Reparative Justice, Inside and Out
"Inheritance Baltimore" Resets the Table, With Black Baltimore at its Head
To what degree can we imagine a reparations program that redirects the inheritance of the University’s elite stature, prestige and resources in ways to bring about anti-racist or democratic outlook? - Dr. Nathan D.B. Connolly, Inheritance Baltimore
It’s not too late to see “Community Archives: Preserving Black Baltimore,” on display at the Eisenhower Library on JHU’s Homewood Campus until July 15, 2022, curated by the Community Archives Program at Inheritance Baltimore. Stop by to learn more about what it means to build a research collection in collaboration with community partners. Featured are materials from the Eubie Blake Cultural Arts Center, the Afro Newspaper Archives, and three historic Black Churches of West Baltimore.
For us at Hard Histories, where we often work in the holdings of institutions such as the Maryland State Archives and the Maryland Center for History and Culture, the exhibition offered a behind-the-scenes look at how the JHU-University of Baltimore Community Archives team approaches “documenting, recording and exploring community heritage to create more inclusive stories of a people’s history,” and left a powerful impression.
At Hard Histories, we can only imagine how our insight into the early years of JHU would be enriched through access to, for example, oral histories of the enslaved people in Mr. Hopkins’ household. The work of the Community Archives Program is a critical reminder that the development of Baltimore’s 19th century archive was too often directed by the state’s white elite leaders, without consideration of the interests or the views of Black Baltimoreans.
We work carefully with these materials, looking to extract insight without furthering the anti-Black racism that premised their creation. Approaches such as “reading along the bias grain,” pioneered by Dr. Marisa Fuentes, Dr. Ann Laura Stoler’s “reading along the archival grain,” and Dr. Gayatri Spivak’s “reading against the grain,” enable us to discover, as Fuentes puts it, the history that lies between the lines and also that which is “not between the lines at all.”1
The Community Archives Program is one facet of Inheritance Baltimore, “a reparations program for Humanities education and Arts-based public engagement in black Baltimore.” In their approach, historical recovery is an act of redress in the present and is also an investment in our capacity to remember, recall, and rewrite our own times for generations to come. This work is grounded in a deep ethical vision: “We regard the history, culture, arts and expertise of black Baltimore as our treasured inheritance, and put forth the arts and archival rescue as mechanisms for ameliorating deep historical wrongs.”
Still, we recognize that the Community Archives Program emerges out of a long-standing tradition, one that includes the work of journalists who have long recorded Black perspectives on our city. In the spring of 1884, the biting pen of the New York Globe’s T. Thomas Fortune offered a glimpse of our city and of Johns Hopkins. Fortune clearly knew our faults, but he also had a faith, faith in Baltimore’s “colored youth,” its “colored schools” and its Black teachers.2 Fortune’s paper is one of our “community” archives that expands upon and even counters the stories we have too long told. We are indebted to the Community Archives Program for continuing that work.
— MSJ
Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archives (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak,” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988); Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
“Where the White Man is Not Wanted,” New York Globe, May 31, 1884. For more on T. Thomas Fortune and his journalism, Shawn Leigh Alexander, An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights Struggle Before the NAACP (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) and Shawn Leigh Alexander, ed., T. Thomas Fortune, the Afro-American Agitator: A Collection of Writings, 1880-1928 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008).