Civil Rights Movement Research Articles

Theorizing Rhetorical Children

Children play a vital role in shaping public argument. However, communication scholars have yet to theorize their rhetorical potentiality. Our essay redresses this limitation by analyzing children as a site of dynamic rhetorical struggle. We develop three constructs for theorizing rhetorical children: Moral obligation; Natality; and Revelatory truth-telling. We illuminate these constructs by analyzing rhetorical children in three case studies: “Mother” Jones and the March of the Mill Children, the American Civil Rights Movement and the Children’s Crusade, and gun violence and the March For Our Lives Movement. We close by summarizing the value of theorizing rhetorical children for communication scholars.

The Whiteness of the White

The Whiteness of the White

Exalting Negro Womanhood: Black Women Poets and Harlem Renaissance Magazines

New Negro magazines such as The Messenger, Opportunity, and The Crisis regularly featured photographs and short descriptions of Black women designed to highlight their role as both moral centers and aspirational figures. These images tended to imply that the ideal New Negro woman would challenge racist stereotypes of Black women not only through her behavior but also through her looks. For instance, a feature in the January 1924 issue of The Messenger called “Exalting Negro Womanhood” seeks to counter the overrepresentation of “[t]he buffoon, the clown, the criminal Negro” in white media with portraits of Black “achievement, culture, refinement, beauty, genius, and talent”. But of the twenty women featured in the centerfold of photographs, all are light skinned. Importantly, however, Black women poets of the era, including Gwendolyn B. Bennett, Gladys May Casely-Hayford, Anita Scott Coleman, Jessie Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimké, Helene Johnson, Anne Spencer, and Octavia B. Wynbush, provide a counter to this coding of light skin as desirable through poems that emphasize the beauty of dark-skinned bodies. This essay places their poetry alongside the visuals of the New Negro movement and the larger white supremacist culture of the 1920s. In poems such as Bennett’s “To a Dark Girl”, Grimké’s “The Black Hand”, Johnson’s “Poem”, and Spencer’s “Lady, Lady”, an emphasis on beautiful and powerful Blackness provides a steady counterpoint to the prevailing color standards surrounding Black female beauty and respectability.

THE MANY LIVES OF CONSTANCE BAKER MOTLEY

THE MANY LIVES OF CONSTANCE BAKER MOTLEY

The Fight for Fair Training: Fair Employment, Defense Worker Training, and the African American Civil Rights Movement in the South, 1940–1945

The Fight for Fair Training:Fair Employment, Defense Worker Training, and the African American Civil Rights Movement in the South, 1940–1945 Bryant Etheridge (bio) If Thurgood Marshall took offense at being counseled on litigation strategy by someone who lacked legal training, he chose not to show it. John L. LeFlore, the secretary of the Mobile, Alabama, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was urging him to make better use of the Supreme Court's recent decision in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938). It was 1941, and LeFlore was deeply involved in the wartime civil rights struggles of Black Alabamians, especially their fight to gain employment in the state's booming industries. The Gaines ruling, he advised Marshall, constituted a vital doctrinal resource in the fight for fair employment. Marshall informed LeFlore that the NAACP's legal staff, in response to similar requests from most of the organization's branches, was already developing a test case that addressed LeFlore's concerns. At the upcoming annual conference in Houston, Texas, NAACP members from around the country would coordinate legal strategy. LeFlore, Marshall suggested, could contribute to that effort by representing the NAACP branches of Alabama at the June 1941 conference.1 [End Page 501] As LeFlore fought racism in wartime Mobile, he had no higher priority than winning access to good jobs for Black residents. The struggle to overcome white opposition to equal employment opportunity in the city's shipyards occupied him and other local activists for the rest of the war. While employment as unskilled laborers was often open to African Americans, semiskilled or skilled work was not. As a result, moving up the occupational ladder was a civil rights imperative in Mobile, as it was throughout the United States, during World War II. The assault on the Jim Crow racial division of labor was foremost on LeFlore's mind when he contacted Marshall.2 LeFlore proposed to make the Gaines case, a lawsuit that was part of the NAACP's campaign against segregation, central to attacking racialized economic inequality. The case involved an African American plaintiff, Lloyd Gaines, who had applied to the law school at the University of Missouri. The all-white university rejected Gaines's application. Missouri instead offered to pay Gaines's tuition at an out-of-state law school, a workaround that many southern states used to avoid complying with even the separate-but-equal stipulation of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Gaines declined that arrangement, and the NAACP's legal team filed suit. In 1938, the Supreme Court ruled that Missouri's tuition reimbursement program was unconstitutional. The ruling left the state with two options for graduate law education: to open a law school for Black students or to admit Black students to the existing institution. Although the decision stopped well short of ending segregation in higher education, it was an important milestone on the long road to Brown v. Board of Education (1954). With the Gaines lawsuit, NAACP lawyers aimed, in part, to make segregation too expensive to sustain. The cost of creating separate-but-equal programs in every area of graduate and professional study, they wagered, would prove too heavy a burden for southern states to bear.3 The faith LeFlore showed in the Gaines ruling as a solution to the problem of fair employment in Mobile's shipyards appears misplaced. The categorical distinction between the NAACP's legal campaign against segregated education, on one hand, and the concurrent but separate fight for economic justice, on the other, underpins our basic conceptualization of the civil rights movement in the 1940s. If alleviating [End Page 502] economic inequality was LeFlore's objective, his propounding the utility of Gaines seems to amount to a non sequitur. Perhaps LeFlore was confused. Perhaps, in offering guidance on constitutional law to an NAACP attorney, he had gotten in over his head and misconstrued the Court's ruling in Gaines. Or maybe LeFlore just screwed up and cited the wrong case. If LeFlore misunderstood the Gaines decision, he was not alone. He informed Marshall that in Mobile, Black residents stood broadly in support of using Gaines as a...

Fantasie nègre: The Piano Music of Florence Price, by Samantha Ege

<i>Fantasie nègre: The Piano Music of Florence Price</i>, by Samantha Ege

This Land Is Herland: Gendered Activism in Oklahoma from the 1870s to the 2010s ed. by Sarah Eppler Janda and Patricia Loughlin

Reviewed by: This Land Is Herland: Gendered Activism in Oklahoma from the 1870s to the 2010sed. by Sarah Eppler Janda and Patricia Loughlin Courtney Kisat This Land Is Herland: Gendered Activism in Oklahoma from the 1870s to the 2010s. Edited by Sarah Eppler Janda and Patricia Loughlin. Women and the American West. ( Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 303. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-6926-2.) Scholars of gender, rural, and western American history will find much to celebrate in This Land Is Herland: Gendered Activism in Oklahoma from the 1870s to the 2010s. The first installment of the Women and the American West series, which is edited by Renée M. Laegreid and published by the University of Oklahoma Press, the volume presents thirteen essays that profile Oklahoma women over time and space. Central to these essays are the notions of belonging and agency: to whom do the rights of a citizen belong, how have they been claimed and refuted, and how does this reshape our understanding of the American West? This scholarship is merely the latest effort at correcting the historiography of the American West, a movement that began in 1982 when the Coalition [End Page 600]for Western Women's History formed to highlight the lack of historical attention on western women's lived experiences and to refute the mainstream, overmasculinized version of the American West. Since then, historians looking to see the past through a more gendered lens have produced valuable scholarship shaped by more inventive ways of imagining the spaces in which women have worked, lived, and died. This Land Is Herlandcontributes much to this vibrant field of western women's history. The anthology's editors, Sarah Eppler Janda and Patricia Loughlin, both of whom are noted historians of gender and the American West, have woven a historical tapestry that artfully represents the activism of Oklahoma women from a variety of socioeconomic and demographic backgrounds between the 1870s and the 2010s. The anthology is organized into three parts and represents the work of a dozen professional historians, adding much to a field that is finally receiving well-deserved attention in mainstream history. Part 1 examines themes of activism, radicalism, and maternalism through the lives of five remarkable women who worked within the bounds of gender norms to help shape their fledgling communities in the postbellum era through statehood in 1907. Part 2 delves into the long civil rights movement in Oklahoma, offering profiles of four courageous women from the 1920s through the 1960s, women who remained determined to improve society even as opposition mounted and consequences loomed large. Part 3 concludes the anthology with four essays covering women who fought for their vision of equality from the 1970s through the 2010s. As the culture wars of the times increased in intensity, the authors explain, so too did each woman's determination to win the day, even in the face of devastating consequences to their liberty and property. By way of critique, the subjectivity of some authors raises questions about potentially overcorrecting the historical record, while other points are weakened by unsubstantiated claims. For example, one author explains that an illustration is "possibly" that of her subject, but as "there are no confirmed" photographs of her, the reader is asked to instead imagine the woman in the photo as representative of the women who occupied that space and time (p. 136). If a specific figure becomes impossible to document through traditional research, where does the historian's due diligence lie, and where does it factor into an imagining of the spaces occupied by people such as those under study in this volume? These questions will continue to provoke scholars who produce scholarship on women's experiences across time and place. The women profiled in This Land Is Herlandremained fluid in tactics, rhetoric, and activism by necessity, because they operated in a world dominated by men. Each utilized the tools of maternalism, social capital, and political persuasion to advance their particular view of a society in Oklahoma. Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote Herlandin 1915, describing a society as a feminist utopia completely free from male presence. As the historians in...

