Real World History: Intergenerational Learning & Student Oral Histories of the Great Migration

Real World History: Intergenerational Learning & Student Oral Histories of the Great Migration

By Max Peterson

A thesis submitted to the faculty of Columbia University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Oral History

New York, New York

October 2021

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Acknowledgements Before I begin, I would like to thank the people who have supported me through the process of writing this thesis.

There are two people who I must thank above all others: my mother, Dr. Meg Petersen, and my wife, Jailyn Gladney. All of the time, love, and labor they have invested in me has made me the person I am today, and without their support, critique, and feedback, this thesis could not have happened.

I must also thank the professional and intellectual mentors I’ve had along the way: Cosby Hunt, Kelly Navies, Dr. Shelley Nickles, Dr. Paul Hutchinson, Dr. Marcia Schmidt-Blaine, and Dr. Linda Heywood (just to name a few). Without their support and encouragement, I never would have had the opportunity to produce this work.

I also wish to thank my thesis advisors, Dr. Amy Starecheski, Kelly Navies, and Cosby Hunt for their feedback throughout this process.

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Table of Contents Title Page ........................................................................................................................................ i Acknowledgments ......................................................................................................................... ii Table of Contents ......................................................................................................................... iii Introduction ............................................................................................................................... iv-v Part I: The Development of Real World History .................................................................. 1-38 Introduction ..................................................................................................................................1 The Origins of Real World History ..............................................................................................5 First Year, 2014-2015 ................................................................................................................13 Second & Third Years, 2015-2017 ............................................................................................16 Years Four, Five, and Six, 2017-2020 .......................................................................................22 Creation of the Real World History Collection ..........................................................................33 Part II: The Real World History Collection: A Promise Kept .......................................... 39-97 Introduction ................................................................................................................................39 Section I – How Real World History Contributes to the Study of the Great Migration ...... 40-97 A Discussion of the Literature ................................................................................................40 The Warmth of Other Suns.....................................................................................................46 The Real World History Collection (Size, Scope, and Demographics) .................................50 Stories that Emerge from the Collection ................................................................................57 Section II – What Makes Student Oral History Different? .................................................. 73-92 Introduction ............................................................................................................................73 Student Oral History & Intergenerational Encounter .............................................................75 Student Oral History Projects .................................................................................................77 Intergenerational Dynamics of the Real World History Collection .......................................79 Part III: Reimagining the Great Migration Oral History Project .................................. 98-114 Introduction ................................................................................................................................98 An opportunity to rethink the Great Migration Oral History Project .........................................98 Major Changes to the Great Migration Oral History Project ...................................................104 The Revised Great Migration Oral History Project .................................................................111 Appendices .......................................................................................................................... 115-150 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................... 151-154

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Introduction Part retrospective, part analysis, and part lesson plan, this thesis is an investigation of an ongoing student oral history project in Washington, DC. The Real World History program is a year-long, after-school, applied history course open to DC high school students attending public and public charter schools. Since 2014, Real World History students have preserved local history through a community-engaged oral history project. Collaborating with older adults in their community, students engage in inter-generational relationship building, contribute to the oral history resources of the DC region, and learn to think like historians.

Alongside the course creator, Cosby Hunt, I have co-taught the course since the fall of 2017. In three parts, this thesis will trace the development of the Real World History program, interrogate the historical contributions of student oral history projects, and outline a new structure for the class’s oral history project.

With the goal of introducing students to the real world of history, the course has had two distinct semesters: 

Fall semester: Students do a deep-dive on the Great Migration, the mass migration of Black Americans out of the Jim Crow South to cities in the North and West (1915-1970), by reading The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson and conducting oral history interviews with people who came to DC as part of the Migration.

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Spring semester: Students are exposed to the field of history through an internship at a historic site or museum in DC and compete in the National History Day competition.

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Begun in the fall of 2020, this thesis project accompanies a turning point in the evolution of the class: the creation of the Real World History Oral History Collection at the People’s Archive of the District of Columbia Public Library. Establishing a partnership with the People’s Archive provided an opportunity for reflection, analysis, and reassessment for us as course instructors.

Based upon a series of oral history interviews with Cosby Hunt and Caitlin Wolf, Part I tells the story of how and why Real World History was created, and the ways it has developed since its pilot year in 2014-2015. This section will provide the reader with important context for the student interviews.

Part two is an analysis of the Real World History collection. One section situates the oral history collection within the scholarship of the Great Migration and examines what this new archive has to offer historians of the Migration. The second section analyzes the collection as a student oral history project and looks at the value of student oral history and what makes it different.

The third and final part of this thesis is a discussion of how the oral history project of Real World History was restructured in light of the requirements of the People’s Archive for oral history interviews and my training as an oral historian. This section contains appendices of handouts and assignment sheets.

Part I

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Part I – The Development of Real World History

“It's a miracle that I know you, right? Like, your mom went to a conference where I was running my mouth, and found me afterwards and said like, "My son who's in college is about everything you were just talking about." And, "He wants to move to Washington, so can he contact you?" (Shakes head) Miracle, right?”1 Oral history interview with Cosby Hunt, March 17th, 2021 Sitting in my college apartment in Boston in late November 2015, I got a call from my mother who was buzzing with excitement about a round-table discussion she had attended at the joint conference of the National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE) and the National Writing Project (NWP). I vaguely remember her telling me breathlessly that there was this “really cool teacher who’d started a high school history program in Washington, DC, that’s focused on African American history and involved oral history and placed high school students in internships at museums around DC and it’s right up your alley and you gotta meet this guy.”

She added that she had even tracked down the teacher, Cosby, the following day of the conference to tell him about me and get his business card.

The program sounded great, and I liked the idea of moving to DC after graduation, but it was late November. I was working on term papers, finals were right around the corner, and I wasn’t thinking about much besides making it to the end of the semester. I thanked her for thinking of me, said I’d shoot him an email (knowing I wouldn’t), and hung up the phone. Over winter break she followed up and asked if I’d ever reached out to “that teacher in DC.” When I said no, she again suggested that I contact him. She also gently reminded me that, come May, I’d

1

Cosby Hunt, interview by Max Peterson, March 17, 2021, Creating and Teaching Real World History.

People’s Archive, District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, DC, 47. http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:290617

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be done with college and I should keep all my options open. I shot him an email just before New Years.

A few month later, in March, I heard back from Cosby. NWP was having their spring meeting in Washington, and Mom had bumped into Cosby again. But by this time, I had established plans to return home to New Hampshire after graduating to work on an exhibition at a local museum called the Museum of the White Mountains. It seemed like it wasn’t meant to be, but I still had hopes of moving to Washington someday, so I held onto his business card.

That time would come a year later. Getting involved in museum work on the ground floor, with only a bachelor’s degree, isn’t the easiest proposition. As I had been brought on at the Museum of the White Mountains to work on a particular exhibition, after the exhibition had opened, my job was done. Having made up my mind that it was time I leave New England, and with DC being the only place my partner and I both agreed we could live, I began applying to dozens of museum and history-related jobs in the DC area. But despite all the hours put into job searching and applying, I wasn’t receiving any responses. I was getting a little despondent about the situation, but at a certain point my partner informed me that we would be moving to DC regardless of whether I could get a job. She worked for herself as a private tutor and did most of her work remotely anyway, so she would be able to work wherever we ended up.

As we prepared to make the move down to Washington, I sent Cosby an email reintroducing myself and explaining that I remained interested in his program. I also pointed out that this time I really was moving to Washington, and that I hoped to meet up once I was in the city. At the end of August 2017, we packed our stuff into a moving van and set out for a new chapter in DC. I now joke about how I came to DC with nothing but Cosby’s business card.

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“Welcome to Washington, Max. Wanna come to class tomorrow evening? If so, meet me at the north entrance to the Dupont Metro station (Q Street) at 4:30 tomorrow. I have a surprise field trip for the Real World History students that I think you'll enjoy.”

Email communication from Cosby Hunt, September 11, 2017 I arrived early and sat on a nearby park bench where I could see the entrance to the Metro stop. I monitored the area for anything that resembled a school group because I didn’t even have a good sense of what Cosby looked like. Soon after, I noticed a group of young people beginning to assemble, but there was no teacher, so I didn’t approach. Eventually, a man who resembled the thumbnail image of Cosby’s email approached the group and begin talking with the students.

As soon as I walked over and introduced myself, an impromptu job interview began. It was friendly, yet serious: Why had I studied history and African American studies? Had I written an undergraduate thesis? What was it about? What had I been doing for work since graduation?

Why had I come to Washington? Why was I interested in the class? What was I hoping to get out of any involvement with Real World History? I answered his questions as best I could, and he seemed satisfied. Since we were standing right in front of the class, we had an audience.

Cosby then turned to the class and bellowed, “Dupont!” Chatter among the students ceased and in unison they responded, “Circle!” With the class’s attention Cosby then explained that he had a special treat for them, and without further explanation, began walking down Q Street. I recall staring at the massive buffalo sculptures of the Q Street Bridge as we passed over into Georgetown. Two of the students who had overheard my conversation with Cosby asked me questions about going to college in Boston for the whole walk. Eventually, Cosby directed us to take a right onto 27th street and the class made their way into a grassy clearing. I noticed a sign that said both, “Mt. Zion Cemetery” and “Female Union Band Society Cemetery.”

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Once the group sat down in the grass, Cosby began rummaging around in his bag. He then pulled out a tweed deerstalker hat, put it on his head, and introduced himself as “Sherlock Hunt.” He then explained that the students had stumbled into a “history mystery” and that he wanted them to try to deduce as much as they could of the long and tangled history of Mt. Zion Cemetery by examining the evidence around them. He then paired the students and sent them off with a worksheet that required each pair to generate questions about a variety of landmarks in the vicinity (different headstones, structures, areas of the cemetery, etc.). Eventually he gathered the group. The class was seated on a hill and Cosby was standing before them, slightly downhill.

They talked through their questions, and the class collectively tried to determine the history of the cemetery. He then sent the students a link to a podcast episode, “The Winding History of Mt. Zion Cemetery,” and the class listened to the 7-minute episode together. While they were doing this, he handed me his camera and asked me to take photos of the class.

As the class neared an end, Cosby gave a short preview of what was to come in the next class. He then gestured at me to come before the group and said, “Mr. Peterson, why don’t you introduce yourself to the group and tell them a little about yourself.” He then sat down with the students as I came to where he had been standing. I recall telling the class about how I had recently graduated from Boston University where I studied history and African American studies, how I had just moved into Anacostia and was brand new in the city, as well as a little bit about why I came to Washington. Cosby then asked the students if they had any questions for me, particularly about my college experience since they were all thinking about their next step.

He then stood up and gestured for me to sit. “Thank you, Mr. Peterson.” He looked at the class, “I get the feeling you’ll be seeing a lot more of Mr. Peterson this fall.”

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“This is what good teachers do, they steal ideas.” - The origins of Real World History My entrance in September 2017 came at the outset of the fourth year of Real World History. Though the program piloted in the 2014-2015 school year, the inspiration for the program came to Cosby on a bus over a decade earlier in 2003. Returning from a five-day Gilder Lehman teacher workshop at Amherst College, he began reading A Passion for the Past by James Percoco. Almost 20 years later, Cosby would remember the exact page that got him thinking about his own practice as a history teacher.

Looking at his copy of the book, you can see the highlights and mad scribbling in the margins. Perhaps most telling is his highlighting of two questions posed by Percoco after reflecting on a summer Fellowship Award for Independent Study in the Humanities. “What would it be like to have kids work with museum professionals and public historians? What kind of similar experiences could be generated for my students so they could have a more active, hands-on, approach to the study of history?”2 As he read the book, Cosby began imagining how he could facilitate similar experiences for his students at Bell Multicultural High School. Though he was energized by Percoco’s applied history course, he was also frustrated by the idea that Percoco’s students from the suburbs of northern Virginia had opportunities to intern at various museums and historic sites in Washington, D.C. that were not available to his students.

“I thought the idea was genius, but I was also bothered by the notion of students from the Washington, D.C., suburbs coming into the city and “taking” internships at museums and historic sites to which D.C. students needed exposure. I’ll never forget one of my first

2

1998), 11.

James Percoco, A Passion for the Past: Creative Teaching of U.S. History (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann,

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field trips in D.C.; I had to help one of my students buy a fare card because she had never ridden the Metro before.”3 Due to the realities of being a full-time teacher, Cosby would not be able to devise an applied history course of his own during his time at Bell. After 13 years at Bell, he got a job offer at Center for Inspired Teaching, an educational nonprofit focused on teacher professional development. In his new job, though he was in and out of schools, he was primarily working with teachers. He was enjoying his work, but he missed teaching his own classes. He also realized that he needed to find a way to maintain legitimacy among teachers.

“And so I realized, okay, I've got to stay in the game somehow, in order to be able to stand in front of people and say anything about how to be a teacher. And so maybe that was part of my impetus for wanting to start Real World History. … [I]t did certainly allow me to say, "I work at Inspired Teaching, and I am a teacher, of students, now. So let's talk about, this is what happened in my class last week that I want to talk about.

[Smirking] Not ten years ago, last week, cause I'm still a teacher like you." [Shrugs shoulders] And I think that helped with my street cred, ‘cause I realized it would run out at some point.”4 Most importantly, he now had more control over the thing that had stymied his excitement while teaching at Bell: time “[T]wo, three years into my time at Inspired Teaching—three years in—I said, "Well, look, I could, I could probably teach an after-school class. Like, I don't have to grade homework anymore; You know, I'm not coaching tennis anymore; I'm not coaching the debate team; and I can be in someone's school at two o'clock to give a pitch to students to join the class." And so I sort of realized that I, in my non-profit capacity, could probably pull it off if my boss said okay.”5

3 Cosby Hunt, “Real World History: Formal Learning in Museums and Historic Sites,” American Association for State and Local History, 2017, https://aaslh.org/real-world-history-formal-learning-in-museums-andhistoric-sites/.

4 Cosby Hunt, interview by Max Peterson, March 17, 2021, People’s Archive, 18.

5 Cosby Hunt, interview by Max Peterson, March 17, 2021, People’s Archive, 7.

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While Cosby built directly on Percoco’s year-long course structure to create Real World History, Cosby’s program would be uniquely his own and evolve over the years as different people had a hand in the project.

Percoco, a teacher in Fairfax County, Virginia, debuted his applied history course in 1991. The year-long course was divided into two semesters: The first semester centered around teacher instruction dealing with the historian’s craft (archival work, historical research methodologies, interpretation, and analysis) along with field trips tied into the curriculum. In the second semester students spend five hours/week in internships at museums and historic sites with the class convening once a month.

While Percoco had a two-step screening process, including an essay and interview, for entrance into his class, Cosby, on the other hand, would only require a teacher recommendation.

Unlike Percoco, Cosby wasn’t embedded in a school. Instead, he had to find a space where students from different schools across the city could convene for class. Whereas he only made one alteration to Percoco’s second semester structure, by building in the class’s participation in the annual National History Day competition, Cosby altered the first semester structure in several key ways: Percoco’s course used a variety of historical works and topics to study history itself, but Real World History was to be built around an in-depth study of a particular topic, the Great Migration, and its impact on Washington, DC. Secondly, Cosby pushed beyond an exclusive focus on archival research methodology to include an oral history project. Both interventions were interrelated and borne out of his own experience.

In 2010, as Cosby began to work at Center for Inspired Teaching, Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns was published. Quickly becoming a bestseller, the book was a major success that friends and peers recommended to Cosby. By the time he got around to reading it,

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he was in the midst of devising his own applied history course and looking for suitable readings.

It was clear the main text had fallen into his lap. It was a wonderful example of narrative history, written by a Washingtonian, that had clear connections to DC history. For a course intended to have a local connection, he couldn’t have asked for a better text. The topic of inquiry for the first semester had presented itself.

There were also personal dimensions to his decision to focus on the Great Migration.

Like many Washingtonians, Cosby had a familial connection to this history as well. His father, Isaac Cosby Hunt Jr., or Ike, as he was known by friends and family, was born and raised in Danville, Virginia, and had come to Washington, DC, in 1962 to work as a lawyer at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Until reading Warmth of Other Suns, Cosby had not framed his father’s story within a larger migration narrative. In fact, neither had Ike. The narrative Ike was familiar with: poor, southern sharecroppers moving North for industrial jobs, bore no resemblance to his experience.

“When I asked him if he was a part of the Great Migration, I don't think he—. He did not see himself as part of the Great Migration. (Pause) In part, because I think he was stuck in that mindset that the people who left the South were poor, and there's lots of evidence to debunk that. Poor and uneducated, and there's lots of evidence to debunk that. But, it's true that he did not leave the South running for his life. But he did leave the South, like a lot of people did, for a job.”6 Over the course of his career, Ike became a high-powered lawyer and law professor. His professional life came full circle when he was appointed as an SEC commissioner by President Clinton in 1995. There were many upwardly mobile migrants whose experience more closely resembles Cosby’s father’s. However, it is not surprising that Ike did not see himself as part of

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Cosby Hunt, interview by Max Peterson, October 20, 2020, Creating and Teaching Real World History.

People’s Archive, District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, DC, 12. http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:276608

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the Great Migration, since this dimension of the Migration is not often represented. Wilkerson reflects this aspect of the migrant experience through Robert Foster, a well-to-do doctor who migrated from Louisiana to Los Angeles in the 1950s. Though Cosby was first introduced to the history of the Great Migration through Nicolas Lehman’s The Promised Land, Wilkerson’s attention to Robert’s experience allowed Cosby to relate to the book in a personal way.

“I was not reading [The Promised Land] and thinking of my family in the same way that I did when I read The Warmth of Other Suns and came across Robert Foster. And you know, just my father, just Ike [slaps palm directly into face] hit me in the face, like, the guy reminded me so much of Ike. So I think just, when reading The Promised Land I was just sort of taking in the Great Migration and not really thinking about my family.”7 Beyond this familial connection, Cosby also felt a sentimental connection to the topic of the Great Migration. When he was 23 years old, Cosby’s mother, Elizabeth “Betty” Ravenell Hunt, took her son to see Jacob Lawrence speak about The Migration Series in Akron, Ohio.

Lawrence’s 60-panel series chronicles the first wave of the Great Migration and is one of the best-known artistic representations of the Migration. While Cosby didn’t think much of the event at the time, the evening would take on a new meaning after his mother’s unexpected death the following week.

“And, I just know that, you know, a week later Betty was gone, and so that was what I realized was the last thing that I had done, you know, of significance, with my mother, was seeing him speak. And so that was kind of in the back of my mind when I got back to DC years later and saw that his artwork was at the Phillips Collection. But I, I wish I had some cool story about what he did or said that night, but it's all a blur. I just know I was there.”8 Having settled on a content focus and main text, he then set out to design the curriculum.

How could he teach the class in a way that students were actively doing the work of the

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Cosby Hunt, interview by Max Peterson, March 17, 2021, People’s Archive, 13.

Cosby Hunt, interview by Max Peterson, March 17, 2021, People’s Archive, 2.

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historian? As an Inspired Teaching program, the course also needed to model the organization’s educational philosophy of positioning the student as expert. He quickly realized that the content itself provided the answer: an oral history project.

MAX PETERSON: One thing I'm curious about in terms of your structuring of the course was just the decision to base the entire first semester around an oral history project, a fairly complex oral history project that they're working on throughout the semester.

COSBY HUNT: … Because so much of Washington DC's history is steeped in the Great Migration, and we have an opportunity to talk to people who were part of it. So, we can go from reading about Ida Mae coming out of Mississippi, and Robert coming out of Louisiana, and George coming out of Florida; and talk to Edith, or Clarence, coming out of these other places to DC.9 This wasn’t the first time Cosby had used oral history in the classroom. As a Teach for America teacher in his early 20s, Cosby learned the efficacy of engaging students through an oral history project called Project Pride (Parents’ Roots Inspire a Dedication to Education), in which he had students talk to older family members about their early lives and educational experiences.

In designing Real World History, he also found a ready model in Glenn Whitman’s American Century Project. The American Century Project is an oral history project carried out by juniors at St. Andrews Episcopal School in Potomac, Maryland.

Integrated into a US history survey course, The American Century Project had students identify and interview a narrator about a topic in 20th century American history. Students are asked to identify an interviewee who is not a family member to force them out of

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Cosby Hunt, interview by Max Peterson, February 25, 2021, Creating and Teaching Real World History.

People’s Archive, District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, DC, 29. http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:290630

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their comfort zone and help them to develop vital interpersonal skills with adults.10 Introduced in November and concluding in February, the project is fairly intensive and includes several components. Once students have identified a narrator (first week of December), they are asked to:       

Provide a 7-10 page historical contextualization paper (due the 3rd week of Dec.) Record an oral history interview (winter break) Transcribe the interview and create an interview index (due the 2nd week of Jan.) Write a one-page bio on the narrator (due the 3rd week of Jan.) Write a 3-5 page historical analysis paper (due the 3rd week of Jan.) Create a museum exhibition for their project (due 1st week of Feb.) Give a public presentation of their museum exhibition (last week of Feb.)11

Cosby borrowed this model with slight alterations given the particularities of the program. One significant change was that he allowed students to interview family members and found interviewees for those who did not have a family member available who fit the criteria. He felt that, because he was designing the class for young Washingtonians, it would be an important and empowering experience for those who could do so to connect their own family history to what they were learning in class.

Taking into consideration that this is an additional, elective course that students are taking after school in addition to their regular coursework, Cosby eased some of the requirements. The course would not require a narrator bio nor an interview index.

Additionally, the historical contextualization paper was reduced to 3-5 pages.

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Glenn Whitman, Dialogue with the Past: Engaging Students & Meeting Standards Through Oral History, (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2004) 15.

11 Whitman, Dialogue with the Past. 8-9, 32.

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With the structure of the course established, Cosby was ready to propose the idea to his supervisor. In order to come to the meeting fully prepared, Cosby pre-emptively went about getting buy-in from potential internship advisors for the second semester of the course. By the time he approached his supervisor, he had confirmed 12 museums and historic sites who were willing to take on a high school intern and he had identified a potential source of funding for the program through an LRNG Innovators grant. “Perhaps for one of the first times in my life, I had some real—. [Pause] Oh, what's the term I want? I was planning ahead.”12 After getting approval from his supervisor and securing the grant funding, final logistical arrangements needed to be made. Because this was to be a city-wide program, open to all students in DC public schools and public charter schools, and it had to take place after regular school hours on Tuesday and Thursday evenings from 5-7:00 p.m., and the students were going to be coming from all over the city. Fortunately, DC students were able to ride the Metro without cost, a crucial issue from an equity perspective.

Cosby was able to locate a venue through his relationship with Kevin Fox, a history teacher at Cardozo High School. The benefits of this site were that it was centrally located, close to both a Metro stop and the Inspired Teaching office, and Cardozo had a meal program to which the students would have access. Through his work at Center for Inspired Teaching, Cosby knew Scott Abbott, the Director of Social Studies for DCPS, and was able to get Real World History added to the course catalogue so students could receive academic credit.

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Cosby Hunt, interview by Max Peterson, February 25, 2021, People’s Archive, 21.

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First year, 2014-2015 Great Migration Oral History Project, 2014-2015 September – October: - Class studies the Great Migration November: - Recorded oral history interview - Grandparents’ Day visit to Asbury Methodist Church (Nov. 16th) December: - Contextualization paper, 3-5 pages (due Dec. 10th) - Student-narrator field trip to see The Migration Series at Philips Collection (Dec. 11) January: - Interview transcription (due Jan. 7th) - Interview analysis & reflection, 3-5 pages (due Jan. 14th) Real World History’s first year began with a significant amount of fanfare. The National Writing Project (NWP), the funders of the grant, commissioned a series of videos to chronicle the pilot year of the course. A crew from the local station WETA-TV filmed several class sessions throughout the year and conducted a series of interviews with students and Cosby.

Fortuitously, Isabel Wilkerson would be giving a talk at Cardozo High School in the fall of 2014 through a program called Writers in Schools. Cosby’s friend, Frazier O’Leary alerted him to the event and Cosby was able to bring Real World History students. As not all of the students were able to attend, he also scheduled a telephone conference with Wilkerson that fall.

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Cosby Hunt and Real World History students with author Isabel Wilkerson at Cardozo High School in 2014.

With the exception of students who were interviewing family members, Cosby took it upon himself to identify narrators for students to interview. He visited churches, senior centers and nursing homes. Through a collaboration with Asbury Methodist Church, Cosby was able to arrange for students to visit Asbury on Grandparents’ Day and conduct interviews with members of the congregation. This greatly facilitated the work of finding narrators. Cosby’s hopes for the course were realized as students took to the oral history project. While some students were exploring their own family history, the whole class was seeing connections between what they were learning in class and the city in which they lived.

Having incorporated The Migration Series into the class, Cosby also organized a narrator-student field trip to the Phillips Collection to view the series. At this gathering, students and narrators perused the panels together and then spread out throughout the galleries to record interviews. For students who had already interviewed their narrator at Asbury, the students recorded a follow-up interview about their narrators’ reactions to the artwork.

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“It was a delight seeing the teenagers switch into respect-for-their-elders mode; watching young and old discuss artwork and history together was a treat. I’m certain that Lawrence’s work sparked some questions from the students that they wouldn’t have otherwise asked.”13

Real World History students and their narrators at the Phillips Collection. December 11, 2014.

The first year of Real World History was a resounding success that can be seen unfolding in a series of NWP videos.14 Over ten years in the making, Cosby’s applied history course was the product of both his personal and professional experience: part Percoco, part Whitman, and uniquely Cosby, the program coalesced to produce a successful pilot year.

That being said, in talking about the first year, Cosby would reflect that the amount of work demanded by the oral history project was a heavy load for most students. As the program evolved, some of these assignments would be dropped or altered to ease the workload. In particular, he eased back on the paper requirements, as only the most dedicated students were able to satisfactorily complete them.

13 Cosby Hunt, “Teaching Real World History with Jacob Lawrence,” Experiment Station Blog, The Phillips Collection, February 9, 2015, https://blog.phillipscollection.org/2015/02/09/teaching-real-world-historyjacob-lawrence/ 14 “Real World History: Six Videos that Model and Inspire,” National Writing Project. March 2017. https://lead.nwp.org/knowledgebase/real-world-history-six-videos-that-model-and-inspire/

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Second and Third Years, 2015-2017 — Cosby Hunt & Caitlin Wolf Great Migration Oral History Project, 2015-2016 (year two) Late August: - Student-narrator field trip to see The Migration Series at the Museum of Modern Art September – October: - Class studies the Great Migration November: - Recorded oral history interview December: - Contextualization paper, 3-5 pages (due Dec. 10th) January: - Interview transcription (due Jan. 7th) - Interview analysis & reflection, 3-5 pages (due Jan. 14th) Mid-year Revisions: DCPL consent form Interview index Great Migration Oral History Project, 2016-2017 (year three) September – October: - Class studies the Great Migration - Student field trip to see The Migration Series at the Phillips Collection November: - Recorded oral history interview (November) January: - Interview transcription (due Jan. 7th) - Interview analysis & reflection, 3-5 pages (due Jan. 14th)

Going into the second year, Cosby had an established structure for the course but there was a new element. Caitlin Wolf, who had recently been hired by Inspired Teaching in May of 2015, would be coteaching the course with him. Caitlin was not a trained educator, nor had she been hired to co-teach Real

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World History, but Cosby was her direct supervisor and she found herself gravitating towards the program as a historian herself. As she and Cosby began to plan year two, Caitlin wrestled with how her skillset could benefit the program:

“What did I have to offer this class? And so I went into it thinking about it like that: What support could I provide? What I knew was that class was focused on teaching the skills of a historian, not just memorizing, but learning how to corroborate a source, and determine if it's accurate or reliable by seeing it within context, and—. Just so many things that I felt were lacking, so many critical thinking skills that I felt were lacking in history. …

Having studied history, I could support on thinking through what we wanted them to be learning. Like, what kind of skills.”15 Beyond leveraging her history training, Caitlin saw another way her presence as a coteacher could benefit the class. She knew it wouldn’t be teaching the content: She was a white woman born and raised in Maine with little familiarity with the Great Migration; Cosby, on the other hand, was an experienced educator of almost 20 years, had command over the history (to which he had a personal connection) and had designed the course.

