Authoring Stories of Freedom: Concept, Process and Product from the American Folklife Center’s Archive
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A conceptual frame for this article, which focuses on archival media collections and a recently launched digital publication platform from the Library of Congress, is borrowed from the notion of the “audiovisual essay.” Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin invoke the term in the 2019 JCMS dossier essay (vol. 5:3), Not Another Brick in the Wall: The Audiovisual Essay and Radical Pedagogy. As they define it, the audiovisual essay is “a work of analysis or critique that mixes language (spoken or written) with images (in the form of re-edited clips or single-frame screenshots) and sounds (music, voices, sampling from film soundtracks).” They go on to note that the structure of the essay rests on “the creative montage of pieces of pre-existing audiovisual works in order to create a new work that carries, expresses or embodies a critical idea.” (ibid)
I support this approach, since it is heartening to see that the “cut n’mix” aesthetic of which Hebdige was such an admirer and which Nam Joon Paik elevated to gallery-level experimental work, is maintained in the field of audiovisual production and pedagogy. I am also familiar enough with the terms employed in the article through my several years of practice as media producer and training in visual anthropology and folklore, which also includes occasional forays into teaching, criticism and analysis in classroom settings and academic publishing. However, while it is reassuring to note the terminology resonates with my own training – so many years later! - my interests do not lie in excavating and re-mixing found media forms to achieve the “full cinema-media experience” (ibid) or to delve into the complexities which are attendant in the construction of bricolage, as the authors seek to do.
Rather, my more prosaic goals are to amplify their argument for the re-purposing of pre-existing audiovisual works while pointing out that media forms (or formats) are always already replete with historical content and crucially, a trove of “works” can be found in cultural memory institutions, principally audiovisual archives. (This is not a direction that the authors incline towards, given their orientation towards the low-hanging fruit of YouTube videos). Archival resources are available to the end-user/producer because dedicated professionals and technical specialists in cultural memory institutions maintain and preserve these resources and provide access to them through tasks ranging from deploying metadata schema that enables discovery of assets to generating check sums for analyzing the stability of the data to migration schedules to ensure sustainability of the data.
Without question, I will note that access to resources is made far easier because of my staff position at one of the leading archival repositories for cultural heritage content, the American Folklife Center at the national library. At the Center I curate a singular collection of digital video recordings of oral histories with activists in the African American struggle for freedom, justice and rights, called the Civil Rights History Project (CRHP) collection. It is a joint venture between the Center and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. In conjunction with Elaine Nichols and Kelly Navies, curatorial colleagues and historians at the museum, I have served as co-director for the CRHP since the inception of the initiative in 2009. My tasks range from supervising production crews in the field to writing summary descriptions, editing transcripts and other metadata-related chores for the interviews to editing the videos for the online presentations to scholarly presentations and publications based on the collection.
The collection forms the basis for the 2019 audiovisual essay I produced in the Library’s immersive digital Story Map platform, entitled Freedom. The Story Map seeks to illuminate some of the hidden and halting paths towards full emancipation for African Americans that came to a culmination of sorts in the latter half of the century in the US. A brief dive into the aims and scope of the CRHP will be helpful in understanding the ways this digital initiative developed.
The Civil Rights Movement, a shorthand for the most profound social, cultural and political efforts to change modern society has received a large share of attention, analysis and critique by historians and other scholars regarding the myriad battles among and between black and white Americans and the political, legal, and policing systems that enforced inequality and injustice for the benefit of the white citizenry of the nation. Not all of this work is good, however, and predominant, non-activist and white-authored views of the Movement are permeated by the tendency to sanitize it, simplify its complexities through formulaic assertions and to fashion teleological narratives that elide the agency of everyday black folk who fought the brutal and often deadly fight against discrimination and racism, away from the spotlight’s focus. As caustically described by the noted activist, the late Julian Bond, the formulation in these texts runs: “Rosa sat down, Martin stood up and then the white folks saw the light and saved the day.”[1]
Far more nuanced and sensitive historical analysis is available in (early) works, for instance, in the writings of Clayborne Carson, Howard Zinn, John Dittmer, and more are emerging in research and writing by a newer cadre of historians – Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Emilye Crosby, Todd Moye, David Cline, Elizabeth Gritter, Lauren Araiza, to name but a few. Their work centers and opens up the space for individuals who were on the front lines to express themselves in their own words. The outstanding and now classic documentary series, Eyes on the Prize (1987) set an early example for this kind of approach in traditional film and video productions, as does Stanley Nelson’s more recent Freedom Riders (2011).
