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Oral History with High Schoolers

All of the normal issues and difficulties that come with conducting oral histories are refracted through new, complex lenses in this fellowship at the Chicago History Museum’s Studs Terkel Center. Relationships are at the core of most theorizing on oral history methods and outcomes. The relationship between the narrator and the interviewer structures the expectations, boundaries, possibilities, and interpretations of the oral history recording. If you were to ask me how much of that theory is intelligible or digestible for two high school juniors, I would not be able to give you a coherent answer. In the workplace, the site where the oral history project is conceived and organized, relationships between employees and their supervisors structure the narrators’ expectations and assumptions about the work of conducting interviews and the project’s outcomes. If you were to ask me how to plan a workplace environment so as to encourage two high school juniors to approach oral history interviewing in the most productive way possible, I would not be able to give you a coherent answer. 

Suffice it to say that I feel unprepared for this fellowship. I am highly goal-focused, process-oriented, and sensitive to relationship dynamics. I have no experience or even passing familiarity with teaching high school students. I am a novice oral historian. I have no familiarity with being an open-ended mentor. To be fair, the fellowship itself is under-prepared: expectations were not set for any of the people involved other than a general outline of goals; there is not a strong theme undergirding the history project other than “North Lawndale”; a solid vision for the outcomes of the fellowships is not apparent. And, in many ways, I am understanding of this state of affairs because of the nature of collaborative public history projects. Working with narrators is in and of itself a difficult task--expectations for consistency and dependability have to be measured. You never know when a narrator might stop responding to your emails or if they’ll surprisingly clam up once the recorder is on. Unpredictability and the need for flexibility and resilience are part of the work. Truly valuable public history projects involve strong connections with community stakeholders, and so many moving parts effect the process.

My own anxiety about not performing in this role at a level with which I am comfortable is substantially due to idiosyncrasies of my personality. I was drawn to information science and archival studies because of my inclination toward detail management, finite projects that can be viewed from a global perspective, and a deep investment in the nuance of language. I would have thought that these skillsets would be well-suited to oral history projects, but they have not served me very well. Two interventions I have made into the process that have been helpful: tracking sheets for each oral history’s tasks, and utilizing the shared Outlook calendar. I rely on them more than anyone else does. These feel like small victories in the course of a project that I experience as unbounded and unwieldy--but that’s just my perspective. 

Halfway through the fellowship the role I have tried to fill and (somewhat) carved out for myself is the buddy and history coach for these two students. I want desperately for them to feel safe and empowered at the history museum. I want them to feel that they belong there. We often have lunch together--sometimes with me buying lunch if they don’t have any money that day--and we talk about almost everything. I didn’t sign up to be a high school teacher and so I don’t know how to give them directives or assert my authority without it feeling awkward and uncomfortable for all of us. I ask them to conduct research on upcoming narrators, but their best bet is often Google. If I print out an article for them, they’ll read it--if I sit there while they do it. No one knows how they’re supposed to be behaving in this position. It’s a job--the first one for both of them--but I think they see it as somewhere between school and hanging out with adults. I don’t know what to expect of them. If I did, I could do a better job of managing everyone’s time. I don’t know how much research needs to be done for them to conduct a good oral history--this is something I’m still learning myself! Even though I am the “senior fellow,” I have little to no say over who we interview or what questions we ask. They are the oral historians in the conceptualization of the project. I’m their guide? 

In the meantime, I’m learning a wealth of information about Chicago history, particularly the Near West and West Side. I’m getting a better understanding of the relationship between a community, neighborhood violence, and press reports. Residents of North Lawndale are pained by the media representation of their home. More than pride in their history, they seem to take pride in their efforts now to transform the public narrative. Simply listening to how Chicagoans talk about Richard J. Daley, “the youth,” and their hopes for the future gives me insight that would normally take years to accumulate. 

For two weeks, between July 24th and August 4th, I will be out of the office for this internship. The National Public Housing Museum is running an Oral History Summer School program for which I will serve as the Archives Coordinator. From this I will ideally receive the type of oral history training I originally imagined for my summer.

