Recovering the Past with Tamar

In the final chapter of Sisters and Rebels, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall quotes directly from a 1974 diary entry penned by Grace Lumpkin, one of the book’s protagonists:

 “A Jacquelyn Hall [had written] from Chapel Hill, N.C., asking if I would let her come & interview me for a job she is doing on ‘Southern Oral History’ whatever that is.” (483) 

From there, Dowd Hall’s own recollections of her visit to speak with Lumpkin, the content of their interviews, as well as Lumpkin’s diary entries and correspondence to family members, is woven together to paint a portrait of the last decade of Lumpkin’s life. That tapestry of sources is what made Sisters and Rebels so compelling to me — even if at times, overwhelming– and set it apart from other texts that utilize oral histories that I have encountered thus far. 

Sisters and Rebels chronicles the life of Grace and her two sisters Elizabeth and Katherine, all of whom were raised in Columbia, South Carolina at the turn of the century by a family steeped in a deep allegiance to the Old South. William Lumpkin, the girls’ father, was himself raised in Georgia in a family that held hundreds of enslaved people in bondage over generations. The onset of the Civil War and Reconstruction completely unmoored and engendered an undying resentment within William, who fell into financial precarity shortly after the war’s end. While Lumpkin never found financial success in his adult life, he did relocate his family to Columbia where he remade his own image as a Confederate veteran, a Lost Cause champion, and a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Dowd Hall focuses on William’s three daughters because of their divergent paths in adulthood and how they would come to understand their own Southern identity in remarkably different ways. While the oldest, Elizabeth, maintained her allegiance to the Lost Cause narrative and became a teacher and later attorney who remained in the South, Grace and Katherine would move to the Northeast after college, develop a robust critique of their Southern roots, and become deeply engaged in labor organizing and interracial coalitions. Perhaps most fascinatingly however is that while Katherine, an academic, remained consistent in her leftist politics until her death, Grace completely retreated by the 1950s. Amidst the rise of McCarthyism, Grace eschewed her ties to the Communist Party, found a new home amongst conservative Christian organizations, and veered to the far right, ultimately returning to the South. 

As a graduate student, Dowd Hall encountered the story of the Lumpkin sisters when she stumbled upon Katharine’s 1946 autobiography The Making of A Southerner, where Lumpkin recounts her childhood, her father’s membership in the Ku Klux Klan, and critiques white supremacy and Southern antebellum nostalgia. Dowd Hall’s interest in the Lumpkin sisters endured into the early 1970s when she was helping to establish UNC Chapel Hill’s Southern Oral History Program. By the time she reached out to interview the sisters, Elizabeth had already passed away, and as such, the bulk of the text focuses on Grace and Katherine. That focus is also bolstered however, by the fact that Grace and Katherine were writers themselves whose works provides a wellspring of information about not just the facts of their lives but how their perception of those facts shifted over time and were heavily inflected by the politics of the moment and the nature of memory. 

In addition to The Making of a Southerner, Grace also penned 4 novels and a screenplay, all of which were fiction but heavily based on her personal life, almost all of them having characters with direct corollaries to individuals in her own social world. These sources add so much to the story that Dowd is telling in that they are able to round out the interviews she captured in a number of ways. For Grace, who by the time she sat down with Dowd Hall had already come to dismiss a significant portion of her life (ie, those decades where she was deeply engaged with leftist organizing) these writings shed light on what her interior world looked like at that time. For Katherine, such written sources– particularly articles she penned while an undergraduate student at Brenau College– shed light on her sexual identity. This, in particular, was an aspect of her life that was in some ways open, as she lived with female romantic partners well into her final years, and yet was not one that she spoke to Dowd Hall about candidly. “For her, as with Grace,” Dowd Hall writes, “the anticommunism and homophobia of the 1950s had dropped a curtain between then and now.” 