Review: A Nation of Descendants: Politics and the Practice of Genealogy in U.S. History, by Francesca Morgan

Review: <i>A Nation of Descendants: Politics and the Practice of Genealogy in U.S. History</i>, by Francesca Morgan

The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics by Frank Andre Guridy

Reviewed by: The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athleticsby Frank Andre Guridy David K. Wiggins The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics. By Frank Andre Guridy. Texas Bookshelf. ( Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. Pp. x, 418. $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4773-2183-6.) I like this book very much. Frank Andre Guridy, utilizing a nice combination of secondary and primary source material, provides a very interesting and insightful analysis of sports in Texas and, by extension, in American culture more generally. Although some might be overwhelmed by its 353 pages of text and disappointed by its limited coverage of interscholastic athletics, the book provides important and detailed information largely about the role and [End Page 590]changing pattern of college and professional sports in the Lone Star State from the end of the Jim Crow era to the 1980s. I have no doubt readers of The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athleticswill gain a better appreciation of the large number of outstanding athletes and culturally significant sporting events that took place in Texas during a rapidly changing and tumultuous period in American history. Guridy covers some frequently told stories such as the integration of football at Southern Methodist University and the subsequent scandal that rocked its gridiron program, the well-known Battle of the Sexes tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs at the Houston Astrodome, the enormous success of the University of Houston's basketball program popularly referred to as Phi Slama Jama, the football dominance of the University of Texas Longhorns, and the emergence and ultimate success of the San Antonio Spurs professional basketball team. He also examines some stories not as well known, including perhaps most important the origin and cultural significance of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. In the process, Guridy provides interesting details on the athletes, coaches, owners, and support personnel who contributed to the vibrant and nationally prominent sports programs in Texas. He furnishes significant details and background information, for example, on perhaps the greatest woman athlete of all time, Mildred Ella "Babe" Didrikson; the University of Texas's great running back Earl Campbell; Jerry LeVias, who integrated the Southern Methodist University football program; coach Guy Lewis, who masterminded the University of Houston's highly successful basketball team; oil tycoon Lamar Hunt, who co-founded the American Football League (AFL); Gussie Nell Davis, who led the highly skilled Kilgore Rangerettes drill team; tennis legends Rosemary "Rosie" Casals and Gladys Medalie Heldman; the Dallas Cowboys' famous coach Tom Landry; Texas Rangers owner Robert E. Short; and University of Houston football coach Bill Yeoman. Adding immeasurably to the effectiveness of the book is the fact that Guridy places sports in Texas in proper historical context and consistently draws connections to what was taking place in the industry on a national scale and how sport in the state both impacted and was impacted by larger societal changes and movements. Virtually every page of the book is filled with engaging details about the business side of athletics and how smart, wealthy, and imaginative entrepreneurs transformed how sports were organized, viewed, and financed. Guridy effectively connects sports in the Lone Star State to the larger civil rights struggle and explains how Black athletes increasingly found their way into intercollegiate and professional sports while still suffering the pangs of racial discrimination and being viewed as commodities in institutions still controlled largely by white men. Guridy also effectively connects sports in Texas to the second-wave feminist movement and illuminates how women athletes negotiated for better treatment while at once struggling to overcome the sexist views and gender stereotypes so rampant in a culture that continued to trivialize their efforts at bodily excellence and skill development. In all, there is much to recommend about Frank Guridy's The Sports Revolution. It is a nicely written, compelling, and thoughtful book that provides an awareness of and appreciation for the changing nature of sports in [End Page 591]Texas specifically and American culture more broadly. I expect it to have a long shelf life and to be of interest to those who want to learn more...