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North Lawndale Minow Fellowship Underway

After several weeks of setbacks and last-minute changes, my fellowship at the Chicago History Museum has finally gotten underway. In essence, the fellowship consists of me being a mentor and oral history guide to two rising juniors at North Lawndale College Prep (NLCP). At the same time, it is much more than that and also more amorphous than that.

Institutionally, I am the North Lawndale Senior Minow Fellow and the two high school students are the North Lawndale Minow Fellows. Exactly what my seniority entails is TBD, but for the most part I am a dedicated tutor, mentor, and leader for them as we jointly execute 4+ oral histories of North Lawndale individuals. I am and am not the lead person on the oral history project. My supervisor, Peter Alter (Director of the Studs Terkel Center for Oral History), has reached out to a number of potential narrators. My job is to follow up with the prospects and instruct the fellows how to prepare for the interviews and make sure that they go successfully. I will not be the interviewer. In addition to Peter, I report in some measure to Paul Norrington (President of the K-Town Historic District Association), who has plans for the two students’ agenda. However, little is set in stone. The ownership of the eventual oral histories will be shared between the K-Town (aka North Lawndale) Historic District’s Sesquicentennial Committee and the Chicago History Museum.

Two things stick out to me from this first week:

(1) The public narrative--public history--of North Lawndale is tragic and painful.

More lasting than any positive, progressive, or hopeful stories about the area are a long legacy (from at least the 1960s) of the harshest racism, social degradation, and despair. Yes, I think despair encapsulates the mood emanating from the neighborhood’s image. Peter recommended American Millstone: An examination of America’s permanent underclass (Tribune Media, 1986) to me as I began to become familiar with the struggles inherent in our public history project on North Lawndale. It is a compilation of an intensive series on the neighborhood’s poor conducted by Tribune reporters in the mid-80′s. It is rife with all of the poverty-shaming, unreflexive white guilt/savior syndrome that we have come to know the 1980s for. The message is simple: North Lawndale (and all the other supposedly identical communities across urban America) was bringing down the entire nation’s ability to thrive. They not only drain financial resources from the rest of the city because a supermajority of its residents depend upon public welfare funds, but also because they do not contribute to the economic development of their surrounding urban cores. Capital’s flight from these areas is old news. And the people who live there, well they are tragedies.

(American Millstone, 1986)

The most galling decision made by the Tribune editors was to serve up North Lawndale as the worst and clearest example of a burden hanging around the entire country’s neck. As a result, the neighborhood became a signifier for urban decay, shorthand for desolation. How any of the editors believed that this portrayal could or would help any of the residents of North Lawndale is beyond me. Pride in the community--any community--is precisely what is needed to strengthen it, and that is what this public history project sets out to encourage.

(Lawndale is known for its iconic greystones. In this picture, an abandoned home is repurposed into community art and creative solidarity.)

Fake 'Corner Store' Reminds North Lawndale Of What It Doesn't Have — Food

(dnaInfo)

**Still to be teased out in my mind, and in the mind of the project: is North Lawndale’s public history the same as its public narrative?...

(2) Public history is messy.

(Credit: MyCityWeb)

I suppose I knew this already at an intellectual level, but the difficulties inherent in getting so many erstwhile strangers together to create a product of lasting social and historical significance have become real parts of my life. For instance, the students live long distances from the history museum and must depend either on their parents or public transportation to get them there. I too depend on public transportation, but live only 12mins from the museum. Cultural and life-experience differences abound between the 5 of us on the project. The two students share a lot because they are in the same class at NLCP, but they are still getting to know each other in many ways. This is the first job for both of them. I have been brought in as a sort of bridge between the outside black world and the inside white world of CHM. To do this job, I spend significant energy trying to demand the most I can from my own intuition. Public history is and must be public service to some degree; in this instance I am happy, proud, and grateful to be exerting my efforts in the service of a community that has genuinely been deprived of its fair amount of care. It is challenging and unclear, it is motivating and humbling.

