Historic Preservation and Folklore: Dismantling Preservation’s Diversity Deficit
By David S. Rotenstein
Panel, Historic Preservation and Public Folklore: Successes, Challenges,
and Failures in Responding to Community
American Folklore Society 2019 Annual Meeting, Baltimore, Maryland
October 17, 2019

INTRODUCTION

I began exploring displacement, gentrification, and erasure eight years ago this weekend. My unanticipated trip down this research road began when I spent all of Wednesday October 19, 2011, documenting the demolition of a small home in Decatur, Georgia. That led me to inquire about the property’s history. What I learned there led to questions about the neighborhood’s housing history and where the suburban neighborhood’s African American residents were going. Those queries moved me to ask how history and historic preservation are produced in that neighborhood; in the city of Decatur; and, in comparable suburbs throughout North America.[1]

Along the way, through two states and the District of Columbia, and nearly 200 interviews later, I met lots of people whose families have called Decatur, Silver Spring, Maryland, and Washington home for generations. I befriended people like Veronica, Charlotte, Patricia, Harvey, and Elmoria who navigate spaces where their stories have been erased and marginalized. They are places where the histories of white supremacists have been memorialized in commemorative landscapes and historic preservation plans. My friends will die in these places never knowing what it is like to be fully part of the communities they call home.

Folklorists and our fieldwork methodologies have much to offer historic preservation as a remedy for erasure and the diversity deficit that permeates preservation. Collaborative ethnography, a firm understanding of the roles that legends and oral traditions play in historiography, and our own theoretical and practical approaches to documenting material culture position us well as historic preservation comes to grips with its own history of colonizing history and erasure. We are integral to historic preservation, not incidental. For the remainder of this paper, I want to explore some of the reasons why.

ERASURE AND THE DIVERSITY DEFICIT

Erasure, simply, is “the practice of collective indifference that renders certain people and groups invisible.”[2] It is as much a product of individual and collective memory as it is a byproduct of political power, racism, and class.[3] Evidence for erasure permeates historic preservation in North America. The architectural historian Ned Kaufman coined the phrase “diversity deficit” to describe the lack of representation of people of color in historic preservation and preservation’s products. The diversity deficit represents the gap between what resources are preserved and whose stories are told and those that aren’t. It is a void that opens up as new historical knowledge replaces old historical knowledge. Inside the diversity deficit lies historic buildings and cultural landscapes ignored by historic preservation done by mainly white professionals.[4]

The diversity deficit manifests itself across the entire historic preservation spectrum, from the identification of historic properties, to significance evaluations, and to developing treatments for them — a stage that includes preservation strategies that range from rehabilitation, restoration, and interpretive programs to decisions whether to preserve in place or document and demolish.

At the identification stage, there are examples from across North America of historic resources surveys that fail to mention African American history, historic properties, and recommend preservation for those properties. In these efforts, the Black experience, historic African American buildings and cultural landscapes, and the roles that segregation and racism played in communities are erased. In their place, buildings and cultural landscapes that celebrate white histories and oftentimes the white supremacists who enslaved Africans and who fought to retain segregation are preserved.[5]

Another place where the diversity deficit appears is the inability to translate narratives about place into meaningful statements of significance and treatments (including mitigation programs in advance of demolition).[6] If historic preservation professionals don’t understand what people in communities are telling them about old buildings and spaces, then appropriate significance statements cannot be crafted. Furthermore, preservation treatments that are directly related to the reasons why people someplace believe a place to be important are not developed. As a result, the North American landscape is full of museum exhibits, historical markers, and other material culture that purports to tell the stories of people and places but in actuality serves as racist microaggressions. When fake history replaces lived history, it erases the experiences of the people who lived in a place and it can lead to tokenization and increased alienation.

Collectively, folklore offers historic preservation an essential remedy to a malaise that has infected the ways we approach heritage and it offers genuine solutions to real-world problems. Last summer I taught a brief course on ethnography and engagement that I designed for Goucher College’s Masters in Historic Preservation Program. It introduced students to the pragmatic tools folklorists use every day to understand people and material culture framed by the reality that most of historic preservation in the United States is done within a regulatory compliance environment.[7] I jokingly told my students that they would leave the class learning how to better engage with people and stuff and they will have some important tools to prevent their employers and clients from litigation and costly project delays. I’m now going to briefly explore a few of the examples from my class.

PRESERVATION BLUES

In 2003, filmmaker Robert Mugge produced a documentary about a Jackson, Mississippi, juke joint. “The Last of the Mississippi Jukes” explored the history of the Subway Lounge and its significant role in the local community as well as national civil rights and blues music history. Mugge’s impetus to make the film came from a trip to Jackson in 2001 that brought him to the bar and the neighborhood where it was located. His first visit was as a blues consumer. While there he learned about the historical significance of the Summers Hotel building where the Subway was located and about the important ties to civil rights history the hotel and nearby buildings had.[8]

Mugge’s film wrapped around such heritage blues entrepreneurs as Clarksdale’s Morgan Freeman and Bill Luckett who, Mugge told me, were “trying to recreate the spirit of classic jukes.”[9] Mugge’s interest in the Subway coincided with an existential threat. Local officials had determined that the building was structurally unsound and its owners were given a short amount of time to bring it up to code or it would be razed. At the same time, a proposed highway project also threatened the property. Mugge included footage shot at a benefit to raise money to rehabilitate the building and he interviewed musicians with deep attachments to the Subway and to its juke joint kin throughout the region. The filmmaker also introduced local officials, historians, and an architect.[10]

About halfway through the film during my first viewing I realized that I wasn’t just watching a blues documentary; Mugge had inadvertently produced a historic preservation film. It dealt with the challenges preservationists face in dealing with properties that are deteriorating. And, it told the story of a historic property that easily met the criteria for consideration as a traditional cultural property.

The efforts to prevent demolition failed. The hotel, including the bar, were razed. Subsequently, the neighboring home of a prominent Black civil rights attorney also was demolished. All that remains is a grassy field and a historical marker. Some of the interviews in Mugge’s film hinted at imminent threats to the historic property beyond the building’s condition. In an exchange with Chris Thomas King, who described the displacement of his father, Tabby Thomas’s, Baton Rouge juke joint by a highway project, Subway Lounge owner Jimmy King said: “You know, we have a similar project across the street from this place that they’re putting a parkway, a four-lane parkway, through.”[11] That highway was the Jackson Metro Parkway (later named the Dr. Robert Smith Sr. Parkway).

The Mississippi state historic preservation office has a file on the Summers Hotel and the community in which it was located.[12] In 1995, the Poindexter Park Historic District neighborhood was listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The district, which included residential and commercial buildings, was determined eligible for listing “for its significance in areas of vernacular architecture, community planning, and development, and archaeology”; the phrase “civil rights” appears nowhere in the nomination form.[13] The Summers Hotel/Subway Lounge building was identified as non-contributing to the district and the one-paragraph summary only discussed its architecture.[14]

Another example that I used in the class involved this building in Helena, Arkansas, and this Washington, D.C., streetscape. The first hour into the first class, I put slides of each up on the screen for a few minutes and asked my students to describe what they were seeing — it’s an exercise common in historic preservation practice. After our discussion of their preliminary observations, I told them what was relevant about the Washington streetscape. It was the mailbox, an ordinary object in an ordinary setting. The photo shows a corner in Southeast Washington in a neighborhood that over the past two decades has experienced increased gentrification.

I learned about the mailbox’s significance interviewing an elderly African American woman who lived a few doors down from it. She could recall a time when there were no sidewalks and no mailbox in the neighborhood that once was stigmatized and collectively lumped in with all neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River as “Anacostia”: a place where everyone did crack and where people got killed. And then the white folks came and started tearing down old homes and building new ones.[15] Along with the white folks came amenities like sit-down restaurants, grocery stores, and better public services, including police protection, trash collection, and mailboxes. I challenge anyone in this room to find a National Register inventory form for a historic district that discusses a street-corner mailbox.