Review: Latina Lives, Latina Narratives: Influential Essays by Vicki L. Ruiz, edited by Miroslava Chávez-García

Review: <i>Latina Lives, Latina Narratives: Influential Essays by Vicki L. Ruiz</i>, edited by Miroslava Chávez-García

“A [B]lack Baudelaire”: Linguistic Panic and Symbolism in Amiri Baraka’s 1960s Life and Work

In his infamous Dutchman (1964), Amiri Baraka evokes Baudelaire, the famed forefather of French Symbolism: building upon Véronique Lane’s 2017 monograph, Baraka, a member of the Beat Generation, has a French Genealogy, a practiced knowledge of French Symbolism which begs the application of a Symbolist paradigm to Baraka’s theory, works, and lived experience. In this essay, I justify this Baraka-Symbolist connection before undertaking a structuralist close-reading of both Dutchman and A Black Mass to suggest one understanding of Baraka’s mid-1960s transition from “[B]lack Baudelaire” to Black Muslim. This developmental narrative is founded within the contemporaneous scholarship of Franz Fanon and Baraka’s written take on the Civil Rights Movement. I unpack Baraka’s lived experience through a semiotic rereading of his autobiography alongside Pierre Quillard’s Symbolist play, The Girl With Cut-Off Hands (1891), applying James Harding’s notion of “linguistic panic” to these case studies to narrate Baraka’s development: like the Girl in Quillard’s play, Baraka’s self-genesis is a tale of cutting off (white) extremities, necessarily enacted in both the dramatic and the domestic. Lastly, I accept Baraka’s invitation to interrogate the racial politics of French Symbolism, informed by Mike Sell’s scholarship on the avant-garde, highlighting the Symbolists’ lack of racial sensitivity and the ways in which Baraka’s work draws our eyes to these shortcomings. I conclude that Baraka’s understanding of Symbolism offers us further insight into his radical artistic practices and personal transformation, while demonstrating how Baraka’s use and usurpation of French Symbolism lay bare the racial aporias of the historical avant-garde.

Excavating the Ancestry of ‘Globetrotting’: New Perspectives on the Intersection of Racial Politics, Civil Rights Struggles and anti-Apartheid Crusades in US Track and Field from the 1920s through the 1980s

During the twentieth century, systems of racial segregation flourished in both the United States and South Africa. Crusades for racial equality aimed at dismantling racial boundaries emerged in both nations. Sport played a key role in these endeavours. Drawing colour lines in athletic competitions reinforced ideologies of white supremacy while demanding racial equality in sporting contests fuelled campaigns challenging segregation. In an American culture that used athletes as globetrotting ambassadors to promote mythologies of exceptionalism, in particular aspirational but unrealized visions of racial equity, interchanges with South Africa highlighted the complex historical intersections between politics, race, and sport. From all-white US track and field tours of South Africa that began in the 1930s, to the key role that the leading American symbol of conquering colour lines, Jack Robinson, played in athletic affairs with South Africa, to American rebellions against anti-apartheid boycotts in the 1980s, this essay introduces a special issue on ‘Excavating the Ancestry of “Globetrotting”: New Perspectives on the Intersection of Racial Politics, Civil Rights Struggles and Anti-Apartheid Crusades in US Track and Field from the 1920s through the 1980s’.