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The Project(s)

(photo: Chicago Sun-Times, 1/25/17)

On Saturday May 20th, I attended an abridged production of “The Project(s),” a 50min work of documentary theater as an introduction to my internship at the National Public Housing Museum (NPHM). The Project(s) is one of the museum’s core programming components, which emerged as the result of a collaboration between the Chicago-based American Theater Company (ATC) and the NPHM. The original idea for the documentary theater project came from the mind of the late PJ Paparelli, ATC’s Artistic Director. Paparelli interviewed residents of public housing in Chicago and transformed the oral histories into a performance by making a script that was completely derived from the words of the interviewees. This is what they call documentary theater.

As a work of public history, the Project(s) is beyond remarkable or profound. I’d never witnessed anything quite like it, although I would say that the Vagina Monologues bear the closest resemblance in my experience to the way in which this performance does the work of giving immediate presence to personal stories. The effect of documentary theater is to bring to life in front of the audience (this particular production took place in a packed lobby of UChicago’s Smart museum, so we were nearly on top of the actors) a sustained glimpse into real lives, real histories. I cannot currently think of a better medium to deliver the message of the NPHM, which is to publicly give dignity to those who have been sidelined in our public culture. Discussions of public housing center around the planning ideology, the resources, the projects, the politics and politicians--rarely, if ever, to we hear directly from those individuals who were classified by the state as deserving of publicly-subsidized housing and by the general public as “people from the projects.” The stigma and ostracization of public housing residents is so profound that we are only now coming to see it. In the long history that will be written about public housing, we are entering the phase of excavation, acknowledgement, and reflection upon a difficult past--that is still not past! Public housing’s atrocities and dilemmas are persistent in our current policy regime, and will continue to be. However, I understand the work of the NPHM to an innovative, heart-felt, and productive (politically, educationally, socially) engagement with the history of public housing as well as its future directions.

But back to the performance. 5 actors. 5 chairs. A few props and minor costume changes. That’s it. The rich, fleshy, heart-rending performance came from the talented actors and remarkably in-depth oral histories. At this particular event, part of a day-long symposium of community-oriented creative placemaking at the Smart, there were a number of public housing residents in attendance. As the performance enfolded, the atmosphere of the museum lobby quickly transformed into something akin to a church-going revival. Knowing grunts and sounds of vindicated acclamation routinely emerged from the closely-gathered audience. 

“Talk about it!” 

“Give it to ‘em yall...” 

“Mmm! C’mon!” 

“I heard that!”

I felt fortunate to be able to see how the beauty of The Project(s) was revealed through this aura of resonance. Themes that stuck out to me as I tried to take in the volumes of information that the performance contained, considering how I might support the NPHM’s efforts to expand it into a national curriculum for high schoolers: 

insider/outsider statuses 

media malpractice and misrepresentation

movement! (migration, turnover, making do until it gets better)

painful and complicated ties to ownership of material property

commanding and insistent claims to ownership of cultural property and communal emotions

building community for the sake of safety and stability and welfare, again and again

initiative and self-reliance; permeating pride

a sociological conundrum, a sociological experiment, (more than) a sociological failure

like cattle

hyper-consciousness of the built environment: high rises vs. low rises; being on top; best structure for a family; elevators and stairs

complete and utter subjection to the Chicago Housing Authority, to someone else’s vision of what my home will be, to someone else’s decision to take my home away

LOSS

death, fracture, dissolution, abduction, theft, unknown

Two of the most prominent characters in the play also serve on the Board of Directors of the NPHM and took questions after the performance. Brad Hunt is a historian of the CHA and VP at The Newberry Library. Annie Stubenfield lived in the Robert Taylor Homes (the biggest public housing development in the history of the United States with a capacity of 27,000 people) and continues to share her stories. 

My official duties for my summer internship with the NPHM focus on formalizing the museum archive and supporting the development of the permanent exhibitions for the eventual museum. It’s set to open at the end of 2018 at the last remaining structure of the Jane Addams Homes. But I will also be supporting the other on-going projects of the NPHM, including the national curriculum for The Project(s).