[Reverb Effect’s theme music, lively and interrogative, plays behind the voice of a narrator, interspersed with historical clips of other voices]
Narrator [a woman’s voice]: How do past voices resonate in the present moment?
Man A: …hear the stories of your parent’s…
Woman A: yeah
Man A: …and your grandparents’ and stuff, so I’m living through them or the stories they told.
Narrator: And how do we make sense of those voices?
Woman B: No, and that’s the story of my life [echo]
Man B: And a case has been made!
Woman B: No I am not trying to void the question, I am trying to clarify the position…
Narrator: What were they trying to say? And whose job is it to find out? This is Reverb Effect.
[Intro theme slowly fades out]
[Upbeat music fades in]
Rachael Barrett: I imagine it to be very sort of serious and uptight. Like they have to check all your documents before you go in. And the archivists are a little bit unapproachable.
Paige Newhouse: So you mentioned earlier your dad doesn’t know what you do, like what do you think he thinks <laugh> you going to the archive is like?
Rachael: I’m not quite sure. I think he probably thinks I sit at a big table and get to touch old documents all day.
[Upbeat music fades out]
Paige: The archives might conjure an image of a small room with hundreds of dusty files that nobody has looked at in ages. If you are a historian of modern Germany like me, you might think of large halls with rows of desks, an older man grunting in the corner reading through documents, an archivist yelling at another visitee who is breaking the rules and sneakily taking hundreds of photos on documents still under a time protection. Historians’ experiences with archives depend on their field, their location. Archives are central to historians’ craft, to their work. But they are not just for scholars. And archivists aren’t there just to process collections and enforce rules in the reading room.
Doing archival research is political and powerful, because of the content of their collections. What’s included? What’s left out? Who can access them and who can share the materials with a larger public?
Welcome to Season 5 of Reverb Effect, a podcast brought to you by the History Department at the University of Michigan. I’m Paige Newhouse, this year’s season producer. In this episode, we talk with an archivist, an archival theorist, and a historian who are working to democratize the archives. We aim to dismantle ideas about these spaces, what they hold, and who can access them.
[Sounds of a football stadium fade in]
Cheyenne Pettit: When we think of what kinds of documents make up an archive, we think of just that: documents. Serious, stuffy, papers. We do not necessarily imagine tickets from last weekend’s football game or an old yearbook from the University of Michigan, capturing the smiling students as they enjoy a Saturday in Ann Arbor.
[Sounds of a football stadium fade out]
Brian Williams turned to such sources from the university to create an archive about the history of Black students. Williams is the assistant director and archivist for university history at the Bentley Historical Library. He has also spearheaded the African American Student Project at the Bentley.
Brian Williams: The African American Student Project is something we started at the Bentley Historical Library in 2016, shortly before the University of Michigan’s bicentennial in 2017. And it started simply enough, somebody had come to us and asked how many African American students were on campus in 1940. And we couldn’t answer that. There wasn’t an answer to that. We learned that prior to the late 1960s, the university didn’t track students by race, so there was no way to know that information. And so we decided to start a project, and let’s find out how many African American students were here.
The core of the project is a searchable database of every African-American student that was here. You can search hometown, local address, field of study, participation in campus organizations, academic honors, membership in fraternities, sororities, just all kinds of information now. We have tools on the website that visualize all that data and different ways that you can search and manipulate that and learn from that data.
This African American student project is an outgrowth of that in a lot of ways. We were able to look at the times the university did not do the right thing—that they discriminated, they excluded. We learned a lot about really specific incidents where Black students were denied service in a local restaurant. They were excluded from the dormitories and really just had to fight to get in. So we’ve learned these stores have been able to kind of elevate them, but add a lot of context around them.
We started using source books, they were Who’s Who volumes who, who was in Black America. There were directories of Black PhD recipients that we used. After working on it a year and a half, we had about 1,500 names and thought we were well on our way. But now it’s a project that has over 9,600 names in our database. And we’ve taken it up beyond 1970, the Black Action Movement, the first Black Action Movement on campus, to fill in all the 1970s now.
Cheyenne: How do you balance sharing this full history of Black students at the University of Michigan, while also protecting sensitive information about the individuals that might arise from this data?
Brian: We’re using information that’s out there and available, but we have been mindful that we’re compiling it in a way that can identify somebody, that we’re mentioning hometown, race. Some people might not want to be identified by race. So those are things we were concerned about, are monitoring, but fortunately, we haven’t had any negative reaction or concerns. We have a take-down policy, so if somebody does contact us, asks to be removed, we’ll anonymize the name, but we want to keep the data so that we have those statistics about how many students were here at a particular time, and that you can still kinda have that sense of data. We don’t plan to take this any further beyond 1980. Part of that reason is that the information the university maintained is much more robust.
We’ve gotten some really great content from African American students, which was an area we didn’t have a lot from before. One woman that became interested in our project, Sharon Patton, she’d been here at DAAS [Department of African American Studies] now, it had been CAAS at the time. Her grandfather had attended and been a law student, class of 1911. She learned about our project, was interested in donating the photos, gave us her grandfather’s photos out of his scrapbook. And just remarkable photos, the earliest photos we have of African American student life outside of like formal, posed graduation photos. And so It was just these students living in the off-campus house and what life was like—fraternity parties, house parties, things that we didn’t really have before.
Sophia Holly Ellis graduated in 1949. She gave us her scrapbook, and it’s just an amazing scrapbook. Just things she collected as a student and pasted in this scrapbook: invitations to rush sororities, ticket stubs from events she went to, football games, plays, speeches, the programs from those events. She details her first date and has a sketch about Bill Nelson. And you know, Bill Nelson is 20 minutes late to the date. She writes that down, how nervous she was, was she gonna be stood up, it’s just this fascinating story and just full of human warmth.
[Sounds of writing with a pen]
Sophia Holy Ellis [voice actor Maya Sudarkasa]:
- Bill was a half hour late! Will I be “stood up on the very first date?” I thought?
- Was scared stiff—wore my maroon blazer suit and my spring coat (in the middle of winter … I hated my ragged winter coat but I made up for it underneath!)
- Walked all the way to the theater—Bill is afraid of cemeteries.
- Saw a German play “Merry Wives of Vienna!”—sehr gut!
- Result—came home at 11:00pm. Said “I had a swell time. Goodnight” all in a single breath. Then ran into the house.
Cheyenne: I noticed on your website that there’s a specific orientation away from groundbreaking first, for example, the first African American med student from Michigan. What does this de-emphasis on the first do for the stories that you can tell?
Brian: I’m really happy that we can get beyond the first. The university spends an inordinate amount of time looking at, celebrating the first. We look back, 1853, Samuel Codes Watson attends the University of Michigan, first African American. We talk a lot about that, but we get stuck at what follows that. I had a colleague at the Clements, did a lot of research on a case he learned about in the midst of the Civil War. Alpheus Tucker, the second African American student to try and attend Michigan, had a really difficult go, and a very unpleasant time. He is basically forced out and told by the faculty member that he shouldn’t be in class because of his race. We kind of stick on that first, but we ignore that second and that unpleasant second, and we stick to other firsts. We look at the first woman and the first PhD, the first in various fields, but celebrating just those firsts, we need to learn more. And you know, without that first, there wouldn’t be a second and so on. But we really should stop and celebrate who was the hundredth, who was the 500th. And that’s what I’m really proud of our database, that we can reasonably determine that now.
Cheyenne: I’m curious if you’ve had a lot of interaction with current students. Are they interested in the project? And how are they interested in it?
Brian: We’ve had some great interaction with the Black Student Union. We had some of their leadership came over. We gave ’em a tour of the archives, showed ’em a little bit about the project, talked about what they’re creating, how we’d like to start a collection, document their time here. We’ve worked with several different groups, trying to connect current students to the past. We had a panel of alumni that were all here, late 1960s, early 1970s, and the students at Trotter House were really fascinated. They were watching a live feed of our event and really were intrigued by that panel, talking about their experiences. And a lot of those experiences from the seventies resonated with them, and they’ve tried to get engaged with them as kind of a council of elders.