‘I See the Struggle against Race Supremacy and Racial Inequality as World-Wide’: Anti-Apartheid Campaigns, Civil Rights Struggles, and the 1961 Track and Field Tours of South Africa

ABSTRACT As the Civil Rights Movement in the US reached its apogee and apartheid in South Africa cemented its grip, the American Amateur Athletic Union in 1961 announced plans to send a team of athletics all-stars to the African nation. Following tours of South Africa by all-white American teams in 1931 and 1950, as well as a 1938 tour scuttled by racial disagreements, the 1961 proposal drew fire from Civil Rights leaders and anti-apartheid activists. In the early 1960s these two factions of fighters for racial justice through sport made common cause. Jack Roosevelt Robinson, the iconic leader of the crusade to desegregate American baseball, joined the anti-apartheid crusade and proposed a sporting boycott of South Africa. Robinson also lobbied Black athletes to boycott track meets that did not extend interracial inclusion to the stadium stands and local accommodations. Under pressure, the Amateur Athletic Union abandoned its 1961 tour, but the US Department of State sent a small, entirely white contingent of athletes to the apartheid state on a ‘goodwill’ mission. The 1961 incidents in the US and South Africa highlighted the growing intersection of racial justice crusades centred on sport that targeted both American segregation and South African apartheid.

‘A Democracy That Will Know Not the Differences of Race’: American ‘Globetrotting’ in South Africa from the 1920s through the 1980s in Perspective

ABSTRACT When in 1931 the United States sent an all-white track and field team to compete against an all-white South African roster, it inaugurated a series of interchanges that over the next six decades illuminated intersections between politics, race, and sport in both nations. Between the 1930s and the 1980s, these periodic sporting encounters served as lightning rods that rallied civil rights activists and anti-apartheid protestors, linking battles over sport and race in both nations. By the 1960s, as legal segregation in the US eroded while the system in South Africa hardened, titans of American sporting desegregation who championed athletes’ rights such as Jack Robinson linked their endeavours to anti-apartheid campaigns. At the end of the 1980s, two multi-racial groups of American athletes broke international anti-apartheid bans and created a new debate over the concept of athletes’ rights. As apartheid crumbled in the early 1990s, an American legal scholar sought to codify this new perspective into a federal ‘athletes’ bill of rights’, providing a paradoxical postscript for this special issue on ‘Excavating the Ancestry of “Globetrotting”: New Perspectives on the Intersection of Racial Politics, Civil Rights Struggles and Anti-Apartheid Crusades in US Track and Field from the 1920s through the 1980s’.

“Black power” and black rhetorical tradition

This essay explores some of the proverbs, sayings, and proverbialexpressions used by Stokely Carmichael (1941-1998) that are foundin writings such as: Black Power the Politics of Liberation in America(1967), Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism (1971),and his autobiography, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Times ofStokely Carmichael (2003). In the process of analyzing traditional languageused by Carmichael, this essay also: (1) seeks to identify sourcesfrom which Carmichael’s sayings are derived, (2) examine some of thecontexts in which they are used, (3) determine the extent that they illustrateCarmichael’s ever-evolving political philosophies and worldviewduring the Civil Rights Era (1954-1968) and the African IndependenceMovement (1950-1975) respectively, (4) and it also seeks to categorizeCarmichael’s proverbs, sayings, and proverbial expressions based on origin,structure, and traits (such as word count and subject matter). (5)Additionally, this essay considers the extent that his proverbial languageis used to establish, reinforce, and regulate both personal and professionalrelationships throughout his entire life.

Landscape architecture education and democracy

The pioneers of landscape architecture invented this profession in a period of democratic, science and industrial revolutions that encouraged civil rights movements. However, before WWII the courses in landscape architecture were developed in only a small number of countries. Until the mid- seventies several new landscape architecture programs started in Western Europe. From the mid-seventies to the end of the eighties existing programs increased their number of staff members and students. The fall of the Iron Curtain, in 1989, resulted in the establishment of several new university degree programs in Eastern Europe. The hypothesis that there would be a correlation between the development of landscape architecture education and the political regimes is discussed in this paper. Different landscape architecture university programs worldwide are analyzed to see their history and the background of the institutions that provide them. Two reputable resources are used to support this analysis: the Democracy Index, and the Freedom House Report. According to this analysis about 88% of landscape architecture programs are offered in democratic countries, 82% are offered in free countries. A good association between the number of landscape architecture programs and democracy index is verified for former communist countries. The analysis showed that the progress of democracy institutions and civil rights create the necessary environment for the development of the landscape architecture profession.