The sheer length of these women’s lives (Grace passed away at age 89; Katherine at age 90) as well as their complexity, make it such that the oral histories collected by Dowd Hall are at once invaluable and incredibly incomplete. Hall’s acknowledgement of that early on is really grounding and admirable, and it also bestows her with an odd (and I would imagine burdensome) authority around how those blanks are filled in. Writing about Grace in particular, Hall says: “Although I was grateful to have met her, I saw the impossibility, even treachery, of basing my vision of her life on this encounter in her later years….At the same time, I try to save her from herself by documenting the convictions and creativity of her earlier years.” (5) The idea that one dimension of Grace needs saving from another only reminds me of how much we change over the course of a life and how the oral histories we capture are far less of a complete portrait of a life and more of a simple snapshot. That snapshot may reveal far less about the life story collected than the moment in which it is captured.

I dived into Abigail Perkiss’ Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey’s Forgotten Shore, after listening to a short podcast episode with the author about the book hosted by the New Books Network. I appreciated the conversation for the context it helped provide about the oral histories featured in the book and more specifically, how her own students were critical in the collection process, even though none of them had ever conducted an oral history before and many were not history majors at all. Understanding the background of the project and knowing that the oral historians involved in it were not just from the same community as their sources but had also just endured the same traumatic event really sheds light on why the project was so successful. The interviews captured in the text came from a space of deep vulnerability that is not necessarily guaranteed with a project of this scope. Below are some key questions I hope to pose to Perkiss on the project and how she approached constructing the book:

1. The text incorporates so many voices and individual stories, which is a testament to what can be created from an oral history project. I’m curious how you went about selecting which parts of the interviews would be featured in the book and what overall considerations you made when turning these hours of conversations into a concrete and coherent narrative. What was the outlining and preparation process, and did you have a sense of the final product you were hoping to create/the ultimate story you were hoping to tell as you entered into the oral history collection process, or did it unfold organically?
2. Given the focus of your upcoming on MOVE and media narratives in the wake of the bombing, I’m curious about your thoughts on media coverage of Hurricane Sandy, particularly local news coverage. When analyzed alongside the oral histories collected for your project, what did the media miss or fail to capture? What, if anything, did journalists get right? Relatedly, what does oral history offer that journalism perhaps cannot provide when it comes to recounting traumatic events of this scope?

While every week of this course thus far has provided me with the opportunity to think about the practice of oral history alongside my own experience as a journalist, this week’s reading of Lynn Abrams’ Oral History Theory put it in most stark relief. The chapter on trauma in particular brought up a lot of questions for me about past interviews I’ve done and underscored how the purpose of and overall product crafted by a journalist is fundamentally different than that of an oral historian, even if much of the work appears to be the same. I appreciated Abrams’ discussion on theories around trauma and how the notion of the “talking cure” has come to pervade our conceptions of how survivors should tell their stories and the overall utility of them sharing those stories at all. At my previous job, one of the stories that I was most proud of but also most challenged by involved a series of interviews with women filing lawsuits against the prisons they were incarcerated in because they endured years of sexual abuse by corrections officers.

I remember feeling the weight of what they shared with me in a far heavier way than I had ever experienced before, and also a really high burden of responsibility because our conversation in its entirety was never going to be accessible to the general public. Instead, I knew that I had to slice, cut, and contextualize their story within a larger article that aimed to serve a purpose that went beyond just platforming these individual women and giving them the space to process this difficult chapter of their past. Similarly, the way these women shared their stories was shaped by their knowledge that the story would be broadcast but also filtered through me— and my editors– beforehand. As Abrams writes, “narrators needed the space to find explanations of what had happened that were meaningful to them and not imposed by interviews’ theories of trauma.” (188) In the context of journalism those theories feel very much at the surface as they shape the whole infrastructure around the interview as it is taking place and they inform our sense of how the information shared will be perceived by the public afterwards.  

Further, because the interviews for that story were taking place during the time of an active lawsuit, there was an inherent element of rehearsal because these women had been sharing these stories to their legal teams and possibly other members of the press before speaking with me. For that reason, I really enjoyed Abram’s discussion on Performance and don’t necessarily think of it as a pejorative or something to avoid. I just think it’s a natural feature of how we tell stories about our lives, particularly those that we have grown accustomed to resharing over time. I would imagine that an oral history— because of the time spent between narrator and interviewer and the knowledge that the purpose for the conversation is solely the collection and preservation of one’s story— allows space for less of that performance, even though it surely will still be there.

Jammin Lewis was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1961 and spent her earliest years living in East New York as the middle child of four siblings– two brothers and one sister. From her youth into adolescence, her life was marked by tremendous shifts, namely the death of caregivers and the need to relocate and create a new sense of home that accompanied those losses. Upon the sudden death of her mother at age 8 from sickle cell anemia, Jammin was raised by her grandmother until high school, when her grandmother passed away due to breast cancer. That same year, Jammin and her siblings moved to Los Angeles to live with their uncle. After graduating from high school, she remained in Los Angeles, attending the University of California, Los Angeles, where she graduated with a degree in Political Science. Not long after college, Jammin returned to her first home of New York City, where she met her husband and went on to have three daughters. While raising her three girls, Jammin began to build a career in the education field, serving as a guidance counselor at a school for students with special needs and later, as an early intervention specialist while earning her Master’s in Education from Brooklyn College. In 1997, Jammin and her husband divorced, ushering her into a new chapter. She purchased a home in Flatbush, where she would raise her young daughters, and pivoted to working for the New York City Department of Human Services, where she remained until her retirement in 2020. That year, amidst the pandemic, Jammin relocated to Charlotte, North Carolina, and made a second career pivot– becoming a certified postpartum doula. While this marked a new career, it also represented a return to a larger throughline in her life’s work: a deep commitment to the health of children and supporting families tasked with rearing them

In the spring of 1968, parents living in the predominantly Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood of Brownsville submitted demands to the New York City Central Board of Education. Disillusioned and frustrated with the quality of education given to their children attending the district’s still largely segregated public schools, parents requested the right to hire and fire school administrators and teachers, to access and control school funds, and purchase their own books and supplies. In essence, parents were demanding community school control, or school decentralization. The effort proved successful when the Central Board approved a pilot program or “experiment” in school community control featuring a local community-run school board. However, their demands also kicked off a year-long battle between parents in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), who waged a city-wide teachers strike after the community-controlled school board fired 19 union teachers for unsatisfactory performance. While the strike impacted the entire city, eight schools in Ocean Hill-Brownsville remained open with classes taught by 300 replacement teachers hired by the community over the summer. The curriculum taught in these “freedom schools” was markedly more progressive and focused on teaching Black history and Black pride.

In July of 1968, Herbert Hill sat down with Dorothy Jones, a former education consultant for the NYC Commission on Human Rights and– at the time of the interview–a fellow at the Metropolitan Applied Research Council (MARC) run by famed psychologist Dr. Kenneth Clark. The interview was one of 31 oral histories collected by Hill alongside his colleagues Jim Keeney, Roberta McBride and Norman McCrae. Between 1967 and 1970, the researchers set out documenting Black labor struggles through 1:1 interviews with Black unionists who were garment workers, automobile workers, Pullman porters and teachers. In 2020, transcripts of these oral histories were made available by Wayne State University’s Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs.

Hill’s interview with Jones focuses largely on her perceptions of the UFT and her evaluation of how they stymied efforts at school decentralization. While at the time of the interview the full impact of the Ocean Hill Brownsville contest had yet to bear out, the latter portion of the interview touched on Jones’ recollections of what led to parent disillusionment with the school board, and her feelings on breaking from UFT in support of “freedom schools.” 

“Strike breaking” in this way marked a significant departure from her previous support of UFT strikes.  

It’s necessary to consider the time at which Hill and Jones’ conversation takes place in order to understand the flow of the conversation. The discussion is clearly shared between two people who have a knowledge of the New York City public school landscape and are offering recollections of events that had only very recently occurred. Jones’ recollections are shaped by an understanding that much of what they are discussing is still unfolding in real time. Early on in their conversation, perhaps to establish rapport or settle into a natural flow, Hill and Jones discuss a lot of organizations and leaders of local associations without providing context. Only after Jones shares her thoughts or opinions does Hill circle back and ask her to, for instance, provide the full name of an organization when an acronym might have been used earlier. It’s clear that Hill knows what Jones has been referring to but wants to offer clarity for future listeners or readers. Additionally, in moments where Jones provides a lengthy answer to Hill’s question, he follows up by synthesizing what she just said, reiterating the key points or takeaways, and asking Jones to confirm if that’s an accurate paraphrasing. 

