Tag Archives: public history

Snapshots from a year in journalism and public history

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What a year. I did a lot of writing about a diverse array of subjects, including housing, social justice, orphanages, ethnic clubs, books about Pittsburgh and its suburbs, and crime — lots of crime. I had the good fortune to meet many wonderful people willing to tell me their stories. The editors who published my work helped me to bring those important stories to readers, some of whom became collaborators on future stories. None of what I accomplished in 2024 would have happened without their help.

I was humbled by the amount of trust so many people placed in me and the risks some of them took to collaborate with me to help tell their stories. One woman whose former neighborhood is being destroyed by her local government turned the tables on me in a conversation we had in August in her mother’s suburban living room.

“How did you get into doing this particular type of work,” she asked me.

“What do you mean,” I replied.

The woman explained:

She’s talked to 100 people. No one’s ever come to talk to her before. Not once. Not once, certainly not twice.

So what intrigued you to dig, to delve?

After more than 20 years of trying to get the attention of local, state, and federal officials, civil rights organizations, and journalists, I was the only reporter who didn’t walk away from her mother’s story.

The woman’s statement underscores how much my experience in public history and ethnography informs my journalism.

Off the printed page and device screens, I did several public programs, including a community history talk celebrating the South Side Carnegie Public Library branch’s centennial and two programs for the Jewish Association on Aging’s Weinberg Terrace residents.

Through Steel City Vice, my public history engagement experiment, I began leading organized crime history walking tours in Pittsburgh’s South Side neighborhood. Though the route and script were constant, each tour was different because of the people who participated. Some of the people who took the tour had family members who were in numbers gambling or themselves participated in the culture. A retired vice cop took one of the tours and added fleshed out my narratives in some colorful and unexpected ways.

South Side by the Numbers walking tour, June 2024.
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Canceled by Decatur

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The City of Decatur, Georgia, is a champion in canceling people. In the early 1900s, it tried to cancel Jews by legalizing a Tuesday through Saturday public school week that held classes on the Jewish Sabbath. It has spent the past century trying to cancel Black bodies through slum clearance, urban renewal, and gentrification. In 2009, the City’s historic preservation survey canceled Black history and Black historical landmarks. Last week, the City canceled me. Again.

City officials and Decatur residents loved my work so much that they built a substantial part of Decatur’s first Juneteenth celebration around it. The only problem is that City officials and residents didn’t ask for my permission to use my work nor did they credit me in any of their Juneteenth products.

For the past several months City leaders and their partners in private organizations planned a large Juneteenth celebration in Decatur’s courthouse square. The event featured two main events: festivities featuring music and speakers and a walking tour of the historic Black community erased in the 20th century.

City of Decatur Juneteenth graphic. Source: visitdecaturgeorgia.com.

In planning for the Juneteenth walking tour, Decatur residents working with the City approached me and other historians for information. In May, one of the event planners asked me to modify the “Decatur Displaced and Erased” walking tour that I developed in 2020 for the National Council on Public History. I offered to update the tour booklet for the Juneteenth event and invited the organizers to link to my storymap. I never heard back from them. Continue reading →

Decolonize Decatur

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In 2015, the City of Decatur, Georgia, opened a new Black history “museum” in the Beacon Municipal Complex, the site of two historic African American schools the city demolished two years earlier. The Champion, a DeKalb County newspaper, reported on the complex opening: “The center is built on the site of the historic Black Herring Street, Beacon Elementary and Trinity High Schools. The center includes a museum that features exhibits on the history of the Beacon community.”

There’s much to be said about the “history” presented in the “museum.” The City is proud of its efforts to “preserve” Black history. “Decatur has taken steps in recent years to preserve the history of the Beacon community and to honor its spirit,” one City website proclaims. Some Black residents, however, are outraged by the many gaps and errors in the City’s story told at the Beacon complex.

The Beacon exhibits are the culmination of a century of displacement and erasure that began with the creation of a Black ghetto in downtown in the first decades of the 20th century. It continued with successive stages of slum clearance and urban renewal between 1940 and 1970. And, it continues today with large-scale public-sector redevelopment projects and gentrification. Perhaps no document better illustrates the ways that the City of Decatur has erased Black people and Black history is the 2009 citywide historic resources survey. Nowhere in the voluminous study do the words “Black” or “African American” appear. The survey furthermore found no Black history sites worthy of landmarking and preservation.

Historic Black schools being demolished in Decatur, 2013. A text panel inside the redeveloped Beacon complex reads, “The former school buildings that now house the Beacon Municipal Center are one of the few remaining landmarks of the Beacon neighborhood.”

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Public archaeology, public history, and race

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A lot has changed in public history and archaeology since 1992. And, a lot hasn’t. In 1992, there were very few African American archaeologists. Within that class, even fewer of them were historical archaeologists specializing in African American material culture.

Former slave cabins, Rappahannock County, Va.

Former slave cabins, Rappahannock County, Va.

The early 1990s were a critical time in cultural resource management/public history/historic preservation. Congress had just passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and the world watched as archaeologists excavated the graves where more than 400 Africans were buried in downtown Manhattan. The archaeology was being done in advance of federal building construction and the site is now the African Burial Ground National Monument. At the time, debate swirled about what would become of the site and the people buried there.

Now, nearly a quarter of a century later, not only are there more African American historical archaeologists but there are more Native Americans, Latinos, and Asians specializing in the the field and turning their professional expertise inwards on their own pasts.

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Were MoCo and MD State government officials and the press duped in 2006 about the real “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”?

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International media attention — from CNN, NPR, the New York Times, the Times of London, and others — was focused on Montgomery County, Maryland, in the winter of 2005-2006 as the county bought what it thought was “the real Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Five years and nearly $2 million later, the Montgomery County Planning Board is holding a public hearing Thursday October 28 at 7:00 PM to take testimony on proposed Parks Department plans to develop the property formerly known as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and to formally change the park’s name by removing the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” label.

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