public history

Ultimately, rendering marginalized communities the subjects of your research doesn’t absolve you of your privilege or complicity in an inherently anti-Black, racist, classist, and ableist system. In fact, it exacerbates the problem — GVGK Tang, History@Work, June 2020

Public history’s activism roots go all the way back to W.E.B. duBois. Over the past month

The author leading a walking tour in Decatur, Ga., Feb. 2020.

historians increasingly find ourselves in the thick of anti-racism movements responding to a white supremacist president; racialized police violence; and, the enduring hold that the Lost Cause has over too many white folks in our nation.

I wrote about my transformation into an anti-racism activist in an earlier post. This post goes back seven years to a plea that I made to the Decatur, Georgia, City Commission. The evening of February 4, 2013, I delivered a report that I had commissioned documenting the city’s racist historic resources survey. And, I asked that city leaders take immediate action to address displacement and the marginalization of the city’s Black residents.

My requests went nowhere. The city moved forward with demolishing historic African American sites and no action was taken to stem displacement. In fact, later that year, in October 2013, the city commission actually rejected a motion to enact a moratorium on single-family home demolitions.

That night in February 2013, I was terrified and angry — the emotions show in my shaking hands and voice. Two weeks earlier, a Decatur builder had filed a false report with the police alleging that I had threatened to kill him; that was his best and only way to silence my writing and speaking on racism, etc. in the city. By that time, my wife and I were one year into a sustained campaign by fragile white Decaturites retaliating against my efforts to shine a light on structural racism there. The racism was facilitating the removal of Black bodies from the city and the erasure of Black history.

Though I had worked in public history since 1984, I think I genuinely became a public historian that night in 2013.