The impulse to re-center and uncover voices traditionally relegated to the margins of Movement historiography is prominent in the 2009 legislation itself that mandated the Library and the National Museum of African American History and Culture to document the Movement through recorded oral histories. Working with the offices of Congressional legislators fashioning the bill for introduction to the House of Representatives, Library and Smithsonian Museum staff provided input into the legislation. They focused on the need to hear from the “grass-roots,” that is, voices other than the notable and well-known figures in the movement in keeping with the legislative mandate. The third clause of the Public Act that authorized the CRHP explicitly states: “While the Civil Rights movement had many visible leaders, including Thurgood Marshall, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks, there were many others whose impact and experience were just as important to the cause but who are not as well known.”[2]
At the conclusion of the collecting phase of the project in 2016, the total number of interview events stood at 145 full-length born-digital interviews (save for six recorded on tape) ranging from 30 minutes in length to several approaching or exceeding the two and three hour mark. They have been released on the website for the Library and the NMAAHC gradually since 2014, and as of winter 2020, all are available on the Library website along with fully searchable transcripts at the project website - https://www.loc.gov/collections/civil-rights-history-project/about-this-collection/
There are several themes that emerge in the interviews, ranging from the influence of the labor movement to the question of nonviolence and self-defense to religious faith to music and the tensions between established civil rights organizations and youth activists. Actions and events discussed in the interviews include the Freedom Rides (1961), the Albany Movement (1961), the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (1963), the Selma to Montgomery Rights March (1965), the Orangeburg Massacre (1968), the Poor People’s Campaign (1968), sit-ins, and voter registration drives in the South.
From the outset, the CRHP documented the memories and experiences of individuals whose struggles placed them on the front lines of harm in places not well-known as centers for movement activity such as Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Saint Augustine, Florida, Port Gibson, Mississippi, and Bogalusa, Louisiana. The importance of place in the struggle manifests itself in a couple of ways in the interviews. One sense of place surfaces in the recollections of those interviewees who ventured South as college volunteers during Freedom Summer in 1964 or the Selma to Montgomery March for Voting Rights in 1965 and encountered white terror and violence, often aided and/or led by the forces of law and order in those communities.
As their work in the communities began, it was deeply impressed upon the young volunteers that they had entered the boundaries of a foreign country - a sentiment that prevails in many interviews. Their experiences on the front lines raised acute questions and realizations about political structures, civil society and an awareness of the daily privileges that were denied one sector of the population but taken for granted by others; the existence of the “Two Americas” that Dr. King referred to were made all too real in the struggle.[3] So too, for the viewing/listening audience.
Another sense of place emerges from the narratives of individuals who lived in a place all their lives. In their recollections we get a vivid sense of the abuse that afflicted generations of African Americans, of the racial terror enacted upon them, and of the ravages of racism and inequality that structured their lives. Even when recalling the ways in which they endured and overcame, there are no explicit triumphalist assertions to be heard in these first-person testimonials – their experiences don't allow for overt celebration. The historian Howard Zinn noted the effects of such repression: “For blacks in the United States, there was the memory of slavery, and after that of segregation, lynching, humiliation. And it was not just a memory but a living presence -part of the daily lives of blacks in generation after generation.”[4] (p. 443)
With reference to Zinn’s assessment of how African Americans understood and lived the long black freedom struggle, Ruby Sales’ interview exemplifies the extent to which voices in the CRHP offer crucial counter-narratives to the sanitized histories that have prevailed in academic accounts and the popular imagination - https://www.loc.gov/item/2015669106/ . She takes sharp exception to the prevailing characterization of the freedom struggle under the tamer heading of the “civil rights movement”.
