Another Gold Star; or, Incorporating Blogging, Teaching, and History

I've been meaning to write this post for exactly a month now!

In late April, the fine arts department had an exhibition of Robert Houston's photographs from Resurrection City, the tent city set up as part of the Poor People's Campaign of 1968. The Poor People's Campaign was and effort to make the Civil Right Movement one about class, including Latinos, Native Americans, and Appalachian whites as well as the impoverished African Americans who had already been the core of the Movement. By 1968, many Civil Rights activists believed that their struggles had benefited the black middle class, while the majority of African Americans continued to live in abject poverty both in the country and in the cities. With Martin Luther King, Jr., and Marian Edelman heading the program, activists began mobilizing poor people regardless of race.

In school buses, by foot, on mule drawn wagons, between 2,000 and 5,000 began converging on Washington, D.C., on May 14, 1968 with plans to lobby Congress and various government agencies for an economic bill of rights. They proposed spending $30 billion on programs to provide full employment, a guaranteed annual income, increased construction of low-income housing, and rebuilding inner cities. Three billion dollars was a mere fraction of the $140 billion being spent on the war in Vietnam where the bulk of the fighting -- and dying -- was done by men from destitute rural regions and inner cities.

Arriving at the Mall, the marchers raised "Resurrection City." Temporary housing -- tents, really -- that could be constructed in under an hour popped up near the Reflecting Pool and the Lincoln Memorial, in the approximate location of the Korean War Memorial today. Planners had obtained a permit for use of the area, and the permit excluded the D.C. and park police forces. The residents of the city would police themselves. They elected Ralph Abernethy as mayor, and set up infrastructure for a functioning town -- although Houston admitted that some of the facilities, such as water and sewage, were pilfered from public facilities or were probably not specifically covered by the permit.

For the next forty-two days, Resurrection City remained intact; but, of course, the project was doomed. The focus on a disproportionate distribution of wealth and the implicit (and often explicit) criticism of the war alienated white liberals and gave more proof to conservatives that the movement was "un-American" and infested with communists. Seven thousand people protested the campaign, legislators ignored their pleas, and even nature seemed aligned against the residents of Resurrection City.

Of those forty-two days, twenty-eight brought downpours that flooded the makeshift streets, often raising water levels above the platform floors of the city's tents.

Rumors began circulating that the government had seeded the clouds to rain out the protest.

Wet, frustrated by the lack of response from government legislators, demoralized by John F. Kennedy's assassination so close on the heels of King's, residents of Resurrection City began to drift away. By June 24th, only a few hundred remained.

On June 24th, the government acted. One thousand police officers entered the grounds. Wielding tear gas, accompanied by snarling dogs, and followed by a team of bulldozers, the officers forced approximately 300 remaining residents out of the city. One hundred and seventy five were arrested, including the mayor Abernethy. Within a week, no trace of Resurrection City remained.

Little still remains of the experiences of the people who committed themselves in this campaign. The city did not generate the sort of records that would constitute the evidence for an institutional history. The newspapers were hostile to the whole endeavor. We have the memories of the participants. We also have these photographs, taken by Robert Houston, who understood the need to record the conditions of the people who participated and of Resurrection City itself.

These are some of the images included in the exhibit:

This one fascinated me first because of the white doll. I had just taught about the experiments involving white dolls in the Brown case, and an older (older than me) woman in our class told me the difficult time she had as a child in finding dolls that looked like her during this same period. We had a nice discussion on the function of dolls in the lives of little girls, and how this affects their sense of self.

These two, like the one above, affected me because the children seem so vulnerable. You wonder about the lives they live and what became of them. The one above and the one just below, with the children clustered together, give you a sense of that vulnerability in the way that they cling to themselves and to one another.

Also, I think that I responded to these pictures because I was a child at the same time, although a bit younger than those in these pictures. My life exited in a completely different world, and I was brought up with the lie that I was better than the children in these pictures simply because I was born to a middle class family with white skin. Why should I be warm, dry and fed while they were cold, wet and hungry? Neither of us had anything at all to do with our conditions. For me, these pictures demonstrated the gap that the campaign wanted to close, and the opposition and end to the campaign demonstrated just how horribly ingrained this falsehood that advantage and disadvantage are ordained and deserved is.

This exibit opened on the day that one of my African American History since 1865 sections met. By pure luck, we were covering the Poor People's Campaign in class that day, so I brought them all over to the gallery to see the pictures. They also had an assignment, to choose three pictures, and write about the reasons that those pictures affected them and what those pictures said about African American life in 1968. Here they are, hard at work:

Earlier in the day, Robert Houston gave a talk about the Poor People's Campaign, Resurrection City, and the photographs in the exhibit. I always feel privileged to meet and hear these veterans of the movement. Actually, I don't like using the term "veteran" because that suggests that they have retired from activism. Most are still in some way engaged in civil rights work.

In his talk, Houston spoke about the need to record African American life as it is today, to actively create a record of African American history as it is happening. Not just the big events, like the first black president being elected, but the down and gritty everyday life and struggles of African American people. He said that this process was something in which we all could engage.

"How can I?" I thought. I always think that when such calls for action are issued. "I teach history. I couldn't make an impact on collection policy when I was an archivist," I thought, "heck! I couldn't make a living as an archivist in order to get to a place where someone might allow me to have an impact. I'm not a journalist nor a photographer nor an activist; but shouldn't there be something I could contribute?"

I am a teacher. I am a teacher and I can force my students to do this sort of recording and collecting through my own assignments. I could make them go out and take pictures of things and write essays about what those things tell them, and future generations, about African American life and history. I could even make these pictures and essays public on a blog (with their permission, of course). They could actively create this record of history. They could become the record-makers and thus, the history-makers.

Thus, the blog assignment came into being, to be piloted in these crushing summer classes. The students have two posts to create. The first has to do with existing historic sites, places, artifacts, museum exhibits, and so forth. This part of the assignment adds another layer to the mission of the project. By recording these existing records or monuments to African American history, they are creating a record of the ways that the history is being commemorated right now in 2009. This part came to me both out of the need to make the assignment directly relevant to the courses that don't cover the 21st century, and after I came across an entry in Susan B. Anthony Slept Here that described a "permanent" exhibit on women in the American History museum, which no longer exists. The second post requires them to photograph (or record) something about African American life today, including evidence of African or Afro-Caribbean immigration.

For both posts, they must write an essay explaining what the image depicts, where the item in the image is located, when they took the image, the dates associated with the item in the image (for instance, when was this monument erected, or that marker place and by whom), why they chose this image, and what they think it tells us and the future about African American history and life today. This way, not only do they have agency in determining what image should be included in this record, but they also have agency in interpreting its meaning.

Since this is the first semester of the project, we are in a sort of experimental state. I have to see what they come up with in order to figure out how the assignment should be tweaked, refined and clarified for the fall. I know that I'm going to have to incorporate some readings about public history, there is a good one about "popular history-making" that will be the first, and my old standby from Lies Across America that puts them in a critical state of mind. In any case, I'll let you know how it develops!