…I loved being a thought partner. But I also realized that Cosby is amazing at doing all of that, at teaching. He also needed someone to manage the logistics. [Chuckles] So, I started doing a lot of that too.…creating folders in our Google drive; photocopying things, printing things; making sure our sign-in sheets were ready to go.”16 Anyone who has had the pleasure of working with Cosby would tell you that he’s a brilliant and innovative thinker. But it’s also safe to say that no one would describe him as a very detailoriented person. As the program matured, this would become a problem as key documentation and materials would be lost or never collected.

Things shook out a little differently in the second year. First, a rare opportunity presented itself that was too good to miss. While Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series is normally divided

15

Caitlin Wolf, interview by Max Peterson, July 23, 2021, Creating and Teaching Real World History.

People’s Archive, District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, DC, 33-34.

16 Caitlin Wolf, interview by Max Peterson, July 23, 2021, People’s Archive, 34.

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between the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, from April-September 2015, MoMA’s One-Way Ticket exhibition brought together all 60 panels in a rare unification of the series. Eager to replicate the success of the studentnarrator field trip of year one, the class opened with a field trip to New York to see the exhibit.

Real World History students and their narrators at the Museum of Modern Art, August 2015.

While it was an incredible opportunity, one significant drawback in comparison to the first year was that only a handful of narrators could be identified at such an early point in the semester.

CAITLIN WOLF: There were several logistical (chuckles) struggles throughout that first year. I know—. Should I go chronologically, with the oral history [project]?

MAX PETERSON: Sure, yeah. (Laughs) CAITLIN WOLF: The big one was finding the interview subjects; finding those people who were part of the Great Migration.17 Identifying 20+ narrators who were interested and available to work with students was a major task for Cosby and Caitlin. In year one, Cosby had been able to lighten this load by identifying multiple interview subjects all at once through the Grandparents Day visit to Asbury 17

Caitlin Wolf, interview by Max Peterson, July 23, 2021, People’s Archive, 37.

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Methodist Church. He wouldn’t be so fortunate in year two, and the process of identifying narrators would delay the project for some students. Even divided between two people, the amount of outreach (visiting churches, senior centers, nursing homes, etc.) required to identify a narrator for every student was a serious undertaking.

In reflecting on the first year, Cosby was already contemplating moving away from interview papers to lighten the load on students. But other than that, the plan was for the oral history project to follow the same structure as it had in the first year, and students needed time to produce both a historical contextualization paper and an analysis & reflection paper. The delay in finding a sufficient number of narrators would turn out to be just the first challenge of the second year as an unexpected development presented a new issue for the oral history project.

Aware of the historical significance of the growing collection of interviews the students were creating with their narrators, Caitlin and Cosby approached Kerrie Cotton Williams, special collections manager at the DC Public Library, about archiving the oral histories. The library expressed an interest in archiving the student work but explained that they would need a consent form, full edited transcript, and indexes for every interview. This development came at the end of the first semester, putting Cosby and Caitlin in the awkward position of having to go back to the students after they’d completed their projects to ask them to produce these additional materials.

While most students produced a transcript, only a few indexes were turned in. Working with the students, Caitlin was able to contact and secure a consent form from many of the narrators. By the time Caitlin and Cosby attempted to reach out to the Library in the beginning of year three, the main branch of DCPL, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, which housed the special collections library, had begun a multi-year renovation project and they weren’t able to

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reestablish contact with Kerrie regarding the interviews. Both Cosby and Caitlin cite the closing of the MLK Library as what stymied this original attempt to archive the interviews.

“Ironically, unfortunately, I believe that year when I went back to Kerrie, the MLK Library was under construction, and we did not send interviews that year. If I remember correctly. (Pause) If I'm remembering correctly, that's what happened. Because I remember that had to be put on pause. It was like, "Oh, we'll get them to her—." It still needed to be part of the assignment, but then we'll get them to her when we can.”18 Unfortunately, after the third year, Caitlin transitioned out of co-teaching the class. Without her taking the lead on logistics and the partnership with the library, that aspect of the project fell apart.

When re-establishing a partnership with the DC Public Library to archive the collection (several years down the line), missing consent forms, interviews, and student-produced materials such as transcripts and indexes would introduce significant complications. In addition, a lack of data collection such as narrator contact information for student interviews, made it difficult to retrace and track down narrators whom Caitlin hadn’t already reached out to. To be fair, two things must be noted: 1) As is the case within any classroom project, some students did not complete all the assignments. 2) Cosby designed the oral history project as a history teacher and not an oral historian. His primary concern was with the value of the process, not the archive. At the outset, he hadn’t given much thought to the afterlife of the interviews once students completed their projects e.g. Where the interviews would be archived and what would be needed to make that possible.

Year two put the program on notice that it was easy to say you wanted to have the interviews archived but it would require significant restructuring of the curriculum to make that

18

Caitlin Wolf, interview by Max Peterson, July 23, 2021, People’s Archive, 36.

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possible. In the third year, Cosby and Caitlin worked to reconcile the original structure of the program with the requirements of the Library. The historical contextualization paper was dropped to make room for full-transcription and indexing in the fall, but ultimately, when they lost contact with the library these procedural, logistical elements soon fell by the wayside.

Regardless, the groundwork Caitlin laid in partnering with the library, reaching out to narrators, and securing consent forms would later pay major dividends. In fact, the 2015-2016 school year remains the year with the most consent forms.

A major intervention Caitlin made to the project was proposing a change in how narrators were identified. After helping Cosby identify the narrators for year two, in planning for the third year, Caitlin argued for having students identify their own narrators, as opposed to having that be the responsibility of the course instructors. Logistically, students would only have to identify one person, whereas the instructors would have to identify more than two dozen or so each fall.

Caitlin also made a persuasive argument about how the change would align with the aims of the course.

“During the next summer when we were planning for the class or we were talking or whatever—I forget what Cosby's perspective was at first—but I pushed very, very, very hard that we shouldn't do that again. Like, it was just so hard for the two of us to come up with thirty people. But also, so much of learning about the Great Migration when you're in DC, because DC was a part of that history, is understanding the way it impacted the community that you live in, the neighborhood that you see, the city that you see around you. And so I thought also a really powerful thing to do would be for a student to go out and find someone who was a part of the Great Migration, because it would build that powerful connection of: I'm in church or I'm in my local store or something and this person that I'm used to interacting with, these people that I see, oh, they're a part of the history I'm learning in the classroom. And how rarely does that happen for students, where you feel like you can actually see it in real life?”19

19

Caitlin Wolf, interview by Max Peterson, July 23, 2021, People’s Archive, 40.

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Asking students to do this would help to solidify the sense of relevance and connection to the history they were investigating. It would also increase students’ sense of ownership over their work. It would no longer be something organized for them, but a connection that they would have established on their own. From the third year on, this would become part of the requirement of the course.

Years Four, Five, and Six: 2017-2020 — Cosby Hunt & Max Peterson Great Migration Oral History Project, 2017-2018 (year four) September – October: - Class studies the Great Migration - Student field trip to see The Migration Series at the Phillips Collection November – December: - In-class interview with Mrs. Olivia Ferguson McQueen (Nov. 28) - Recorded oral history interview January: - Interview transcription (due Jan. 7th)

Great Migration Oral History Project, 2018-2019 (year five) September – October: - Class studies the Great Migration - Student field trip to see The Migration Series at the Phillips Collection November: - Pre-interview discussion with narrator - Narrator Biography, 2 pages December: - Recorded oral history interview January: - Interview transcription

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Great Migration Oral History Project, 2019-2020 (year six) September – October: - Class studies the Great Migration - Student field trip to see The Migration Series at the Phillips Collection November: - Pre-interview discussion with narrator - Narrator Biography, 2 pages December: - Recorded oral history interview January: - Interview transcription - Interview analysis & reflection, 4-6 pages

In the fall of 2017, the fourth year of the program, Cosby began planning and teaching Real World History alone. He was simultaneously managing the course (already requiring a significant amount of coordination) as well as a teacher development component called the Humanities Hub which was layered on top of the class. The Humanities Hub was a professional development series offered by Center for Inspired Teaching that took place throughout the fall semester of 2017 for DCPS and charter school English Language Arts and Social Studies teachers. Participants worked on ways to approach a common text (The Warmth of Other Suns) from an interdisciplinary perspective.

While Real World History was meeting on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, the Humanities Hub met once a week and joined RWH for the Thursday evening classes. On these Thursday evening classes, the size of the group precluded meeting at Cardozo because the classroom space was not large enough to accommodate 40 people. As a result, Tuesday class sessions were held at Cardozo as they normally would be, while Thursday classes were held in a third space rented by Inspired Teaching.

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On top of the increase in workload, the new logistical challenges and the loss of Caitlin, Cosby was spread thin. Then, a personal tragedy struck when his father, Isaac Cosby Hunt Jr., passed away unexpectedly. The combination of these factors and the uncertainty surrounding the connection with the DC Public Library led Cosby to drop the paper assignments, which he had already been contemplating.

As I was getting involved with the class, the oral history project had been reduced to an interview and a transcription followed by in-class reflection and analysis with no formal paper or reflection assignment. Looking back on his decision to stop assigning the analysis paper, Cosby pointed out that ever since the first year of the program, many students were unable to produce a paper after turning in their interview and transcription. This made him feel as though the assignment was too burdensome for most students. Again, RWH is an honors-level, afterschool program that students take in addition to their regular academic and extracurricular commitments, and the oral history project is only one component of the course.

In order to develop a sense of community among the class, each student presents a curation of personal artifacts that represent different aspects of their lives. These “personal museum” presentations take place throughout the fall semester with a student presentation opening each class period. When I joined the class, Cosby asked that I participate as well.

Students were quite interested in my “museum” and were intrigued by the fact that I had a partner who I had been dating since I was their age. In a class of mostly Black and Latino students, I had the advantage of being Black, Latino and a near-peer. All of this made it easy to integrate myself into the class and made my transition into teaching, from the perspective of working with the students, pretty easy. The transition into a teaching role, however, was more difficult. As a 23-year-old recent graduate who had studied history and African American

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studies, I was well-versed in the content, and I also had oral history experience. But, Real World History would be my first time in front of a class. As Caitlin had before me, I seriously considered both where I fit into the class and what I had to offer.

Being brand new to the city, brand new to teaching, and only a handful of years older than the students, I tried to follow Cosby’s lead as I familiarized myself with the content and structure of the class. But Cosby wanted me to design my own lessons rather than execute his.

The first major lesson I designed and led was a part of the Humanities Hub alongside three veteran DC educators. Together, we were tasked with tackling the longest section of the book, Part IV of The Warmth of Other Suns, “The Kinder Mistress.” We led two class sessions while being observed by Cosby and the other Humanities Hub teachers. Dividing the class into four regionally-focused small groups, we each led a lesson on migrants’ experiences in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Washington, DC. Ironically, I ended up planning the overarching lesson structure and leading the DC group despite my lack of teaching experience and having spent less than a month in the city. In retrospect, the lessons were pretty low-stakes, but at the time I felt as though I was way out of my depth.

After Humanities Hub concluded in mid-October, there were a variety of lessons that Cosby tossed my way. It wasn’t uncommon for him to send me an email the day before class with a lesson plan including a highlighted, incomplete section with a topic such as “Wilkerson reading – housing discrimination” and a note saying “Max leads.” Throughout the fall he asked me to lead small activities and enlisted my help with grading student work. With no teacher training nor experience in the classroom I agonized over lessons and worried that it would be clear to both Cosby and students that I didn’t know what I was doing. Beyond covering many of the logistics of the course, I selected readings for students to analyze; developed activities related

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to the Migration Series; and helped devise on-site activities for class fieldtrips to the Phillips Collection, National Museum of African American History and Culture as well as the Library of Congress.

Due to my previous experience doing oral history work both in college and for a museum exhibition, Cosby soon asked for more direct support on the oral history project. By the time we got to dedicated lessons on interview preparation it was mid-December. These were the lessons on which I took more of a direct lead. In designing these lessons, I asked Cosby to share interviews from previous years. He soon sent two student interviews (with narrators Ruth Casey and Mabel Mitchell), and, after reviewing the interviews, I selected a series of excerpts that could be used as the basis for class discussion. I also designed a peer-interview exercise in which students conducted a 10-minute interview with one another during class time which I used to provide feedback on their interview style. Once students completed the interview with their narrator, Cosby asked that I grade half of the class and provide feedback on their interviews. As I began listening to the interviews, the students’ work exceeded my expectations. Regardless of whether I was fumbling the instruction, students were learning—from their elders—much more than I or Cosby could impart.

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Max and Cosby posing for a photo with the 2017-2018 cohort of Real World History at Center for Inspired Teaching’s annual Changemakers Celebration in May 2018.

Moving into the second year, Cosby asked me to take a more direct role in planning the oral history project. I had a better sense of the project, the course, and was more confident in the classroom. Moreover, the Humanities Hub would no longer be a complicating factor. At the same time I was stepping forward in RWH in the fall of 2018, I also began an oral history internship at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). My work at the Museum greatly informed my approach to teaching the oral history project. I came under the tutelage of a professional oral historian for the first time. My supervisor, Kelly Elaine Navies, a Black oral historian like myself, was the first person I’d ever met who called themself an oral historian. Prior to meeting her, I’d always thought of myself as a historian doing oral history work. The field of oral history as something distinct from history was new to me and I learned a lot through working on her interviews and through conversations with her about her practice.

Through these conversations, I came to appreciate her emphasis on relationship building and the bond forged between interviewer and narrator in a well-facilitated oral history interview.

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This relationship building, so foundational to her practice, was heavily influential on my own.

One particular conversation between us that has stuck with me was one in which Kelly discussed oral history not only as a process for creating vital primary source documents about Black lives, but also an important means of forging bonds between generations. I drew connections between this aspect of Kelly’s practice and something I had seen Cosby emphasize in the way he prepared students for their interviews. Pushing the bounds of the assignments, Cosby would often encourage students to take full advantage of this rare, in-depth, inter-generational encounter to seek advice and wisdom that could be useful to them in their own lives. Both Kelly’s and Cosby’s emphasis on inter-generational relationships is fundamentally grounded in African American cultural traditions and would become a guiding principle for my own practice, and how I approached teaching oral history.

Cosby teaching a lesson about the history of Central High School and school desegregation in Washington, DC, outside of Cardozo High School in September 2018.

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Once Cosby asked me to take the lead on the oral history project, I acted on a series of observations I had made during the fall of 2017 as well as what I was learning at my internship at NMAAHC: 1) I emphasized the need to collect some type of release form depending on what he envisioned doing with the interviews after each year of the class; 2) I felt the timeline need to be elongated and students needed to identify their narrators earlier in the semester; 3) I insisted that we require students to have at least one pre-interview conversation with their narrator to establish familiarity between both parties; 4) Based on those preliminary conversations, students should write a biographical sketch of their narrator.

Release forms In my conversations with Cosby about the oral history project, he was clear about his desire to archive the interviews and alluded to the fact that the DC Public Library had expressed interest in collecting the oral histories. Having done oral history work in museums, I knew we had to have a release form for interviews to be archived and made publicly accessible. When Cosby explained that he had fallen out of contact with the Library and was uncertain about the possibility of getting them archived, I decided to develop a consent form of our own. In my capacity at the Museum, Kelly had introduced me to the online resources of the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (her alma mater), and I devised a release form based upon their resources (appendix 1). Students were given the form and required to ask their narrators to complete it if they were interested in having their interview archived.

Timeline On a logistical note, I witnessed students struggle with the timeline of the oral history project when we didn’t ask them to begin the process of identifying a narrator until November.

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Beginning that late in the semester, some of the students wouldn’t have their narrator identified until mid-December. With so little time to prepare, schedule, record, and transcribe the interview, students struggled to complete the project on time. Moreover, such a rushed timeline diminished the value of the project to both student and narrator.

Pre-Interview Discussion I felt strongly that the quality of the interviews was tied to how comfortable students felt with their narrator and vice versa. Building trust and familiarity required more interaction than the project facilitated at the time. In most cases, the interview encounter was the first and only time that student and narrator were meeting face-to-face. In my internship I observed how a basic component of Kelly’s procedure was having a preliminary discussion with each narrator in which interview topics, interview location, and narrator biographical information were discussed.

Following this model, we instituted a requirement that students have at least one phone call or meeting before the interview to talk about the class, the project, and what they hope to discuss in the interview.

Biographical Sketch Pre-interview discussions are an important aspect of preparing for an interview, but research and question development is another. It was important that students weren’t just working on their interviews in isolation. If we were asking them to meet with narrators, talk about the project and then use those discussions to inform their interview questions then why not build in a more formal process that facilitates that happening? If the students translated their notes from their preliminary discussion into a biographical sketch of their narrator, those bios could be workshopped in class to have students help each other develop questions and identify important topics to explore in the interview. In teaching this lesson, I provided students with a

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narrator bio I had written for an interview Kelly had conducted in the summer of 2018. I learned later, that in the first and second year of the program a similar encounter had been required and students completed a pre-interview worksheet identifying basic biographical information about their narrator (appendix 2).

While some of these changes, as well as changes I would make in later years, were reminiscent of previous iterations of the project, I was unaware that the project had been structured differently in the past. It’s important to note that I came in thinking that the structure I saw was the way in which Cosby had been teaching the class since the beginning. In trying to understand the class as it was unfolding during my first year (2017-2018), which already involved so many moving pieces,20 we didn’t have conversations about insights and oversights from previous years. This failure to communicate was a mistake on our part as we began planning for the 2018-2019 school year.

20

For the purposes of this thesis, I am focusing exclusively on the oral history project, but it’s important to note that this is only one aspect of the fall semester. A significant amount of time is dedicated to preparing the students for internships and National History Day projects in the spring; teaching the content using The Warmth of Other Suns and the Migration Series; teaching basic historical skills such as primary source analysis and archival research; and implementing miscellaneous assignments/projects. In addition to this, Center for Inspired Teaching also ran another youth program, Speak Truth, that involved RWH students in inter-school seminars with other students from across the city.

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Cosby and the 2019-2020 cohort of Real World History sitting on the steps of Thurgood Marshall Academy on the first day of class. 2019-2020 marked the first year Real World History would not be taught at Cardozo High School.

Before the 2019-2020 school year, Inspired Teaching underwent an organizational restructuring. Cosby returned to full-time teaching and began working at Thurgood Marshall Academy Public Charter School. He continued to work with Inspired Teaching, however, running the organization’s after-school youth programs. This was a major transition for Cosby and a heavy burden to try to continue teaching Real World History while managing a full-time teaching position.

MAX PETERSON: And I'm curious, yeah, to hear you talk a little bit about that year of teaching the class; about why you chose to continue to be the head teacher for the class when you were gonna be a full-time teacher. It was a lot on your plate. I'm curious about that transition into the 2019-2020 school year when previously Real World History had been your only teaching responsibility.

COSBY HUNT: (Laughs) Oh, it's a very good question. Part of the answer is fear. I do worry that if I take a year off that it's gonna all fall apart. So, (chuckles) certainly, [20192020] would have just been a year to take, take a year off and not do it. But, thank God I didn't take a year off, because I think Real World History ended up being a salvation for

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me. And, you know, so many days—and you saw it, as I was losing twenty pounds— when I had such a crappy day, at TMA, but then had a great evening with Jordan and Lola and Sameer, uh, and the others, in a, (closes eyes, gently shakes head, and casts up hands) in a different learning environment. And being able to remind myself that, oh, I actually do know how to teach. (Chuckles) I'm just having a harder time teaching during the day. So, I'm glad that I did not take a year off, but part of it is fear. Just like, if I stop, maybe it won't come back.21 Seeing the strain Cosby was under, I recognized the need for me to step up and shoulder more responsibility in regard to the course. With more confidence in the classroom, a better handle on where the project was headed and having seen that the students could handle the additional assignments, I began building upon the changes I’d introduced the year before.

The biggest structural change I argued for was the need to re-introduce some sort of analysis-reflection assignment, and Cosby agreed. Without this reflection, producing a transcript became an onerous task without a satisfactory culmination. Students had no opportunity to exercise the historical thinking skills they’d learned on the primary source they had created.

Thus, students had no chance to turn a critical lens on what could be learned from the interview and what they had learned from the process of creating it with their narrator. Despite being a heavy lift on top of the interview transcription, the re-introduction of an analysis and reflection paper was a success. Seven of the ten students in the class completed the assignment, and the students’ thoughtful and detailed papers solidified my resolve to maintain this final project.

Creation of the Real World History collection Since I had stepped forward in a more active role given the strains on Cosby in the sixth year of the class, I felt more emboldened to press the issue of archiving the interviews. When Cosby informed me that they had been in contact with Kerrie in the past, I reached out to her

21

Cosby Hunt, interview by Max Peterson, March 17, 2021, People’s Archive, 33-34.

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about whether the library would be interested in archiving student interviews. Eventually, we were able to make contact and I had a very similar conversation with Kerrie to the conversation Cosby and Caitlin had four years prior. The library was still interested in the collection, but they now required an index, transcript, a summary, and bio, as well as an updated consent form from each narrator. Once we knew that the library wanted to collect the interviews if we could produce the required materials, I began an accounting of everything we had and did not have. I asked Cosby to share all files he had access to since the pilot year of the program and I began searching through every folder. This was a time-consuming process, and the results were not encouraging.

Academic year 2014-2015 2015-2016 2016-2017 2017-2018 2018-2019 2019-2020

Accounting of recovered RWH interviews Interviews conducted Audio files 15 4 23 18 13 12 15 14 13 11 11 9

DCPL Consent forms 3 15 4 8 6 7

Totals

90

43

68

The chart above represents where we are with consent forms as of the summer of 2021.

The disparity between the number of interviews conducted by RWH students and the number of recovered audio recordings to which we still had access is large. While some materials were never submitted, much of this discrepancy reflects file mismanagement on the part of the course instructors. The number of consent forms featured above reflects a concerted effort to reach back out to narrators and ask if they would be willing to donate their interviews to the library. There were some narrators who were not interested in donating their interviews. Before we began

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reaching back out to narrators in the summer of 2020, the only year for which we had applicable DCPL consent forms was the 2015-2016 year, thanks to Caitlin’s efforts to secure release forms.

An unfortunate development for the 5th and 6th years of the class, in which we used the consent form I had developed, was that the DCPL consent form had more conservative terms and conditions. Whereas I developed a consent form based on a Creative Commons License that allowed the narrator to maintain copyright, DCPL required that narrators convey full copyright to the Library. One silver lining to this development was that we had narrators’ contact information through the consent form I had developed which made it easier to reach back out to narrators from the 5th and 6th years than from earlier years of the class. As you can imagine, it was a logistical nightmare and required much more time and effort than it would have had we collected appropriate consent forms at the time of the interview. While it was a long process of backwards outreach, it did come with its benefits. First, it provided Cosby an opportunity to reach back out to almost every RWH student and through that process, he was able to catch up with previous students to see how they were doing. It also came with more bittersweet moments such as in the case of several narrators who we found out had passed away since their interviews were conducted. Instead of establishing contact with the narrators themselves, we were talking to their children, some of whom had never known that their parent participated in such a project.

“And so, I guess I've learned that we are, we're doing a service for the larger academic community, but we're also doing a service for individual families. You know, when I could call [Mrs. Taylor’s] son, and say would you like to hear your mother's voice again?... I mean, that was a special moment for me.”22 Talking to narrators and next-of-kin through the project amplified the importance of this work and served as an important reminder that our students, and by extension we, have been entrusted

22

Cosby Hunt, interview by Max Peterson, March 17, 2021, People’s Archive, 30.

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with these stories and a responsibility to preserve and share them if that’s what the narrator would like.

Of course, while reaching back out to narrators and students was an undertaking, (re)producing the accompanying interview materials was even more so. Over the course of the next year, I audit-edited and revised the student transcripts and created all the missing interview materials (many transcripts and almost all the indexes). I also wrote interview summaries and narrator bios with the help of an Inspired Teaching intern, Nina Pulley. I began doing this work in the summer of 2020 and continued it while working as an oral history assistant at the National Museum of African American History and Culture and completing coursework as an oral history master’s student at Columbia University. Ultimately, I decided to build a thesis project around the student interview collection. Although not all the work that Real World History students or their narrators have done is represented in the collection, it is an important starting place and will grow with each year of the class.

Begun as a pipe dream on a bus in 2003, Real World History came to fruition in 2014 and has evolved significantly since its pilot year. Originally drawing upon Glenn Whitman’s American Century Project, Cosby engaged students in an oral history project with the aim of helping students “think like historians.” As the course developed over the years and a formal archive was created for students’ work, the oral history project was professionalized, and the class incorporated more of an oral history ethic. These changes came about in response to two developments: 1) The partnership with the DC Public Library (initiated by Caitlin Wolf); 2) The influence of an oral historian. The project has shifted from a more rigid focus on information and documentation to place more emphasis on interview preparation and technique, relationship building, narrator review, and community engagement.

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Since the advent of portable recorders and the growing social history movement in the 1960s, oral history education has become a popular pedagogical practice. Though this work was largely concentrated in graduate and undergraduate instruction in the ’60s and ’70s, by the 1980s participation at the primary and secondary level had grown significantly. Beginning in the 1990s, technological advancements made it even easier for teachers to engage their students in an oral history project.23 For example, Real World History students have been able to easily record interviews on their phone since the course began in 2014.

Despite the development of standards, instructional models and curricula for oral history education, archiving student interviews remains an often-neglected aspect of student oral history projects, especially at the precollegiate level.24 Most educators are primarily concerned with the benefits of the process for students’ education and community engagement. Many student oral history projects culminate with the creation of zines, public presentations, the publication of books, or the circulation of curated interview excerpts. It is far less common, however, for a student oral history project to receive the same treatment as a professional project and for interviews to be archived and made publicly accessible in their full and unedited form. The creation of a public archive in which student interviews are fully accessible online separates the Real World History project from many other student oral history projects.25

23

Barry A. Lanman and Laura M. Wendling, Preparing the Next Generation of Oral Historians (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2006), xx-xxii.

24 Whitman, Dialogue With the Past, 103; “Oral History as an Educational Experience,” EDSITEment!, National Endowment for the Humanities, https://edsitement.neh.gov/teachers-guides/oral-history-educationalexperience 25 Most student oral history projects are preserved in school archives or family collections and not made accessible to the public. Others, such as the Southern High School Veterans Oral History Project housed at the Maryland State Archives, are archived and publicly accessible but not made available online. Even the American Century Project only makes interview transcriptions available online (https://collections.digitalmaryland.org/digital/collection/saac). The Telling Their Stories Oral History Archives Project of the Urban School of San Francisco, which maintains a website (http://www.tellingstories.org/) where student interviews in their full audio/video form can be easily accessed, is an example of another such student oral

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In part two, I will examine the Real World History collection for what it has to contribute to the study of the Great Migration and DC history. I will also consider its value for oral history educators, as well as what it can show us about a kind of intergenerational exchange and encounter.

history project; Howard Levin, “Authentic Doing: Student-Produced Web-Based Digital Video Oral Histories,” The Oral History Review 38, no. 1 (2011): 8, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41440850

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Part II – The Real World History Collection: A Promise Kept “[The collection] is a validation for everybody involved. It's a promise kept, maybe that's the most important thing. I talked about it, ‘You're gonna be able to live forever!’ That was one of my selling points in the dog-and-pony show. Your voice and the voice of your interviewee are gonna live forever, and so now, and that's a promise kept!” 26 Oral history interview with Cosby Hunt, March 17th, 2021

When we take a step back, what is the result of all the hard work of Real World History students and their narrators? In Part II, I will shift focus from the class to the student work, the growing collection of oral history interviews now publicly accessible at the People’s Archive of DCPL.27 Divided into two subsections, I will examine the collection from two different (though, at times interconnected) perspectives. First, I will analyze the collection as a new archive for study of the Great Migration. What does this collection of interviews have to offer historians of the Migration? Second, I examine the collection as student-conducted oral history and explore what student oral history has to offer the field. How is student oral history different, and how are student oral history interviews valuable sources for historians?

Though students have produced more oral histories than the 40 interviews archived in the Real World History Collection, this analysis is limited to the interviews accessible through the People’s Archive. While I would love to involve the 28 interview recordings not included in the collection, as discussed in Part I, these additional interviews have been excluded from the collection for one of two reasons: 1) because Cosby and I weren’t able to reconnect with the narrator, or 2) the narrator declined donation to the Library.

Cosby Hunt, interview by Max Peterson, March 17th, 2021, People’s Archive, 32.

These interviews are fully accessible via DCPL’s digital gateway, Dig DC, and I encourage readers to listen to the primary source alongside the transcribed excerpts that will be featured in this section. Each excerpt has a stable link to the interview in the corresponding footnote, and all excerpts have been timecoded to assist the reader with navigation.

26 27

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Section One – How Real World History Contributes to the Study of the Great Migration Real World History students conduct oral history interviews with African American residents of the District of Columbia who arrived as part of the Great Migration. Their work has produced a growing archive of primary source material on an experience that has not been welldocumented: the impact of the Second Great Migration (1940-1970) on Washington, DC. In preparation for their interviews students engage with the scholarship of the Great Migration through Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns. As Wilkerson synthesizes and builds upon decades of scholarly production in her book, the sources produced by Real World History students are informed by historical narratives about the Great Migration.

From 1915 - 1975, over six million Black Americans left their homes in the South to escape their status as second-class citizens. At the outset of the migration in 1915, only 10% of African Americans lived outside of the Southeastern United States; By its conclusion in the early 1970s, nearly half of all African Americans (47%) lived outside the South.28 With the exception of its dramatic peaks around the world wars, particularly World War I, scholarly analysis of the Migration has tended to position it as the backdrop for other historical dramas playing out in 20th century American history. As a decades-long, leaderless movement of people, the Migration does not conform to the ways Americans are taught to conceptualize history as a procession of key characters and pivotal moments. Wilkerson, in The Warmth of Other Suns, goes so far as to characterize the Migration as “perhaps the biggest under-reported story of the twentieth century.”29 In writing her book for a general audience, Wilkerson brought the Migration to the fore on a national scale. Though her book is widely read, many people who

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York, NY: Random House, 2010), 10, 177-178; “Great Migration, 1910-1970,” United States Census Bureau, September 13th, 2012, https://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/020/ 29 Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, 9.

28

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are a part of this story don’t contextualize their own experiences or family history as part of a broader narrative of Black migration.

To live in the District is to live in the wake of this history. The legacy of the Migration can be seen in the city’s politics, language, music, food, even the physical layout of the city.

Despite this (and the fact that it’s Wilkerson’s hometown), the Migration has yet to make its way into public school curricula in DC. While helping DC high school students connect past and present and to think like historians, Real World History introduces young Washingtonians to this history and facilitates their interaction with someone who participated in it. Students become local historians, and, together with their narrators, explore this transformational history. After six years of collecting oral histories, what does the Real World History collection have to offer studies of the Migration? To determine how this new archive fits into the history of the Migration, I will first position it in relation to how the Migration has been studied.

Contemporary studies of the Great Migration are interdisciplinary projects. The Migration has been studied with different disciplinary lenses and research methodologies in different eras. In The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender, Joe William Trotter, Jr. identifies three distinct paradigms applied to scholarship of the Great Migration:30 



The Race Relation Model (1920s-1950s): primarily sociologists and socialanthropologists concerned with the push-pull factors of the Migration. This model acknowledges preceding historical patterns but does not firmly position the Migration as a historical phenomenon. It is heavily focused on Chicago due to the influence of sociologists and social scientists at the time in that city.

The “Ghetto” Model (1960s-1970s): primarily historians concerned with the impact of the Migration on the formation of 20th century “black ghettos” in northern cities.

Joe William Trotter, Jr. “Introduction. Black Migration in Historical Perspective: A Review of the Literature” in The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race Class and Gender Ed. Joe William Trotter, Jr. (Bloomington, IL: Indiana University Press, 1991), 1-2.

30

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

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The Proletarian Model (1970s-1980s): studies the Great Migration as a historical process and examines the Migration as a component of class formation.

Since the 1980s oral history has featured prominently in studies of the Great Migration both in research and writing. Due to the over-emphasis on impersonal push-pull factors in early scholarship, oral history came to be used as vital, corrective primary source material for speaking to the Migration in a nuanced, personal, and individual sense.

One of the first studies of the Migration to use oral history as a central archive was Goin’ North: Tales of the Great Migration, a five-part public radio documentary series produced as part of a public history project at the Philadelphia History Museum.31 Goin’ North came at the beginning of a revival of Black migration studies and both the oral history project, and the subsequent radio documentary had a significant impact on the study of the Migration. Interviews from the Goin’ North collection were prominently featured in the 1987 exhibit, Field to Factory: Afro-American Migration, 1915-1940, at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. One of the most significant moments of this period’s efforts to bring the Great Migration into the public consciousness, the exhibit would remain on the floor for twenty years.

The exhibit not only remained on display far longer than originally intended, but it also later became a popular travelling exhibition.

Field to Factory sparked renewed scholarly interest in the Migration and was followed by a flurry of publications which gave rise to some of the most widely-cited texts on the topic.

Several works that are relevant for thinking about the collection of student interviews are: Elizabeth Clark-Lewis’s Living in, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington, D.C., 1910-1940; the essay collections, The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New

31

2010.

At the time the Philadelphia History Museum was called the Atwater Kent Museum. It was renamed in

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Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender, edited by Joe William Trotter Jr.; and Black Exodus: The Great Migration from the American South edited by Alferdteen Harrison. The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, also revamped their exhibition of Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, the iconic 60-panel series about the Great Migration, during this time. Following Goin’ North, several significant oral history projects related to the Migration were designed and conducted as well.32 Beginning in 1995, The Warmth of Other Suns, too, was born out of this renewed interest in the Great Migration, and the book itself is in conversation with several of these texts and exhibitions.

The collection of essays, Black Exodus, made two significant interventions in the study of the Great Migration that Wilkerson would develop in The Warmth of Other Suns. First, the authors effectively made the claim that, through community and kinship networks, the study of the Great Migration had to be grounded in the South and a study of its impact on the region. This stood in contrast to much of the pre-existing literature which was primarily concerned with the Migration’s impact on northern cities. Another significant intervention of the essays was the attention the authors paid to the period following World War II. Black Exodus expanded the time frame of the Migration to 1960, whereas previous scholarship was exclusively focused on what is now thought of as the First Great Migration (1915-1940). Black Exodus also framed the Migration as a means for seeking freedom and full citizenship for Black southerners, a framing

Immediately after Goin’ North in 1987-1988, another oral history project entitled, “African American Migration to Philadelphia Oral Histories,” was conducted and archived at Temple University Libraries Special Collections and Oral Histories Repository. Two other significant projects were carried out in the early 1990s: the “African American Migration and Southern Folkways in New York City Oral History Project” (1992-1993), conducted by City Lore and archived at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and an oral history project with senior citizens at the Potomac Gardens public housing development in Washington, DC, (1993) sponsored by the DC Community Humanities Council’s City Lights program.

32

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Wilkerson would adopt. The student interviews, focused on the experience of migrants in the Second Great Migration, build upon this foundation.

Another important collection of essays, Historical Perspectives on the Great Migration, also examined Black migrants’ role in shaping their own geographical movement. One particularly influential essay from the collection was Darlene Clark Hine’s, “Black Migration to the Urban Midwest: The Gender Dimension, 1915-1945.” In this essay, Clark Hine argued that a focus on economic motives obfuscates the experience of many Black women migrants who left for reasons thus far underexamined and that women were integral to the maintenance of travel networks used by migrants to make their way north. She also challenged historians to further investigate women’s different migration experiences since pushing past a purely racial or economic lens to incorporate gender would provide a more nuanced understanding of why Black southerners left their homes and what their lives were like in the North.

Acknowledging the direct influence of Clark-Hine’s work on her own, Elizabeth Clark Lewis’s Living In, Living Out explored the specificities of Black women’s migration experiences and patterns.33 Living In, Living Out was significant in that it both spoke to Black women’s experience and situated Washington, DC, as a migration city. Through in-depth oral history research, Clark-Lewis chronicled the experience of Black women migrating to work in Washington, DC, as domestic workers, and, in so doing, examined some of the ways in which women aided and prepared one another for the realities of the move.

Earl Lewis’s essay in Historical Perspectives on the Great Migration, “Expectations, Economic Opportunities, and Life in the Industrial Age: Black Migration to Norfolk, Virginia,

33

Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington, D.C., 19101940 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), XI

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1910-1945,” added another important intervention into studies of the Migration. Using Norfolk as a case study, Lewis argues that the Migration must be understood not only as a movement from the rural South to northern urban centers, but also as a migration from the rural South to southern cities. He points out that more people migrated to southern cities than northern cities in the early years of the Migration, and that for many migrants, southern cities served as their launchpad north.34 Wilkerson would build upon these interventions in her book.

The interviews of the Real World History collection provide new evidence for future historians to build upon the interventions of the aforementioned texts. First, being comprised primarily of interviews with people who migrated during the 1950s and 1960s, this collection provides insight into the later years of the Migration. Secondly, the majority of the interviews are with Black women who migrated. Third, this collection is focused on the migration experience in Washington, DC. Having become the nation’s first majority-Black city in 1957, due in large part to the influx of southern migrants, the Great Migration is part of the narrative of DC history.35 But, the migration experiences of the people who came to the Washington region have rarely been the focus of historical studies. Fourth, through a life history interviewing approach, students make space for narrators to ground their migration experience in their upbringing in the South, illuminating their own family and kinship networks. Students then facilitate the narrator’s reflection on the decision to leave, the experience of migrating, what their lives have been like since and their ongoing connections to the South. Though students do not read the books discussed in this section, as they prepare for their interviews, they are grounded in the history of

34 Earl Lewis. “Expectations, Economic Opportunities, and Life in the Industrial Age: Black Migration to Norfolk, Virginia, 1910-1945” in The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race Class and Gender Ed. Joe William Trotter, Jr. (Bloomington, IL: Indiana University Press, 1991), 22.

35 Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove, Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017) 242-243, 318.

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the Migration by reading what has come to be the definitive text of the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration: Wilkerson began writing The Warmth of Other Suns following the period of academic and public interest during the late ’80s and early ’90s. Published 15 years later, in 2010, Warmth of Other Suns is now one of the most widely read and cited books on the Great Migration and is well-regarded in both academic circles and by everyday readers. Synthesizing decades of scholarship into rich historical context, Wilkerson weaves the stories and experiences of three migrants into a narrative history of the Great Migration. In her section “Notes on Methodology,” Wilkerson is clear about how the book was intended to intervene in the history of the Migration: 1) to adjust the time frame beyond 1915-1940.

2) to expand the geographic understanding of the Migration beyond cities such as Chicago.

3) to convey an intimate history and expand the (albeit important) focus on demographics, politics, economics, and sociology.

Before the publication of The Warmth of Other Suns, the First Great Migration received the majority of scholarly attention and was often treated as the Migration in its entirety. Up until that point, however, The Second Great Migration remained ill-defined.36 Building upon the work of the sociologist, Stewart Tolney, and arguing that the Migration continued until about 1975, Wilkerson extends the length of the Migration beyond all pre-existing time frames. She also moves beyond the jobs-driven characterization of the Migration, arguing that the Migration did not end until the legislative victories of the Civil Rights Movement were implemented and

36

Wilkerson, Warmth of Other Suns, 13, 539.

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enforced at a local level in the 1970s.37 Real World History has adopted Wilkerson’s timeframe of the Migration, and the collection is comprised almost entirely of narrators who migrated during this later period.

In contrast to other works in the field, The Warmth of Other Suns transforms the Great Migration into a national narrative. Whereas previous works were regionally focused, or even city-specific, Wilkerson sets out to tell the story of the Migration on a national scale and chronicle the movement in its entirety.38 To that end, she equally positions the three major streams of Migration: up the eastern seaboard, to the Midwestern cities, and to the West Coast.

She also acknowledges migration to “border cities” such as Washington, DC, by weaving her own family history into the book.

Some of her interventions are less overt and more representational. While the literature has been dominated by the archetype of sharecroppers (primarily men) migrating north to take advantage of opportunities in the industrializing North, Wilkerson’s character selection pushes back on this archetype. Collectively, her three protagonists represent different social classes, genders, geographic locations, and educational experiences. And, all three leave the South for different reasons. Ida Mae, a sharecropper, leaves in the 1930s both under the threat of violence and in search of greater opportunity; George, a blue-collar worker who had received some college education, leaves in the 1940s for fear of his life; Robert a middle-class doctor, leaves in the 1950s in search of dignity and a place where he could live the life he wanted. Together, their stories represent the diversity of the broader Migration experience.

Stewart Tolney, “The African American ‘Great Migration’ and Beyond,” Annual Review of Sociology 29, (2003): 210; Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, 539.

38 Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, 539-540.

37

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Wilkerson also likens the southern migrant experience to an immigrant experience.

Historicizing the migration of Black Americans to areas of increased social, economic, and personal freedom, Wilkerson situates this story within a larger, international narrative of human experience. She also compares the experiences of Black migrants fleeing the South to those of refugees and others fleeing genocide and political persecution, deftly transmitting the significance of this migration and the depth of the oppression in the South to the reader.

While she is not the first to make this comparison, she uses this characterization to push back against scholarship of the “ghetto model” era that pathologizes Black southern culture as a causal factor in the proliferation of concentrated poverty in urban Black communities in the North. Drawing upon the sociological analyses of Stewart Tolney, Wilkerson refutes this characterization, likening southern migrants to immigrant communities to argue that they were by many metrics better educated and more industrious than their northern counterparts.39 Wilkerson also situates her characters in ways that ground the Migration in the South.

Brief asides are interspersed throughout the book to provide historical contextualization for the character-driven narrative in ways that maintain the connection to the South even after the protagonists have arrived in the North. In chronicling the entire movement, the impact of the Migration on the North and the South are kept as one cohesive story. While settling outside of the South, the narrators maintain, to varying degrees, a connection to the region through familial networks, visitation, and cultural connections. Building on Lewis’s intervention of needing to expand the understanding of the Migration to include migration to southern cities and ClarkLewis’s positioning of DC as a migration city, Wilkerson, through her own family history, situates DC in the context of the Great Migration on a national scale.

39

Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, 260-265.

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As was discussed in Part I, one of the reasons Warmth of Other Suns is a useful teaching tool is because of its narrative writing style and character-driven storyline. While Wilkerson pulls on similar archives as the pre-existing literature, the bulk of her original research is in her extensive oral history interviewing: conducting over 1,200 oral histories over a 15-year period.

In addition to that, this project weaves together historical, sociological, and economic research and synthesizes much of the literature from all three categories of scholarship Trotter delineates.40 As Wilkerson chronicles the Migration through the lives of these characters, she breaks the book down into distinct parts which are used in the class to frame the students’ oral history interviews: 1. “Beginnings” – Narrators’ life in the South, thereby embedding them in southern community and kinship networks 2. “Exodus” – The decision to leave the South and the journey north, centering their own decision-making process, and self-identified factors in that choice 3. “The Kinder Mistress” – Adjustment to life in the North, establishing themselves in the city, building new communities, and their life in Washington.

4. “Aftermath” – The decades after the end of the Migration and the migrants’ lives as older adults.

Building on Wilkerson’s work, it is our hope that this archive will be useful for exploring the impact of the later decades of the Migration, particularly as it pertains to Washington, DC.

Referring back to the Race Relation Model (1920s-1950s), the “Ghetto” Model (1960s-1970s), and the Proletarian Model (1970s-1980s). Trotter, “Introduction,” in The Great Migration in Historical Perspective, 1-2.

40

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The Real World History collection (size, scope, demographics): In thinking about what this new archive has to offer historians of the Great Migration, let’s first get a sense of the size and scope of the collection. What follows is a sketch of the collection at the time the interviews were donated to the People’s Archive (2020). New interviews will be added each year, and we are still reaching out to narrators from previous years with the hope that they may be interested in donating their interviews to the Library.

As of the summer of 2021, there are 40 interviews (with a total of 39 narrators) in the Real World History collection (one narrator, Ms. Jaqueline Hines, was interviewed in both 2018 and 2019). Of these 40 interviews, 37 are fully accessible through the Library’s digital gateway, Dig DC.41 Of course, given the design of the oral history project, all of the individuals interviewed by Real World History students are Black/African American.

Gender Breakdown of Narrators Men (12) 31%

Women (27) Men (12)

Women (27) 69%

Figure 1.

41

Three narrators, Rev. Evangeline Taylor, Hattie Dunston-Tanner, and Clara Benjamin Neal, placed restrictions on their interviews requiring researchers to request access.

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In terms of gender diversity, Black women comprise the majority of the narrators (see figure 1), and this trend continues in the latest group of interviews conducted by the 2020-2021 cohort of Real World History students. This is significant because most studies of the Migration have focused on men’s migration experience, and these interviews provide more opportunities for learning about the experiences of Black women who migrated to Washington. As was discussed above, in her essay, “Black Migration to the Urban Midwest: The Gender Dimension, 1915-1945,” Clark Hine calls attention to the need for more exploration of how migration was different for Black women and challenges scholars to find new sources for interrogating women’s migration experiences. “[W]e need micro-studies into individual lives, of neighborhoods, families, churches, and fraternal lodges in various cities. Examination of these themes makes imperative an even deeper penetration into the internal world of Afro-Americans. Perhaps even more dauntingly, to answer fully these questions requires that the black woman’s voice and experience be researched and interpreted with the same intensity and seriousness accorded that of the black man.

Information derived from statistical and demographic data on black midwestern migration and urbanization must be combined with the knowledge drawn from the small, but growing, numbers of oral histories, autobiographies, and biographies of twentieth century migrating women. …[T]hese sources, properly “squeezed and teased” promise to light up that inner world so long shrouded behind a veil of neglect, silence, and stereotype, and will quite likely force a rethinking and rewriting of all black urban history.” 42 The interviews of the Real World History collection represent a new addition to that growing number of oral histories. Along with The Warmth of Other Suns, the collection should be examined alongside Lisa Krissoff Boehm’s Making a Way Out of No Way: African American Women and the Second Great Migration due to her focus on the experience of women during the later decades of the Migration. Basing the book on oral history interviews with 40 women who migrated to various cities in the Northeast and Midwest, Boehm puts her narrators in

Clark Hine, “Black Migration to the Urban Midwest: The Gender Dimension, 1915-1945,” Great Migration in Historical Perspective, 129 42

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conversation with one another in order to explore the dynamics of Black women’s migration in the forties, fifties, and sixties. How the interviews of the Real World History collection converge and diverge from Krisoff Boehm’s history will be discussed in the next section.

Home State of Narrators South Carolina 15%

Virginia 12%

North Carolina (17)

NY

Georgia (7)

Georgia 17%

South Carolina (6) TX

CO

Other 14%

Virginia (5) Mississippi (1) Louisiana (1) Texas (1)

LA

MS

New York (1) Colorado (1)

North Carolina 42%

Figure 2.43 Real World History narrators made their way to Washington from a variety of southern states, but by and large they traveled up the East Coast. In particular, many hailed from North Carolina (see figure 2). The narrators represent a relatively random sample of people, and the breakdown of states where the narrators migrated from aligns with both the history of the Great Migration and the history of Washington, DC. Not only was Washington the first major stop for migrants following the East Coast stream of the Migration, but a preponderance of people from the Carolinas, particularly North Carolina, is a well-known aspect of DC history.44

43 On occasion, students have interviewed the children of southern migrants, who themselves migrated to Washington, DC, later in life. Such is the case with Alberta Bryant, born in New York City, and Korea Strowder, born in Denver, Colorado.

44 Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, 240; Martin Austermuhle, “When Blacks Fled The South, D.C. Became Home For Many From North Carolina,” WAMU, September 23, 2016, https://wamu.org/story/16/09/23/when_blacks_fled_the_south_dc_became_home_for_many_from_north_carolina/

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At the outset of the Great Migration in the early 20th century, the major streams of migration followed the existing infrastructure: the railroads; people took the most direct path out of the South available to them. But Wilkerson and other historians of the Migration have shown how, once these routes were established, inertia maintained these patterns despite the decline of railroad travel and interstate transportation becoming more open. People moved to where they knew people. Once patterns of migration were established, migrants followed their friends and family.45

Following Family North 4

6 Joining Family 1st in Family Unspecified

29

Figure 3.

Joining family who were already living in Washington is a theme of the interviews, and this speaks to a distinctive aspect of the collection: its focus on migrants of the Second Great Migration (1940-1970). Krissoff Boehm discovered a similar trend with the 40 women interviewed for her book.46 During the later decades of the Migration far fewer migrants were

45

Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, 242-243.

Lisa Krissoff Boehm, Making a Way Out of No Way: African American Women and the Second Great Migration, (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 94.

46

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pioneering an uncharted path as the first in their family to make the trip North. With the majority of the narrators arriving in Washington in the 1950s and 1960s, the Real World History collection speaks most clearly to the experience of the Second Great Migration.

Decade of Migration North 17

18 16 14 12 12 10 8 6 6 4

2

2

2 0 1930s

1940s

1950s

1960s

1970s

Number of Narrators

Figure 4.47 To illustrate the focus on the Second Great Migration in the collection, figure 4 provides a breakdown of the decades in which the Real World History narrators migrated North.48 The combination of the collection’s focus on women narrators and the experience of the later decades of the Migration makes it distinctive. As Krissoff Boehm points out, “Existing archival

47

One narrator, Alberta Bryant is discounted from this chart since she was born and raised in New York City. Ms. Bryant’s parents both migrated to New York City in the 1920s before she was born. Through they did not migrate to Washington, DC, both Bernard Hayes and Jettie Brown are counted in this chart since they did migrate north during the Great Migration. Mr. Hayes migrated to New York in 1960 with his family, and Ms. Brown migrated to Chester, PA, in 1950.

48 The predominance of narrators who migrated after 1940 does not represent an active decision to record the history of the Second Great Migration, but rather the temporal realities of when the project began. Most of the people who were part of the First Great Migration (1915-1940) had passed away by the time Real World History students began interviewing in the fall of 2014. In fact, the instructors emphasize the importance of identifying older narrators since it is more likely that there will be more opportunities in the future to interview a narrator who is in their seventies, for example, than their nineties.

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collections feature few stories of the Second Great Migration and only rarely has the movement been considered from the female viewpoint in oral histories.”49

Age at time of migration 17

18 16

13

14 12 10 8 6 4 4

2

2

2 0 ≤10

11--15

16-20

21-25

25-30

Number of narrators

Figure 5.

As figure 5 demonstrates, the individuals interviewed by Real World History students made their migration at a young age. This reflects the fact that by these later years of the Migration, with kinship networks firmly established, most of the narrators migrated north to live with relatives at a young age. Since the experiences of children in the Migration are not wellrepresented in the literature, it is worth highlighting that several of the narrators were children when they were either sent north or their family made the migration together.50 One common story that emerges from several of the interviews is that some children were raised with the understanding that when they finished high school, they would be sent to live with family up North.

49 50

Krissoff Boehm, Making a Way Out of No Way, 92.

Krissoff Boehm, Making a Way of Out No Way, 98.

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Level of formal schooling 25 22 20

15

10

8

8

5 1

0 Grade School

High School

Post-secondary

Graduate degree

Number of narrators

Figure 6.51 Another demographic dimension is the level of formal schooling of the narrators. As depicted in figure 6, by and large, the narrators were well-educated. The majority of the Real World History narrators had some form of post-secondary education whether that be technical education or attending a four-year institution of higher education. In talking about the educational background of her narrators, Krisoff Boehm points out that a study on migrants in which working-class and lower-middle-class women do not predominate is highly irregular.52 The narrators’ educational attainment aligns with Wilkerson and Tolney’s arguments about the greater educational attainment of migrants in the later stages of the Migration. These could also speak to the educational and economic opportunities of the DC region.

While migration themes are present in much of the oral history resources of the DC region due to the impact of the Great Migration on the city, the Real World History collection is All post-secondary/pre-graduate education has been grouped under “post-secondary” in this graphic. For example, individuals who went to nursing school, barbering school, beauty school, etc., are included in “postsecondary.”

52 Krissoff Boehm, Making a Way out of No Way, 15.

51

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one of the only collections focused on this experience in Washington. Oral history projects focused on the Great Migration in Washington, such as the 1993 oral history project at Potomac Gardens, have recorded the stories of the First Great Migration.53 The Real World History collection is the only oral history project focused on the later years of the Migration in Washington.

Stories that Emerge from the Collection While student oral history is often widely appreciated as a valuable educational activity, the work produced is rarely taken seriously for its contributions to the historical record.54 In this section, I will highlight some examples of how the Real World History archive contributes to scholarship of the Great Migration and DC history. The interviews in the collection are rich, and I encourage researchers to take this archive of student oral history interviews seriously as primary source material. Even a researcher who might be inclined to discount the intellectual contributions of young people can appreciate the historical value of the narrators’ thoughts and reflections.

While it must be noted that these interviews represent the student interviewers’ first foray into oral history interviewing, the recollections and reminiscences facilitated by students add to our knowledge of the period and provide valuable material for historians. Yes, sometimes students are bad at getting names and dates, or neglect an important follow-up question, or fail to ask a narrator to elaborate on a thought, but all oral history interviewing contains missed opportunities. Anyone who takes the time to listen to the student interviews will be impressed by

53

This community-based oral history project in Potomac Gardens was sponsored by the DC Community Humanities Council’s City Lights program and was the basic of both the documentary, In Search for Common Ground (1993), and the exhibition, “In Search of Common Ground: Senior Citizens and Community Life at Potomac Gardens” (1994-1995), at the Anacostia Community Museum.

54 Levin, “Authentic Doing,” 8.

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the preparation, poise, professionalism, and maturity the interviewers exhibit when talking with their narrators. Howard Levin, Director of the Telling Their Stories Oral History Archives Project at the Urban School of San Francisco, is worth quoting at length in regard to the quality of student oral history work: “The initial reaction of adults in the field is almost always the same: a skeptical acknowledgment of quaintness at the idea of students as oral history practitioners. …However, just as predictable as the initial reaction, the response upon actually seeing samples of student work is often also equally predictable: a sense of flabbergasted appreciation of what students can actually accomplish with appropriate training, adequate equipment, and the world stage in which to publish this meaningful work.”55 There is far too much content in this collection to examine the variety of contributions made by Real World History students and their narrators here (for starters, each and every interview speaks to some of the specificities of Jim Crow in a different town or city in the South). I will outline a few starting points for further investigation which I have observed in the material.

Most of the narrators recount how they left the South as a teenager, particularly once they finished their high school education. Listening to the interviews of the Real World History collection, the centrality of family in the decision to migrate becomes a common theme. For those who were minors when they migrated, the decision to leave was not always one they made themselves. As was discussed earlier, coming of age in the later decades of the Migration, most of the narrators had family who had migrated to Washington either before they were born or during their lifetimes. Some of the narrators, such as Ms. Hattie Dunston-Tanner, recall the decision to migrate being predetermined.

MIKAYLA SHARRIEFF: [00:14:59] What influenced you to finally move to D.C.?

55

Levin, “Authentic Doing,” 8.

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HATTIE DUNSTON-TANNER: [00:15:04] Okay. Before I graduated it was just assumed. Meanwhile, another aunt had moved here, so I had two aunts that lived here.

My grandmother had two daughters that lived here in DC. One of the daughters was in the house; I grew up with her, almost, in the same house with my grandmother. But she was older than I was. And so she came to DC and got established and everything, so by the time I came, finished high school and came to DC, she had gotten an apartment and a place. So, it was like automatically that I would be going to DC when I graduated.

(Pause) My parents could not afford to send me—well, one brother was already in college—so they could not afford to send me to college down there. And, of course, some of the teachers did not tell you about financial aids and different things that you could get to subsidize your education, which I found out myself later on, but it was too late then.

Well, [it’s] never too late to get an education; I take that back. But, by that time, it was just assumed that I would come to DC when I graduated.56 It is also worth noting that the kinship networks that brought Ms. Dunston-Tanner to Washington were comprised of all women. This is a common theme among all the narrators, but particularly the women, and is an interesting distinction from the women of Making a Way Out of No Way, the majority of whom related that their husbands initiated the migration.57 While not all narrators describe the decision to migrate as predetermined, many of the narrators discuss how they came to Washington soon after graduating from high school. In many cases it was parents, particularly mothers, who would pressure their children to leave the South upon graduation. The predominant reasons identified were: 1) there were no desirable jobs available; or 2) there were no opportunities for furthering their education in the South. Ms. Thelma Jones recalls that, though she had no particular destination in mind, her mother was the one who encouraged her and her siblings to leave Snow Hill, North Carolina.

LOLA ROGIN: [00:19:07] So before you came here were you told things about DC? And then, when you got here, did it meet your expectations? Did you think it was going to be a different way?

THELMA JONES: [00:19:15] You know, actually, I don’t really remember being told, other than, “You want to go elsewhere.” And, you know, opportunities would be better 56

Hattie Dunston-Tanner, interview by Mikayla Sharrieff, December 29, 2017, Center for Inspired Teaching ‘Real World History’ Oral History Collection, People’s Archive, District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, DC. 57 Krissoff Boehm, Making a Way Out of No Way, 96.

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for me, is what my parents said, especially my mom. Because, somehow, even though she was a farmer’s wife, and she grew up on a farm with her parents—. My maternal grandmother died early, so my mom had to play a leadership role very early. And she graduated from high school at sixteen—she was very smart—she went to New Jersey, and she would have stayed there, however, her mom became very ill, and she had to come back home to take care of her mom. So, I think that’s sort of how she came up with that idea, of sending me, encouraging me to go to DC. Because she tried that with [my other older siblings]. You know, your parents sort of know their kids and their personalities.

ROGIN: Yeah.

JONES: [00:20:31] So, with my oldest brother he went away to college, and he stayed in college for a long time and never graduated, but then he left and went to the military. And my next, my oldest sister, my mom tried to get her to go to New York.58 Both Mr. Caesar Dudley and Mr. Jimmie Suggs also recall how their mothers made the decision that they would go to DC. MICHAEL BAYLISS: [00:03:02] So, who in your family decided it was time to move?

Or was it you that decided it was time to move?

CAESAR DUDLEY: [00:03:07] It was my mother. My mother and father decided that—I had relatives here in DC—and they decided that it would be best for me to leave Georgia and come to DC and finish school and at least get a fairly decent job.

BAYLISS: [00:03:27] So you came by yourself?

DUDLEY: Yeah.

BAYLISS: Wow. DUDLEY: [00:03:30] So they put me on a bus—five dollars—and sent me away to my relatives.59 JIMMIE SUGGS: [00:06:01] But, we came here because work was very little there, and we had to come here to find an exact—. I graduated from high school; my brother—who had been living here ever since 1966—he came down on graduation. And he was leaving that Sunday, and my mother told me, said, “Well, your brother got a seat driving [to DC].

His wife sits there, his daughter sits here; you be in the next seat. Go to DC and find a job.” So that’s what I did.60

Thelma D. Jones, interview by Lola Rogin, November 27, 2019, Center for Inspired Teaching ‘Real World History’ Oral History Collection, People’s Archive, District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:286548 59 Caesar Dudley, interview by Michael Bayliss, December 18, 2015, Center for Inspired Teaching ‘Real World History’ Oral History Collection, People’s Archive, District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:272298 60 Jimmie Suggs, interview by Maya Woods-Arthur, December 11, 2017, Center for Inspired Teaching ‘Real World History’ Oral History Collection, People’s Archive, District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:272821 58

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For both women and men interviewed by Real World History students, the kinship networks that either directly initiated or facilitated their move north were primarily made up of women. The majority of the narrators moved in with aunts (particularly aunts), grandmothers, cousins, and older sisters when they first came to Washington. Of the people who came north to live with family, only Rev. Evangeline Taylor, Jimmie Suggs, and Ms. Jaqueline Hines lived with a male relative upon arrival in Washington. This is an important pattern that emerges from the interviews and corroborates scholarly arguments about the importance of women in the migration chain.61 Family networks and educational and economic opportunities are the predominant reasons that the narrators came to Washington, but there are a few narrators who came north fleeing violence and racial tension. Mr. Henry Breedlove was sent north when he was 18 years old because his parents feared for his life after a confrontation with some white boys in his hometown of Vienna, Georgia. Mr. Julius Watson relates a similar story that led him to leave South Carolina. While most narrators identify segregation and racial oppression as an inextricable part of their motivation to leave, stories such as those of Mr. Breedlove and Mr. Watson are a minority of the interviews. It is also worth noting that both are men, and the collection’s lesser number of male narrators may be a factor here. Most of the narrators, even those who witnessed racialized violence in the South, in one case a spectacle lynching, 62 identify

Darlene Clark Hine, “Black Migration to the urban Midwest: The Gender Dimension 1915-1945,” in The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender, Ed. by Joe William Trotter Jr. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 133.

62 In her interview, Mrs. Korea Strowder recalls the lynching of one of her classmates, Lloyd Warner, when she was a teenager in St. Joseph, Missouri. Korea Strowder, interview by Jamilya Rich, December 1, 2015, Center for Inspired Teaching ‘Real World History’ Oral History Collection, People’s Archive, District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, DC, 6, http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:272811; “On this day – Nov 28, 1933,” A History of Racial Injustice, Equal Justice Initiative, https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/nov/28 61

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a job or educational opportunity as the moment/event/primary motivation that brought them to Washington, DC. There are several narrators in the collection, such as Rev. Irene Pierce, Alvin Harris, Claudia Lewis, and Damita Goldsmith who came to Washington as children.63 The stories of children in the Migration are not well-documented and these interviews provide insight into an underexamined experience. With the exception of Ms. Lewis, the importance of the migration in their self-conception is evidenced by their vivid memories of the South and recollection of their migration to DC as a turning point in their lives. The journey loomed large for Ms. Goldsmith in particular: REBECCA AKHIGBE: [00:21:01] So how many states and countries did you migrate through before officially settling in D.C., and what were their names?

DAMITA GOLDSMITH: [00:21:08] Okay. I actually have been in every state from Texas traveling north, and the reason for that is: my dad drove. We packed the station wagon up—five kids—and drove from Louisiana to here. My dad drove three straight days, because when we tried to stop—. I have seen where you pull up to a motel, and the sign says “Vacancy,” and when my dad walked in and came out, the sign said, “No Vacancy.” So he had no other choice. When we got here—I’ll never forget that night— him going to a Catholic church, to the rectory, and the priest said, “I’m sorry. I would like to, but I cannot.” And see, when you have five kids, people think you’re going to tear up their house—. So that’s how we ended up in rural Waldorf at a place called the Blue Jay Motel. They tore it down a few years back. But my mom ended up cooking on a hotplate; we lived there for three months, until he could find suitable housing. And that’s when I went to sixth grade.

AKHIGBE: [00:22:33] Wow. GOLDSMITH: [00:22:35] And it’s ironic that they moved back to Waldorf eleven years ago, but it was a peaceful living for them, because they are eighty-three and eighty-five.64 Though Ms. Goldsmith was only eleven years old at the time, the hardship her family experienced in the trip to DC would stick with her for the rest of her life. The Blue Jay Hotel

63 Mr. H. Bernard Hayes also migrated at age seven, but his family moved to New York City and he later came to Washington.

64 Damita Jo Goldsmith, interview by Rebecca Akhigbe, February 2016, People’s Archive, Center for Inspired Teaching ‘Real World History’ Oral History Collection, People’s Archive, District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:272299

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which Ms. Goldsmith mentioned, was a Green Book stop in southern Maryland.65 This is an example of how the interviews can highlight interesting aspects of local history.

Picking up on a point raised by Darlene Clark Hine, in Making a Way Out of No Way, Krissoff Boehm discusses how some of her narrators left children behind in the South in the care of extended family when they migrated north. The narrative of men leaving wives and children in the South in search of work is well-established, but the stories and experiences of women who made this difficult decision remain marginal to the male-centric narrative. Some of the narrators, such as Ms. Louise Baxter, recall how their mothers went north as the primary breadwinner.

KENYA AGUILAR: [00:03:04] So what made you move?

LOUISE BAXTER: [00:03:06] My mother was here, and my aunt.

AGUILAR: Yeah.

BAXTER: [00:03:11] So after finishing school, I come to live with my mother. I was raised by grandparents in the South.

AGUILAR: Yeah.

BAXTER: [00:03:20] And I stayed there until I finished school.

AGUILAR: Oh, okay.

BAXTER: [00:03:23] So my grandmother passed, and then I come up here.

AGUILAR: [00:03:28] Oh, okay, okay, okay. (Pause) So, why did your mom move to the North?

BAXTER: [00:03:38] To get a good job and to make more money.

AGUILAR: Oh, okay.

BAXTER: [00:03:43] They wasn’t paying that much there. Uh-huh. And then she could send money for me, you know?

AGUILAR: Yeah.

BAXTER: [00:03:50] For my grandmother and those to care for me.

AGUILAR: Yeah.

BAXTER: [00:03:54] Mm-hm. But I had two cousins; it was three of us that lived with our grandparents. It was two boys and myself.

AGUILAR: [00:04:03] So you didn’t have any siblings?

BAXTER: [00:04:05] I’ve never had—. No. I’m an only child.

AGUILAR: Oh, okay.

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The Negro Motorist Green Book, originally published in 1936 by Victor Hugo Green, was a series of guidebooks that listed restaurants, accommodations, service stations, etc. that served Black travelers. Anthony Plaag, “The Green Book in Maryland: The Blue Star Motel and the Blue Jay Hotel in Southern Maryland,” Preservation Maryland, April 8, 2020, https://www.preservationmaryland.org/the-green-book-in-maryland-the-blue-star-moteland-the-blue-jay-hotel-in-southern-maryland/

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BAXTER: [00:04:08] Uh-huh. (Both chuckle) It’s hard. (Both laugh) I always wanted a sister or brother.

AGUILAR: [00:04:15] Really?

BAXTER: [00:04:16] Yeah. So, I [could] fight or do something with them. (Both laugh) But I was the only child.

AGUILAR: Okay.

BAXTER: Uh-huh.

AGUILAR: [00:04:24] So, you decided to move to the North to be with your mother, right?

BAXTER: Yeah.

AGUILAR: [00:04:29] So, was there anyone that didn’t want you to move? Like your grandparents or anything?

BAXTER: [00:04:35] Well, my grandmother had passed, so, and my grandfather was there by himself, and he didn’t want me to leave. But there was nobody, no woman there in the house. So I came on, you know, he sent me up to my mother. So that’s what happened.

AGUILAR: [00:04:58] How about, did anyone convince you to move here? Or you just did it on your own?

BAXTER: [00:05:03] I, oh, I did it on my own, because I was a teenager, you know? So I come to [be] with my mother. Mm-hm.

AGUILAR: [00:05:13] So, you came by yourself? No one came with you?

BAXTER: [00:05:17] Mm-mm. No, I didn’t have anyone to come with me.

AGUILAR: [00:05:21] And how old were you when you left?

BAXTER: [00:05:23] How old was I? AGUILAR: Yeah.

BAXTER: [00:05:25] Oh, I was in my teens. About seventeen, I guess. Seventeen or eighteen, something like that.

AGUILAR: [00:05:33] Wow.66 Ms. Baxter not only speaks to the experience of women migrating north by themselves to support their families, but her experience, again, speaks to the importance of women in the Migration.

Not only is it that her mother and aunt drew her to DC, but her move was initiated by the death of her grandmother. Even though her grandfather didn’t want her to leave, there was an understanding that she ought to be under the care of an older woman.

Louise Baxter, interview by Kenya Aguilar, January 17, 2016, Center for Inspired Teaching ‘Real World History’ Oral History Collection, People’s Archive, District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:272812 66

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There also are interviews that speak to the other side of this experience. In discussing her quest to secure a government job and continue her education, Ms. Mabel Mitchell explains that she left her daughter in the care of her mother and grandmother in Raleigh, North Carolina.

ALISON EIGSTI: [00:31:45] So you held your job at the drugstore, and then, did you ever look for other employment?

MABEL MITCHELL: [00:31:53] Oh, well, when I got the job at the drugstore, I had no intention of staying there. I had to do what I had to do until I could do better.

EIGSTI: Mm-hm.

MITCHELL: [00:32:02] And they would often give the civil service test, and I would always take the test whenever I'd think it was something I wanted to do. Sometimes I would pass, and sometimes I wouldn't. I took typing when I was in school, but I really found I made a mistake when I really didn't go into business, you know, take a lot of business courses then. Of course, since I've been out of school years ago, I've taken courses. And, I continue to try to—. ‘Cause that was my objective, was to get in the government and to go to college. I started Federal City College but I didn't finish, so I didn't really go to college. I took courses off and on, but I never pursued a degree in anything. But until I had a child, and I left home—. Um, and I left my daughter with my mother and my grandmothers there; it was kinda rough doing that.

EIGSTI: Mm. MITCHELL: [00:33:01] Because, when you get attached to a child, it's hard to leave them.

EIGSTI: Mm-hm.

MITCHELL: [00:33:06] But, I couldn't progress there with a job, and I just had in my mind that was gon’ do better, that I wanted to make more money. So, I sacrificed the relationship between my daughter—she was three years old—and came to Washington.

My mother, she didn't really—. She wasn't happy about it. But the idea, she knew that I wanted to make more money. And I promised her that I would still send money home, which I did. And that's what most of us Blacks did, we went away to make more money to help ourselves and our family.

EIGSTI: Mm-hm.

MITCHELL: [00:33:43] And some sent money back to help their families to migrate also. But, I sent my money back to help with my daughter. And my, cause my grand—. I didn't have any problems with my grandmother and aunts and everything, they all helped me with her. And I, finally, I got a job from the drugstore. A friend of mine was working at George Washington University in the cafeteria. So, at the drugstore I had to work on Sundays, and I like to go to church.

EIGSTI: Mm-hm.

MITCHELL: [00:34:20] So, she got this job—helped me get a job there, recommended—I got this job as a bus girl, at George Washington University in the cafeteria. And I worked there. And, it so happened that a job came open in the bookstore

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at George Washington University, so I applied for that job and I got that. So I kept on doing jobs until I finally got in the government.67 While thinking about Black women’s different migration experiences, Clark Hine identifies the threat of sexual exploitation and gender violence as an underexamined push factor for Black women.68 Some of the women in the collection speak to this in their interview. For example, in reflecting on her experiences with segregation in Culpeper, Virginia, and the racial tensions of her upbringing, without prompting by the interviewer, Ms. Edith Crutchfield discusses the sexual harassment she and her sisters experienced working in the homes of white people: ISABELLA RAMOS-BRACHO: [00:09:40] So, what are your, like, your encounters with Jim Crow, you know? Like, you mentioned that there was, all your town was mostly Black people and all the white people were over in the medical building, but like there should have been many encounters between both.

EDITH CRUTCHFIELD: [00:10:06] It was, the town, it was small. But, there were white and Black people who lived in the town. On our street, we were the only ones that had the big medical building with the white people who resided there.

RAMOS-BRACHO: Mm-hm.

CRUTCHFIELD: [00:10:24] But around the corner from us, there were white people this way, and the Black people lived that way. So same street—West Street is what it was called—but they both stayed in their respective areas. They greeted each other; they’d say hello; they went to church. Our church was right around the corner in the middle of the two: whites on one side and Blacks on the other. So we, it was, it was strange. But, (sighs) most people just seemed to accept the behavior. Your greetings might be, like to my father they would say, “Hello, Uncle John.” But his response was, “How you doing, Cousin Joe?” Cousin Joe didn’t want to be called Cousin Joe. (Laughs) My father was strange. But, um, like going to the bus station—we took the bus station to come to Washington to see family members—you could not ride in the front of the bus; you had to ride in the back of the bus. Even the waiting rooms were segregated. The whites would be on one side and there was a door, and then the other side was the one—. Even the bathrooms were all divided. So you, that sort of that thing. You went, you know, you ran into—. In the stores, because they knew most of us, and there were so many of us, we did not encounter many problems of anyone following us around stores. I guess they knew if they told our mother or father we took anything, we would be punished forever. So, we didn’t engage in that, and they really did not bother us in that sense. But you could not go Mabel Mitchell, interview by Alison Eigsti, January 8, 2016, Center for Inspired Teaching ‘Real World History’ Oral History Collection, People’s Archive, District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:294111 68 Clark Hine, “Black Migration to the Urban Midwest,” 138.

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into a drugstore and sit down and order a sandwich or a soda, whatever. So you knew you could go in there to buy all the products, but stay away from the counters, because you knew you weren’t going to be served. And in some cases, when integration came and the stores had to serve everyone, a lot of the drugstores just took out all of their counters and seats, rather than do that. So, you had to, yeah, you had to accept that. And of course, going to school. As I said, we were not allowed to go to the school we could walk to and we got on the buses. And, the kids who came from other counties were to come into Culpeper to go to the school. Well, when these buses passed each other, there were rock fights. They would pull down the windows and throw rocks. (Laughs) And the Black kids would have rocks in their bags, and there would be a rock fight— ISABELLA RAMOS-BRACHO: Oh. EDITH CRUTCHFIELD: [00:13:33] —between the buses. I didn’t engage in that; my sisters did. (Laughs) I just thought it was stupid, on both sides. But, those kinds of things we encountered. And then I—. And babysitting, because we had to babysit when we were very young. And we were mature, so a lot of people trusted us with their children; plus, there were a lot of children in our family. We would encounter some problems, in, um, that manner. Uh, mainly with the husbands of the people for whom we were babysitting.

Um, they would make overtures, uh, that we knew were not quite right, and we would just tell our mother and father we couldn’t go back and babysit for them. When they wanted to know why, we said “Well, they don’t really like us.” But, um, it was like we were expected to do whatever they wanted us to do. That made me feel kind of uncomfortable then angry. But, these are the kind of things we endured; We got around them the best we could. But at least I had my sisters to whom I could make known what had happened. (Whispers) “Don’t babysit for them!” They’d go, “Why didn’t you just hit him?” And I didn’t really mean big trouble, but those are the things that we contended with, lived with, and tried to get through.69 Though it is a long excerpt, it is important to show how, when given the space to reflect and freely associate, these experiences at work are connected to other experiences of racism and segregation in Culpeper for Ms. Crutchfield.

The collection also speaks to the specificities of the Migration to Washington, DC. As can be seen in the above excerpt with Mabel Mitchell, a predictable theme that emerges when listening to the interviews of the Real World History collection is the draw Washington had as the seat of the U.S. Federal Government. Almost all the narrators worked for the federal

69

Edith Crutchfield, interview by Isabella Ramos-Bracho, December 14, 2018, Center for Inspired Teaching ‘Real World History’ Oral History Collection, People’s Archive, District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:270811

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government in one way or another over the course of their lives and many came to DC in search of a government job.

CLAUDIA LEWIS: [00:49:19] And the one goal we had in line, because we all used to say, “We want a good government job.” That was our main aim, because we knew that’s where the money was at that time.70 Despite Washington’s position as the nation’s capital and the first stop for migrants moving up the east coast, it still was a southern city. A common theme among narrators, whether they came in the forties, fifties, or sixties, is disappointment upon finding racism, segregation, and discrimination manifest in Washington. For some of the earlier arrivals, such as Mrs. Korea Strowder who came in 1943, it was more de jure: JAMILYA RICH: [00:22:40] What were your hopes, dreams, and fears of leaving Nebraska and coming to Washington, DC? KOREA STROWDER: [00:22:47] I didn’t have any fears about that all. (Rich laughs) No, because after having gone through all I’d been through with Denver and St. Joe, Missouri, it didn’t bother me at all. Except I was surprised that there was so much prejudice in DC! RICH: Hm. STROWDER: [00:23:08] Oh, yes! When I got to DC, I came by train. And my sister was already here because she went to a college in West Virginia, and there were three other girls who graduated with her and they had an apartment, so everything was all set.

But, when I got to Washington, uh, at Union Station, I have two big bags. And, there’s this white fella standing there, and I see the cabs all lined up over on this side. And, he puts his—I step forward to get a cab—and he puts his hand up to hold back, and tells the whites to come. (Taps table) (Pause) I said, “I don’t believe this.”

RICH: Hm. STROWDER: [00:24:10] I said, “Well, maybe he didn’t see me.” So I came a little closer to him. And, he pushed me back. And I, finally, a Black cab driver across the street waved to me frantically, to come, “Come over here!” And I went over there, he said, “You’d been standing there ‘til tomorrow, because they don’t put Blacks in the cabs.”71

70 Claudia Lewis, interview by Michael Artemus, November 25, 2019, Center for Inspired Teaching ‘Real World History’ Oral History Collection, People’s Archive, District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:307697 71 Korea Strowder, interview by Jamilya Rich, December 1, 2015, Center for Inspired Teaching ‘Real World History’ Oral History Collection, People’s Archive, District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:272811

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For those who came as segregation was being dismantled in Washington throughout the early 1950s, several narrators identified the downtown department stores as holdouts.

ALBERTA BRYANT: [00:20:07] Yeah. And we, at that time, 1953, you know, segregation was taking place—I mean, integration was taking place—and they had—. I came to Washington, and I remembered we couldn't go to—. What's the name of that—?

(Pause) Mm. It's one of the department stores we couldn't go to. We could go to, we could go to Hecht's, Landsburg—. But we couldn't go to a place like Neiman Marcus, or the big names. They were still segregated.

HARRIS MARKS: I gotchu.

BRYANT: [00:21:00] If they were not segregated, they were supposed to be integrated, but you met that resistance to service.

MARKS: Okay.

BRYANT: [00:21:09] They didn't want to wait on you, or—. No one was ever rude, but you can tell when someone doesn't like what they're doing.

MARKS: [00:21:21] I gotchu. So, it sounds like the biggest thing is you really noticed how people, how just people were just like uncomfortable— BRYANT: Mm-hm.

MARKS: —just did not like want you there. Could you go a little bit more into depth of what that feels like? If you want to, I guess. I don't know if it's—.

BRYANT: [00:21:37] Well, really, it didn't bother me. I can't say it didn't bother me. It didn't bother me to the point to where it affected how I related to other people.

MARKS: Okay.

ALBERTA BRYANT: [00:21:50] It bothered me because I knew it shouldn't be that way. But I tried not to get into situations where someone might have an opportunity to mistreat me or not service me.72 Ms. Kathy Senior, who came to Washington, DC, in 1959 to attend Howard University School of Nursing, recalled her disappointment to find such hostilities in the downtown department stores as a young woman in the 1960s.

KATHY SENIOR: [00:30:03] I didn’t know that racism existed here, you know, I’m coming to the North.

JABESSO YADETTO: Mm-hm.

SENIOR: [00:30:08] But when I would go to a department store back in the sixties, [I’d] stand in line in a department store to pay for my items, and got discriminated against the same way I did in Columbus, Georgia. White people got waited on all around me, and I’m standing there. And that was what I ran away from Columbus, Georgia— YADETTO: Right.

Alberta Bryant, interview by Harris Marks, December 2016, Center for Inspired Teaching ‘Real World History’ Oral History Collection, People’s Archive, District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:307075 72

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SENIOR: [00:30:35] —to avoid. Racism was—you knew—in your face, and you knew where you belonged. But up here it was subtle and wicked, sneaky.73 Some other aspects of Washington’s Black society during the 20th century that emerge in the interviews are the phenomenon of white-passing for economic opportunity as well as classconsciousness and colorism present in the city.

EDITH CRUTCHFIELD: [00:47:17] And then I had friends from Culpeper who came here to work, and they were working in the department stores—Saks, Hecht’s, and Woodies [Woodward & Lothrop]—and they were passing. And they would almost faint when they would see you come in the store. It’s like, “Oh, they will expose me! I’m finished!” Yeah. You knew better than to go over and say hello. Because they were going to get called in the office, “How do you know them?” And that was a rather strange encounter. And you were just kind of trying to give them the eye like: I am not going to say anything to you; Don’t worry about your job. And that became secret. And they would call, you know, they would call each other and say, “So-and-so is working at Woodies now, and she’s in the shoe department. Do not say anything to her. Make pretend you don’t know her, because she will get fired.” Yeah, that went on here a lot.74

ESSENCE FULWOOD: Were race relations different when you moved to Washington?

THELMA MORGAN: The only thing about Washington, DC—. It was a little bit different. I found that we were more racially bound, Blacks with Blacks. We were as racially bound as we were with Blacks and whites. They had—I was just amazed—they had a school called Dunbar [Dunbar High School].

FULWOOD: Dunbar.

MORGAN: It only catered to lightskin professional people. I was just shocked. They were very color conscious. Color conscious within the race. That was the first, my first impression of what I learned about race, differences in being in North Carolina and being in Washington, DC. So, the advertisement for jobs, they wanted lightskin waitresses.

FULWOOD: So, you were basically segregated within your own race?

MORGAN: Yes, that right; That’s right. And of course, if you were working for a white person, they wanted lightskin too, because that’s what people wanted to see. So I didn’t have a chance did I? I’m just glad God steered me in another direction. The jobs were subservient. There were more jobs in hotels, blue collar—. You could get a blue-collar job. Administration and businesses, you, it wasn’t—. They were not as free. The high school—this is interesting—the high school I graduated from was called Franklin County Training School. When I came to DC, all of the training schools were school for bad kids.

When you had that “training” at the end—. And I found that to be part of the problem Kathy Elaine Senior, interview by Jabesso Yadetto, January 1, 2016, Center for Inspired Teaching ‘Real World History’ Oral History Collection, People’s Archive, District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:272297 74 Edith Crutchfield, interview by Isabella Ramos-Bracho, December 14, 2018, People’s Archive. http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:270811 73

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with getting a job, was that they thought I was from a correctional institution. So on my own I just dropped the “training” part and put Franklin County High School. It took me a while to realize that that was holding me down. All of the schools down there were “training school,” and that was a big negative for the Blacks.75 Many of the narrators who were government workers recall their disappointment upon witnessing discrimination in the federal government. In particular, narrators discuss discrimination in hiring, promotions, and pay.

MABEL MITCHELL: [00:27:10] And once I came, I think when I came to the wedding, we came up in a car, but when I actually came to live in Washington it was by bus. And that's what helped me to decide to move to Washington, because the jobs, the government jobs were plentiful. And, they were open for Blacks. But, it was the lowpaying jobs. Like, for instance, a Black person that had a college degree, they would be hired as a messenger or custodian. But, I don't know, that's just the way the laws were.

And the jobs that they would get, sometimes, the Black people would be making less than the white people. But they would be doing the same work! Because, for instance, I had a friend, he had a college degree, and when he first came here—and you know, if you go to college and get a degree, you look forward to getting something better making big money—well, he was hired as a messenger. Then he moved up as a clerk typist. So he just died about a couple of years ago.

ALISON EIGSTI: [00:28:22] Oh, I'm sorry.

MITCHELL: [00:28:22] He was a grade 15.76 And that happened through the, you know, by the time changing, and integration, you know, began to get better. And it's still [segregated], though, to a certain extent.77 SARAH ANN HARDY: [00:21:35] Now, it was a little disappointing when you would find that the white, um, employees or workers, or your coworkers, most of the time their grades were much higher than the Blacks. But, you know, that was just one of those things that I guess people just accepted at that time. They had a certain amount of grades Blacks, and then they had a certain amount of higher grades, you know, for the white people.78

Thelma Morgan, interview by Essence Fulwood, December 2015, Center for Inspired Teaching ‘Real World History’ Oral History Collection, People’s Archive, District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:297010 76 Referring to the General Schedule (GS) payscale for government employees.

77 Mabel Mitchell, interview by Alison Eigsti, January 8, 2016, People’s Archive. http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:294111 78 Sarah Ann Hardy, interview by Ramani Wilson, December 26, 2016, Center for Inspired Teaching ‘Real World History’ Oral History Collection, People’s Archive, District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:277080 75

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What I have presented here is just a small sample of the rich historical material offered by these interviews. Each interview provides insight into a variety of historical topics and provides a window into the experience of participants in the Second Great Migration into Washington, DC. But, the historical value of the narrators’ reminiscences and recollections are not their only contribution to the historical record. When we shift our lens to focus in on the interview encounter itself, these interviews can be viewed in a different light. They can be seen as a record of intergenerational encounters at the present time and the generational transfer of history and memory within a community. This is what I will be discussing in the following section.

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Section Two – Student Oral History When oral history educators advocate for the importance of archiving student interviews, their arguments have hinged on students’ contribution to the historical record relative to the topic of the interview.79 This is certainly the most readily apparent reason to archive student interviews. But along with valuing the historical information relayed in an interview, oral historians hold that the narrative itself is a form of historical evidence; that the intersubjectivity of interviewer and narrator and the dialogic nature of the interview constitute another type of evidence: the power relations and cultural exchange of two historical actors at a particular place and time.80 The intergenerational dynamics present in student-conducted interviews are what distinguish them from oral histories conducted by adults, so why not position the intersubjectivity of student oral history as an equally important rationale for their preservation?

Oral history educators have picked up on this point by highlighting the student-teacher relationship that forms in the interviews and have emphasized the fact that students elicit new and different responses from narrators due to this relationship.81 A narrator may respond differently when recounting an experience that occurred when they were the age of the interviewer or frame their stories differently for didactic purposes. These are valuable arguments and ones I will engage with in this section. However, this has been a supplementary argument, and the analysis has been confined to the positive affect of the intergenerational dynamic on the historical information being related by the narrator. To draw too much attention to the intersubjectivity of the interviews would emphasize that these interviews are, in fact, different

Whitman, Dialogue with the Past, 48-49; Levin, “Authentic Doing,” 8-9.

Alessandro Portelli, “What Makes Oral History Different,” in The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), 45-58.

81 Whitman, Dialogue with the Past, 13.

79 80

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from interviews conducted by adults; a risky proposition if your audience is skeptical of young people’s ability to produce credible historical work.

But it’s not always positive, and the need for oral history educators to defend the legitimacy of student contributions has led to a silence surrounding the ways in which the intergenerational dynamics interfere, at times, with the transmission of history and memory across generations. The problems that emerge in student oral history interviews are not something that should be obfuscated by highlighting the skillful work of student interviewers; both the pitfalls and promises constitute important primary source information on our current moment in history. The common errors that occur are not always the result of novice interviewing skills; they often highlight broader issues that interfere in intergenerational communication. For example, the tendency of a narrator to lecture a student interviewer or a student’s discomfort around the taboos of death and dying or age and aging, or a student’s timidity in interjecting with questions. In fact, these interferences are one of the things that make student oral history collections vital primary sources for educators and other historians, relative to the study of interaction between young and old, and the study of generational transfer of memory. For this reason, they are also invaluable teaching tools.

How an interview operates as a primary source is dependent on the goals of the researcher and the period of study. The evidence offered by an interview changes when the focus of investigation shifts from the period being discussed in the interview to the time of the interview encounter itself. The Real World History collection is a rich archive of source material about the Great Migration and Washington, DC, but how does the collection’s evidentiary value change if the interview encounter itself becomes the topic of investigation?

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In this section, I will discuss the Real World History collection as a collection of studentconducted oral histories that offers evidence of intergenerational relationship building, and the generational transfer of memory within a community.

Student Oral History & Intergenerational Encounter I didn’t have a substantive, one-on-one conversation with an older adult who wasn’t a relative until I was twenty-one years old, and I didn’t think anything of that. Like most young people I had been inculcated with a certain respect and reverence for the elderly, but I never thought about associating with older adults outside of familial obligations. It wasn’t until I conducted a series of oral history interviews for my undergraduate thesis that, for the first time in my life, I had extended one-on-one conversations with people in their seventies, eighties, and nineties. Through these relationships I gained an awareness of the degree to which my life was separated from older adults (especially non-relatives).

Despite the fact that the people who I interviewed gave me the gift of their time, knowledge, stories, and wisdom through a series of lengthy interviews, they all thanked me profusely for coming to talk with them. In particular, I received praise simply for being a young person who was interested in their lives and who wanted to spend time with them. While it’s nice to feel appreciated, this aspect of the experience was disconcerting and made me wonder why our interaction was so abnormal. I didn’t think I was doing anything praiseworthy. I wasn’t doing them a favor by interviewing them; I needed information, and they had it. But, when I pointed this out to some of the narrators, we discussed how little contact they had with young people who weren’t grandchildren or great-grandchildren. They also pointed out that these encounters were more circumscribed as the grandparent-grandchild relationship sometimes impeded more person-to-person conversations.

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The whole experience jumpstarted my thinking about issues of age segregation.

Intergenerational interactions are exceedingly uncommon in our age-segregated society. What are we losing as a result? Not only does this separation contribute to ageism, generational enmity, and loneliness, but we deny ourselves mutual support and seal ourselves off from relationships with other people. In a society that’s increasingly multi-generational as people live longer, a lack of intergenerational interdependence creates wasted potential for collaboration.82 As I began working with students, I learned my experience was not atypical. Most of the Real World History students I’ve worked with have very few, if any, relationships with older people outside of older relatives. And relationships with older relatives were frequently mediated by other adults in the family. For most students, this makes identifying a narrator for their interview one of the most nerve-racking components of the project.

In a society segregated by race, age, social class etc, oral history interviewing provides an occasion for people who would not normally interact to come together and build relationships.

While a project can provide opportunities to simultaneously bridge a variety of social divisions, one unifying element to student oral history projects is the opportunity they provide to confront generational separation. The importance of this aspect of student oral history cannot be understated. As Angela Zuzman states: “The well-documented fragmentation of the American family has uprooted individuals from their shared history. We start afresh with each generation instead of drawing upon the wisdom of our inheritance. Young people are left to themselves to figure out who they are by looking only forward. …The elder who tells the story is granted an audience, a sign of respect for what they have to offer. Each question, asked with interest, acts as a key, unlocking the relevance that had been seeping away from them with age. The young person stretches outward, connecting words with their own experience; the world

Marc Freedman, Trent Stamp, “Overcoming Age Segregation,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, March 15, 2021, https://ssir.org/articles/entry/overcoming_age_segregation 82

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becomes a tiny bit more inspiring and manageable. In the alchemy of storytelling, they both transcend time and space.”83 Age segregation fosters loneliness on the part of older adults, but young people’s disconnection from older people also inculcates a different form of loneliness, as it denies them perspective. Because they lack meaningful conversations about life with older people, young people often view their struggles as personal deficiencies that they need to figure out for themselves. People grow up without a sense of the wholeness of life. This is an issue for everyone, but for Black people, age segregation holds even more dangers. So much of the history and culture of Black communities is passed down orally that age segregation poses a real threat to its transmission. Institutionalized white supremacy means that age segregation represents a threat to the transmission of Black history and culture as well as the healthy replication of Black personhood.

As a Black oral history educator working mostly with Black students, this is especially important to me. Forming intergenerational relationships with Black elders as a 21-year-old helped me put my life into perspective and see myself in history. Difficult experiences felt more manageable as narrators discussed low moments and lessons learned or shared wisdom about how they had learned to move through the world. As we talked, I felt these people not only embodied my past in the present, but they were also my future, and I began to see my life more holistically. These are major benefits of oral history education.

Student oral history projects The benefits of the process of oral history have long been a draw for educators to incorporate oral history into the classroom. While helping develop research skills, oral history

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Angela Zusman, Story Bridges: A Guide for Conducting Intergenerational Oral History Projects, (Walnut Creek, CA: Routledge, 2010), 12.

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projects also help students develop intangibles such as respect, empathy, self-confidence, social responsibility, etc.84 Oral history projects also present opportunities to develop meaningful partnerships between schools and the local community. For place-based educators, oral history projects easily fit into units on local history and facilitate the generational transfer of memory while simultaneously enhancing community cohesion, fostering community identity, and bridging generational divides.

Existing oral history curricula rarely address preconceptions about older or younger people directly. While they acknowledge benefits of intergenerational interaction, and you see the language of “bridging generational divides” and “building bridges,” this is often framed in terms of the benefits of student oral history projects to a community. It is less of a political project. In fact, student oral history projects are often spoken of as an encounter between the present and previous generations, as the title of Whitman’s book, Dialogue with the Past, would imply. The language of these guides and texts sometimes refers to “past generations” or “future generations” as if we were not all living in the present or occupying the same room during the interview. This risks playing into common ageist tropes which run counter to the expressed intent of the projects. This is not to say that these preconceptions and barriers are not being eroded in the kind of interactions that occur in the interviews or that educators do not value this aspect of their work, but more that they have not directly addressed its subversive nature. One guide that I encountered that does gesture towards this issue from the perspective of preparing the student interviewer is the “Tell Me Your Stories” curriculum of the Living Legacies Historical Foundation. The curriculum asks students to examine their preconceptions about “senior citizens,” age, and aging. However, this is the only curriculum where I saw this issue

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Whitman, Dialogue with the Past, 2, 106-107.

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approached. More often, the emphasis is on older people, and the opportunity the interviews provide for them to revise some of their assumptions about youth as they see the young people’s curiosity, professionalism, and idealism.

The promises and pitfalls of intergenerational relationships in our own society are recorded in these interviews, both in the moments where generational divides were successfully traversed and in the moments in which they precluded mutual understanding. This makes them invaluable sources for examining the nature of these relationships and how they affect the sharing of history from one generation to another in our time. We tend to conceive of these divides as somehow natural and immutable but it is important to remember that this age segregation is a creation of the twentieth century and that intergenerational dynamics may look very different one hundred years from now.85 These archives will provide a historical record of what a particular type of generational encounter was like in our time.

In this section, I will examine the intersubjectivity of these Real World History interviews, with a particular focus on intergenerational dynamics, in order to highlight how these dynamics play out in this situation.

Intergenerational Dynamics of the Real World History Collection The interaction between younger people and older people recorded in these interviews not only inflects the historical information being shared but allows the listener to eavesdrop on several different types of intergenerational encounters in a particular time and place. Below you will see some graphics that illustrate the basic dimensions of the intersubjectivity of the Real World History Collection.

Marc Freedman, Trent Stamp, “Overcoming Age Segregation,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, March 15, 2021, https://ssir.org/articles/entry/overcoming_age_segregation 85

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Race & Ethnicity of Interviewer (21) African American Black/African American (12) NonBlack

Black (28)

Non-Black Black/Non-African American (7) Non-African American

Figure 7.

Due to the design of the project all of the narrators are African American. Thus, figure 7 illustrates the number of interviews in the collection that crossed racial and ethnic lines. Just over half of the interviews (21 of 40) are an encounter between a young African American person and an older African American person. Of the interviews that cross racial and/or ethnic lines, seven interviewers are white Americans, seven interviewers are non-African American Black people, four interviewers are Latinx, and one interviewer is of Middle Eastern descent.

Gender dynamic between interviewer & narrator 20

19

18 16 14

Young woman interviewing older woman

12 9

10 7

8 6

Young woman interviewing older man Young man interviewing older man

5

4

Young man interviewing older woman

2 0 Young woman Young woman interviewing interviewing older woman older man

Young man interviewing older man

Young man interviewing older woman

Figure 8.

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The majority of the interviews (19 of 40) are an encounter between a younger woman and an older woman, and, of those interviews, thirteen are between a young Black woman and an older Black woman. The least represented of these categories are the encounters between a young woman and an older man. Only eight interviews in the collection are between family members making the majority of the interviews an encounter between relative strangers.

Family Interviews Vs. Non-Family Interviews

8

Non-Family (32) Family (8)

32

Figure 9.

All are encounters between teenagers (15-18 years old) and narrators who are at least 60 years old. The oldest was 100 years old at the time of her interview. It is this intergenerational dynamic that I will examine in more depth. This is by no means an exhaustive study, but it may suggest directions for further investigation.

Interactions between teenagers and older adults are rare enough that some narrators even remark upon it in the interview. Referencing the student-narrator field trip to see One Way Ticket, Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Henry Breedlove, a retired construction worker, expresses just that:

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HENRY BREEDLOVE: [00:22:52] And I’ll tell you another thing, too, it was a blessing, for me, when we went to New York with y’all kids, young peoples and everything like that.

MATTIE JONES: Mm-hm.

BREEDLOVE: [00:23:02] It was, uh, to me, it made me feel special. I can’t speak for the rest of them.

JONES: Mm-hm.

BREEDLOVE: [00:23:08] But it made it, made me feel special, because, you know, here’s some young people that would take time, that want to mingle with the elder peoples. Not just because they came from the South or nothing like that, or they history or nothing like that. But it was, uh, I enjoyed it. And I hope maybe, maybe next time when y’all go again, maybe we can tag along again.86 At earlier points in the interview, Mr. Breedlove discusses feeling as though his grandchildren don’t listen to him. That this reflection came unprompted at the end of the interview indicates that Mr. Breedlove felt this was important to express. The emphasis Mr. Breedlove places on the social interaction between young and old is particularly insightful: He doesn’t point to the interview as what was most impactful for him, but rather that a group of young people would want to socialize and spend time in community with elderly folks. In fact, he seems to view the interview as less meaningful when he says, “Not just because they came from the South or nothing like that, or they’re history or nothing like that.” The historical information they are recording is one thing, but that doesn’t feel as meaningful to him as the opportunity to simply interact with teenagers as people.

While it’s easy to romanticize the idea of young and old coming together, these interactions come with their own challenges and present important learning opportunities for the students. Generational segregation often leads young people to accept stereotypes of the elderly.

But collaborating with their narrator over the course of a semester (through pre-interview discussions and the interview itself) provides a number of occasions for unlearning ageist beliefs.

Henry Breedlove, interview by Mattie Jones, January 2016, Center for Inspired Teaching ‘Real World History’ Oral History Project, People’s Archive, District of Columbia Public Library http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:272293 86

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Sometimes, these understandings are eroded through the process of developing a relationship with someone. Other times, the narrators address them directly: TENEE' CRUMLIN: [00:36:37] You have good memory, to remember all this.

(Chuckles) IRENE PIERCE: Well— CRUMLIN: All the— PIERCE: —I just—.

CRUMLIN: —dates.

PIERCE: [00:36:42] My voice is bothering me, and I can’t talk. Well, I should—. How old do you think I am? How old am I? CRUMLIN: [00:36:54] I have no clue. Hm, okay.

PIERCE: [00:36:55] Well, you got my age there! How old am—?

CRUMLIN: [00:36:58] Okay. I’m going to have to—.

PIERCE: [00:37:00] Oh, you gotta, (laughs) you got to add up what it is? (Turns another student observing the interview) Where do you go to school?

STUDENT 2: [00:37:07] Cesar Chavez.

PIERCE: Hm? STUDENT 2: [00:37:10] Cesar Chavez.

PIERCE: [00:37:12] Well, you see, these hearing aids, this hearing aid I have is not working at all. Say it again.

STUDENT 2: [00:37:17] I said, Cesar Chavez.

PIERCE: [00:37:19] Mm-hm. Okay. (Turns back to interviewer) It take you that long to decide?

CRUMLIN: [00:37:26] Can you tell me? I don’t want to guess the wrong number.

PIERCE: [00:37:29] Come on now.

CRUMLIN: [00:37:32] You’re sixteen.

PIERCE: [00:37:33] What?

CRUMLIN: [00:37:34] You’re sixteen.

PIERCE: [00:37:35] I’m sixteen? (Laughter) Thank you.

CRUMLIN: [00:37:39] See, I did a guess, so you have to tell me now.

PIERCE: [00:37:42] Okay, you take the sixteen, (laughter) multiply it by, (students laugh) (pause) multiply sixteen by seven.

CRUMLIN: [00:37:58] Oh, jeez.

PIERCE: [00:38:00] Okay, do it—. This is the way you do it. Okay—.

CRUMLIN: [00:38:02] 'Cause this what I got—.

PIERCE: [00:38:04] No, no. You go by tens, okay? This is now 2014.

CRUMLIN: Mm-hm.

PIERCE: [00:38:12] And I was born 1926. You just subtract— CRUMLIN: [00:38:16] Yeah, that’s what I did.

PIERCE: —1926 from 2014. And you get—. What do you get? What do you get? You don’t want to say it?

CRUMLIN: No. PIERCE: [00:38:24] Why not? I don’t look it? (Laughs) CRUMLIN: [00:38:28] No, you don’t.

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PIERCE: [00:38:30] (Laughs) Oh, you want to complement me? (Laughter) I don’t act it?

CRUMLIN: No. PIERCE: [00:38:36] What do you expect a person my age to be like?

CRUMLIN: [00:38:40] I don’t know. I mean, that shows you kept yourself up or something. Like, I don’t know.

PIERCE: Hm? CRUMLIN: [00:38:46] I don’t know. It just shows you’re healthy, I guess.

PIERCE: [00:38:49] (Pause) What would you imagine—? (Turns to observer) How old am I? STUDENT 2: [00:38:55] Eighty-eight.

PIERCE: [00:38:56] Yes. Now, what would you imagine and eighty-eight-year-old doing?

CRUMLIN: [00:39:04] (Pause) Like during—? I don’t know. At home, you know—.

PIERCE: [00:39:15] (Turns to observer) What would you imagine? (Crumlin laughs) STUDENT 2: [00:39:18] I don’t know. (Laughter) You are real healthy for your age.

CRUMLIN: Yeah, like—.

STUDENT 2: [00:39:22] 'Cause a lot of, like, I don’t know. They—.

PIERCE: [00:39:25] What, don’t you have a grandmother?

STUDENT 2: Yeah.

PIERCE: [00:39:27] She, but she’s not eighty-eight. See, your grandmother—.

STUDENT 2: [00:39:29] She’s like seventies, though. But she—.

PIERCE: [??]

STUDENT 2: [00:39:32] She moves around and stuff.

CRUMLIN: [00:39:33] My grandmother don’t tell us her age.

PIERCE: [00:39:36] She won’t tell you [her] age? Oh, well, God has blessed you to be whatever age that you are.

CRUMLIN: Mm-hm.

PIERCE: [00:39:45] Well, I have a, one of my granddaughters tells me, she said, “Grandma, you’re just old that’s all. You’re just old.”87 This is a fascinating moment of intergenerational communication. Whether or not the student was implying that Rev. Pierce has a good memory for an elderly person, the comment plays into stereotypes about the mental acuity of older adults and sparks an interesting back-andforth in which Rev. Pierce directly challenges the students’ beliefs about the elderly. The interaction also reveals the discomfort students feel around addressing issues of age and aging as well as some of the stereotypical beliefs they hold. Their comments about her liveliness and

Rev. Irene Pierce, interview by Tenee’ Crumlin, Center for Inspired Teaching ‘Real World History’ Oral History Project, People’s Archive, District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:272273 87

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quick-wittedness and her vivid memory reveal how these things fly in the face of their expectations about older people. To cope with that, they position her as an exception, as in their comment about how it “shows you kept yourself up or something.”

Taboos around death and dying and age and aging are frequently confronted in interviews with older adults. Students often experience discomfort when narrators raise these issues.

Perhaps something about the situation of talking to a young person about events distant in time may provoke these kinds of ruminations from the narrators. Remarking on the passing of his exwife causes Julius Watson to talk about the passage of friends and family: JULIUS WATSON: [00:48:05] So, I thought I wouldn’t miss her, but I do miss her. I do miss her. I miss her as a friend, not like my wife.

ISAIAH THOMAS: Mm-hm.

WATSON: [00:48:12] Now, that’s the mother of my kids—some of my kids—but I miss her. I really miss her. So, you know, that was one of the most hurtful things that ever happened to me, when I lost her and my mother and my father, my grandmother. When you get older, this is what you’re going to have to experience. You’re going to see everybody around you die. Your main focus in forties, in late forties, is going to funerals.

I’m serious! Going to funerals. Every—I’m talking about you—every week there’s somebody you know. “Oh, alright. Somebody dead.” You remember Mr. Butch that used to work here? You don’t remember Mr. Butch [who] used to work in the—. What was your first year here? We had an older guy. You came here in sixth grade or seventh grade?

THOMAS: [00:49:06] Sixth.

WATSON: [00:49:07] No, you don’t remember him.

THOMAS: Mm-mm.

WATSON: [00:49:09] Because it wasn’t a—. When he left here, we hadn’t had, um, we didn’t have sixth grade yet. We started in the seventh grade. There, well, he died.

Everybody I know—. And it’s painful to see your grandma, both of your grandmas, both of your granddads, your, all your aunts—I had no uncles. I only had one uncle—all of them died. And now, I’m the old person in the family. I used to be the youngin, now I’m the old person. Now, my grandkids say, “Oh, Grandad, you’re just old.” And I’m like, you wait. Wait until your time comes and stuff. Yeah, it’ll happen. I didn’t, uh, I didn’t realize that—. I didn’t think I would live this long. I thought I would be gone by fortyfive. I thought I’d—. I never thought I’d make sixty-two. I thought I’d be dead and in hell by forty-five years old. And then I look around, I’m at fifty. Damn, I’m surprised. Now I fifty-five? Whoa. Now sixty? Now, I can’t wait until seventy. (Thomas laughs) You know? And see what comes off of that.

THOMAS: Mm-hm.

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WATSON: [00:50:34] But it’s a hard pill to swallow, to see somebody you really love die, and you can’t see them no more.88 At the end of this interaction, Isaiah proceeds with his next question, perhaps out of discomfort with what Mr. Watson is telling him, or simply not knowing how to respond. Mr. Watson was reacting emotionally to what he was telling Isaiah, which may have also created discomfort. In the following example, Eva McLeod, the only centenarian in the collection, speaks dispassionately about her own death: STEVEN ALVAREZ: [00:28:43] In what ways was segregation still a part of your daily life after it had ended?

EVA MCLEOD: [00:28:51] Good question. (Pause) Well, some people just look at you and look at the color of your skin and, (pause) and think you’re lesser than they are, you know? (Pause) I’ve gotten to the place now where, I don’t really care what happens. I’m getting myself, trying to get myself ready for my next move, because I just had my 100th birthday, in July.

KAY WASHINGTON: [00:30:09] So what’s your next move?

MCLEOD: [00:30:12] Hm? WASHINGTON: [00:30:12] What’s your next move? (Laughter) MCLEOD: [00:30:13] (Laughs) My next move? My next move might be death.

(Laughter) It might be, so I’m trying to get myself ready for it.89 In this interaction, her daughter, who was observing the interview, teasingly asked her mother about what her next move could possibly be as a one-hundred-year-old. Eva McLeod responds matter-of-factly about her own death. Once again, after a pause, the student interviewer moves on to his next question without comment. These kinds of moments can inform both the study of intergenerational relations and our pedagogy with student oral historians as they prepare for their own interviews. Not only does it serve to prepare students to confront such issues in their interviewing, but it also gets them thinking about the wholeness of life and increases their

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Julius Watson, interview by Isaiah Thomas, April 6, 2016, Center for Inspired Teaching ‘Real World History’ Oral History Project, People’s Archive, District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:272295 89 Eva Mcleod, interview by Steven Alvarez, December 7, 2018, Center for Inspired Teaching ‘Real World History’ Oral History Project, People’s Archive, District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:270812

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comfort with these kinds of taboo topics. The life cycle is directly addressed in this interview where Ms. Louise Baxter matter-of-factly talks about death, not only her own, but of people she has known and goes on to say that it is part of the life cycle: KENYA AGUILAR: [00:26:05] When you moved, like fully moved down here, was there anyone that you met that you’re still friends with today?

LOUISE BAXTER: [00:26:18] Friends of mine? Do I have, did I—? The people that I met then, am I friends with them now?

AGUILAR: Yeah.

BAXTER: [00:26:28] (Pause) No. (Aguilar laughs) No, most people are gone already.

You know— AGUILAR: Yeah.

BAXTER: [00:26:35] —they've passed, most of my friends. And the ones that haven’t passed, I don’t know where they are anymore, you know?

AGUILAR: Yeah.

BAXTER: [00:26:43] I don’t have any of the friends that I used to know, you know, when I first came here.

AGUILAR: Yeah.

BAXTER: [00:26:50] Mm-mm. No, sure don’t. There was one man that I met, and he is a—. I was trying to get in touch with him now, because I called him, and he'd always give, order calendars for the next year.

AGUILAR: Mm-hm.

BAXTER: [00:27:09] And so, I haven’t been able to contact him. I don’t—. He’s a vet, so I’m not sure if he’s in a hospital or what. So I haven’t been able to contact him, but I’ve known him for years. But I don’t know where he is now. So, he’s probably in the hospital or something.

AGUILAR: Yeah.

BAXTER: [00:27:29] Uh-huh. But he'd always send me a calendar for the next year. Uhhuh. But I haven’t received one this year, as yet, you know?

AGUILAR: Yeah.

BAXTER: [00:27:40] So I’m not sure what happened. But he’s about the only one that I know, that I used to know, really. (Aguilar chuckles) Uh-huh. Oh, no. Most of or all of the people are gone already. Because I’m eighty-five, myself, so, uh, and you get in the eighties and whatever—you know?—you just pass on, you know?

AGUILAR: Yeah.

BAXTER: [00:28:11] We have lived a full life, ‘cause we were supposed, the bible said we supposed to live at least seventy. And after you leave seventy years, you’re going on over, you know?

AGUILAR: Yeah.

BAXTER: [00:28:30] Uh-huh. Yeah, that’s the way it is. (Pause) But if everybody who was born lived, lived forever, it would be something wouldn’t it? It’d be horrible. (Both laugh) AGUILAR: [00:28:45] I don’t know how that would work.

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BAXTER: [00:28:46] That’s right! (Aguilar laughs) So, you know, people are being born, and they have, people leave, you know?

AGUILAR: Mm-hm, yeah.

BAXTER: [00:28:55] That’s the way—. It’s a cycle.

AGUILAR: Mm-hm.

BAXTER: [00:28:57] Yeah. (Laughs) So if everybody stayed, who was born, it would be something. (Chuckles) Probably too many people. Yeah.

AGUILAR: Yup. BAXTER: [00:29:06] Yeah, too many. (Laughs) Oh, boy. But that doesn’t happen, it wasn’t to be.

AGUILAR: Yeah, it’s not.

BAXTER: [00:29:14] No, no, we’re here for a while, and then we have to go. Mm-hm, exit. Then somebody comes, a new one comes in. Mm-hm. That’s the way it is. (Pause) So, that’s about it.90 This interaction demonstrates some of the additional benefits students receive through these encounters with older adults.

Much has been made of the benefits of the student-teacher relationship for the historical information related in an interview, but less attention has been given to the ways this dynamic can interfere with the transmission of history, memory and the forging of an intergenerational connection. Students aren’t the only ones who come into the interview with preconceived notions about the other party. There are times in which it’s clear that the generational disconnect is on the part of the narrator who may be addressing the interviewer as a representative of “kids these days” as opposed to an individual. These are the growing pains of intergenerational relationship.

Student and narrator, together, stumble over the misconceptions and stereotypes they hold about each other. The following excerpt is from an interview where the narrator, Jettie Brown, a retired teacher in DC, spends a significant amount of time dispelling what she assumes the student believes or doesn’t know about her upbringing.

JETTIE BROWN: [00:10:13] And then we would have, we'd have [to] kill the hogs.

Daddy would get someone; they'd go down to shoot the hogs. You always had to kill Louise Baxter, interview by Kenya Aguilar, January 17, 2016, People’s Archive. http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:272812 90

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them, clean 'em up. And we would have a nice fresh ham. Have you ever had a fresh ham?

LONDON HART: No. BROWN: [00:10:28] You don’t know about a fresh ham?

HART: Mm-mm.

BROWN: [00:10:31] Where you come from?

HART: [00:10:32] I’m from DC. BROWN: [00:10:33] (Incredulous tone) You don't know nothing about, nothing that I’m saying?

HART: [00:10:38] Sounds good, though! (Chuckles) BROWN: [00:10:40] It was happy—! We was happy, cause we didn’t know—! I was born there, in Blair! And the doctor—. I didn’t go to the hospital; My mother had me in the house, in the little wooden house. So I didn't go to the hospital to be born, the doctor came and mother had me on the farm. I came through in the house, and so it was really— . It was a happy time, because we knew nothing else but the farm. Born on the farm; Raised on the farm; Lived on the farm; Everything on the farm. And Daddy wanted to take us out, he would get in the wagon. And we would get in the wagon and visit my aunts, and that was on the farm. We had no car; We had no transportation. We walked to church, a long ways to church. And we was happy. Just jumping along—. Like I said, there's eight of us, initially it was five of us that started going—. And we was happy. It was my oldest sister—my sister named—my older sister's still living on the farm, right there where I was born at. Yeah, she came here for—. Because her daughter moved—you know, she had nine children, my sister did, my older sister—and she moved to Maryland.

And my older sister came up from the farm, and she said she wouldn't live nowhere else but on the farm. And we chatted and we laughed about the good old days. [00:12:07] -BROWN: [00:12:44] And so my farm life was beautiful, because I knew nothing else about nothing else. No television; No phones. After very many years that's [when] we got a phone, and it was called "a party line," and your teacher might understand that. The line had about three or four people on it. We had a special ring. If it ringed twice, that was us.

And my mother'd pick up the phone, but we didn't pick up the phone; we didn't touch the phone, in those days. It was only my mother that controlled those things. And so, but we was happy—. The main thing I want to get you to know, young man: We was happy with our money. One pair of shoes a year. Daddy could not afford, cause we only got a hundred dollars a year. [00:13:41] -BROWN: [00:14:51] Even though we didn’t have a lot, I want you to know that—so [when] you’re married, getting married and grow up—you don't have to buy a whole lot to make children happy, just love them! My parents loved us! So we didn't worry about— . And when dinnertime comes, and the hot biscuits, and the molasses—. Bet you don't know about that. (Hart laughs) And we’d put some butter in and stir it up—. Oh my gracious! Mm. Oh where's my tissue? Oh my God. Oh my gracious, the butter, and the biscuits—oh, they were so good—hot biscuits taken out the oven. Did you know about that?

HART: No.

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BROWN: [00:15:32] Those were good days! (Hart laughs) You missed it, beauty of life that god had prepared for us.91 In this excerpt, Ms. Brown is responding to the idea she holds that London, as someone born and raised in the city, assumes that life on the farm was a life of misery and deprivation.

She is countering this narrative at length, though London never says anything that would indicate he held such preconceptions. In the following example, Julius Watson also makes some assumptions about historical narratives he assumes his student interviewer believes.

JULIUS WATSON: [00:30:33] The way we grew up, we didn’t go over that side. We didn’t want anything to do with that side [of] the tracks. Over where they lived, that’s your area. You stay over there; we stay over here. So, we didn’t want to infringe on them, not like now how they forcing us to go to school with them and stuff. Like we ain’t want that. We ain’t even want that! We had the better school! We had the better school! Our school was better; our school was cleaner; our school was better. The teachers cared; you did more work. In their school, you could—. You know what stopped me [from] smoking cigarettes going to, we called it the white school? (Pause) All you had to do is take a piece of paper and write, sign my mother’s name on it, and that would allow me to smoke cigarettes.

ISAIAH THOMAS: [00:31:25] Oh. WATSON: [00:31:26] At school.

THOMAS: Mm-hm.

WATSON: [00:31:28] And I did, but I signed her name, I forged her name.

THOMAS: Mm-hm.

WATSON: [00:31:35] And, nobody wouldn't say—. You go, long as you go to the smoking area, [you could] sit there and smoke cigarettes. And, go to study hall, you sit in study hall you couldn’t—. Oh, at the Black school, there was no such thing as putting your head down on the desk and going to sleep! You did that, oh my God! I guarantee you that you would have a welt on the back of your neck as big as a ruler, because they’re going to come and hit you across your neck. Ain’t no such thing as doing this like it’s—.

Uh-uh. Mm-mm. You was in class, you were gon' be sitting there reading books; you gon' be doing some, some kind of exercise. And your next class, whatever [it was], if you went to math, you had to be doing some math stuff; if you went to science, you better be reading something; You doing the history? Same thing, you better be reading something.

Wasn’t no sitting around, and wasn’t no like destroying of—. We had—. Our high school it was so clean. I swear. I swear, you, the floors were so clean, it's like you could eat off the floors. It was so clean. It wasn’t even a mark on the—. They didn’t allow you—!

Jettie Brown, interview by London Hart, December 24, 2017, Center for Inspired Teaching ‘Real World History’ Oral History Project, People’s Archive, District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, DC., http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:282582 91

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Like, you know, because we wore hard sole shoes, it wasn’t—. Only—. You wore tennis shoes as athletic shoes.

THOMAS: Mm-hm.

WATSON: [00:32:51] And—. But, to wear a pair of leather-sole shoes and then go down the hallway and do like this here? You know, leave that little mark like that?

THOMAS: Mm-hm.

WATSON: [00:33:04] You better be down there scrubbing that up. (Thomas laughs) You better get that up, 'cause they see you, you gon' end up doing that whole hallway. I had to do the entire gym! I had to mop the gym for a week, because I ran across the gym floor in shoes. Now, I didn’t leave mark! It was just the principle.

THOMAS: The principle.

WATSON: [00:33:23] You don’t run across this here. And our school was like that until the end when they, they integrated. It was the worst thing that ever happened. Black people got the worst part of the deal. Because, as a teacher, if I really didn’t care about you, it’s not, I know I got to teach, but I don’t have to give you the full effect. So, I can give you just brief outlines. And, I can write a paper, sign my name on it, and give it to them—and it don’t have no substance to it—and they'd give me a C. Ain’t nothing on it.

Ain’t nothing on it. You know, it’s some writing there, but there’s no substance. It might be: "Jon Doe went down the hill and come back," and that’s it. And they’ll give me a C. Because they didn’t give a damn whether you learned. They didn’t want you to learn. It was, you were getting smart? They don’t want smart niggas around. You know, they don’t want smart Black people. So, our teachers cared. Our teachers made us speak—.

Right now, we speak flat, but in school, you spoke flat perfect English.

THOMAS: Mm-hm.

WATSON: [00:34:43] From South Carolina, you know what I’m saying?

THOMAS: Mm-hm.

WATSON: [00:34:46] Flat perfect—. And they wouldn’t allow anything—. They didn’t accept secondary stuff. They didn’t accept being less. They made you strive to be better and stuff. I, I was into so many organizations. I was into so—. Because the teachers encouraged me, you know?92 In his emphatic statements about the quality and rigor of Black education in his hometown, Mr. Watson uses his own experience to intervene on what he sees as an incorrect historical narrative about segregated education. Due in part to the framing of legal arguments made in the struggle for school integration, in talking about their educational experiences, many attendants of segregated Black schools feel the need to push back against popular narratives which characterize segregated Black education as inferior. While in an interview conducted by

Julius Watson, interview by Isaiah Thomas, April 6, 2016, People’s Archive. http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:272295 92

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an adult, the narrator might provide this corrective narrative for posterity, in the context of the student-teacher relationship, it is more of a direct intervention on the student’s education. Mr. Watson seizes the opportunity to disabuse the student of the narrative that Black schools were always inferior to white schools and that Black students wanted to be in the white school.

Whether or not this is true or is being perceived through a lens of nostalgia would need to be triangulated with historical research about schools in his particular town in South Carolina. But his statements about all “Black people” are examples of historical interpretations he is making based on his recollection of the period.

This excerpt demonstrates the ways in which the intergenerational student-teacher dynamic can both elicit different responses and interfere with the transmission of information.

While Mr. Watson feels emboldened to make this point in a way he may not with an adult interviewer, to a student these types of responses typically feel like an unsolicited lecture. These moments are less evident when more relationship building has occurred prior to the interview but instances such as this or the excerpt of Mrs. Brown can be good teaching tools to help students recognize when a narrator is speaking to them as an individual and when they are being addressed as part of a perceived group or audience.

In these interviews, older adults have so much to offer, but students do as well. In reviewing students’ interviews I’m always impressed with the maturity, respect, and attentiveness they show narrators even when they are occasionally being talked at instead of talked to/with. On the occasions where that does happen, students always handle it with grace and almost always manage to move the interview to a space of more meaningful reflection.

Well aware of the fact that young people get a lot of unsolicited advice from older people but simultaneously recognizing the opportunity in this intergenerational encounter, Cosby and I

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have begun to encourage students to develop a question that prompts narrators to dispense genuine advice rooted in their own life experience. Students often find effective ways of framing such a question before concluding their interview: CLARENCE HAYWOOD: [00:42:46] You don’t have to let circumstances determine your outcome. That’s what I would like to leave with you.

SAMEER GLAZERMAN: Yeah.

HAYWOOD: [00:42:59] You know, just because the circumstances were not good at first, doesn’t, don’t let that write your story.

GLAZERMAN: Mm-hm.

HAYWOOD: [00:43:11] Because you can do it. If anybody else has done it—. And that was my thing too: Well, did anybody else do this? Yeah? Well, I can do that too!

GLAZERMAN: Yeah.

HAYWOOD: [00:43:21] There’s nothing stopping me from doing it but me.

GLAZERMAN: Right.

-GLAZERMAN: [00:59:59] We’re reaching, we’ve just reached one hour. So I want to ask, from your story what are some of the most important lessons that you feel it’s important to know for a young person like myself?

HAYWOOD: (Pause) Nobody owes you anything but respect— GLAZERMAN: Mm-hm.

HAYWOOD: —and opportunity.

GLAZERMAN: [01:00:24] Right.

HAYWOOD: [01:00:25] You know? They should respect you as a human being, not get in the way of your opportunities. (Pause) I think you have a chance to do great things, because DC has a lot of educational institutions to choose from. My first school was called Federal City College. It’s now UDC [University of the District of Columbia]. It was put together by Marion Barry, and there’s a law school there. There’s a low-cost law school over there, too. So if you want to be anything, including a lawyer, you can do it.

All you have to do is apply yourself.

GLAZERMAN: Mm-hm.

HAYWOOD: [01:01:30] Don’t let one door closing be the last door you try.

GLAZERMAN: Right.

HAYWOOD: [01:01:38] [Chuckles] That has always been my philosophy.

GLAZERMAN: Yeah.

HAYWOOD: [01:01:48] So, one door close, knock on another one.

GLAZERMAN: [01:01:52] Find another one, yeah.

HAYWOOD: [01:01:54] If you get knocked down, get back up. Because there’s going to be some rough times. It’s just how life works. So if you can’t find opportunities in one place, you look somewhere else. You’re going to get discouraged, but pick yourself up.

GLAZERMAN: Right.

HAYWOOD: [01:02:20] You know, get with like-minded people. If anybody else has achieved in an area, you should believe that you can do it too. Don’t, don’t think there’s anything that you can’t do. Just keep trying.

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GLAZERMAN: [01:02:41] Alright. Well, thank you very much— HAYWOOD: Mm-hm.

GLAZERMAN: —for sitting down for this interview. It was great to hear all about your story.93 These interactions can be all the more poignant when they occur with a narrator who is a family member. In the structure of an interview, asking for advice from a grandparent or older family member is received differently, as in this example, where Sarah Ann Hardy gives heartfelt advice to her granddaughter, Ramani Wilson: RAMANI WILSON: [01:01:22] So we talked about, you know, a lot of the things about your journey; What advice would you give to me or just future generations on taking risks, uh, like you did, at a young age?

SARAH ANN HARDY: Well, since you're—. I mean, I tried to, um, give this—. Well, you are my granddaughter; You’re sixteen years old; You have a great head on your shoulder; You have the common sense of a thirty-year-old—.

WILSON: (Laughs) Thanks.

HARDY: [01:02:02] You really do, you have a good common sense. And that’s with a S-E-N-S-E. (Wilson chuckles) So my advice to a sixteen-year-old with thirty-year-old common sense, is to complete your education, go as far as you can, and—with an open mind—and try to enjoy the ride that you're on. Because sixteen becomes twenty— WILSON: Mm-hm.

HARDY: —twenty becomes twenty-eight, twenty-eight becomes forty; That's how fast time goes.

WILSON: Mm-hm.

HARDY: [01:02:45] Time flies. You don't realize how fast it flies, but it does fly. So along the, sixteen 'til you get to be thirty, enjoy the ride; get your education; learn as much as you can; and, treat people the way you want to be treated; honor God, and God will honor you. That’s my advice to my granddaughter.

WILSON: [01:03:15] Thank you, Grandma. So, I know those were some lessons that you learned, probably because of your journey, right?

HARDY: Oh yeah.94 How can studying the past better people’s lives here and now? By treating working-age people as the proprietors of the present moment, we preclude ourselves from harnessing the immense potential of our multi-generational society. Elderly people are not “the past” or “the 93

Deacon Clarence Haywood, interview by Sameer Glazerman, January 5, 2020, Center for Inspired Teaching ‘Real World History’ Oral History Project, People’s Archive, District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:277111 94 Sarah Ann Hardy, interview by Ramani Wilson, December 26, 2016, People’s Archive. http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:277080

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previous generation,” and young people are not “the future.” We are all here in this moment together and facilitating meaningful exchange in the interview across generational lines bolsters intergenerational interdependence and allows us to take advantage of what everyone has to offer.

Student oral history takes advantage of the simultaneity of younger and older generations: JABESSO YADETTO: [00:54:34] So, through your journey, through your migration, what do you feel, as an individual, how do you feel about, uh, about where it’s taken you? And also, how it ties into the greater movement? How do you see yourself, as a person taking this immense journey, from escaping from such a hostile environment and coming to a new place where you knew virtually nobody? How do you feel that, how do you feel about your role in history?

KATHY SENIOR: [00:55:16] Mm-hm. Well, one thing that jumps out as you were speaking that, is I came from racism, to racism.

YADETTO: Right.

SENIOR: [00:55:29] And I am currently living in the midst of racism and white supremacy.

YADETTO: Mm-hm.

SENIOR: [00:55:36] So [in] that timeframe and that gap, even though there have been many doors opened, many privileges afforded—. And we’ve worked hard, because we wanted things to be different for you, for young people. We want you to appreciate the suffering that has gone into this.

YADETTO: Mm-hm.

SENIOR: [00:56:02] (Pause) But the struggle is still here, and that is a, that’s heartbreaking. I’m getting older now, I can’t march up and down Pennsylvania Avenue— YADETTO: Mm-hm.

SENIOR: [00:56:18] —and run around in the Capitol Building. (Both laugh) But it don’t, we’re not getting a lot of young people who are willing to do that either and— YADETTO: Right.

SENIOR: —that cannot be.

YADETTO: Mm-hm.

SENIOR: [00:56:30] So the struggle, for me, is that—with my walker, my rollator—I got to still get out there and march [to] some extent.95 In this moment, which is, in a sense, a fleeting moment in which these two individuals co-exist in time, the elder passes on her plea to the younger generation to value and take up the mantle of her struggle, which is the struggle of people who came before. We must

Kathy Senior, interview by Jabesso Yadetto, January 1, 2016. People’s Archive. http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:272297 95

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simultaneously appreciate the work that has been done by those who came before us, while also building on and carrying forward that work.

An educator’s role as a facilitator between students and the elders in their family or community bridges the gap of age segregation. The entrenchment of generational separation makes this role vital. Oral history interviews provide a structure that empowers students to learn through relationship with an elder, a form of learning that cannot be replicated in the classroom.

This requires that we accept that elders can speak for themselves and that students can facilitate their own learning. Ultimately, my hope is that through this process, some intergenerational solidarity can be built which students will take far beyond their history class. In the documents archived in the library, these dynamics can be observed, analyzed, and used as teaching tools.

Downplaying the disconnects and discomforts in student oral history interviews denies us valuable information and educational material. Some of the moments concerning age, aging, death and dying, for example, could be used as authentic material to spark important discussions.

These materials are all the more powerful for being situated in an interaction between someone the students can see is like themselves and an older person.

Beyond our belief in the archive’s contribution to the historical record, we also firmly believe in the transformative power of the process itself. While the oral histories produced by these partnerships are important historical resources, the lessons learned through each student’s semester-long collaboration with their narrator is a core value of this project. Students gain far more through these partnerships than skills and new historical understandings. In developing a relationship with their narrator, students nurture and strengthen community bonds, enhance their sense of local identity, learn invaluable life lessons from their elders, learn how to communicate across generations, and erode generational segregation. How can we take these insights about

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oral history as a complex social process into account as we think about engaging young people in an oral history project? This is one question that drives the curricular restructuring that will be discussed in Part III.

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Part III – Reimagining the Great Migration Oral History Project From 2020-2021, several factors converged leading us to restructure and reimagine the Great Migration Oral History Project beyond the year-by-year adjustments described in Part I. While the initial impetus was born out of the requirements of the People’s Archive, the restructuring coincided with developments in my thinking about oral history and oral history education.

An opportunity to rethink the Great Migration Oral History Project The establishment of the Real World History collection at the DC Public Library necessitated a restructuring of the Great Migration Oral History Project since additional assignments would have to be incorporated to meet the requirements for transcription, indexing etc. of the People’s Archive. However, the changes I will describe here are much deeper and more fundamental than additional assignments.

Just after the partnership between the DC Public Library and Real World History was reestablished, I began the Oral History Masters of Arts Program (OHMA) at Columbia University in the fall of 2020. Along with my deepening involvement with the Oral History Initiative at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, this graduate program, too, has had a significant impact on my practice. The restructuring necessitated by the connection to the People’s Archive presented an opportunity for reimagining the Great Migration Oral History Project in light of my learning in the OHMA program and my work with the NMAAHC Oral History Initiative.

I was in a good position to devise and implement changes to the project. After conducting a series of oral history interviews with the instructors, spending time with the student work, and

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having communicated with narrators from years past, I got a good sense of both what had been tried, and what had and had not worked in prior iterations of the course. Additionally, I wasn’t an outside observer trying to implement best-practices without an understanding of the particularities of the course. I’d been heavily involved with the program for four years, working directly with Cosby and students.

When I first became involved with Real World History in the fall of 2017, I viewed oral history from the perspective of an academic historian. I conceptualized oral history primarily as an archival practice in which the interviewer or researcher was creating sources for future historians. Having studied African American history, my focus on the archive was inflected with a social history bent. I saw the recording and archiving of oral histories as critically important for mitigating archival bias and allowing for the production of more accurate and inclusive history.

In fact, my introduction to oral history was in direct response to archival erasure of Black communities in New England. I viewed the archive as the primary objective.

I also viewed the interview process, and the archiving of the interview, as constituting reciprocity. A conventional approach to oral history holds that archiving the interview and sharing interview materials with narrators is a sufficient form of giving back. If the interview is part of a particular research project, narrators will be invited to the exhibit opening or sent a copy of the book. The logic is that the interview process itself is beneficial for narrators who have the opportunity to have an attentive and well-prepared listener who is interested in them and their story. Additionally, through the preservation of the interview, the narrator’s story is being honored and acknowledged for its historical significance. In this sense, the interview represents a form of public affirmation that the narrator’s knowledge and experiences are important and worthy of preservation.

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This is a standard logic for oral history projects and one that I held (and hold). I have seen (in both my own work and in students’ work) how this level of reciprocity is, in many cases, not only satisfactory but cause for narrators to express deep gratitude. Since Cosby and I had established a home for the interviews, I came into OHMA feeling that the class was finally where it needed to be. However, through coursework, readings, and discussions with faculty and peers at OHMA, I began to view the project in an entirely new light.

My time in OHMA caused me to rethink reciprocity in my own oral history practice. I also came to see that the oral historian has a responsibility not only to collect and archive, but to share their interpretations and engage the community in generative discourse. Archiving the student interviews remained a priority of mine, but I began to consider how the program could more actively share the students’ work with the community. I found the oral historian Alessandro Portelli’s reflection on reciprocity particularly thought-provoking as I contemplated changes to Real World History: “Our first responsibility in restitution, then, is to the mutual growth of ourselves and the people with whom we engage in dialogue, and it begins at the same time as the interview.

Therefore, restitution means more than returning the raw materials; it is also necessary to offer a tentative discourse, a possible organization, a range of interpretations. …While accepting criticism, we must take responsibility for the fact that restitution is meaningless unless it changes the previous image of the community. Restitution is not a neutral act, but always an intervention, an interference in a community's cultural history.”96 Class discussions around topics such as this got me revaluating the oral history project. Beyond the opportunity to work with a student and have their interview archived, what was the project giving back to narrators? While recording and preserving community history is of critical importance, how could the knowledge produced by Real World History students be shared more

Alessandro Portelli, “Tryin’ to Gather a Little Knowledge: Some Thoughts on the Ethics of Oral History,” in The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue, (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997) 68-69.

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actively with the DC community? How could the oral history project stimulate conversation within the community, and among the narrators, about the meaning of this history? Could we move beyond a passive, ‘they-have-access-to-the-archive’ mentality and imagine something more? I had been so focused on the need to archive the interviews that I hadn’t thought about other directions the project might take. In this way, as Glen Whitman notes, student oral histories can have a benefit for the students’ education and the community: “An oral history project becomes an opportunity not just to participate in the preservation of the past but also to provide a service to a community while learning in a more authentic and enduring manner.”97 Interestingly, as I began to read about oral history education, I observed how trained educators have a very different approach to oral history. Due to their disciplinary training, they tend to emphasize the need for authentic audiences and public presentation of student projects, to the exclusion of archiving and publication. Howard Levin, director of the Telling Their Stories: Oral History Archives Project at the Urban School of San Francisco, goes as far as to describe the archiving and publishing of student oral history as a paradigm shift “to both the field of oral history and to the notions of the limitations of students’ contributions to society. …[S]tudentconducted oral histories are not only a healthy and constructive educational practice but also a critically important new addition to the field of oral history collection and archives.”98 Having been trained as a historian and not an educator, I came to Real World History focused on the archival preservation of the student interviews without recognizing the importance of public presentation beyond the archive. In fact, I was surprised to hear that there was skepticism about

97 98

Whitman, Dialogue with the Past, 106.

Levin, “Authentic Doing,” 8-9.

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the historical value of the student oral history projects. It had never even crossed my mind to question whether the students’ work was worthy of preservation.

Now that we had a public archive, I was particularly interested in the potential for collaborative interpretation of the collection by narrators and students for the community.

Through public discussion of this work, how could we instigate conversations about the significance of this history to the DC community? This also directly connected to the learning objectives of the course, which sought to introduce students to the work of historians. Part of doing historical work is sharing historical production publicly with the aim of sparking conversation and raising historical consciousness. I began to see untapped potential in the project.

My desire to have some form of a public event was reinforced as I reached out to narrators about their oral history interviews. Unprompted, one narrator spoke directly to this idea I had been considering: “I have begun to listen to one of the tapes and hear many similarities about the family and racial dynamics that existed in Culpepper, VA as well as in my childhood upbringing. I really look forward to hearing all of the [interviews] and actually hope to meet the interviewees one day. Is there a plan to ultimately bring us all together in a panel type discussion??”

Email communication from Ms. Thelma Jones, Dec. 5th, 2020 In an oral history interview I conducted with Edith Crutchfield who had worked with an RWH student in the 2018-2019 school year, she too expressed a desire for a greater degree of public engagement with the interviews. In further conversations, Ms. Crutchfield suggested that we hold public events at senior centers.

Another aspect of the project which I hoped to build upon was the connection between the students and their narrators. The public event could be a part of both giving back to the DC

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community and an opportunity for extending student-narrator relationships without the mediation of the instructors. As was discussed in Part II, section 2, there is an important social dynamic in these intergenerational interactions, which are simultaneously natural and unnatural: The oral transmission of memory, history and culture from older generations to younger generations is a natural aspect of intergenerational relationships. However, these kinds of relationships are uncommon as our society has become increasingly segregated by age over the past 100 years.

I’ve learned through this project that most students have never had a relationship with an older person who was not a family member or one which was not mediated by an adult and I have found this to be a common observation among oral history educators.

I felt a strong drive to expand or develop the relationship-building component of the project. It is not fair to expect that this will occur naturally without conscious facilitation aimed at creating spaces for that kind of relationship. At a logistical level, I felt that a focus on the relationship would improve the quality of the interviews: The more trust and familiarity students and narrators build, the more robust the narrator’s sharing during the interviews would be. I also felt it would increase the student’s dedication and sense of responsibility to the project.

In addition, facilitating space for intergenerational relationships to develop is also subversive in many ways and I have come to see it as the most important aspect of oral history education. A focus on creating the conditions for intergenerational relationship has the potential to break down both students’ assumptions about older people and stereotypes and preconceptions that older people have about youth. This runs counter to the production-oriented culture of schools by encouraging students to slow down and focus on a relationship instead of on completing a task.

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Major Changes to the Great Migration Oral History Project Reworking the Great Migration Oral History Project entailed a few major changes. I will discuss them in the following order: 1) The timeline, 2) the narrator-student field trip, 3) the interview index project, 4) in-class interviewing, 5) a creative final assignment, and 6) the public event.

Timeline: First and foremost, the project needed to begin much earlier in the semester to allow sufficient time for each step of the process. From personal experience working with Real World History students, I felt that the timeline of the oral history project needed to be extended, but knowing that an additional project, the interview index & summary, would need to be incorporated sealed the deal. My opinion was further solidified through conversations with Cosby and Caitlin who both discussed the consistent issues students had with completing all the assignments due to the schedule of the project.

The identification of a narrator is the aspect of the project that takes students the most time (and often caused the most stress). While we encouraged students to begin outreach as soon as class began, we wouldn’t begin pressing the issue until mid-October since the students would need to write a narrator bio and begin developing questions in November. For some students this process would drag into December making the project highly compressed at the end of the semester.

The first major change I decided upon was to ask students to identify their narrator over the summer. While I saw drawbacks to this shift, I felt the positives outweighed the negatives.

Were students able to have a narrator identified by the beginning of class, this would give

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students much more room for each step of the project. It also avoids placing this responsibility on students at a point when they are already busy and only have time to do outreach on their weekends. Instead, they would be doing this outreach at a time when they could stop by a local church or community center in the middle of the day. Initiating this process over the summer would also allow any students who have difficulty identifying a narrator the time to catch up and avoid falling behind.

While this all seemed good, I knew that identifying a narrator over the summer would mean that students wouldn’t have the support of the course instructors. Thus, I created an “Identifying a Narrator” handout that could be shared with students when they received their copy of The Warmth of Other Suns (appendix 3). This handout had to serve as a resource document to which students could refer as they conducted outreach. But, as I created the “Identifying a Narrator” handout, I realized another problem with initiating this process over the summer was that students wouldn’t have a good sense of the project and the work ahead. They would need this in order to talk with potential narrators about the project. Thus, I developed a comprehensive overview of the assignment that could be a resource for students (appendix 4).

Students did most of the communicating with their narrators in previous years, but this model became a major logistical problem when archiving the student interviews. I knew moving forward that students needed to connect narrators and course instructors, so that we would have all their contact information on file. Thus, I developed a “Narrator Identification Form” that students would need to submit upon identifying a narrator (appendix 5). Returning to the American Century Project which Cosby had used in designing Real World History, I adapted this structure from the materials Glen Whitman shares in Dialogue with the Past. Implementing an important aspect of project design that I learned in OHMA, I also developed an information

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packet that could be shared with the individuals whom the students identified (appendix 6). This year will be an important trial run for initiating the project over the summer.

With the introduction of this change, some tough decisions had to made about how to ease the workload on students who are required to read the majority of The Warmth of Other Suns over the summer. I had many conversations in which students shared that reading The Warmth of Other Suns was difficult. And some were honest about not reading sections of the book. For many students this would be the largest book they’d ever read, which brings with it its own sense of pride. For this reason alone, I see a lot of value in reading the book in its entirety, but in thinking about what could be cut, I saw an opportunity.

To decrease the reading load, students could be divided into reading groups focused on a particular character: Ida Mae Brandon-Gladney, George Swanson Starling and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster. This allows the reading requirements to be greatly reduced while still allowing students to have the sense of following the narrative from start to finish. Additionally, this structure allows for more active and engaging classroom discussion in which students rely on one another instead of direct instruction from Cosby and me.

Narrator-Student Field Trip The next alteration that I initiated was the reintroduction of a joint narrator-student field trip to the Phillips Collection. As discussed in section 1, this was something Cosby organized during the first and second years of Real World History but was discontinued. In thinking about the way Cosby had done it in the past I thought it was a great idea to bring students together with their narrators to look at the art, talk about the history, and get to know one another. If students were identifying narrators over the summer, then this field trip could be taken early in the fall to

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jumpstart the narrator-student relationship. It could also be a great opportunity for me and Cosby to talk to students and narrators together about the goals of the project.

Interview Index and Abstract Knowing that several additional assignments had to be introduced to a project that was already a heavy load for students demanded that the project be spread out more evenly throughout the semester. The biggest assignment introduced by the partnership with DCPL was the interview index (appendix 8). As a derivative of the interview itself, the transcription and indexing must take place after students have recorded their oral history interview. Aware of how burdensome the interview transcription can be for students, I could not find a way to introduce this indexing assignment at that point in the semester. To do so was not only unfair to students, but I also worried it would negatively affect the quality of their final project.

This was the first major logistical hurdle introduced by the archiving process. How can we get all these documents to be produced by students on such a limited timeline? One part of the solution was to postpone the creation of an interview index until the following year.99 This served multiple purposes 1. Logistically, the time commitments of the oral history project are more significant later in the semester when students are already over-burdened. Postponing the index until the following year allows for the assignment to be introduced at a point in the semester when they have less going on.

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I drew inspiration for this innovation from the Telling Their Stories: Oral History Archives Project at the Urban School of San Francisco. In preparation for their own interviews, students work on a “Subject study” in which they produce materials related to a previous year’s project. Levin, “Authentic Doing,” 28-29.

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2. Listening to oral history interviews from the prior year fit organically into the unit focused on oral history methodology as students prepared for their own interview.

Additionally, the index could serve as the basis for interview critique and analysis.

3. Listening to student work demystifies the interview process by lowering the stakes and exposing them to their peers’ work. Listening to peers’ work helps students envision themselves as the interviewer.

4. This exercise facilitates structured engagement with interviews from previous years, instigating thought about their own approach and interview questions.

In-class Interviews Through reading other curriculum guides, I came to see that in-class interviewing is an important means of preparation for student-interviewing. The Telling Lives Oral History Curriculum Guide was particularly influential in this addition. Having established contact with so many narrators while archiving interviews, I had a group of people who knew about the class, understood the project and might be interested in participating as a class guest. Additionally, having the interviews archived and easily accessible, in-class interviews with narrators from past classes would be another opportunity to get students engaging with interviews from previous years (appendix 9).

Creative Final Assignment My time at OHMA showed me a number of ways to engage with oral history interviews and to share the lessons learned from them with the public beyond academic writing. A number of our readings provided examples of ways to use oral histories to create artistic productions

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such as: theatrical performance, poetry, music, audio-visual, visual art and more. In thinking about it, I had to confront the fact that Real World History students had no means of engaging with the material outside of academic writing and analysis. Cosby has always provided rigorous, detailed feedback on student writing, and this emphasis helps students develop an important academic and life skill (especially important as they head off to college). However, in Real World History we teach history in an inter-disciplinary way with The Migration Series used alongside The Warmth of Other Suns. In a class that is attempting to teach history in more active and engaging ways, the absence of alternative forms of analysis meant at the end of the day students still had no choice but to write a paper.

If our goal is to have students engaging with the history and the primary source they’ve created then we need to acknowledge that people have different learning styles. We have many artistically-inclined students who weren’t given the opportunity to engage with their oral history in those ways. Additionally, to honor the concept of “student as expert” that is central to the Inspired Teaching instructional model, we must offer students a variety of ways to showcase their expertise and knowledge of the material. With all of this in mind, I devised an assignment that leaves room for students to engage with the interviews in a way that allows them to dictate the form while still asking them to reflect on the experience of doing the oral history project (appendix 13). This addition carries with it an additional benefit. Oftentimes artistic productions or creative presentations are more accessible to the public and connect with the public in a different way than academic writing. This will lead students nicely into their internships at institutions of public history as well as the public event.

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Public Event The final addition was that of a public event. Cosby was open to and enthusiastic about the idea of a public event but we both agreed that it couldn’t fit into the fall semester. In looking ahead to the spring semester as to when such an event could take place, we saw an opening in May. Throughout the spring semester of Real World History, students are completing an 80-hour internship requirement and working on a National History Day project. As such, while the class meets twice per week during the fall, class only meets twice per month in the spring. Holding the public event in May felt like a win-win-win.

Both Cosby and I felt that there had always been a disconnect between the first semester and the second semester of Real World History. While the National History Day Project is a unifying experience in some respects for the students in the spring semester, they’re all working on their own research project. Additionally, the city-wide NHD contest in which all Real World History students compete occurs in early April. At this point, only the students whose projects have been selected to go on to the national competition continue working on their NHD projects.

Thus, there’s little to unify the class from mid-April to the end of the year. Students are each embedded in their own internship, and the class meets twice a month to debrief on students’ internship experience. This time is also used to help any students who are competing at the national level of NHD, but introducing a public event in May gives the students something to collectively work toward after the city-wide competition. Moreover, it would constitute a culminating event for the year and closure for the oral history project. It would also extend their relationships with narrators throughout the year and provide continuity between the first and second semesters.

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In discussing what form the public event should take, we felt it was important to give the narrators an opportunity to talk with one another about the history and do some public interpretation. In keeping with the aims of the course and to introduce students to the real world of history, the students could fulfill the role of the public historian: posing questions and facilitating the conversation. Thus, we came up with the idea of a roundtable discussion between students and narrators. Throughout the spring, students could identify themes in the oral histories they recorded throughout the fall and prepare discussion questions for the public event. They could also highlight excerpts of the oral histories to serve as the basis of discussion with their narrators.

The revised Great Migration Oral History Project

Summer: Preparation for class By mid-July, students receive their copy of The Warmth of Other Suns, are informed of their reading group (#1 Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, #2 George Swanson Starling, #3 Robert Joseph Pershing Foster), and receive the project overview and “Identifying a Narrator” handout.

(Appendix 3, 4, and 5) - Part I, In the Land of the Forefathers, Part II, Beginnings, and Part III, Exodus, are read by August 31st (first day of class) Aug. 26th, family orientation gathering - Instructors introduce students and parents to class & oral history project.

Students identify their narrator by the first day of class and connect narrator with course instructors - Course instructors give a resource packet to narrators outlining the project trajectory (Appendix 6) September-October: The Great Migration Class reviews sections of Part IV, The Kinder Mistress, and work with Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series to become familiar with the Great Migration.

September 16th – Students and narrators are brought together for the first time at the Phillips Collection to explore Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series together.

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- Field trip concludes with preliminary conversation between student and narrator about the narrator’s experience and the scope and focus of interview. Students use this meeting to write a biographical sketch of their narrator September 21st – Students submit a biographical sketch of their narrator (Appendix 7) Class begins reading sections of Chocolate City (Chapters 10-14) to form a basis of knowledge on local history/context.

October-November: Oral History Practice and Methodology Class reads part V, Aftermath, finishing Warmth of Other Suns, and continues reading sections of Chocolate City (Chapters 10-14) while they are introduced to oral history interviewing through classroom activities - Students analyze and critique interviews from the RWH collection and discuss interviewing strategies October 5th – Interview timeline prepared.100 Class guest and in-class interview (Appendix 9) October 26th – Interview index & abstract project complete (Appendix 8) - Submit oral history to DCPL for archiving Late Oct. – early Nov. class completes a peer interview assignment to practice one-on-one interviewing. (Appendix 10) - Interviews assist with community building/studying class section of final exam November 4th – Interview questions prepared November-December: Oral History Interviewing December 2nd – Oral history interviews are completed. Students record reflections using Flipgrid - These are used for class discussion, but also for students when working on final product December 14th – First ten minutes of the interview is transcribed (Appendix 11) Students present sections of their interviews for group discussion and analysis.

January: Oral History Processing, Analysis, and Reflection January 11th – Interview transcription completed January 18th – Final assignment complete (two options: analysis & reflection paper or creative assignment) (Appendix 12 & 13)

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An interview timeline features biographical information about the narrator alongside historical events relevant to the interview. These timelines serve as an important reference during interviews. The addition of an interview timeline assignment was both the product of my experience working at the NMAAHC Oral History Initiative and reading the Telling Lives Oral History Curriculum Guide.

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February – April: Planning for Public Presentation Class is focused on student NHD projects and internships.

Minor portion of each class dedicated to planning student facilitation for public event at DCPL May: Public presentation Culminating public event at MLK Jr. Memorial Library with narrators, students, family members, educators, and community members.

- Students facilitate a conversation with narrators about the impact of the Migration and direction of the project Students share final products with narrators and record a final reflection together on the project (5-10min).

This thesis has been an investigation into the Real World History program created by Cosby Hunt in 2014. In Part I, I chart the development of the Great Migration Oral History Project from the program’s pilot year to the creation of the Real World History Oral History collection at the People’s Archive in 2020. In Part II, using the student interviews as a case study, I argue for the importance of archiving student oral history projects and making them publicly accessible as they both contribute to the historical record and provide primary source evidence of intergenerational encounter in a particular time and place. In the third and final part of this thesis, I conclude with a discussion of how the oral history project was redesigned with a renewed focus on community engagement and to fulfill the archival requirements of the DC Public Library.

While oral history educators have argued for the importance of archiving student oral history work based on their contributions to history, I have shown that student oral history projects should also be archived for their intersubjectivity: an interaction between a young person and an older adult engaging in the transfer of history/memory from one generation to another. These documents constitute primary source evidence of a particular way of sharing

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history and memory across generations. Rather than downplaying the more difficult aspects of these encounters, I argue that we should lean into them for what they can teach us, our students, and future audiences about intergenerational contact and relationship in this moment.

In a more immediate sense, archiving student oral history projects and making them fully accessible online provides educators with material that offers a variety of teachable moments.

Student interviews are not only worthy of examination when students exhibit skillful interviewing, or a narrator shares interesting stories and reflections. The missteps, missed opportunities, and disconnects between narrator and interviewer provide authentic material for sparking discussion and building lessons on a variety of topics related to intergenerational communication, age segregation, and the passage of history, memory, and culture across generations.

In outlining the development of the class and the thinking of the course instructors, this thesis is a useful resource for anyone interested in using the interviews of the Real World History collection. The teaching materials included below are not intended to be a wholly transferable model. Rather, I have included them with the hope that bits and pieces of this project may be transferred and adapted to create new projects or enhance existing ones elsewhere.

I don't think Jim [Percoco] could have predicted that his class would create exactly what has become of this class, and so I can't, I'm not quite sure what someone else is gonna do and spin off of Real World History. But someone probably will at some point. And that's great, and that's something to be proud of, and that's something to be, that's something to look forward to. 101 Oral history interview with Cosby Hunt, March 17, 2021

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Cosby Hunt, March 17, 2021, People’s Archive, 48.

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Appendix 1 – Center for Inspired Teaching consent form used in year 5 & 6 of Real World History.

Informed Consent & Copyright Permission for Oral History Interviews102 The Great Migration Oral History Project is a component of the Real World History Course (District of Columbia Public Schools course H72) run by the Center for Inspired Teaching. In order for the material provided by you to be deposited in the Great Migration Oral History Project Collection, it is necessary for you to sign this form. Before doing so, please read it carefully and ask any questions you may have regarding its terms and conditions.

I, ________________________________________, voluntarily agreed to be interviewed for the Real World History Great Migration Oral History Project. I understand that some or all of the following materials were collected/created as part of the interview process:  An audio and/or video recording  An edited transcript, abstract, short analysis & reflection essay, and a tape log  A photograph or other still image of me in my home or site of interview

I understand that this project is a class assignment for the Real World History class in which _____________________________ was a student during SY ______________. S/he conducted an audio and/or video recorded oral history interview concerning my participation in the Great Migration, the mass movement of African-Americans from the American South to the North and West during the period 1915 to 1970.

I herein freely share my interview and other material with the Center for Inspired Teaching and the Real World History Great Migration Oral History Project under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. This means I retain the copyright to my material, but that the public may freely copy, modify, and share these items for non-commercial purposes under the same terms if they include original source information.

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This consent form was adapted from online resources made available by the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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_______________________________________ Narrator Signature

_______________________________ Interviewer/course instructor signature

_____________________________________ Date

______________________________ Date

_____________________________________ Street address _____________________________________ City, State, Zip code _____________________________________ Email _____________________________________ Telephone

Please fill out two copies—one stays with the narrator and the other returns to Real World History instructor, Cosby Hunt at Center for Inspired Teaching. Should the narrator have any questions concerning their rights in this research initiative, they may contact Real World History instructors Cosby Hunt (202.412.9213 | cosby@inspiredteaching.org) and Max Peterson (603.412.2500 | Max@inspiredteaching.org).

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Appendix 2 – Pre-interview Worksheet used in years 1-3 of Real World History

Real World History Great Migration Oral History project Pre-Interview Worksheet Your name: ___________________________________________________________________________________ Name of the interviewee: ___________________________________________________________________ What is your relationship to the interviewee? ____________________________________________ Has the interviewee agreed to sign the release form and be recorded?

Yes ____

No ____

S/he was born in the year ___________ .

S/he moved to DC from _____________________________________________________ .

How old was s/he when s/he came to DC? _________ The first place where s/he lived in DC was ______________________________________________ .

Will you be able to record the interview on your phone?

Yes _____

No ______

Will you be able to conduct the initial interview before Thursday December 4?

Yes ____

No_____

Where can you conduct the interview in person?*

*Your interviews must be done in person and recorded

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Appendix 3 – GMOHP Narrator Identification Handout (2021-2022)

Real World History (H72) Identifying a narrator

A group of RWH narrators on a field trip to see the Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series

Welcome to Real World History! The fall semester of RWH will revolve around an in-depth study of the Great Migration – the mass movement of African American people out of the South to the North and West from 1915-1970. As part of this study, you will complete an oral history project with an individual who was a part of the Great Migration. This summer, as we prepare to embark on this semester-long project, you will need to identify the individual with whom you’ll collaborate throughout the fall. For some of you this will be as simple as asking a grandparent or great-grandparent if they would be willing to work with you on this project; for others, this will require a little more work.

Before class begins on August 31st, you must identify a Washingtonian who: 1. Was born and raised in the South 2. Moved to DC before 1970 If you don’t know someone who fits these criteria and you’re already beginning to panic about how you’ll identify a narrator, don’t worry; you’re not alone. We often hear from students that this is one of the more nerve-racking parts of the project.

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So, why do we ask you, the students, to do this? There are several important reasons: 1) Real World History positions students as historians, and historians have to get out there, do the research, and engage the communities with whom they work. This process forces students to get out into the city and connect themselves with the people and organizations of their community.

2) Identifying their own narrator gives students a sense of ownership over the project and their collaboration with their partner from the outset.

3) Students have to practice important skills, such as giving a pitch to strangers, and gain experience and comfort conducting cold-calls and presenting themselves respectfully and professionally.

4) All of us are embedded in different communities throughout the city (not only different neighborhoods, but also different communities based on shared interests, belief systems, or common causes), and through our communities we all have access to different people.

Having students identify their own narrators creates a more diverse group of interviewees with individuals coming from a variety of neighborhoods, having a variety of careers and vocations, and representing different socioeconomic backgrounds.

Ideas about how you might want to approach recruiting a narrator.

First and foremost, start as close to home as possible. If there is no one in your family who fits the criteria, reach out to institutions in your neighborhood (churches, community organizations, etc.) where you may be able to find a narrator. Here are some of the ways students have found their narrators in previous years:     

 

Asking parents, older family members, teachers, family friends and others to connect them to potential narrators in their networks Reaching out to community organizations they were a part of (such as their church, community garden, scouting troop, community sports league, etc.)

Asking around at community gathering places such as a barber shop or hair salon (yes, two students have identified narrators this way!)

Contacting civic organizations in their community (such as the Anacostia Coordinating Council or Hillcrest Community Civic Association) Calling/stopping by local churches to ask if they might be connected with some who could serve as a narrator. Some churches students have worked with in the past are: o Asbury United Methodist Church o Shiloh Baptist Church o Greater Refuge Temple of Washington, DC o New Bethel Church of God in Christ o Vermont Ave. Baptist Church o St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church o National Presbyterian Church Reaching out to the DC Department of Aging and Community Living (DC DACL) Calling/stopping by local senior centers (such as Bernice Fonteneau Senior Wellness Center in Petworth or Malta House in Avondale Terrace - Chillum, MD)

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Before you begin reaching out to people, prepare a pitch that: 1) explains who you are, 2) explains what you are asking of them, and 3) outlines the project.

As you approach potential narrators, you should not be trying to convince anyone to participate in the project if they are not interested. A successful oral history interview requires a genuine willingness to participate. Without the buy-in of the narrator, your oral history interview is going nowhere, fast.

Here is a loose formula you can use to design your pitch:

Hello, my name is [your name]; I’m a [10th/11th/12th] grader at [your high school] and I’m seeking some help with a project for my history class. Do you have a moment to talk?

I’m part of an after-school history class called Real World History in which I’m studying the Great Migration and DC history. The Great Migration was the mass movement of African Americans from the South to the North during the 20th century.

As part of my class, I need to conduct an interview with a Black/African American person who moved to DC from the South before 1970. Is there anyone at your [church, organization, group, etc.] who might be willing to work with me on this project? If so, could you please give them my contact information: [your name, phone number, email]

If you’re leaving a message, before hanging up make sure to (slowly and clearly) reiterate your name, your school, and your contact information.

Once you have identified an individual who fits the profile and is willing/available to participate in the project: 

Complete and submit the Narrator Identification Form

Inform your narrator that your teacher will be following up with more information about the project!

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Appendix 4 – GMOHP Overview (2021-2022)

Real World History (H72) Great Migration Oral History Project

Real World History students with their narrators after recording an oral history interview.

The Great Migration Oral History Project is the focus of the fall semester of Real World History and is designed to put students’ learning about the Great Migration and their skills as historians into practice.

Over the course of the fall semester, you will collaborate with a Black Washingtonian to record an oral history interview about that person’s life and experiences moving to DC from the Jim Crow South. While research and preparation will be vital for this project, a successful oral history requires that you develop a working relationship of trust and familiarity with your narrator. Thus, in addition to developing your historical thinking skills, this project will help you cultivate important interpersonal skills that are transferable to other forms of community engagement.

Through this project you will:     

Gain experience analyzing primary and secondary source material Become familiar with 20th century American, African American, and DC history Learn how to conduct oral history interviews Gain archival research skills and learn about archival preservation Create and archive your own primary source: an oral history interview with someone who was a part of the Great Migration

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You will be doing the work of a historian actively documenting the experience of the Migration, but the work of the historian does not end with information-gathering. As a class, you will share your findings and knowledge with the DC community. First, the oral history you and your narrator record will be archived at the DC Public Library and made fully accessible to the public on Dig DC; Then, together as a class, you will organize and facilitate a public event about the impact of the Migration at the DC Public Library, stimulating discussion about the meaning of this history to the DC community.

What is the Great Migration, and why are we studying it?

The Great Migration was a massive migration of African Americans from the American South to cities in the northern and western United States. From beginning to end, roughly six million African Americans migrated out of the South. When the Migration began in the 1910s, 10% of African Americans were living outside the Southern U.S.; by its conclusion in the 1970s, nearly half of Black America (47%) lived outside the South!

In recent scholarship, the Migration is divided into two periods: the first Great Migration (19151940) & the second Great Migration (1940-1970). Though we will study the Migration in its entirety, through the oral history project we will be recording the history of the latter half of the Migration and how it was experienced in Washington, DC. The Great Migration completely altered the demographic landscape of this country and redefined the modern American city. The DC you know is a product of this history in terms of politics, language, music, food and even the physical layout of the city. Together, you and your narrator will explore this transformation.

Source: “The Great Migration, 1910 to 1970,” United States Census Bureau, September 13, 2012, https://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/020/.

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What is oral history, and why will we be conducting interviews?

Oral history is the transmission of history or knowledge from one person to another through narrative and storytelling. This knowledge is usually, though not always, transmitted orally.103 For the purposes of this project, we can think of oral history as people’s recollection and retelling of their first-hand experience of history.

Oral history has many different uses, but one of the primary reasons that historians turn to oral history is to understand the human experience of history and the ways that people make meaning of their past. In an oral history interview these two processes are interconnected as the narrator is both recalling and interpreting their past experiences for future listeners.

Another common reason that historians record oral history is to fill in gaps and omissions in our understanding of the past. The histories of women, people of color, working-class people, queer communities, etc., have not traditionally been as well documented by professional historians.

Beyond that, much of what was recorded about marginalized groups and communities was not created with their input nor inclusive of their perspectives.

We’re turning to oral history for our study of the Great Migration for two main reasons: 1. As a leaderless movement spanning six decades, the Migration is a story of everyday people. Oral history interviews allow us to understand this larger history by exploring how it played out in the context of one person’s life.

2. Oral history interviews allow for migrants’ understanding of their own migration experience to take central focus. This focus allows us to see how individuals relate memory and personal experience to a broader collective experience, and thus, how a collective experience starts to become history.

Informed by the structure of our main text, Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, your interview will touch upon the following themes: 1.

2.

3.

4.

Life in the South Migration Life in the North Retrospection and reflections

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For example, people who communicate through American Sign Language (ASL) do not transmit their “oral history,” orally. For this reason, oral history is referred to as narrative or story history in ASL.

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Project timeline & assignments: (*** = assignment will have a separate assignment sheet)

 Sep. 2nd (Thurs) – Narrator identification form submitted*** 

At our first in-person class session, students will submit a form with contact information for their narrator. Each student is responsible for identifying their own narrator for the oral history project.

 Sept. 16th (Thurs) – Narrator-student field trip to Phillips Collection 

Class will gather at the Phillips Collection to explore Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series with their narrators. The course instructors will then discuss the oral history project with the group, answer any questions narrators/students may have, and the evening will conclude with the first pre-interview discussion between students and their narrators.

 Sept. 21st (Tues) – 250-300 word narrator bio completed*** 

Based on their preliminary discussion at the Phillips, students will write a brief biographical sketch of their narrator.

 Oct. 5th (Tues) – Interview timeline prepared. 

Based upon pre-interview discussions with narrators as well as course reading, each student will populate a timeline with biographical information and historical events relevant to their interview. This timeline will serve as an important reference during the interview.

 Oct. 26th (Tues) – Interview index & abstract complete*** 

Students will produce an index which divides their interview up into short intervals along with an accompanying summary (brief) of the topics discussed and a list of questions posed.

 Nov. 4th (Thurs) – Set of interview questions prepared. 

Students’ questionnaires should have at least 3-5 open questions for each section of the interview: 1) Life in the South, 2) Migration, 3) Life in the North, 4) Retrospection and reflections.

 Dec. 2nd (Thurs) – Oral history interview complete 

Students will record an oral history interview with their narrator (minimum duration: 45 minutes).

 Dec. 14th (Tues) – 10min of interview transcript complete  Jan. 4th (Tues) – Interview transcript complete*** 

Each student will transcribe (type up, word-for-word) the entirety of their oral history interview. Expect roughly six hours of transcription for each hour of audio.

 Jan. 18th (Thurs) – Final assignment complete*** 

Each student will complete a final assignment engaging/analyzing their oral history interview as a primary source. Students may elect to complete an analysis/reflection paper, multimedia piece, or an artistic piece with an artist’s statement. These final products will be on display at the end-of-the-year public event.

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 May – Public event with narrators at DC Public Library 

Throughout the spring semester, the class will organize a public event about the significance of the Great Migration to Washington, DC. Students will facilitate a roundtable discussion between their narrators about the meaning of the Migration to the DC community.

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Appendix 5 – GMOHP Narrator Identification Form (2021-2022)

Real World History (H72) Great Migration Oral History Project Narrator Identification Form

Your name: ___________________________________________________________________________

Name of the interviewee: ________________________________________________________________

When & where were they born?

When did they move to DC?

How old were they when they came to DC?

What was the first place they lived in DC

What is your relationship to the interviewee?

Narrator contact information PHONE:

EMAIL:

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Appendix 6 – GMOHP Narrator Information Packet (2021-2022)

Real World History Great Migration Oral History Project | Information Sheet

Thanks for your interest in working with a Real World History student on their Great Migration Oral History Project! Please take a moment to read this information about the project and the Real World History program.

This packet will address the following questions:     

What is Real World History?

Who are the teachers?

What is the Great Migration Oral History Project about?

What is an oral history interview?

What should I expect if I agree to work with a Real World History student?

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What is Real World History?

Real World History is a year-long after-school history class open to high school students in DC public and public charter schools. With the goal of bringing history to life for young Washingtonians, the class introduces students to the field of history as something people “do,” not memorize.

Real World History has two parts: In the fall, students do a deep-dive on 20th century DC history and the impact of the Great Migration on Washington. As part of this study, students record an oral history interview with someone such as yourself who made the move to Washington from the South before 1970.

In the spring, students are placed in internships at museums and historic sites in DC and compete in the National History Day competition. They also organize a public event about their oral history project at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library (DCPL) in May. Who are the teachers?

Our names our Cosby Hunt (left) and Max Peterson (right), and we’re co-teachers of Real World History.

Cosby Hunt is a high school teacher here in Washington. A native Washingtonian, he began his teaching career in the District in 1997 at Bell Multicultural High School. He currently teaches history at

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Thurgood Marshall Academy in Anacostia. In the fall 2014, he founded the Real World History program and has been teaching the class ever since. He is married and has two sons (12 & 14).

Max Peterson works in the Oral History Initiative at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and has co-taught Real World History with Mr. Hunt since the fall of 2017. He was born and raised in New Hampshire, and has lived in DC since 2017. He is recently married and lives in Anacostia.

What is the Great Migration Oral History Project about?

The District has changed tremendously over the decades, and it continues to change, fast. The city that young Washingtonians are growing up in today is quite different from the Washington of the 1990s, let alone the 1960s.

How better to get students plugged into the history of their city than to have them talk to older people in their community? In this project, students learn about the past and present of Washington by focusing in on one important aspect of DC history: the movement of Black people from the South to the DC region in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. This influx of

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people was part of larger movement now called the Great Migration in which six million Black Americans moved out of the South to cities in the North and West between 1915-1970.

Throughout the fall, students study the Great Migration by reading The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson and work with someone like you who made the move from the South to Washington, DC, before 1970 to record an oral history interview about the experience moving to DC from the South.

If you decide to participate in this project, you will have the opportunity to review your interview and decide whether or not to have it archived at the DC Public Library in the Real World History Collection.

What is an oral history interview?

Unlike a journalistic interview, an oral history interview centers on people’s recollection and retelling of their life experiences. In other words, oral historians are interested in the stories people tell about their lives.

Oral history interviews have the long-term goal of being archived and made accessible (in full) to future generations. This means that interviewers usually take a broad look at an individual’s life starting with their family and upbringing. This helps future listeners get a better sense of the person talking.

This style of interviewing often means that the interviews are long, but most Real World History interviews do not exceed an hour.

The narrator, or the person being interviewed, has much more control in an oral history interview. Topics of the interview are usually discussed in advance and developed collaboratively between interviewer and narrator. Interviewers ask open-ended questions that prompt the narrator to elaborate on personal experience. Names, dates, and facts are not usually the focus of oral history interviews. After the interview, the narrator is consulted about how the interview can be used, and whether or not it is to be archived.

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What should I expect if I agree to work with a Real World History student?

The oral history project will take place in stages between September and January. If you agree to work with a student this fall, there are two things that we ask you to commit to: 1) That you join us for a field trip to the Phillips Collection on September 16th to see Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and talk about the oral history project.

2) That you sit for a 45-minute to 1.5-hour oral history interview with the student sometime in November. This meeting can take place wherever is most comfortable for you. The interview may take place at your home, a public library, the interviewer’s school, etc. The student will audio record the interview, so the location should, ideally, be fairly quiet.

Through pre-interview discussions, you and the student will work together to decide what topics will be discussed in the interview. The basic structure that we encourage the students to follow (based on our main text, Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns) is as follows: 5.

6.

7.

8.

Upbringing/life in the South Move to Washington, DC Life in Washington, DC Retrospection and reflections

After the project is done, the students will begin organizing a public program about the Great Migration for the DC Public Library. The event will take place in May at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, and we invite you to participate in the event, if you are interested and available.

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At the program, students will facilitate a roundtable discussion between narrators about the meaning of the Migration to the Washington DC community.

Project timeline:  Sept. 16th 4:30-6:00pm (Thurs) – Narrator-student field trip to Phillips Collection  Class will gather at the Phillips Collection to explore Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series with their narrators. Over dinner, the course instructors will then discuss the oral history project with the group, answer any questions narrators/students may have, and the evening will conclude with the first pre-interview discussion between students and their narrators.  Nov. – Dec. – Students & narrators record oral history interviews  Students will record an oral history interview with their narrator (minimum duration: 45 minutes).  May – Public event with narrators at DC Public Library  Throughout the spring semester, the class will organize a public event about the significance of the Great Migration to Washington, DC. Students will facilitate a roundtable discussion between their narrators about the meaning of the Migration to the DC community.  Fall 2022 – Interviews are archived by the People’s Archive of the District of Columbia Public Library and made publicly accessible via Dig DC. Questions?

Contact Cosby Hunt at Cosby@inspiredteaching.org or 202-412-9213

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Appendix 7 – GMOHP Narrator Bio (2021-2022)

Real World History (H72) Narrator Bio One of the first steps to your oral history project is to write up a short bio (biography) containing basic information about your interviewee’s life from childhood to the present. In order to write this bio, you will need to gather biographical information through pre-interview discussions with your narrator.

The narrator bio should be a brief and broad-strokes summary of the interviewee’s life. This bio does not need to be too intensive, but it should be at least 300 words. Two sample narrator bios can be found below. Writing a narrator bio has several purposes: 1) 2) 3) 4)

It will provide an opportunity for you to develop familiarity and trust with your narrator.

This information will guide further background research as you prepare for the interview.

Biographical information is vital for developing appropriate interview questions.

The bio will be featured in the catalog record of your interview to introduce the narrator.

Your first pre-interview discussion will take place during our field trip to the Phillips Collection, but you will need to coordinate subsequent conversations with your narrator. During these preliminary conversations, make sure to cover basic information such as:       

 

Their full name When and where they were born Basic information about their family (such as the names and occupations of parents, how many siblings they had, etc.) and where they grew up.

What schools they attended Places the narrators has lived When and why they moved to Washington, D.C. Their chosen occupation, profession, vocation, career, etc. (Note: If your narrator does not work in wage-economy, this does not mean that they do not “work.” Indicate their occupation(s) whether or not they are paid for their labor) Their passions and hobbies Any important events, turning points, or milestones in their life. You can ask about common life events, such as when they met their partner or spouse (if they have one) or when their children were born (if they have any), but make sure to ask your narrator to identify any important moments/events in their life.

After you’ve had your conversation, ask if they have a photograph of themselves that they would be willing to share with you, OR if they are willing to let you take their picture. Remember, if your narrator does not want to share a photo with you, that’s totally fine!

Once you’ve written the bio, share it with your narrator for their review.

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Appendix 8 – GMOHP Index and Abstract Project

Real World History (H72) Oral History Interview Index In this assignment you will review an oral history interview from last year’s class, create a timed index of the interview, and write an interview abstract. While this project is an important listening activity for the class and will serve as the basis for class discussion, there is a practical purpose to this assignment as well.

As you know, by the end of the semester you will have written a narrator bio, recorded an oral history interview, and created an interview transcription. But, for an interview to be archived at the People’s Archive of the DC Public Library, it must have all of the following: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5)

A signed consent form A narrator bio An interview summary A complete interview transcription And a timed interview index

Through this project you will produce the final materials for one of your peer’s interviews, allowing for it to be archived and made publicly accessible. Next year, another Real World History student will do the same for your oral history project.

An interview index is a document that divides an audio recording into short intervals of time and features a brief (2-3 sentence) summary of the topics discussed in each interval. Indexes increase the accessibility of audio recordings since they help researchers quickly navigate to specific sections of recordings while conducting research.

The timed sections featured in your index should reflect shifts in the discussion and do not need to be a uniform interval of time. As you’re listening to the interview and reading the transcript, make a note of the points where the conversation takes a turn or there is a shift in focus.

Moments such as these will indicate where you will want to begin a new section in the index. In case it is helpful to be able to physically mark the transcript, everyone will be provided with a hard copy of the transcript for their interview.

Each timed section featured in the index must be accompanied with: a brief summary of the topic of discussion, and a list of the questions posed during the section. These short summaries do not need to include the details of what is discussed (the reader can listen to the audio or consult the transcript for the that). Instead, try to identify the topics and themes being discussed by the narrator.

Once you’ve completed the interview index, it’s time for the final piece of the interview, the abstract. An interview abstract is a one-paragraph summary of the contents of the oral history that identifies the key themes and topics addressed in the interview. Abstracts are incredibly important since they often are used by researchers to make quick decisions about whether or not an interview is relevant to whatever it is they are investigating.

Below you will find a sample of an interview index with commentary. A properly formatted template will be provided to you before you begin the assignment.

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Appendix 9 – In-class Interviewing Lesson Plan

Real World History (H72) In-Class Interview Materials: 

Oral history interviews from the Real World History collection

Learning objectives:    

Prepare interview questions informed by preliminary research (class readings and archival listening) Cultivate interviewing skills through interview critique and practice with close listening and posing follow-up questions Learn how to operate recording technologies Develop a more conscientious approach to working with their narrator by listening to a narrator reflect on their experience of working with a Real World History student

Overview: To provide more face-to-face interaction between students and narrators, people who have been Real World History narrators in the past will join class (one guest at a time) for in-class interviews and discussion. Guests will spend an hour with the class (5:30-6:30pm) to allow for time to prepare and debrief. The in-class interviews will build upon the oral history interviews in the Real World History collection and serve as an opportunity to practice both archival listening skills and the listening skills required during an interview.

Before the in-class interview, students will be assigned the archived oral history interview with the narrator and will develop interview questions based on their listening. Students will also be asked to identify what they feel are the strengths and weaknesses of the interviewer’s approach which will serve as the basis of a class discussion with the class guest about their experience in the interview.

Homework: -

Class listens to the narrator’s archived oral history interview in preparation for their visit.  Narrators will also be asked to listen to their interview in preparation for class.

Students prepare/identify:  At least two questions that they would like to ask the narrator derived from the interview.  At least one thing they think interviewer did well in the interview (interviewing strategies/tactics, listening skills, etc.).  At least one thing they felt the interviewer could have improved upon.

Procedure/activity: Before the class guest arrives, instructors discuss the purposes of the in-class interview and explain how the interview will function.

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The instructors will leave the questioning to the class.

One student will manage the recording technology (if narrator has agreed to be recorded) The narrator will call upon students to ask questions.

After any prepared question is posed to the narrators, the class must ask two follow-up questions or a prepared question which can be directly connected to the topic, before another prepared question can be asked.

The class guest joins class for an in-class interview and discussion.

Part 1 (30min): Students are given the opportunity to pose questions to the class guest (alternating between prepared questions and un-prepared follow-up questions).

Part 2 (30min): Instructors facilitate a conversation between the class and the class guest about the guest’s experience working with a Real World History student. Together the class and the class guest will discuss what the student did well, what they could have improved upon in their collaboration with their narrator, and what advice the narrator has for the students as they work with their narrators.

Follow-up: Short term (If recorded) Instructors will review the recording and will use excerpts of the recording as the basis for class discussion.

Long term Instructors will compile a document with narrator’s feedback on their interview experience.

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Appendix 10 – Peer Interview Project

Real World History (H72) Peer Interview Materials:  

Timeline template “Helpful Hints for Oral History Interviewing” by Amy Starecheski

Learning objectives:      

Learn more about a classmate’s life experiences through an oral history interview Prepare interview questions informed by preliminary research Practice relationship building and historical contextualization Develop interviewing skills through practice and reflection Learn how to operate recording technologies Develop empathy through reflection on the experience of the narrator in an oral history interview

Overview: To provide students with the opportunity to act as both interviewer and narrator in an oral history interview, students will collaborate with a classmate to record a 20-minute oral history interview.

Students may record their interviews remotely or in-person, but they should try to interview their partner in the format in which they plan to interview their narrator.

This interview can focus on a specific topic/experience or take the form of a life history interview. This assignment will also allow students to practice having pre-interview conversations with their narrator as they prepare for their interview. During a preliminary meeting (during class time) students will discuss the topic and approach of their interview and prepare an interview timeline with their partner.

After conducting the interviews student will write a 1-page reflection about the experience of both interviewing someone and being interviewed. These reflections will serve as the basis of classroom discussions about interviewing and the experience of the narrator. Students will then share their reflection with their partner and have time to debrief with one another.

Since this project has the dual purpose of providing the class with study materials for the final exam, the fact that their classmates will have access to these interviews must be emphasized when introducing the assignment. Students may request that their interview not be shared with the class.

Procedure/activity: - Divide the class into pairs (avoid pairing students with someone from their school) and hand out timeline sheet (one per student).

- Re-introduce the interview timeline and discuss its purposes. Then, as a class, brainstorm a list of events/collective experiences that have taken place during the students’ lifetime (online - in shared Google doc. In-person - on board).

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- Give students 30 minutes of breakout time to have a preliminary conversation with their partner and indicate that they should: 1) Decide which events (from class discussion) they want to put on their timeline.

2) Talk over basic biographical information and get to know each other. This conversation should be used to add additional information to each student’s interview timeline.

3) Discuss whether or not they wish to focus on a particular topic/experience or take a life history approach. Remind students that they should ask their partner if there are any topics they do not wish to discuss in the interview.

4) Coordinate a time to do their interview in the coming days.

- When student return from the breakout, share and review the handout, “Helpful Hints for Oral History Interviewing,” and explain homework.

Homework: - Record a 20-minute life history interview with their partner. Interviews should be submitted to the instructors via Dropbox (create folder and provide students with link).

- After the interview, write a short (1 page) reflection about the experience of interviewing/being interviewed. Provide the following questions to guide student reflections: (Students do not need to answer all questions.)          

How did it feel to be interviewed? How did you feel beforehand, during, afterward?

How did it feel to be the interviewer? o What was easy/difficult, and why? o What do you think worked well, and why? What didn’t work so well, and why?

What did you notice about yourself as an interviewer?

What did you notice about yourself as a narrator?

What did you notice about your partner as an interviewer? (Be specific.)

What did you notice about your partner as a narrator? (Be specific.)

How did the knowledge that the interview was going to be shared with your classmates affect you as a narrator?

Were you to be interviewed again, what might you do differently?

What might you do differently when interviewing your narrator?

Do you think you successfully established trust and familiarity in your pre-interview discussions? Why, or why not? What might you do differently next time?

Follow-up: Short-term - After interviews/reflections have been submitted, use recordings/reflections as the basis for a classroom discussion about the experience of both interviewing and being interviewed.

Reflection questions can be used as discussion questions in class.

- Each student will then read their partner’s reflection and have breakout time to debrief as a pair.

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- Instructors will gather all materials in a Dropbox folder so students can use the collection as study materials for the “US!” section of the final exam.

Long-term - Throughout the fall, the instructors will pull clips from peer interviews for classroom critique and discussion of interviewing strategies.

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Appendix 11 – GMOHP Interview Transcription Project (2021-2022)

Real World History (H72) Oral History Interview Transcription “I didn’t really get all of the things she told me in the interview until I began the next part of the project, the transcript.” – RWH student, 2019-2020

Now that you’ve completed an oral history interview with your narrator, it’s time to transcribe the interview! An interview transcription is a written document that represents (word-for-word) what was communicated in an interview.

Thoughtfully and intelligently transcribing an oral history interview is a difficult and timeconsuming task, and your interview transcription should not be taken lightly. It is safe to expect 6+ hours of transcription for every hour of recording depending on the audio quality and your typing ability.

Transcription is often looked upon as a chore, but it is one of the most important aspects of your oral history project as it increases the accessibility of your interview. For someone who is deaf or hard of hearing, an oral history without a transcription can be completely inaccessible. On top of this, transcripts increase the interview’s accessibility for everyone by providing a written companion that can be referenced while listening to the interview.

It is also much easier to navigate through a written document than an audio file. Oral histories are long, and most people don’t have the time to sit down and listen to them in their entirety. The average person will only selectively engage with your interview in its original form by listening to the sections that interest them.

The written text of your interview transcription is the medium through which most researchers will engage with your interviewee’s oral history narrative. Since most people will be reading your transcription instead of listening to your narrator directly, you must portray your narrator’s words with as much accuracy as possible and stay true to what they were trying to convey.

A successful interview transcript not only conveys the narrator’s words, but it also captures the spirit of the encounter and gives the reader a sense of the narrator’s speech patterns – the cadence and tempo of their speech and how they construct sentences. As a transcriber you will (at times) need to make slight edits to assist the readability of the interview as a written text and to ensure that your narrator’s intention is effectively translated. “Translated” may be confusing in this context since your interview will be conducted in English, but as you begin your transcription you will notice the ways in which oral communication does not translate neatly into a readable written text. We transmit thoughts and meanings quite differently orally than we do in written language.

Below you fill find transcription guidelines and a sample of a transcript with commentary.

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Real World History transcription guidelines:  Work with a copy of the original recording when transcribing.  Listen to the recording fully before beginning the transcription. This will greatly help your ability to understand your narrator and transcribe the interview. Listening to the interview will familiarize you with the voices on the tape, patterns of speech, and the questions being asked.  Formatting – Please use the transcript template as it is properly formatted for you. If you choose to create a new document, format the document as follows: o o o o o o

Margins: 1” margins.

Font: Times New Roman, size 12.

Spacing: double spaced, no spacing before or after lines.

Indentation: .5 first-line indent for each speaker.

Page numbers: top right.

Header: Narrator’s name, bolded, aligned left.

 Properly fill in basic information about the interview on the title page: 1) Narrator’s name; 2) date of interview; 3) duration of recording; 4) interviewer’s name; 5) interviewer’s high school.  Identify all speakers’ full names (all caps, followed by a colon) the first time they appear in the transcript. Subsequently, speakers should be identified by their last name. If speakers share the same surname, include the narrator’s first initial.  Create a word-for-word transcript but omit crutch words/phrases such as "um/uh,” “like,” and “you know.” That being said, these crutch words/phrases can remain in the transcript if: 1) their removal would make the narrator’s thought confusing, or 2) their inclusion indicates something important to the reader that would not be conveyed were they omitted. For example, inclusion of “um” or “uh” could help indicate to the reader that the narrator was struggling to find the right word to describe something. You also should eliminate false starts.  When a narrator is quoting someone or recalling something someone said, use quotation marks. Grammar note: Always begin quotations with a capital letter and place punctuation inside the quotes. When a narrator is recalling/quoting their own internal through process, you should also use quotation marks. If a narrator has a quote within a quote, use apostrophes to demarcate the quote within the larger quotation. For example: PETERSON: I remember Mr. Hunt saying to me, “January is usually when I start getting the emails from students saying, ‘I didn’t think the transcript would take so much time.’ ”  Nonverbal sounds should be noted and in (parentheses). Some examples of these nonverbal communications are: (laughs), (chuckles), (winks), (groans), (grins), (smirks), (claps), (taps on table), (snaps fingers), etc.

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142 (Laughs) when speaker laughs (Peterson laughs) when someone other than the person speaking laughs (Laughter) or (both laugh) when the speaker and other participants laugh.

Avoid editorializing. I.e. (laughs), not (laughs rudely). When these occur at the end of a sentence or a clause, position them after the punctuation.  While you will, at times, need to break up your narrator’s speech with punctuation to assist the readability of the transcript, try to avoid such arbitrary punctuation as much as possible. For example, run-on sentences should only be closed by a period when it is reaching the point that it will be difficult for a reader to follow the narrator’s thought.

Sentence fragments should be left as is. EM dashes followed by a period (—.) can be used to indicate an incomplete or unfinished thought. Commas may be used to reflect pauses in the narrator’s speech. If a there is a significant pause, insert (pause) in parentheses.  Correct and [bracket] grammatical errors if they are an obvious error of speech. But, if non-standard grammatical structures are a part of your narrator’s speech patterns, ask your narrator how they would like their speech reflected in the transcription. Though we’re aiming for the most accurate portrayal of the individual's speech, our ultimate responsibility is to represent our narrators as they wish to be presented. Some of your narrators may want the transcript edited to reflect standard grammatical structures.  Titles of books, films, songs, etc. should be formatted according to the latest edition of the Chicago Manuel of Style. The Purdue Online Writing Lab has a helpful guide to Chicago Style Citation.  Preserve chit-chat to indicate the formality or informality of the interview session.  In order to reflect the tone of the interview, vulgar responses and explicit language should be retained in the transcript unless the narrator instructs you to omit or edit the words/phrase/section.  Do not use ellipses (. . .) in your transcription. This will suggest that material was omitted from the transcript.  Note the need for additional information, such as first names, dates, definitions of technical, obsolete, or slang terms. Add information using footnotes at the bottom of the page  If there is an interruption in the interview recording, timestamp the moment the recording was paused and indicate the interruption as follows: [00:38:46 – Pause in recording]  Format the notation in the center of the page as seen above. Also provide a brief explanation about why the interview was interrupted. For example:

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[00:38:46 – Pause in recording. Interview interrupted by phone call]  For any words/phrases that you are unable understand or are uncertain about, ask for someone else to give it a listen. A second opinion goes a long way! If it still cannot be deciphered, underline the section and insert two question marks in [brackets] followed by a timestamp. For example: COHEN: On, uh, Georgia Avenue, I believe it was. He had a record shop called Earl B’s Record Shop [??] [0:23:40].

Doing this ensures that the reader is aware that what is in the transcript is the transcriber’s best guess at what was said and not necessarily the narrator’s words.

Indicating the timing of such sections allows the reader to navigate to that exact moment in the interview if they wish to double check what you have transcribed.  Share your transcription with your narrator after it is complete. Always respect the narrator's right to review and make changes to the transcript, but note such edits using [brackets] and footnotes.

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Appendix 12 – GMOHP Final Assignment – Analysis & Reflection Paper (2021-2022)

Real World History (H72) Interview Analysis & Reflection Paper

The goal of this assignment is for you to reflect on your experience as an oral historian and to analyze your oral history interview in light of what you’ve learned about the Great Migration.

This paper should take the form of a reflection. Where does your interviewee’s story fit into the history of the Great Migration? And what did you learn about history itself through oral history interviewing? This assignment will require thoughtful reflection on, and analysis of, your interview as well as the class text: The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson.

Your reflection essay should contain three connected elements/discussions: 1) The historical context of your oral history (the history of the Great Migration), 2) your interviewee’s migration experience, and 3) your experience collecting oral history.

The paper can be organized however you see fit, and the topics are interconnected, but we suggest starting with an analysis of your interview in the context of what we’ve learned about the Great Migration and concluding with a reflection on the process of oral history collection.

When discussing your interview and the Great Migration, use your transcript to pull quotes from your interviewee that connect to points you are trying to make. In your paper, you should discuss at least three quotes from your interview (note that quotes will not count toward the word count).

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Organizing your ideas: In this assignment, you will need to refer to The Warmth of Other Suns as well as Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series while thinking about your interviewee’s story, but the most important piece of this exercise is your analysis and reflection.

To start, you should consider the following questions and make notes about them: 

The Great Migration & your interviewee  How does your interviewee fit into the story of the Great Migration? Does their story reinforce what you’ve learned about the Great Migration? Contradict it? Or both?  In what period of the Migration did they move? What was the larger historical context going on around them at that time?  What was their experience in the South like, and what were their reasons for leaving?  How did they adjust to life in Washington, DC?  What did you learn that surprised you most?  What was your thinking about the Great Migration going into this project?  How has your understanding of the topic changed or evolved through your oral history?  What questions were raised for you? What insights have you gained?  What was the impact of your interview on your understanding of the Great Migration?  How does your interview shed new light on the topic?  What are some similarities and differences between your interviewee’s migration story and the stories of Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Foster?  Think about their reasons for leaving, the time period, their education, their gender, their economic opportunity, their family and family history, etc.



Oral history methodology  What did you learn from preparing and conducting this interview?  Think about the process in its entirety - from finding an interviewee to finishing the transcript  What did you learn from the process itself, from participating in this oral history assignment?  What did you learn from your conversations and interactions with your interviewee?

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

      

Talk about the interactions you had with your narrator (i.e. the Phillips Collection field trip, phone conversations, your interview.) What was that relationship like?

What did you find particularly striking about this experience?

What are some things you noticed about your interview while transcribing?

How did you, as the interviewer, affect the interview?

In reviewing your transcript, do you recognize any of your own biases?

How did conducting your interview in this historical moment affect the interview?

What surprised you about yourself during this process?

How did this experience affect your interest in history?

Make notes in response to these questions. Organize these notes into the key points you would like to make in the paper. Your paper should address the two broader topics outlined above (the Great Migration & your interviewee and Oral History Methodology), but you do not need to address every question. Focus on what is most interesting/important to you.

Write an introduction which captures your thinking about the Great Migration and history before you engaged in this project and what your expectations were. Describe and explain aspects of the experience which had the most effect on you. Mention what struck you most about this experience.

In your conclusion, discuss what you see as the strengths and weaknesses of oral history as well as how your feelings about history have been affected by participating in this oral history project.

What did you expect, and how was the actual experience different? How have these experiences affected your interest in history? What concerns did it raise? What was affirmed for you?

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Length and formatting requirements: Word Count: 750 – 1250 words (double spaced) Citations: Chicago style. Chicago is the standard for historical writing, and it is what you will be using in your NHD projects this spring. Below you will find a model for the three sources you will need to cite in this assignment.

1) The Warmth of Other Suns 

First footnote:

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York, NY: Random House, 2010), [page #s] 

Subsequent footnotes:

Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, [page #s] 

Bibliography:

Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.

New York, NY: Random House, 2010.

2) Your Oral History Interview 

First footnote:

[Name of narrator – first name, last name], Oral history interview conducted by [your name – first name, last name], [Interview date], Center for Inspired Teaching ‘Real World History’ Oral History Project, People’s Archive, District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, DC, transcript, [page #s] 

Subsequent footnotes:

[Name of narrator – first name, last name], Oral history interview conducted by [your name – first name, last name], [Interview date], transcript, [page #s] 

Bibliography:

[Name of narrator – last name, first name]. Oral history interview conducted by [your name – first name, last name], [Interview date]. Center for Inspired Teaching ‘Real World History’ Oral History Project, People’s Archive, District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, DC. 3) Lawrence’s Migration Series 

First footnote:

One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, Museum of Modern Art, 2015, online exhibition, [Panel #], [URL]. 

Subsequent footnotes:

One-Way Ticket, Museum of Modern Art, [Panel #], [URL]. 

Bibliography:

One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series. Museum of Modern Art. 2015. Online exhibition. [URL].

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Appendix 13 – GMOHP Final Assignment – Creative Assignment (2021-2022)

Real World History (H72) Creative Assignment & Reflection Paper

Art can be a means of conveying history to the public, just look at Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series. The goal of this assignment is for you to translate your learning about the Great Migration into an artistic piece based on your oral history interview. This could take the form of a painting or drawing, a persona poem or a found poem, a short story, a monologue, a short audio or video piece using selections of the interview, a collage, etc.

To accompany your piece, you will need to write an artist’s statement and a reflection. In the artist’s statement, you should discuss the piece, your process of creating it, and explain the connection to your oral history interview. When discussing the inspiration for your artistic production, use your transcript to pull quotes from your interviewee that connect to points you are trying to make. If the piece is based on a particular section, include the whole section as a block quote (note that quotes will not count toward the word count).

In the reflection, you should discuss what you have learned about the Great Migration through your oral history project. Think about your understandings of the Great Migration and history as a field of study before you engaged in this project and what your expectations were. Describe and explain the aspects of the experience of working with your narrator and doing oral history that had the most effect on you. What did you learn about history itself through oral history interviewing?

The statement and the reflection should be in separate sections, but each can be organized however you see fit. The total word count for both pieces combined should be a minimum of 500 words, not including quotations from your interview.

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Organizing your thoughts & creating your piece: As long as the piece is connected to your oral history interview, you have a lot of freedom with this assignment. The piece could be inspired by the interview as a whole or based on a specific story told by your narrator. It could also be inspired by something more specific, such as a particular thought, a vivid description, or an exchange between you and your narrator.

To start, think about what part of the interview stood out to you. What do you most remember?

What struck you most? What were you left thinking about?

Once you have identified those moments, think about what drew you to them. Was it the narrator’s words, was it the visual image the words evoked, was it the performance of how they expressed something, was it the rhythm or musicality of their speech... these are all clues as to how you might best represent this artistically.

Remember that the material you are drawing inspiration from is someone else’s stories and memories. You want to honor that and think about how your narrator would want to be represented. Remember also that these will be displayed at the public event in May. Try to focus in on something manageable that you can do well within the allotted time. Often a more focused project is more impactful than one that tries to do too much. This assignment is not intended to be onerous. For example, if you want to do an audio or video production, aim for a three-minute piece at the most.

Here are some ideas for different formats of artistically presenting your oral history interview: 1. Short Story or scene: Take a page out of Isabel Wilkerson or Edward T. Jones’s book and try your hand at creating a short story narrative based on part of your interview.

2. Persona poem: Write a poem in the voice of your narrator 3. Found Poem: Arrange your narrator’s words into a poem by lifting quotes from the interview. You might repeat quotes or phrases for effect.

4. Visual art: In the tradition of Jacob Lawrence, create a visual representation of some aspect of this history to which your narrator’s story connects.

5. Multimedia piece: This could be a short video or audio piece about an aspect of your narrator’s story. One example of an audio piece based on an oral history interview with Mr. Hunt can be found here.

These are only suggestions. Let your content (what you would like to convey) suggest the form that your art needs to take. If you like, please feel free to discuss your ideas with the instructors.

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Writing your reflection: Use these questions to guide your thinking as you prepare to write your reflection. You do not need to address every question. Organize your notes into the key points you would like to make and focus on what is most interesting/important to you. 

Your learning about the Great Migration  What was your thinking about the Great Migration going into this project?  What did you learn that surprised you most?  How has your understanding of the topic changed or evolved through your oral history?  What questions were raised for you? What insights have you gained?  What was the impact of your interview on your understanding of the Great Migration?



Experience of oral history interviewing  What did you learn from preparing and conducting this interview?  Think about the process in its entirety - from finding an interviewee to finishing the transcript  What did you learn from your conversations and interactions with your interviewee?  What are some things you noticed about your interview while transcribing?  How did you, as the interviewer, affect the interview?  How did conducting your interview in this historical moment affect the interview?  What surprised you about yourself during this process?  How did this experience affect your interest in history?

Bibliography

151 Bibliography

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Blatti, Jo. “Untitled.” Review of Field to Factory: Afro-American Migration, 1915-1940, by Spencer Crew, James Sims, William Withun. The Oral History Review 16, no. 1 (Spring, 1988) 194-198.

Bockman, Johanna. “History of Potomac Gardens (Part 1).” Sociology in My Neighborhood: DC Ward Six (blog), August 30, 2011. http://sociologyinmyneighborhood.blogspot.com/2011/08/histories-of-potomac-gardenspart-1.html Boehm, Lisa Krissoff. Making a Way Out of No Way: African American Women and the Second Great Migration. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2009.

Borchert, James. “Field to Factory: Afro-American Migration, 1915-1940.” Review of Field to Factory: Afro-American Migration, 1915-1940, by Spencer Crew. The Journal of American History 76, no. 1 (Jun., 1989) 224-228.

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Freedman, Marc and Trent Stamp. “Overcoming Age Segregation.” Stanford Social Innovation Review, March 15, 2021. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/overcoming_age_segregation “Goin’ North: Stories From the First Great Migration to Philadelphia.” West Chester University, 2014. https://goinnorth.org/

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Griffin, Farah Jasmine. “Who set you flowin’?”: The African American Migration Narrative.

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Grossman, James R. Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration.

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Hardy, Charles A. III. Goin’ North: Tales of the Great Migration. Atwater Kent Museum, 1984.

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Hunt, Cosby. “Teaching Real World History with Jacob Lawrence,” Experiment Station Blog, The Phillips Collection, February 9, 2015, https://blog.phillipscollection.org/2015/02/09/teaching-real-world-history-jacoblawrence/ James Lane, Carmen and Betsy Cox. “In Search of Common Ground.” DC Digital Museum, HumanitiesDC, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBRvlwhh4c4 Lanman, Barry A. “Oral History as an Educational Experience.” EDSITEment! The Best of Humanities on the Web. National Endowment for the Humanities. Accessed September 10, 2021. https://edsitement.neh.gov/teachers-guides/oral-history-educational-experience Lanman, Barry A. “The Use of Oral History in the Classroom: A Comparative Analysis of the 1974 and 1987 Oral History Association Surveys.” The Oral History Review 17, no. 1 (Spring 1989), 215-226. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3675276 Lanman, Barry Allen and Laura Marie Wendling Ed. Preparing the Next Generation of Oral Historians: An Anthology of Oral History Education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.

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