“And I think that when you limit it to ‘civil rights,’ you obscure, first of all, the horrors of segregation. You do not have to come to terms with the violence. You do not have to come to terms with the economic oppression. You do not have to come to terms with white people who wanted to turn black schools into plantations. You do not have to come to terms with the fact that no black girl was safe from rape in that society. No black girl was safe from rape in that society! You obscure all of that. And, at the same time you obscure the long hard years of black struggle and the blood and the sacrifice that we have poured into that struggle. I think that it does not do justice by limiting it to – and it’s really not accurate - to limit it to ‘the Movement.’” (excerpted in Freedom - https://bit.ly/3eeXbb2)
My aim, in developing and producing Freedom is to suffuse the digital space with these critical perspectives about the struggle. I attempt to do so by juxtaposing distinctive media forms - excerpts from contemporary video oral histories from the CRHP and also historical television documentaries; newspaper cartoons; still images; quoted text; geo-location coordinates; maps; and software-generated animations and captions. The intent is to inform and expand public consciousness about the past and raise critical questions about received understandings of history, by embedding distinctive perspectives and elements in a modular framework, that is, aggregating these viewpoints them under topics such as “The Albany Movement,” “The March,” and “Community Work”. Component parts of the Story Map essay are available for use and re-use by viewers as long as they are not copyright restricted. Freedom can be accessed by worldwide audiences here: https://bit.ly/3pphb17 .
To conclude, in my role as author and producer of the Freedom essay it has become very apparent to me that there exists great potential to bring critical perspectives to bear on historical phenomena by using innovative digital platforms and archival audiovisual resources. I look forward to seeing others take up the task.[5]
Author Biography
Guha Shankar is Senior Folklife Specialist at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. He is involved in a range of public outreach programs at the Center, including serving as co-director of the Civil Rights History Project, a national oral history collecting initiative of the Library and the Smithsonian’s NMAAHC. He coordinates Ancestral Voices, a collaborative, digital knowledge curation and sharing initiative with Native communities and open source platforms, Local Contexts and Mukurtu CMS. Drawing on his extensive media production background, Shankar conducts workshops in field documentation methods and skills training in oral history, photography, and archiving for higher education institutions, professionals, and local communities. He is a member of many professional associations, serves on boards and committees of several public scholarly and arts organizations, and publishes his research in a variety of media formats. He is an adjunct professor in the M.A. program in Cultural Sustainability at Goucher College, Baltimore. Shankar has a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin (2003) with a concentration in Folklore and Public Culture.
I heard Bond deliver this line in 2010 at a keynote address to the 50th anniversary gathering of the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at Shaw University, Raleigh, NC. I encountered it again in an essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates for The Atlantic in 2017 - https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/colin-kaepernick/541845/ ↑
Public Law 111-19, May 12, 2009 – “Civil Rights History Project Act of 2009,” https://uscode.house.gov/statutes/pl/111/19.pdf ↑
“One America...is overflowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of opportunity. This America is the habitat of millions of people who have food and material necessities for their bodies, and culture and education for their minds; and freedom and dignity for their spirits [In the other] America people are poor by the millions. They find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.” https://billmoyers.com/2013/04/10/dr-kings-two-americas-truer-now-than-ever/ ↑
Zinn, Howard, 1922-2010. A people's history of the United States : 1492-present / Howard Zinn. [New ed.]. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. ↑
Other Story Maps using the Library collections are found on the Library’s Geography and Maps website - https://www.loc.gov/rr/geogmap/storymaps.html?loclr=blogmap ↑
