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.

Tuning into Baltimore: Internship at the Maryland Center for History and Culture I

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

By: Wyatt Lindsey

Though I was a history student attending college next door to Baltimore for nearly three years, I hadn’t taken an opportunity to dig deep into an area of Baltimore’s history. I got a chance to do so when I received an email from Professor Meringolo, offering me an opportunity to join a public history “boot camp'' in the form of an internship with the Maryland Center for History and Culture. There, I worked with the Collections department to digitize oral histories for the McKeldin-Jackson project, examining Baltimore politics and the civil rights movement during the 1960’s. My work included summarizing and transcribing oral histories.

The project is centered around Governor Theodore McKeldin and civil rights activist Lillie May Carroll Jackson: their work in Baltimore, their contributions to the civil rights movement, as well as firsthand accounts of how McKeldin and Jackson were as individuals. The project also touches on many other influential leaders of civil rights in Baltimore, such as Furman Templeton. Interview subjects included members of the Jackson-Mitchell family, members of McKeldin’s staff during his mayoral term, as well as citizens of Baltimore who lived through the era. Issues of the time are brought up, including the rise of militancy in the civil rights movement, as well as the passing of an omnibus Maryland Civil Rights bill in 1963.

COVID-19 inevitably left an impact on my internship, reducing my time onsite to one day a week. This did not create any significant issues however; the recordings of the interviews were hosted online, allowing myself and other interns to summarize and transcribe from home. To be frank, the weather created more issues over the course of the internship than COVID did; a delayed opening one day, as well as being snowed in on what was going to be the first day.

Spring 2022 Internship: UMBC Special Collections

Hello! My name is Meredith; I am an alumna of UMBC's undergraduate History program (2021) and began in their Historical Studies MA this past fall. Most of my research is focused on medieval Europe, but I also have an interest in art and art history. This secondary interest led me to an internship in the Special Collections department of the Albin O. Kuhn Library on campus, which I started earlier this month. My work for this internship will focus on the library's extraordinary Lewis Hine collection of photographs. 

Hine (1874-1940), who worked as a teacher in the New York City area before picking up his camera full-time, traveled across the United States in the early twentieth century. His employer, the National Child Labor Committee, asked him to document the working conditions that children endured in factories, mills, mines, and other businesses around the country. The NCLC hoped that Hine's photographs would cause enough of a shift in public opinion that legislation prohibiting child labor could pass.  

For more than ten years, Hine criss-crossed the country, stopping in at tenement apartments, furniture factories, newspaper offices, and other places where children worked. He brought not just his camera but also an arresting, innate sense of photographic composition. Though he did not sugar-coat or overplay his subjects' circumstances, he also did not try to sugarcoat or exaggerate them. Children - some not more than five years old, some in their teens - gaze out of the thousands of images Hine produced, caught in a moment of rest in their day. Some of the images are joyful or whimsical. Some are heart-wrenching. Hine's work for the NCLC constitutes one of the first times that photography was put to work for reformers' causes. 

Lewis Hine, Young Chicken Venders [sic], Sixth St. Market, Cincinnati, 1908 (acc. no. P33).
The Photography Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

UMBC's collection of approximately five thousand of Hine's NCLC prints is unique among other collections, because the back of the prints are visible and accessible. My work for this internship will involve using a copy stand to take photographs of the back of each print, notating the relevant digital metadata, and perhaps, eventually, also assisting with rehousing some of the prints in new storage containers. Covid-related supply chain issues mean that the project is off to a slower start than the Special Collections staff and I had hoped, but I found my rhythm last week and made it through approximately sixty of the photographs! 

Each unique photograph must be carefully removed from its archival folder, transported to the copy stand's platform, and arranged so that the camera can see it in its entirety. For many of these, that is a fairly straightforward task, but a notable number of the photographs have multiple prints - copies - of the image in their sleeves. In this case, I also document the back of each copy. It is work that requires significant attention to detail and concentration, both to ensure that the fragile photographs are handled safely and to prevent any mistakes in the digital data entry. I am enjoying it so far and look forward to continuing through the semester and beyond. My work will not only increase public access to this important collection of early twentieth century photographs, but also will help to preserve them for future scholars and others with an interest in photography and history. 

For more information about Lewis Hine, visit the Library's Hine Collection page and online database.

Maryland Center for History and Culture Internship Part 1: An Introduction to the MCHC

 

https://www.mdhistory.org/about/

An Introduction to the MCHC

Maxwell Fore 

 

Over the winter I participated in a short internship "boot camp" over the period of about a month at the Maryland center for History and Culture. The MCHC is a non-profit organization dedicated to the collection, preservation, and interpretation of materials which reflect the history and heritage of Maryland. It contains both a museum and a library which are open to the public for free use. The MCHC houses hundreds of thousands of objects within its museum, and in its library a collection of 7 million books, documents, manuscripts, and photographs. Located in Mount Vernon, Baltimore, the organization itself serves as apart of Maryland's history and culture as one of the oldest cultural institutions in Maryland, having been founded in 1844.

