In this episode, listen in on student interviews with Washingtonians who moved to the District during the second wave of the Great Migration from The Center for Inspired Teaching ‘Real World History Class’ Oral History Collection. Also, explore two new music collections and protest posters now available in DigDC.
Introduction to Center for Inspired Teaching 'Real World History' Oral History Project
Interview with Edith Crutchfield, Center for Inspired Teaching 'Real World History' Oral History Project
Interview with Reverend Irene Pierce, Center for Inspired Teaching 'Real World History' Oral History Project
Interview with Deacon Clarence Haywood, Center for Inspired Teaching 'Real World History' Oral History Project
Chip Py Go-Go Collection
Friday Morning Music Club
Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis Posters
Check out a copy of The Warm of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson at DCPL
Laura Farley 0:03
Hello and welcome to The People's Podchive recorded in The Labs at Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. I'm Laura Farley, digital curation librarian. And it's just me. Lisa Warwick is taking a break while she serves as interim manager of The People's Archive. On this episode, I am so very excited to share with you one of our newer digital collections, The Center for Inspired Teaching "Real World History Class" Oral History Collection.
Lola Rogin 0:37
Okay, so Hello, my name is Lola Rogin.
Nikolas Ferreyra 0:39
Hello, my name is Nikolas Ferreyra.
Ramani Wilson 0:42
This is Ramani Wilson and I am interviewing Ms. Thelma Jones from my Real World History Class.
Lola Rogin 0:47
I'm conducting an interview for the Real World History oral history project.
Nikolas Ferreyra 0:50
I have conducting this interview for the Great Migration oral history project, and my Real World History Class.
Laura Farley 0:59
That clip gets me with the feels every single time. This collection contains six years of oral history interviews conducted by DC high school students with residents who migrated to the district during the Great Migration. These students are so respectful and smart and clearly interested in how the experiences of their fellow Washingtonians shaped the city we live in today. This course is currently co-taught by Cosby Hunt and Max Peterson. Let's listen to how Mr. Hunt describes the real world history class.
Cosby Hunt 1:34
Real World History is a credit bearing after school class for DC students. We spend the whole first semester studying the Great Migration by reading Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns. Her book chronicles the stories of three migrants and tells the story of the 6 million people who were part of the Great Migration through their stories. One of the many great things about Wilkerson's book is that she provides us with a framework to do our interviews. The basic organization of the book is it looks at life in the south. The decision to leave the journey itself and life in the north. So students use that framework to create their interview questions. Life in the south.
Speaker 1 2:33
So what was your early life like in Georgia,
Cosby Hunt 2:37
Their decision to leave the South.
Speaker 1 2:40
So that let me know I can't I can't stay here, I must leave.
Cosby Hunt 2:47
their journey to the north or the west
Speaker 1 2:50
When mom and daddy and my brother put me on the train, I was scared. But determined.
Cosby Hunt 2:59
And then their lives in the north.
Speaker 1 3:01
I had lived up in the upper Northwest. You know I felt like I had accomplished something.
Cosby Hunt 3:09
They are documenting stories that have never been documented before.
Laura Farley 3:13
Wow, Mr. Hunt, Mr. Peterson, can I sign up? This course sounds absolutely amazing. Let's look at a couple of the skills and lessons the students learned during the course. Oral histories and the Great Migration may be new to you. Oral history is either an audio or video recording of a planned interview. This means an oral history is usually a one on one conversation, where an interviewer asks questions of the narrator around a specific topic or event. Before the interview the person asking the question commonly completes research around the topic or the event so that they have, you know, a little more focus for the interview. Interviewers and narrators may also meet for a mini-interview before the recorded session to get to know each other and to discuss the flow of the recorded session. Typically after an interview is complete a transcript and time-coded index of the interview are created. With a few exceptions, all the oral histories in our digital collection Dig DC have transcripts and indexes.
I know for me personally The Great Migration was never taught in my high school history classes. It's an era that many people still alive today lived through and participated in. It was a catalyst for all kinds of change that touched everything from labor unions to pop culture. The Great Migration was an exodus of African Americans out of the south to the northeast, the Midwest and the West between roughly 1916 to 1970. During this period, more than 6 million people decided to leave their homes in the south and take their chances of finding a better life outside of Jim Crow America. Single people, families, young, old, they all packed their belongings and joined growing communities of Black people in cities like New York, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and of course our home Washington DC. Some migrants had family and friends already living in their destination cities. Others moved to neighborhoods where they were total strangers. People left the south for greater economic opportunity and many found in their new homes. Every move took courage. Let's listen to a 2018 clip of Edith Crutchfield explaining to student Isabella Ramos-Bracho, why she and many people like her, left their homes in Culpeper, Virginia.
Isabella Ramos-Bracho 5:45
You left Culpeper at 16 what year?
Edith Crutchfield 5:48
1953.
Isabella Ramos-Bracho 5:50
And what kind of things influenced like, was there like a main reason why you left like a sudden...
Edith Crutchfield 5:59
There wasn't any viable employment there. For people of color, all of my sisters before me had already left. Because we knew we couldn't get a job in any of the stores couldn't work in the bank. The only thing available to you was going to be housekeeping. So, that was the main reason most, not only our family, but almost all the families of people of color left from Culpeper. And, just looking for better opportunities which we knew were not going to be found there.
