The Importance of Leaving Footprints- Lessons From the Slave Narratives and "Footnote Four"
During the last few years, it has been a matter of extreme frustration to me that I have been able to do little to prevent our country from "going off the rails." I saw what was coming four years ago, warned people about it, and had virtually no influence on anybody that didn't already share my views
In the last few weeks, I have started to make peace with my ineffectiveness as a political actor when it comes to current events. My influence, such as it is, will be manifested over a long period of time, for the most part through the activity of the students I have taught, but also through my writings, my postings on social media, and the data base on Bronx and New York History I have created with my colleagues through the Bronx African American History Project
To explain why I think this way, I want to share two things that took place in the Great Depression that would have their greatest influence over thirty years after they were done
The first was an initiative of the Federal Writers Project, created by the Works Progress Administration, to conduct oral history interviews with more than 2,000 formerly enslaved people who were still alive during the great Depression. These interviews, conducted by scores of young scholars, were placed in the Library of Congress and were neglected for more than twenty years because historians of slavery, overwhelmingly white, only trusted written documents and were only willing to use as source for their accounts of slavery journals and letters of slave owners, newspaper articles, and a small number of published memoirs of former slaves. However, in the late 60's and early 70's with the rise of the Black Studies movement, these interviews were not only "discovered" they were transformed into the major source for CONTINUE READING: With A Brooklyn Accent: The Importance of Leaving Footprints- Lessons From the Slave Narratives and "Footnote Four"