At the time of writing, the MCHC has nine exhibitions housed in its museum. Of those nine there were a few that were particularly notable to me: Flickering Treasures, an exhibit which explores the history of movie theaters within Maryland and the culture surrounding them; Intimate Expressions, which contains highlights from the diaries of several Maryland residents from between the 18th-20th centuries in order to document the personal experiences of Marylanders from the past; and finally the Unfinished Revolution, which ties together the French and Indian War, the American Revolutionary War, the Quasi-War, and the War of 1812, and connects how these conflicts affected Maryland.

During my time as an intern I assisted through transcribing and writing descriptions for the oral history interviews of several people involved with the civil rights movement in Baltimore. The interviews are a part of the McKeldin-Jackson Project Oral History Collection containing interviews recorded from between 1969-1977. The interviews were incredibly fascinating and without a doubt extremely important pieces of Maryland and Baltimore history. Assisting in a project dealing with such invaluable pieces of history was very enjoyable and fulfilling, despite the short time I had.

Baltimore Heritage Internship, Part 3: Bolivar in Bedford Square

Bolivar in Bedford Square In my daily Baltimore City life, I spend a lot of time wondering how and why things are where they are. Working with Baltimore Heritage, Inc., has given me the opportunity to dig for the answer to one of these questions. I must have noticed the statue on N. Charles Street first about 10 years ago. I’d probably driven past it a thousand times, but this time I was walking up Charles Street past the mansions of Guilford, and it’s presence struck me, the realistic but unfamiliar face, and the military regalia on the metal bust. The description on the pedestal before was unexpected, “Simón Bolivar, 1783-1830, Liberator of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia.” But it said nothing about when it had been placed there, or why. What was Bolivar, the “George Washington of South America” doing in tiny park in a wealthy residential neighborhood? I thought of him as a South American revolutionary figure unrelated to Old Baltimore’s past. I would wonder about it occasionally when I passed it by. When I started my internship at Baltimore Heritage, Molly Ricks, my supervisor, had a list of possible sites for me to write about, but also encouraged me to suggest some of my own. I had a few to list, and we decided that I’d start with the Bolivar bust, as it seemed like an interesting and perhaps not too complicated assignment. And I really did want to know how he turned up where he did. It turned out that so did others. I shared my question on social media and got a surprising number of responses, mostly from people who lived in Charles Village but went running in that neighborhood and had jogged by it, also wondering. I began to look for the answer. The responses I got on social media, while interesting, turned out to be dead ends. A friend who used to be the Editor of the sadly departed free weekly, The City Paper, remembered one of the regular contributors writing about the very same question. But it was so long ago he didn’t have a copy. And when The Baltimore Sun bought The City Paper just to close it down, they took down all of the content that had been online. He’d try to reach the author, but it was a long shot. And he never was able to reach him. An acquaintance posted that he’d been there on the day of the dedication, and that it was there because some embassy staff lived in one of the houses right behind the park, and he’d been on his paper route. But he had no other information but for this over 50 year old, perhaps not completely accurate memory, and nothing I found in my research backed that up. But there wasn’t much of anything to find about the location. All I learned looking in all of the right places (I think!) was that it was there simply because there was room for it there. Perhaps there was a special reason, but I could find no evidence that there was. What was interesting was the why of it being in Baltimore at all, not the where of the site where it was placed. And that was what I wrote my post about: https://explore.baltimoreheritage.org/items/show/707