Laura Farley 6:41
The Great Migration led to a cultural blossoming for all kinds of artists and creatives including the Harlem Renaissance and the Chicago Black Renaissance. DC had its own cultural blossoming during this period as more Black residents moved to the District and white families left for surrounding suburbs. DC was a hub for arts, education and civil rights. The district was a majority Black and Brown city by high margins from the 1950s through the 1990s. And by the 1970s during the Marion Barry era, was affectionately known as Chocolate City.
But it wasn't all good times and success. Although migrants escaped the horrors of the Jim Crow South new arrivals were often greeted by hostile communities who felt threatened by the influx of what they considered to be economic competition. Northern cities use tactics such as red lining, the practice of excluding services to people because of their race or identity, most frequently seen and housing discrimination, and labor union exclusion to control Black people. The legacy of these discriminatory practices is still felt by many Black and Brown families today. Migrants also experienced explicit and unspoken expectations of segregation in their new homes. In this clip from 2014, Reverend Irene Pierce shares with student Tenee' Crumlin, her experiences of racism and segregation as a child in the district.
Tenee' Crumlin 8:16
But did you expect for Washington to be different?
Irene Pierce 8:19
Like, literally from coming from South Carolina, it's like, well, I had no expectations, I guess. It was one of the things was they did not have the white and colored signs on the water fountains like they had in the south. I remember that. But let's you knew you knew where you could go and what you could do. You were limited to where you could go and what you could do, and southerners, southerners were as I grew up, and particularly the lady that took me with her children, she treated me just like one of them until they had a birthday and other people would come.
Tenee' Crumlin 9:13
And so others who come?
Irene Pierce 9:16
Their friends, their white friends would come but then I would have to go back in the kitchen with my mother. See, so-. But that's the way it was there.You just-. And they played with me and all, but I was not included in the groups of their company, their friends.
Laura Farley 9:39
The Center for Inspired Teaching "Real World History Class" Oral History project includes interviews with Washingtonians born between the late 1920s to the late 1950s. Most of the narrators moved to the District in the 1950s and the 1960s during the second wave of the Great Migration. Let's listen Mr. Hunt, describe this time and how it shaped DC.
Cosby Hunt 10:04
There's no way to talk about the history of Washington DC, without talking about the Great Migration. The first wave of the Great Migration from World War One through the 1930s gets a lot of attention. And the second wave of migration gets plenty of attention. But the wave, the second wave as it pertains to Washington, DC, not so much. DC is just at the border of north and south. In fact, some people have called it the Up South. So this collection, I hope is giving the world a special look into a part of the Great Migration that hasn't been looked at as closely as others. I mean, we've seen a lot about Chicago. We've seen a lot about folks going to New York and Harlem. So I hope that our collection is a way to shed light on the second wave and its impact on one very important city, my city, our city.
Laura Farley 11:14
A new school year just kicked off and a new class of Real World History students will be beginning preparations for another batch of oral histories for this collection. First, though, they're reading the Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. You can read along to and learn more about this incredible chapter in American history. Look for a link in the show notes for copies of The Warmth of Other Suns available through DC Public Library. To close out this segment, let's listen in on some advice from Deacon Clarence Haywood to Sameer Glazerman during their 2020 interview.
Clarence Haywood 11:51
Don't let one door closing be the last door you try. Right? That has always been my philosophy. Yeah. So one door close. Knock on another one, another one. If you get knocked down, get back up. Because there's gonna be some rough times. It's just how life works. So if you can't find opportunities in one place, you look somewhere else. You're gonna get discouraged. pick yourself up.
Laura Farley 16:09
Did you enjoy that music? That's just a snippet of our newest digital collection in Dig DC, Friday Morning Music Club. This collection contains 92 Friday Morning Music Club concerts recorded between 1968 and 2010 and digitized from reel to reel tape, cassettes and CDs. This organization has been active in the District since 1886 and provides free performances to the community as well as a space for local composers and musicians to showcase their talents. Want to hear the Friday Morning Music Club live? Come into the MLK auditorium on the second and third Wednesday's of the month at noon, starting in October.
Also new in Dig DC is the Chip Py Go-Go Collection showcasing over 1,900 images of the Go-Go community between 2010 and 2020. The creator and donor of this collection Chip Py captured stunning images of bands and performers like the Godfather of Go-Go himself Chuck Brown, E.U., Be'la Dona and Rare Essence. Go-Go was made the official music of DC in February 2020 and this collection captures the energy and joy of this unique DC music genre.
And last but not least are 95 huge and colorful protest posters from the Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis Poster Collection. These posters feature caricatures of politicians, charts and graphs, and bold catchphrases, like "TV coverage is not citizen participation".
Find Friday Morning Music Club, Chip Py Go-Go Collection and Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis Posters all in Dig DC now.
That's our show. Join us next time to take another peek into the stacks of The People's Archive. Until then, get vaccinated, wear a mask where it's required, and come see us on the fourth floor of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library.
This episode was written by me Laura Farley. Sound engineering was provided by Robert LaRose of The Labs at DC Public Library and Siobhan Hagan. Check our show notes for links to all the collections mentioned in this episode, and a calendar of events, as well as how to get a copy of The Warmth of Other Suns. Find us on Facebook at People's Archive at DC Public Library. Have a question? Email us at peoples.archive@dc.gov or stop by the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library and say hello. We're open Monday through Saturday 10 to 6, except Thursday when we're open 12 to 7. Remember to bring your mask. Until then see in the stacks.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai