The Civil Rights History of Baltimore at the MCHC: Part 2

The thing about oral history is that you have the opportunity of learning from different people and hear different perspectives on particular topics and issues of society. Baltimore has a rich history that many don’t know or heard about. The McKeldin-Jackson Project showed and explained the history of segregation during the civil rights movement.

Upon reading and listening to the interviews, I was able to get a better understanding of Theodore McKeldin, the people on his team, and civil rights leaders such as Lily May Jackson and her family. The transcription and translation process of these interviews gave us new perspectives on how African Americans were treated in society and the way Governor McKeldin worked with race leaders to bring change into Baltimore. Not just that but most of the summaries that I was able to create from the interviews were concerns about African American disenfranchisement; education and employment of African Americans; black relations with the police and with Jews; public accommodation of African Americans, black political action, and black women. This opened a doorway for me to learn more about Ford and Lyric theatres in Baltimore; desegregation; restaurant discrimination; the Urban League; Gov. Theodore R. McKeldin's appointments. I think it was truly interesting to see different groups of people come together to fight for a common and rebuild a community that wasn’t getting any respect from society.

I think it was quite inspiring to see a black woman like Lillie May Jackson, working closely with the governor of Maryland to create opportunities and change for the black community. It was amazing to see her support Louise Kerr Hines, who was discriminated against at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, as she wasn't offered a position for a free library training course due to the color of her skin. It was quite significant to see Carl Murphy of the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper and Lillie Mae Carroll Jackson of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People suing the library for their discriminatory actions towards the black community.

The most important part of the internship was the opportunity to listen to and transcribe old audio from the 90s. It was a long and difficult process but it was worthwhile for any future historian who was trying to get into the field of transcribing works of others from any time period. Overall, though the internship wasn’t too long of an experience, I still found all the projects and work that we did to be quite interesting and such a contribution to my field of study as a future historian.

Tuning Into Baltimore: Internship at the Maryland Center for History and Culture II

 Tuning Into Baltimore II: Internship at the Maryland Center for History and Culture

By: Wyatt Lindsey

From the politically established to the average Baltimorean, the people behind the oral histories I listened to came from a variety of backgrounds. This provided me with a multifaceted perspective of Baltimore in the 1960s, with three main categories of conversation: politics, race/racial tensions, and development of Baltimore.

Discussion of Baltimore’s politics centered around the second mayoral term of Theodore McKeldin from 1963-1967, as well as the immediate effects of his term. From listening to McKeldin’s son, staff members, and advisors, an image of McKeldin as an honest man who got into politics to be among people. Many who knew McKeldin saw him as a rock, holding together Baltimore through his affable demeanor and through his image as someone who listened to whoever entered his office door. Behind closed doors, he was a big-picture thinker who often yearned to spend more time with his family, with a rage that occasionally got the best of him, causing him to act out. It was rare to hear anyone speak ill of McKeldin, and any criticism was often followed by numerous statements of how great of a person and leader he was, leading one to believe that his reciprocated love for Baltimore was genuine.

One of McKeldin’s proudest accomplishments was the development of Baltimore’s inner harbor. The establishment of the Charles Center saw the area rejuvenated under his successor, Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro III. The inner harbor remained an area that McKeldin was involved with until his death in 1974.

Listening to political actors of the time gives a large-scale view of the changes that were occuring in Baltimore, but a more intimate perspective lay in the oral histories of everyday people. Stories about racial tensions from those who witnessed the era of the Baltimore and Cambridge Riots, including efforts at police reform and the struggle of experiencing integration in public schools. Hearing from many members of the NAACP was also fascinating, especially concerning their retrospective views on the rise of black militancy in the civil rights movement. Throughout all, Lillie Mae Jackson remained a powerful influence, being brought up repeatedly by anyone who talked at any length about the NAACP or its efforts. The admiration demonstrated by those interviewed, even if they had once faced pressure from Jackson in the past, was indicative of her influence in the Baltimore community, especially in regards to race or religion.

An Archival Conundrum

I am nearing the finish line. At least, the finish line of uploading our backlog of photographs onto the baltimoreuprising2015.org website. When the Maryland Historical Society (MdHS) originally put out the call for photographs, they received an overwhelming response, but they had nowhere to put the astounding contributions. Contributors were instructed to send images to MdHS via dropbox. When I arrived on the scene, the Historical Society dropbox had over a thousand images shared to their account. The first things I had to do when I began my work, was download the files off dropbox to a physical hard drive and catalog each person's contributions and corresponding metadata. In a couple of days, I was able to do this. The Hard drive contained every contribution and were organized into files for each contributor. Once all of the images were stored offline and documented, I had to start uploading those images to the baltimoreuprising2015.org website.

The baltimoreuprising2015.org site is built using Omeka. Omeka is a Content Management System (CMS). Collections, series, and exhibits can all be constructed through Omeka, but it all starts with a digital archive of “items” stored on the Omeka site. For each photograph on the hard drive, I had to upload it to the website and provide the necessary metadata such as description, title, creator, date, etcetera. Making sure each image, audio file, or video is uploaded correctly, has the correct provenance information, and is organized within the archive in a way that it can be retrieved by users has been my most time consuming task.

I am pleased with the number of contributors and the magnitude of the contributions. The size of the archive is larger than my most optimistic projections at the start. It is not enough, however, for the archive to simply be large. It also must be usable. Most descriptions, titles, and subjects for items that were provided by contributors were vague and confusing. There was little continuity from one collection to the next, which made it difficult for the whole archive to be searched. Although we wanted to preserve the artistic intention of the content creators, we also want the site to be a resource. Our compromise has been to keep the title and description of photos how the creator indicated, but to limit the subjects of items to a controlled vocabulary. Now, when users contribute to the archive, they have to select from a limited list of subjects. What this means for researchers is that they can click on the subject of any one item, and be able to see all the items with that same subject.

Our decision to limit subjects at first might seem minute, but it actually represents a continuous struggle for archives both digital and physical. What is the right balance between preservation and accessibility? In one sense, the item subject could be seen as an important interpretive component that needs to be preserved to reflect the contributors complete artistic vision. On the other hand, the purpose of preservation is almost always to ensure long term usefulness for future generations. Consistent categories and labels are the only way a repository of almost 2,000 items can be made searchable for future users. Ultimately, we tried to find a balance between the two ideals, but tended to favor access.

Baltimore Uprising Project

I have had the good fortune to work on the Baltimore Uprising project this summer. The project is a digital archive of photographs and stories from the Baltimore Uprising, www.baltimoreuprising2015.org. The website is built using Omeka, a free platform developed and supported by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media.

Some readers might not be familiar with the Baltimore Uprising, at least as a term. I am linking a thorough explanation of the term here. In brief, after Freddie Gray, a 25 year old Baltimore man, died in police custody, many people took to the streets in protest. They spoke out against systemic racism and police violence. Media coverage monikered the events the Baltimore riot, but on twitter, the hash-tag #baltimoreuprising arose to counter the inappropriate national characterization of events transpiring in the city.

All too often, the history of events can only be accessed through the lens of bureaucracy and official reports. This is problematic to say the least. Michel Rolph-Trouillot spoke to this struggle in his book Silencing the Past.  Trouillot proposed that power, in the form of silence, influences the production of history at multiple stages. Although historians can alter the power dynamics in the historical record through source selection and interpretation, they are usually limited by the kinds of sources that exist. In her article “Seeing Yourself in History”, Michelle Caswell equates a communities absence in the archives as “symbolic annihilation.” With this in mind I am sure, Dr. Denise Meringolo quickly responded to the Baltimore Uprising by creating an Omeka based website where people could upload their own photographs and stories from the Uprising as primary sources for future researchers to access. The site could be a digital repository, recording the grass-root voices of the social movement. The Maryland Historical Society (MdHS) had a similar idea and eagerly made a public call for photographs. They were flooded with submissions, but did not have a prepared infrastructure to handle the submissions. Fortunately, the Historical Society heard about the Baltimore Uprising site and proposed a partnership between Meringolo and the Society. So, like any inspired Public History venture, the project grew.

Next, I was brought on as an intern to process the backlog of photos that MdHS already had and upload them to the website. I was also enlisted to collaborate on developing the website as an archive and a useable resources. So far, the site has over 1,500 items and is still growing. The number of institutional partners has grown and the project is still thriving and expanding nearly 3 months after the most tense moments of the Baltimore Uprising.

Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).

Michelle Caswell, “Seeing Yourself in History: Community Archives and the Fight Against Symbolic Annihilation” The Public Historian, Vol. 36, No. 4 (November 2014), 26-37.