A second slide that I showed was of a one-story concrete block building in Helena, Arkansas. I asked them to tell me what they saw. Some said an old grocery store, others said it was a restaurant. Decades of historic preservation work and blues heritage tourism development in Helena had overlooked this building. I first encountered the building in 1988 while working in Arkansas. It was a juke joint that the daughter of a local visionary artist had taken me to one evening. I described the episode in an article on blues heritage tourism published in 1992.[16]

When I returned to Helena in 2016 for the first time since 1988, I found the building was isolated in a streetscape dominated by vacant lots and abandoned, deteriorating buildings.[17] It was located in Walnut Street, one block west of Cherry Street, which was a National Register of Historic Places district and Helena’s historic Main Street. Cherry Street is one of several places in Helena where historic preservation has resulted in building rehabilitation, economic development, and intensive tourism efforts. It is where the city’s permanent performance space is located and where the annual King Biscuit Blues Festival is centered. Historically, Cherry Street was segregated Helena’s white Main Street. It was where Saturday crowds plied the sidewalks shopping and dining during the day and where teens cruised in cars after dark.

Walnut Street was a Main Street, too. It was the Black business district where African American entrepreneurs had restaurants, barbershops, a movie theater, and the juke joints that helped make Helena a Mecca for blues musicians in the early-mid twentieth century. It was where African American agricultural workers, factory workers, and Helena’s small Black middle class shopped on Saturdays. At night, juke joints thrummed with music and dancers while Black teens cruised up and down Walnut Street in their parents’ cars.

During my most recent visits to Helena I began asking about how history and historic preservation are produced there. I was interested in the stark contrasts distinguishing Cherry and Walnut streets. And, I was especially interested in learning more about the little concrete block building where I had spent a night back in May of 1988 drinking, talking, sharing joints, and listening to a well-curated jukebox. Helena’s white blues superintendents, the city’s blues festival proprietors and other blues heritage entrepreneurs knew nothing about the building except that they thought it might have been an old Black nightclub. None of them could tell me the name of any of the businesses that had operated there.[18]

Among the longtime Black residents, many recalled that it was one of the city’s most popular music and dancing spots. Over the years it had been known by several names, including Kale’s Nightspot and the Penthouse. They recalled the famous musicians who played there in the 1950s and 1960s. Photographer and musician Rogerline Jonhson Sr. even captured an image of dancers inside the club and his son Steve, who curates and exhibits his father’s work, tells people about the night in 1963 when the band Birdlegs played there.[19]

For all of its vernacular architectural significance and its associations with Helena’s rich intangible culture, the Walnut Street building and its history are invisible in all of Helena’s historic preservation documentation and in the city’s blues heritage efforts. Though the building still exists, it is a powerful reminder that the physical landscapes of Walnut and Cherry streets reflect how memory in Helena’s white and Black communities is separate and unequal. To the whites who own it, the building is a potential income stream with murky ties to Helena’s historic blues culture. To Helena’s African Americans, it is a silent sentinel in their city’s ruined Black business district.[20]

SILVER SPRING MEMORY WALL

Another example that I want to use comes from the Washington suburbs, about thirty minutes from where we are now. The Silver Spring Memory Wall is a series of five murals installed on the exterior wall of a building adjacent to the unincorporated community’s namesake cultural feature: the mica-flecked spring that Francis Preston Blair encountered in 1840. Silver Spring developed in the twentieth century as a sundown suburb: a place where Jim Crow and residential segregation ruled. For most of the century, African Americans could not buy or rent homes in the community’s residential subdivisions and their money was unwelcome in stores, restaurants, and movie theaters.

Located in Montgomery County about 6 miles north of downtown Washington, D.C., Silver Spring did not begin desegregating its businesses until the late 1950s and housing discrimination remained legal there until 1968, when the county’s open housing law went into ef­fect. Despite dramatic changes in Silver Spring’s demographics and poli­tics, the community’s history and historic preservation efforts remain as segregated as its earlier public culture. New residents with attachments to the community and a historically white and wealthy power regime complicate local efforts to make history and historic preservation more inclusive. African Americans, the Jim Crow era, and the civil rights actions that helped break down racial barriers in Silver Spring in the 1960s remain invisible in published histories and in the commemorative land­scape.

The memory wall was conceived as mitigation: compensation by a developer seeking a zoning variance and for impacting the historical park next door. In the early 1990s, white flight and disinvestment had taken its toll on Silver Spring’s central business district. A regional department store was among the first in a string of new investments. The county’s historic preservation office collaborated with the developer to hire an artist to produce a mural installation with five panels “depicting historical images or moments from Silver Spring’s past.”[21]

Washington artist Mame Cohalan dug into existing histories and the county’s historical society archives for inspiration. She also consulted with members of the community, mostly white community, county, and business leaders. The subjects ultimately were chosen: (1) Francis Preston Blair’s 1840s mansion; (2) the Civil War; (3) Silver Spring’s first armory on the eve of World War I; (4) the B&O Railroad station in 1941; and, (5) the rehabilitated 1938 Silver Shopping Center. County planners described the project as the “first attempt to realistically depict Silver Spring’s history in a representational public art form.”[22]

In her research on Silver Spring’s history, Cohalan noticed something missing from the images she was looking through: racial diversity. She relayed her concerns to county officials: “The artist would like to explore having more cultural diversity in the 20th century images.”[23] The final product is a public art installation that planners and preservationists intended to accurately convey the community’s history. Yet, the artist’s recognition that Silver Spring’s history was depicted as all-white resulted in African Americans being illustrated in the 1940s train station image. It was a scene that would have never been possible in the 1940s. Or the 1950s. Or even the 1960s. Silver Spring was that rigidly segregated. The Silver Spring Memory Wall erases the Black experience in Silver Spring by uplifting the stories of the white supremacists who developed the community; by omitting realistic depictions of African Americans in Silver Spring’s past; and, by inserting Black bodies into a space and time where they never would have been found.[24]

FOLKLORE’S POTENTIAL

In the examples I just presented, ethnographic and collaborative approaches, along with the specialized canon of knowledge underpinning folklore and folklife, likely would have resulted in different outcomes. Let’s consider the Summers Hotel and Subway Lounge in Jackson, Mississippi. Mugge captured a grassroots effort to rehabilitate the building and preserve the architecture and its important intangible culture. That intangible culture and its associations with civil rights history remains invisible in the historic preservation documents: The National Register form and Mississippi state historic preservation office survey forms. It also appears to be invisible in the Section 106 compliance that may or may not have happened related to planning the parkway project — the SHPO has no record of any.[25]

A different outcome for the juke joint, the hotel, and the neighboring civil rights house might have involved a more ethnographic approach to evaluating the significance of the resources and determining appropriate treatments, including mitigation. The Section 106 consultations, had they occurred, could have included recommendations to fund the rehabilitations necessary to preserve the buildings in place. Mitigation for adversely affecting the properties by construction of the parkway also could have extended beyond architecture and into protecting the blues culture and civil rights histories embedded in the properties.

Helena’s Black Main Street is a much more complicated case. Though folklorists were involved with creating Helena’s blues heritage tourism programs from the outset, those efforts were not fully integrated into historic preservation beyond the Cherry Street corridor. The architectural historians who documented downtown Helena took a strictly antiquarian approach to their work: they focused on pretty or potentially pretty buildings in a space that the city’s white blues superintendents thought was significant. The only way to fully understand the historical significance of the one-story concrete block building best known as Kale’s Nightspot didn’t involve documents or maps; it required talking to people with attachments to the building and its surroundings. A better understanding of segregation in Helena and the city’s Black map might have resulted in better integrating Walnut Street in historic preservation efforts and in festival planning. Instead, Walnut Street and its rich blues heritage is populated by seasonal parking lots filled with blues ghosts.[26]

And finally, let’s consider Silver Spring’s Memory Wall. It was the first undertaking in a quarter-century of economic development and placemaking that has relied heavily on heritage. Yet, for all of that work, the Black experience in Silver Spring remains invisible and white supremacists are celebrated. Had planners, historic preservationists, and others engaged with Silver Spring’s Black communities through ethnographic fieldwork and collaborations that go beyond tokenization and manipulation, the people I befriended during my fieldwork there might feel differently about the public spaces they navigate and the stories they see and hear told about Silver Spring’s history.[27] They wouldn’t say to interviewers like me, “We don’t exist to them” when asked about the local historic preservation groups.[28]

There is great potential in historic preservation right now for a paradigm shift towards what Jeremy Wells and others call human-centered and values-centered preservation.[29] It is a shift that folklorists have tremendous opportunities to offer more than the occasional consultation about traditional cultural properties. It is an opportunity to break down barriers that sort historic preservation projects by obsolete and antiquated categories that themselves lead to the tokenization and marginalization of ethnography and folkloristics and that privilege such disciplines as architectural history and archaeology. The diversity deficit in historic preservation itself may be erased by folklorists asserting ourselves and moving our work away from the margins to the center of historic preservation.

 

NOTES

[1] David S. Rotenstein, “The Decatur Plan: Folklore, Historic Preservation, and the Black Experience in Gentrifying Spaces,” The Journal of American Folklore 132, no. 526 (2019): 431–51. The article also has a web-based multimedia site: https://jaf.press.uillinois.edu/526/.

[2] Parul Sehgal, “Fighting ‘Erasure,’” The New York Times, February 2, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/magazine/the-painful-consequences-of-erasure.html.

[3] Danielle Purifoy, “A Place Called Mebane,” Scalawag (blog), August 8, 2016, https://www.scalawagmagazine.org/2016/08/a-place-called-mebane/; Diane M. Rodgers, Jessica Petersen, and Jill Sanderson, “Commemorating Alternative Organizations and Marginalized Spaces: The Case of Forgotten Finntowns,” ed. Leanne Cutcher et al., Organization 23, no. 1 (January 2016): 90–113; Diane M. Rodgers, Lucy Sosa, and Jessica Petersen, “Historic Preservation: A Multilayered Inclusive Approach Honoring Immigrants Past and Present,” Humanity & Society 42, no. 2 (May 2018): 193–220.

[4] Ned Kaufman, “Historic Places and the Diversity Deficit in Heritage Conservation,” CRM: The Journal of Heritage Stewardship 1, no. 2 (2004): 68–85; Ned Kaufman, Place, Race, and Story: Essays on the Past and Future of Historic Preservation (New York: Routledge, 2009).

[5] Kaufman, Place, Race, and Story; Angel David Nieves, “Memories of Africville: Urban Renewal, Reparations, and the Africadian Diaspora,” in Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, ed. Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Adrian Woods (Toronto, Ont. : Cambridge, Mass: Between the Lines ; South End Press, 2007), 82–96; Ted Rutland, Displacing Blackness: Power, Planning, and Race in Twentieth-Century Halifax (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2018).

[6] Thomas F. King, Places That Count: Traditional Cultural Properties in Cultural Resource Management, Heritage Resources Management Series, v. 6 (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2003), 279–80.

[7] Jeremy C Wells and Priya Chhaya, “A Guide to Becoming an Historic Preservation Professional: The Work You Can Do, What Employers Want, and Educational Considerations,” 2019, https://higherlogicdownload.s3.amazonaws.com/SAVINGPLACES/UploadedImages/0c3403cc-8d61-409e-bb18-cb8a6609345b/Guide_to_HP/Wells_-_A_Guide_to_Becoming_an_Historic_Preservation_Professional.pdf.

[8] Robert Mugge, Personal Communication, interview by David S. Rotenstein, September 21, 2019.

[9] Mugge Interview.