Baltimore Heritage, Inc. Part 2: The W.E.B. DuBois House

“W.E.B DuBois had a house in Baltimore?” That was my surprised response to Molly Rick’s suggestion of the site as one of the five I would write about for the Baltimore Heritage, Inc. website as part of my internship. I’d always associated DuBois with Philadelphia, New York, and Atlanta, all places where he spent many years studying and writing, and sometimes teaching. And it seemed odd that such a titan of civil rights, Black, and intellectual history had lived in Baltimore for at least ten years and that I’d never heard about it in my twenty of living here. I suspect that at least part of the reason that it was under the radar that DuBois had a home in Baltimore from 1939 to 1950 is that the location had little, if anything to do with his professional and activist life. DuBois was known for his sociological studies on Black life in Philadelphia, his prodigious output, including one of his most famous works, “Black Reconstruction in America,” and his teaching life are associated with his time at Atlanta University, and his civil rights and political work, especially with the NAACP are connected to his life in New York City. In fact, while he was living in Baltimore he also had a home in New York. In fact, DuBois’ choice to have a home in Baltimore during that period was personal, it was in order to be close to his daughter, Yolande, who taught in Baltimore city public schools for decades. I was presented with a number of challenges in this assignment. First, there was so much information! My pieces are limited to about eight hundred words each, which is fairly short. It was daunting to confront how to cover a long life with so many different events, changes, publications, moves, and influences on other people and on the United States itself in less than one thousand words! I felt the pressure of having to define a life that was so important and yet that many don’t know about to the public. If I was writing for an academic audience, I could at least assume certain prior information. Here, in order to do what I was meant to, I practically had to start from scratch. In my work for Baltimore Heritage overall, and not just on this topic, I felt a responsibility for my beloved city, which is so often seen as pathological, neglected, and a joke, to show the brilliance in its history and its inhabitants, its overall importance in the history of the country. Perhaps this is not the most objective outlook to have, but I don’t think that public history (and don’t even get me started on academic history) can or even should pretend to be objective. As public historians, our responsibility is to the public, whether we are bringing it information, gathering information from it, or creating knowledge together. That does not mean burying histories that are unpleasant from the public eye. In fact the opposite is true. In order to be respectful of and responsible to a community, the truth about that community must come first. My motivation was related to the importance of telling less known truths about a community, like that the most important Black intellectual of the twentieth century chose to make the little Northeast neighborhood of Morgan Park his home. And in telling that truth there arose a conduit into talking about truths on a grander scale—for example the history of civil rights activism, the historiographical debates (ongoing!) about Reconstruction, and how and why Baltimore has and hasn’t changed over the decades. I had to make hard decisions about what to include. My first draft was twice as long as the allotted word limit. As both Cicero and Mark Twain observed, writing shorter pieces is more difficult than writing longer ones. Cutting it meant getting rid of information that I found fascinating, like DuBois’ daughter’s very short lived marriage to Countee Cullen, major poet of the Harlem Renaissance, and details about his falling out with the NAACP. I also had to find out the best way to frame the story—to begin and end it in Baltimore, although it DuBois’ life is not a Baltimore story. The work of other public history institutions, particularly the Lillie Carroll Jackson Civil Rights museum, helped to flesh out elements of the story, the walks DuBois took with Carl Murphy, that were not available in newspapers or other written resources. I hope that what was resulted was accessible, honest, and respectful of both Baltimore and DuBois. Let me know what you think! https://explore.baltimoreheritage.org/items/show/705

Internship at Baltimore Heritage, Inc.-- Aimée Pohl

        Founded in 1960, Baltimore Heritage, Inc is a small (as in only two staff people small!) non-profit organization devoted to historic and architectural preservation in Baltimore. The organization works to preserve, educate, and communicate about Baltimore's past in a variety of ways. Their active website is full of an amazing depth and breadth of resources for the public, including hundreds of written stories as well as over 180 5 minute videos histories about people, places, buildings, neighborhoods, and cultural and political events in Baltimore's history. Some of these videos and stories are done in partnership with other organizations, such as the series "South Baltimore: In the Shadow of History" created with the Baltimore Museum of Industry, and "Virtual Histories," a weekly video program made in cooperation with the Baltimore Architecture Foundation and The American Institute of Architecture.

        The arrival of the COVID pandemic in Spring of 2020 meant that many of the organizations in person offerings, such as talks, classes, and walking tours had to be suspended or adjusted. A few outdoor tours re-started in the fall, and the hope is that more will return in the spring. Tours in October in November visited Green Mount Cemetery, the Federal Hill neighborhood, and in Dundalk a tour called, "Life Goes on, The Legacy of Henrietta Lacks and Turner Station.” Online talks and discussion include lectures by academics, including UMBC's own Dr. Sarah Ann Rubin presenting on her digital project “Slave Streets, Free Streets: Visualizing the Landscape of Early Baltimore,” and Dr. Lawrence Brown on "Mapping Baltimore Apartheid."

        In addition to these educational offerings to the public Baltimore Heritage assists in the preservations of buildings and neighborhoods by connecting neighborhoods and homeowners to grant makers like the Maryland Historical Trust, Baltimore National Heritage Area Authority, Maryland Humanities Council, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and a variety of local foundations—they also make connections with loan and tax credit programs and guides to fundraising, and give out mini-grants for local projects.

        My internship is based on working on the educational content element of of Baltimore Heritage’s mission, not on the preservation funding side. I am writing 5 individual posts, collaborating on one of the 5 minute video histories, and creating and helping to lead a walking tour. The video and the tour will be in the spring. As I’ve started writing my pieces and discussing with Molly Ricks (UMBC History MA Alum!), Community Engagement and Communications Manager, and my supervisor, ideas for pieces as well as for the video and walking tour, the current prevalent issues in public history work have arisen. We’ve discussed the question of what places and people and buildings are determined to be worth of historic status, and by who, how to expand the coverage of Baltimore’s history to include traditionally marginalized groups, thorny issues of who gets to tell those stories, and who owns them—how and should we make difficult stories palatable, who are we responsible to—all questions that have a special resonance in this kind of public history institution. I will go into more depth in some of these issues in my next two posts, which examine the process of writing these short histories.