Historians Want to Be Cited in the Media. Here’s Why It Matters.

Paul Drinkwater/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

It was getting late, and the 2018 Golden Globe Awards were dragging on. But Danielle L. McGuire, a Detroit-based historian, was still waiting. She was staying up for something much more important than the year’s entertainment honors. She was waiting for Oprah Winfrey.

That night, Winfrey’s speech accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement, in which she presented a passionate argument for the #MeToo movement, electrified viewers and prompted questions about a presidential run.

For McGuire, the speech prompted a different question: How had Winfrey found out about Recy Taylor, one of the women at the center of her speech?

In September 1944, Taylor, a 24-year-old African-American sharecropper, was abducted and raped by six white men while she walked home from church in Abbeville, Ala. Decades before the civil-rights movement reached its climax the NAACP sent Rosa Parks to investigate the situation, and the seeds of the movement for racial equality were sewn, she said.

McGuire’s 2010 book, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance — a New History of the Civil Rights Movement From Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (Penguin Random House) brought attention to a figure who had been largely absent from mainstream history. McGuire had connected the dots between the activists who called for Taylor’s rapists to be prosecuted and the rise of the civil-rights movement years later.

The speech introduced Taylor but didn’t go full circle to the civil-rights movement, And it lacked a reference to McGuire’s work.

Not that the historian was upset. At first she was just surprised that Winfrey was speaking about Taylor. “I was genuinely shocked, like, in a good way,” she said.

McGuire had just returned from Taylor’s funeral. She spent time with Taylor’s family, and helped The New York Times write her obituary. To hear Winfrey tell the story was an extraordinary moment, she said. “You couldn’t ask for a better bookend to somebody’s home-going than have Oprah Winfrey tell your story in front of millions of people and praise your courage,” McGuire said. “And single you out as first, right, a leader. And so it was amazing. I was so grateful.”

She held out hope that Winfrey would mention her book in the speech, but that night she could do without it. “I mean, look, it’s Oprah Winfrey.”

That Feeling of Anonymity

Most historians’ work will never get the Oprah treatment. But many historians have become familiar with the feeling of anonymity as their work gains attention from the news media.

Weeks before Oprah said the name “Recy Taylor,” the History Channel published an article, “Before the Bus, Rosa Parks was a Sexual Assault Investigator.”

The article framed Parks as a leader and an advocate for black women, using the Taylor case as an example — just as McGuire’s Ph.D. dissertation and book had argued. Mention of the book was added at the end of the article after McGuire notified History.com.

McGuire and other historians don’t want work that took them years to craft to go uncited. Uncovering history takes time, and historians’ work should be treated like any other source, they argue.

Many articles about Taylor that followed Winfrey’s speech made it seem as if she was the first to tell Taylor’s story and to uncover Parks as one of her advocates, McGuire said. “So many people tend to think that historians don’t do detective work. We know how to find things that other people don’t know how to find, because it’s how we’re trained.”

McGuire had four boxes of historical materials to sift when she began to research Taylor. It was “an archival gold mine,” she said, especially because black women’s stories are often left out of archives. Two boxes contained the archives of an investigation of the incident by the Alabama governor’s office. The other two were filled with postcards and petitions on Taylor’s behalf.

McGuire recognized activists’ names in the papers. The postcards were the backbone of the Alabama bus boycotts. The folks who would march in Selma, protest in Birmingham, and boycott buses had written to the governor on Taylor’s behalf years earlier.

In her research, McGuire learned that black women didn’t like how they were treated on the buses, how drivers touched them, how other passengers sexually harassed them. Her book put Taylor’s case in a larger context — a movement for black women’s bodily integrity, and the bus boycott as a women’s movement.

Four months after Winfrey’s speech, McGuire still finds new articles with Taylor’s “untold story.” She emails editors, and asks reporters to cite her work. Then the next article shows up.

“You do what you can to hold onto it, the parts that are yours to hold onto,” she said. “And then there’s also this tension, too, you know. I write black women’s history. Do I have a right to even claim any of it as a white woman?”

‘How Do We Know This History?’

When historians produce work on topics related to breaking news, media demand grows quickly, said James T. Downs, a history professor at Connecticut College.

That happened to Downs after a gunman killed 49 people and wounded 58 others at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., in 2016.

Downs published Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation (Basic Books) in 2016, in which he documented a June 1973 arson attack on the UpStairs Lounge, a bar in New Orleans.

Days after the Orlando shooting, Downs wrote an opinion piece in the Times reminding readers that the Pulse shooting wasn’t the first time a space for LGBT people had been attacked.

Then he saw news articles that referenced his work on the New Orleans incident without citing him. Like McGuire, he saw the words “untold story” over and over again, he said. In fact, Downs had almost missed the June 1973 fire during his original research.

“The reality of it is there is no way they knew about this if it weren’t for me sitting in the community centers, once a week, for three hours, the only time they were open, and piecing together this information,” he said.

He doesn’t feel as if he owns history, Downs said, but when his uncovering of that story isn’t acknowledged, that’s when things get irksome. “I don’t think this is a coincidence that this is happening about LGBT history and black history and women’s history, because these are brand-new fields,” he said. “Historians that are breaking these archives open and telling the history, they’re always the first ones.”

When news breaks about any minority group, or when new research emerges, journalists are quick to use historians’ findings. But, Downs argued, just as with any other source, journalists should take note of where historical information comes from, so historians aren’t skipped over.

“This is just encouraging journalists to say, ‘Wait a minute. Where did this information come from? How do we know this history?’ "

There’s also a problem in what people value, said Heather Ann Thompson, a history professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The skills that historians use, like evaluating primary sources, aren’t always understood.

Thompson, who has also had her work used by news media without citation, did note that journalists, working under tight deadlines, don’t have it easy.

“No one would presume to understand the stock market just because they have some money put in stocks,” she said. “And likewise, our position is one should not assume that history is just this uncontested thing,” or “that everyone’s a historian just because they were there at the event, or because they know someone that was.”

Historians aren’t only discovering facts, Thompson said. Historians provide a new understanding of a person or moment by assessing the facts that weren’t strung together at the time.

“If it took me 600 pages to prove that to you,” she said, “just cite the book. That’s all.”

Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz is a breaking-news reporter. Follow her on Twitter @FernandaZamudio, or email her at fzamudiosuarez@chronicle.com.