[10] Robert Mugge, Last of the Mississippi Jukes, Documentary (Mug-Shot Productions, 2003).

[11] Mugge Interview.

[12] Eric Reisman, Survey Manager, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, email to David Rotenstein, July 10, 2019.

[13] John Linn Hopkins, “Poindexter Park Historic District” (Washington, D.C.: United States. National Park Service, 1994).

[14] Hopkins, Section 7, 24.

[15] L.W. Interview with David S. Rotenstein, July 25, 2015: “Now that I’ve been over here and we’re getting whites moving in the neighborhood, we’ve got a mailbox on the corner. We don’t have to go up to the post office … The mailbox is new. And pickup on time: eleven o’clock very day. Eleven o’clock every day. So you see, you get different service and you get general services and so forth and so on.”

[16] David S. Rotenstein, “The Helena Blues: African-American Folk Music and Cultural Tourism in Helena, Arkansas,” Southern Folklore 49, no. 2 (1992): 133–46.

[17] David S. Rotenstein, “Erasing and Reclaiming History: A Delta Photo Essay,” Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies 49, no. 3 (December 2018): 196–203.

[18] David S. Rotenstein, “Blues Ghosts in the Black Mecca: Appropriation and Erasure in Helena, Arkansas,” Journal of Urban Affairs, in press.

[19] Phyllis Y. Hammonds and Steve Johnson, You Lookin’ Good! Images of African American Life in the Delta 1950s-1960s. Photographs by Rogerline Johnson, Sr., Exhibition catalog (Helena, Arkansas: The E.C. Morris Foundation, Inc., n.d.); Andrea Price, “Hidden Pictures: The Brilliance of Rogerline Johnson,” The Giving Net (blog), February 16, 2017, http://thegivingnet.com/2017/02/rogerlinejohnson/.

[20] Melissa Martinez, “Renovations Underway on Biscuit Row,” The Helena World, September 19, 2013, http://www.helena-arkansas.com/article/20130919/News/130919580; Ron Kelley, “American Music Triangle to Link Helena with Other Major Music Sites,” The Helena World, May 4, 2015, http://www.helena-arkansas.com/article/20150504/news/150509885; Magical Madge, “Clarksdale Mayor Highlight of Helena Annual Chamber Dinner,” Delta Bohemian (blog), May 5, 2015, http://deltabohemian.com/clarksdale-mayor-highlight-of-helena-annual-chamber-dinner/..

[21] M-NCPPC Development Review Division Staff to Montgomery County Planning

Board, “Site Plan Review #8-94030,” Memorandum, (n.d.), 7.

[22] Marilyn Clemens to Calvin Nelson, “RE: Silver Spring Art Panel Review of the Caldor Store Memory Wall by Artist Mame Cohalan,” Memorandum, (July 20, 1994).

[23] Ibid.

[24] David S. Rotenstein, “Producing and Protesting Invisibility in Silver Spring, Maryland,” in Demand the Impossible: Essays in History as Activism, ed. Nathan Wuertenberg and William Horne (Washington, D.C.: Westphalia Press, 2018), 89–111.

[25] Eric Reisman, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Personal Communication, July 10, 2019.

[26] Rotenstein, “Helena Blues.”

[27] Sherry R. Arnstein, “A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35, no. 4 (July 1, 1969): 216–24.

[28] That phrase and variants appeared in interviews I conducted with residents of Lyttonsville, a historic African American hamlet first settled in 1853 adjacent to present-day Silver Spring. The interviews were conducted between July 2016 and December 2018.

[29] Kingston Wm. Heath, “Toward a Humanist Approach to Historic Preservation,” The Journal of American Folklore 132, no. 526 (2019): 390–411; Jeremy C Wells, “Making a Case for Historic Place Conservation Based on People’s Values,” Forum Journal 29, no. 3 (2015): 44–62; Jeremy C. Wells and Barry L. Stiefel, eds., Human-Centered Built Environment Heritage Preservation (London: Routledge, 2018).

© 2019 D.S. Rotenstein

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