Cheyenne: The interest in the African American Student Project has traveled outside of Michigan and Michigan alumni.
Brian: We’ve had some interesting, yeah, queries. We’ve worked with faculty members here on campus. We’ve worked with—Michigan in the world has done some segments, some HistoryLab work. We met a researcher, Crystal Sanders, who is at Penn State, but now is at Emory. And she’s really studied students that were coming here from Southern states, before the Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, that Supreme Court decision that destroyed separate but equal. She found that a lot of students were paid by Southern states to go out of state and get educated. So we found this huge influx of students from Southern states, being essentially paid by Alabama or some other Southern state to come here and study, and usually in the summer.
Cheyenne: Pursuits like the African American Student Project allow archivists to create an archive which might otherwise not exist.
Brian: This is truly the most rewarding project I’ve been involved with in my career. Usually somebody comes in, wants to research a topic, and we will say, you’re gonna wanna use this collection, look in these particular boxes, and have at it. But this is the opposite of that. We’ve compiled all this information, we’ve done the research and created this database, and you can search it any way you want. We’re working with visualization librarians at the University Library to map it. So we have an interactive map that you can actually see these clusters of housing. You can visualize data any number of ways.
We can say, here’s all the data. And you wanna look at how many students came from Alabama throughout history, you can. You know, how many students came from the Upper Peninsula, how many students came from Detroit, all kinds of different ways you can use this data. How many belong to fraternities, sororities? How many Phi Beta Kappa awardees did we have? I just love that it’s there and can be used. And the engagement we have has just been so fulfilling.
[Upbeat music fades in and out]
[Sounds: Shuffling of papers, as one might hear in an archive]
Enrieth Martinez Palacios: Here is what you might expect the archive to sound like: the shuffling of papers, the filing of documents.
[Sounds end]
These sounds oppose the tumult and violence that the subjects of the documents experience as the papers are being written. Scholars examine archival documents to seriously think about the past, but for Patricia Garcia, an assistant professor in the School of Information at Michigan, in many ways, these documents can shape somebody’s present.
Patricia Garcia: I study lots of things, but one of the things is archives, and I specifically study how records sort of are created and mobilized and how they impact vulnerable communities. Just to give an example of a context is I have studied how the H2 Visa program, which is a federally approved way for agricultural workers that are temporary from countries like Mexico to have a legal path to come to the US to do temporary agricultural work. And as you can imagine, when you’re making bilateral agreements between the US and Mexico, there’s a lot of legal records that get produced.
And so I study what those legal records are and whether or not they actually provide the protection that they’re supposed to provide and what the shortcomings are and really how it impacts workers’ abilities and legal pathways to fight against exploitation. So I’ve studied that context. Something similar with social workers where we look at the documentation that they need to put together to prove homelessness for unhoused individuals and the burden that that places on them. And also that downstream very important impacts on the actual unhoused individuals in terms of how big of a burden it is to prove that you are actually unhoused. The work with the social workers is, it’s just really important, is and done collaboration with my doctoral student, Pelle Tracey, who himself was a social worker.
Enrieth: Legal records point to gaps in protection of vulnerable people, but they don’t even begin to approximate a person’s story. They don’t tell us how the subject felt, what they were doing in the moment. We wanted to know a little bit more about how to bring back silenced voices.
Patricia: I think I can only sort of speak to it from this particular case that I studied. But I think it can probably apply more broadly, which is that the burden of creating the records is often one way. So, in this case, it was the temporary workers who had to come up with all of these documents to prove to the federal government that they would come to the US and that they would stay only 364 days, not a full year.
There was all these sort of like popup intermediaries that basically offered workers to say, “Hey, we’ll prepare this paperwork for you. You don’t have any money, but you can leave us the deed to your house and once you’re in the US and you make the money, you can pay us for our services and you’ll get the deeds back.” And what ended up happening is not just that the burden is placed on the workers to come up with the paperwork, but that once they’re here, all of the effort that was trying to quote-unquote document them as they cross the border, they don’t put in that same energy for documenting their worker experiences when they’re in the US.
