were pulled to the center of the room and the volunteers interviewed each other.  On the second day, at the end of the session the entire group broke up into pairs and practiced Dash's technique. I got the opportunity to see what it feels like to be in the hot seat: answering questions and reflecting on memories that seemed to have long faded away. After thinking about my earliest childhood memory, all kinds of images resurfaced and I found myself revisiting people and places that I hadn't thought about in years.