Perhaps because the interview exists within a larger series about Black labor history, Hill’s interviews read as being more purpose-driven than an oral history that allows its interviewee to meander and move in the direction that they so choose. Hill’s questions are clearly guided towards a specific end and in instances where Jones veers off on a small tangent, Hill will redirect or circle back by saying “I don’t want to lose the thread” Similarly, before he poses a question he will at times give a signal to the significance of the information he wants to glean, telling Jones, “this is a very important thing.” 

I don’t think that this is inherently unethical; however, it is clear that Hill and Jones are of similar opinion on the role of UFT and its president, Al Shankar. Thus, sometimes Hill makes assertions about the union and asks Jones if she agrees as opposed to posing neutral questions and enabling Jones to answer for herself. However, I wonder if conducting the interview in more of an objective manner could have eroded Jones’ sense of trust in Hill especially when the subject matter is so contentious and still bears weight in the moment in which the interview was taking place.            

In addition to learning about the history and background of formal oral history education in the US, namely Allan Nevins’ development of the oral history project at Columbia University, this set of readings was most intriguing to me in their discussion of the role of the interviewer and specifically the interviewers’ relationship with their subject. For one, I had to marinate on Nevins’ assertion that a good interviewer possesses a combination of “personality and intellect that is hard to obtain” (34) as well as how an interviewer’s positionality, personability, and overall approach to the subject matter and their subject influences the oral history they co-produce. Most fascinating to me is how the impact of an interviewer, despite being very profound, is not always easily discernible by the listener or reader. 

This takes me to Portelli’s discussion of the value of tapes versus transcripts. I was particularly intrigued by the comparison that Portelli draws between interpreting an oral history transcript and doing literary criticism on a translated text. The idea that “the transcript turns aural objects into visual ones, which inevitably implies changes and interpretation” (47) made me return to my own experiences engaging with the WPA slave narratives that were the focus of the illuminating series of Library of Congress articles. Over the past decade or so, I’ve used the WPA narratives in a variety of both personal and academic research projects, but I’ve always only ever utilized the interview transcripts. While I’ve always been aware of the project’s limitations, particularly how “caste-etiquette” likely shaped the responses of previously enslaved informants to their white interviewers, I only really grasped those limitations when I listened to the audio for the first time just last year. 

Last fall, the Center for Brooklyn History hosted an evening dedicated to the 1619 Project. A part of the evening of programming was listening sessions of select WPA narratives. Hearing both the conversation shared between the interviewer and informant was incredibly illuminating for me and made real the many ways in which the interviews were both very valuable and also potentially compromised. The tapes revealed the intonation of the interviewer and their skepticism of some of the responses to their questions– all components of the conversation that are completely lost when relayed via written transcript and especially when the interviewer’s voice is erased from the transcript and the oral history is instead presented as the informant’s stream of consciousness. 

While the set of Born in Slavery articles discusses the enduring value of the collection and how historians can still utilize them while, as Saadiya Hartman notes, “remaining aware of the impossibility of fully reconstituting the experience of the enslaved,” I’ll be continuing to think about how to acknowledge all of these limitations in my own work that employs these WPA narratives. I’m also thinking, as we turn to our class project, how I wish to present myself as an interviewer in such a way that builds rapport without compromising the quality of the interview and the accuracy of the information that it produces. 

My name is Tamar Sarai Davis and I’m currently a second-year History PhD student at Temple University. My primary objective for this course, The Theory and Practice of Oral History, is to gain firsthand experience with producing an oral history project. I’m also really excited to continue pulling on some of the threads established last semester during Managing History and flesh out my knowledge of both the African American Museum in Philadelphia, as well as Black public history efforts throughout the city in general. For the past 6 years, I’ve worked as a journalist, which has given me a lot of experience interviewing and speaking to different types of people with varying relationships to the subject matter I was reporting on. I’m looking forward to better understanding how the work I’ve done and my existing expertise differs from what is required for an oral history project. What skills will be complementary? What new methods will I have to adopt? What old approaches might I need to adjust? 

Welcome! As a part of our course on Oral History, I’ll be maintaining this blog to capture my thoughts, reflections, and learnings. Thank you for joining this journey with me, and I’m excited to share as I learn and delve into the past.