And so, part of the agreement is that they come and they’re tied to one particular agricultural producer, like a farm or a farmer. If that farmer exploits them in any way, they can’t then move to another farm because it’s tied just to them. So then they have to go back to Mexico, in this case, that’s the country I studied. And if they do that before they make the money back to buy back the deed to their home, then they lose their home.
So what ends up happening is that something that was supposed to be a legal path to the US that is documented, ends up producing undocumented workers in the US because the workers come here, they say, “Hey, this person’s exploiting me. I have no recourse. No one from the federal government is coming to check in on the worker conditions. And I can’t leave because I’ll lose my house.” So they end up running away from the farm and getting other sort of low-skilled jobs. So they literally move from being documented to undocumented. I think some of the silences are the worker experiences.
I think in terms of, how do you bring those voices back in, it’s difficult. One thing is that kind of research to say, hey, if we don’t center just the records, but all the people and processes that go with creating those records and then like the implications of those records on people’s lives, then I think you get a fuller picture of like how archives function in society.
Enrieth: Patricia’s work with the archives goes beyond her research. She teaches the introductory courses on them to masters students, many of whom aspire to become archivists.
Patricia: I tell the students, I can give you as much best practice on literally how do you construct an archive, but that’s gonna be different from institution to institution. The thing that you have to remember is that the archive is constructed. It is not something that just exists. It is not something that is the truth. It’s something that someone, usually archivists, have decided should exist and have decided what should go in it.
I sort of give the example of if you’re an archivist and you are in charge of describing student activism on campus. We do this activity where, like on the one hand the terms that you use to describe it is student uprising. And on the other hand, someone else describes it as student protest. And I say, “What are the implications for how you think about what happened in that point in time in history based on those two ways that you decided to describe something?” Does one have more negative or positive connotations, and how does the way that you describe it impact the way that scholars are going to read the document, or the lens that they’ll be able to see? No aspect of archives is neutral.
There’s usually these five processes for archives. There’s acquisition, selection, description, and making things accessible. And then public outreach. Each of those processes is political.
One big thing about archives is that I don’t think that the general public really knows that they can use them. Not in the same way that we think of public libraries as a true community space where you can go and get help. I think archives for a long time have been the realm of scholars, genealogist. And in some archives, like one of the very first ones I went to, you needed to have an academic reason to be there, you needed to have an academic letter of introduction. It’s like, then who gets access to these stories, whose stories get to make it into it? One thing that we could do is look at these major processes and really try to reimagine them. Who makes these decisions on behalf of who of whom, and what voices are missing, what voices should be included? And are there just more expansive ways to think of things?
Enrieth: So maybe a question to tie it into the conversation about power and community archives is, well, one, if you can help us define what a community archive is and also what’s the role of the community, and then maybe talk a bit more about the role of the archivist.
Patricia: I think a community archive, what it is, is still up for debate. Or maybe I think there’s multiple definitions of community archives. Typically a community archive is documenting a quote-unquote community. And where the interpretation comes in is, well, what is community like? Is it geographically based? What is the affinity that people share that makes them a community? Is it beliefs? Is it race? It could be any of those things. Community archives in general will document a group of people who have a shared affinity. It could be cultural, it could be political, it can be many things.
People tend to think of community archives as smaller and more community run, but I have seen lots of flavors of quote-unquote community archives. I’ve seen community archives with boards, like board of directors, and I’ve seen community archives where it’s literally two people who keep the community’s records in their basement with zero funding. There’s community archives who have, you know, grant funding, some who it is all just the labor of love of one person with no money. I think the things that unify them all is documenting a community with a shared affinity of some sort, and sort of this understanding that that community is under documented. There’s a need for those voices because either they’re not in institutional archives or they have not previously been considered a community.
[Upbeat music fades in and out.]
[Sounds of cicadas, as you might hear in a rural area on a hot summer day]
Talitha Pam: The quest for materials leads historians to some strange places, such as someone’s attic or basement in the middle of July. Here, historians can find a deeply personal and in-depth look into the past. Maybe they come across old photos. For Stephen Berrey, a historian of race and US culture in the twentieth century, these photos might point to a community’s past violence, exclusion, and racism. Such materials help Berrey recreate the realities of everyday life in a sundown town.
Stephen Berrey: A sundown town refers to a town or a suburb, a place that has intentionally excluded some groups most often, Black people, but also potentially depending on when it was, when, where it was, Native American people, Mexican American, Asian American, Jewish people. And the… it’s an intentional practice of racial exclusion. Sundown town is a term that was a little bit more common in the Midwest, but also shows up in, like people in some parts of the country would refer to a gray town, which also falls into that same category of racial exclusion.
The Sundown Town Project was created by James Lowen. James Lowen was a sociologist and historian, and he started doing research around his hometown of Decatur, Illinois. He knew that there were some places in that part of Illinois where people had excluded Black people, and he wanted to do that history, to talk about what was happening in those places. He wanted to engage a larger public in this conversation. So he created this database online in which he put all of his research into it on various places that were sundown towns, or might’ve been sundown towns. And then also created space for people to submit additional information for that database to grow.
Talitha: Stephen took over the Sundown Town Project after James Lowen died.
Stephen: The Sundown Town Project is about documenting this practice in an online database. It’s also about working with communities to, one, help communities document the practice, but then also talk about what do you do about it? What are next steps? How do you, how do you respond to that history and what does it mean for your town and for what your town is in the present and potentially in the future?
One of the things I’ve discovered when I was working on the civil rights movement is how important oral histories were. It’s not just that there are silences in the archives, but there are particular kinds of silences and some people are underrepresented or misrepresented. And oral history seems really important for capturing historical silences, archival silences.
But I’ve also learned over time that the work, the kind of things that I do, I’m interested in, in everyday practices, everyday interactions, and that leads me to all kinds of strange places for sources like local libraries and flipping through yearbooks. It leads to looking on eBay for things. I think the thing I’ve learned the longer I’ve gone in this profession is having to be really creative and thinking very expansively about what’s an archive and where do you find traces of everyday life from the past.
I’ve been doing research on small towns and how people in small towns think about race, how they engage with it, especially in the twentieth century, 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50. And, and I think that my interest in yearbooks came out of like, just not finding a lot of materials of everyday conversations. And that’s a place where there’s so many photographs in there that if there are things happening throughout the year, they are likely to show up in a yearbook. And in this case, specifically I was looking for evidence of minstrel shows in high schools, of people dressing up in blackface, putting on shows, because I, I knew from other sources that that was really common into the 1950s, 1960s, even the 1970s. One of the places that I see it show up a lot is in the yearbooks.
Talitha: Going through the Sundown Town website, you can see in every state the lists of towns and counties. Clicking on a town, you can find instances where people had racist encounters in these communities. How did people working on the project go through to recollect these experiences?
Stephen: One of the challenges is finding people who are willing to talk about that past and willing to share what they know or what they heard growing up. In some cases, it is talking about people who grew up in a town who have memories, things that they were told or experiences that they had growing up, and people who no longer live in that town. In some cases it is about sharing information about a nearby town and, and that people who live in a town that’s not so far away often know about the reputation of a town that’s five, ten miles down the road. And so often it is about collecting data from people who are nearby who say, “Oh, yeah, this is, this is what we know about this town”, or “We know to stay out of this town”, for example.
We have essentially a three-step process. We get lots of information about potential sundown towns. We’ve had, I think in the last three years, more than a million visitors to the site. A lot of people come to the site, they’re encouraged to share information that they have about a town, and also encouraged to send us an email and say, we think you should look into this town. When we do look into a town, and that happens with volunteer groups, it’s also something I’ve done with students in college courses. When we do do that research, and sometimes we ask somebody locally if they want to do their research, that’s where we use a three-step process that usually starts with census data and going decade by decade to check the numbers, to see who lived in this town.