Nashville Opera’s One Vote Won (2020) and the Challenge of Engaged Opera Performance

In September 2020, Nashville Opera released a new opera by composer Dave Ragland and librettist Mary McCallum that brought together ‘the Women’s Suffrage Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the disenfranchisement of modern-day voters’. Set in a parallel present, One Vote Won centres sonic and visual markers of Black sorrow, rage, and joy during a year defined by police brutality and widespread protests in support of #BlackLivesMatter in the United States. This article explores Nashville Opera’s attempt to navigate the possibility of opera at the intersection of youth culture and activism. One Vote Won has been variously positioned by its creators as a nonpartisan vehicle of civic engagement; a model of Black representation in the world of opera; a record of Black history making connections to present-day social movements; and an example of ‘accessible’ opera that aims to curate new audiences through educational outreach efforts targeted at socially-conscious students. Building on Naomi André’s practice of ‘engaged musicology’ to posit an ‘engaged opera performance’ that considers the lived experience of audiences during the creation of the work, I show how the use of social media networks as both content and context for One Vote Won illustrates competing visions of operatic ‘engagement’.

A Journey to Justice: Transnational Civil Rights and Ramnath Biswas, an Indian Globetrotter from Bengal, 1938–40

Ramnath Biswas (1894–1955) independently travelled around the world on a bicycle between 1931 and 1940. His travelogues about Africa and the US reveal Biswas to be an active supporter of the nascent transnational civil rights movement. This article connects his endeavours to achieve social justice for African, African American and Asian people with the phenomenon of ‘coloured cosmopolitanism’. Biswas’ observations—in particular, his portrayal of racial dynamics between Indians and Africans—are striking. Exploring Biswas’ narratives from a micro-historical perspective allows us to envision an alternative history of solidarity between non-white (‘oshwet’) people and to place his journey at the intersection of Indian Ocean Studies and studies of transnational civil rights activities during the inter-War period.

THE “WHITE DARKNESS”

Rather than considering the modernist aesthetic of primitivism as singular, this article contends that there are multiple and diverse primitivist projects. Each of these speaks to its historical context, and this article considers that of the Ukrainian-born, American avant-garde film-maker Maya Deren’s primitivist investments in Haiti through her published writing, diary entries and her film footage produced between 1948 and 1953. Deren’s work must be understood in relation to US imperialism and the occupation of Haiti (1915–34). It is also informed by her complex modernist aesthetics, Trotskyist politics and proximity to the New Negro movement through her association with choreographer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham. Despite a clearly articulated modernist vision for her film in Haiti, when confronted with the material reality of Haiti itself Deren abandoned her film in favour of a written “personal ethnography.” This article considers Deren’s refusal of film and the fracturing of her aesthetic gaze, framed as a refusal to manipulate reality, in the context of colonial ethnographic film. Finally, it considers the legacy of – and resistance to – Western imperialism and voyeurism informing Haitian artistic works today, as well as the policies of the Geto Byenal (Ghetto Biennale), held in Port-au-Prince from 2009 onwards.

Is Oral History White? The Civil Rights Movement in Baltimore, an Oral History Project from 1976, and Best Practices Today

ABSTRACT What can a focus on a past oral history project on the Civil Rights Movement teach us about best practices and an antiracism approach today? This article grew out of the 2020 Oral History Association virtual meeting panel, “Is Oral History White? Documenting Race in Three Baltimore Oral History Projects,” and examines that question by investigating the McKeldin-Jackson Project, an oral history of the Civil Rights Movement in Baltimore produced by the Maryland Historical Society in 1976. The article has a forward-looking focus on lessons that we might glean as oral historians today, lessons that apply not only to historical societies or to oral histories of the Civil Rights Movement, but also to museums, archives, and public history projects of all kinds. The paper expands on the question of whether oral history is white by interrogating what whiteness means for the field of oral history. Through this lens, three themes from the McKeldin-Jackson Project emerged: white interviewer/Black narrator dynamics; the biographical framing of two public figures (Theodore McKeldin and Lillie May Jackson), and why that was problematic; and what I call the project’s invisible architecture—the white foundations, including the historical society itself, that made the project possible. Finally, I offer some possible solutions for both individuals and institutions to work toward in building antiracism practices in oral history.