If somebody reports a potential town, we’ll ask for things like, is there evidence? There was a sign, a lot of these places had signs on the, the, the town limits that had some said something to the effect that, that you had to be outta town by sundown, if you were Black, for example. and some people will have evidence of that. The photographs are pretty rare.
I will say that out of that process of starting with the census and then looking at local sources, that often the local sources are pretty silent about this practice, that there isn’t often a lot in there, in part because it was informal, in part because people didn’t talk about it. It was a shared agreement. That’s why the third step of talking to people in the community or people who know about the community, is so important because that’s where we often get our best evidence of people talking about, like, this is my experience growing up there, this is what happened to me.
Talitha: How difficult is it to kind of get your foot in the door at the local level and work with local sources?
Stephen: That’s what we’re trying to do is to tell the truth about the past, to talk about why it matters in the present, whether that’s about the legacies of things in these towns, or just thinking about what kind of place a town wants to be going forward. And that’s really hard to have that conversation. I think in part because local history, and especially local histories in small towns, and I grew up in a small town, so I’m familiar with what it is to grow up in a small town in the Midwest.
One of the challenges with local history in general is that local history does often serve this function about celebrating a place, creating something for people to take pride in it. So our challenge is to be able to to talk to people about why it’s important to tell the truth about what happened in a place, and that there may be some histories in here to celebrate and to have a sense of pride in, but we also want people to grapple with these more difficult, these hard histories and to help local people understand why it matters.
How do you talk to people in towns about their past? What kind of town do you want to be in the future? How do you become a welcoming place? We encourage places to acknowledge the past to issue a formal or an official apology, and then to take steps to think about, like, so now what do we do? How do we pivot from that? What can you share with people, that will give them some tools to think about how to move forward? Because often it is about having a conversation about resources, about, like putting money into conveying that you’re a welcoming place or to offering job opportunities for diverse populations, diverse in all kinds of ways. We are very much wanting to help communities think about those steps.
Talitha: This project has significance because it allows Stephen to share the past—and his research—with more than an academic audience.
Stephen: One of the things that I enjoy about this project, it’s very much a public history project, is the opportunity to talk to larger audiences about what history is, about why it matters about what an archive is, and to connect history to actual evidence and actual primary sources. We live in a moment in which people can say things without necessarily having to back them up with, with primary sources, with evidence. And so it’s an opportunity, I think, to remind larger publics that when we’re talking about what happened in the past, about why it’s important, about how it’s connected to the present, that like sources matter and being able to show your sources and to talk about the role of archives of primary sources and having these conversations both about the past, but also why the past matters in the present seems really, really important. Whenever there are concerns about a particular history, if you have primary sources and say, well let’s look at what the sources tell us, that is often really compelling.
[Upbeat music music fades in and out]
Markus Merin: Generally speaking, my experience was like arriving in these Italian towns, like Reggio Emilia or Modena in particular, this genuine enthusiasm that someone is coming to town to sort of take a look at their wares, if you will. It’s a real sense of enjoyment and pride for a lot of them. And that enthusiasm and that intimate knowledge was really useful, especially for me as someone who, generally speaking, new to archival research, especially in-person archival research. If I was really left to my own devices without someone who was going to listen to what I was looking for in depth, I would’ve been, I would’ve been in a very bad state for a while. <laugh>.
Paige: Do you have any advice for grad students going into the archives?
Irene Mora: I think for me is just like focus on really good stories that you find. I find that stories and storytelling tells the best kinds of histories and can make points for you that you don’t then have to make so explicit. The history can tell itself through storytelling.
Paige Newhouse: Thank you for listening. Thank you to Brian Williams, Patricia García, and Stephen Berrey for their interviews. Thank you to all who made this episode possible, especially Enrieth Martinez-Palacios and Cheyenne Pettit for conducting the interviews.
Our editorial board is Enrieth Martinez Palacios, Talitha Pam, Cheyenne Pettit, and Sophie Wunderlich. Gregory Parker is our executive producer, and I’m your host and season producer, Paige Newhouse. Please join us for our next episode for more stories about how the past reverberates into the present. This is Reverb Effect.
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