Whose History? Scholars and Students Attempt to Correct Years of Archival Neglect at Johns Hopkins

Johns Hopkins U.

Flip through the institutional archives at the Johns Hopkins University, and you might notice something’s missing.

Save for a few examples, Johns Hopkins’s catalog of its own history is “very administrative, bureaucratic, and elite,” said N.D.B. Connolly, an associate professor of history. Evidence of the black people who’ve toiled at the university is largely concealed, he said. There’s mention of Vivien Theodore Thomas, a surgical technician who helped develop a treatment for cyanotic heart disease, and of Minnie Hargrove, a longtime assistant to university presidents. But for the most part, though they breathed life into the institution with their daily labor, Connolly said, African-American employees are invisible in the record books.

Now, a cohort of scholars and students are correcting what they see as systemic archival neglect. Through a project called “Housing Our Story: Towards Archival Justice for Black Baltimore,” they’re building a new collection of oral interviews with African-American employees at Johns Hopkins. They’ve asked workers to detail minute aspects of their lives on and off campus. And in asking the small questions, the scholars have touched on a big one. Whose history gets told in higher education, and why?

As universities are increasingly asked to account for their historical faults, the project at Johns Hopkins may provide a roadmap for institutions that want to dive headfirst into their archival gaps, and help write a more accurate history. Doing so is key because the history of a place “is always written by the people on top,” said Jasmine Dong, an undergraduate student involved with the project. But “when you have history like that, it’s not really history,” she said. “It’s a story that’s been made.”

A ‘Certain Kind of Silence’

In the spring of 2017, Connolly and two colleagues, Shani Mott and Jennifer P. Kingsley, met up for a cup of coffee to discuss what they considered the imbalances in the way the Johns Hopkins institutional archive captures the black experience. University archivists were already aware of a “certain kind of silence” of voices and wanted to do something about it, said Kingsley, a senior lecturer and the interim director of the Museums and Society program.

So Connolly, Kingsley, and Mott, a lecturer in the Center for Africana Studies, applied for grant funding to start recording previously unsought narratives. After securing $30,000 from the Berman Institute of Bioethics’ Exploration of Practical Ethics program, a Johns Hopkins research center, they reached out to existing organizations at the university, like the Black Faculty and Staff Association, to get their feedback. Lynnise Norris, president of the association, was excited. “Nobody ever asked us what we think about Hopkins, and where we come from.”

And the university archives department jumped at the chance. Recording and preserving these oral histories seemed like an ideal way to flesh out “a blind spot that the university archives has had for some time,” said Jordon Steele, the archives’ curator.

The scholars wanted students to be the ones who operated the microphones and asked the questions. Last year students in one of Connolly’s courses, called “America After the Civil Rights Movement,” and in one of Mott’s courses, called “Black Narrative,” learned about archival practices. They were taught how an archivist’s preconceived notions can shape a collection and also how they, as interviewers, could avoid biased questions like “Did you grow up in a dangerous neighborhood?” Barae Hirsch, a sophomore, said she learned that with no attention paid to the stories of black workers at Johns Hopkins, “it’s a way of turning a blind eye to their lives and their experiences.”

Altogether, about 25 staff and contract workers have been interviewed so far. Those interviews were transcribed and will hopefully have a digital home by the end of this spring semester. If they can get more funding, Connolly said, he and his colleagues want to keep the project going.

One goal is to change the narrative of who gets to be considered an intellectual. University workers are doing deep thinking about labor relationships, their city, and the uniqueness of this political moment, the professor said. “People are not going to be writing blog posts all the time,” Connolly said, “but they do have ideas.”

Ideally, Connolly said, the archive won’t just serve the institution, but will face outward, toward the greater community. “If you have researchers who are coming to this moment 40 or 50 years from now and want to know what was it like to live in the era of Trump, or to live in Baltimore City, or to be a university worker,” he said, “we would have a repository available to them.”

A ‘Very Real Power Dynamic’

But telling an untold history is harder than it sounds. Xandi Egginton, a freshman, said he tried to set up interviews with three different security guards. None worked out. The guards either said they weren’t allowed to conduct interviews, or they were advised against it by a loved one, Egginton said. The experience opened the freshman’s eyes to what he called a “very real power dynamic” between the institution and its laborers.

Several students told Connolly that they had trouble scheduling interviews because university employees were afraid of speaking candidly, the professor said. Dong said she set up a couple of interviews with a market employee, but the woman never showed. It was clear some interviewees used “more guarded language” than they would have if they had felt totally comfortable, Connolly said.

Built into the project were certain safeguards. People could seal their oral histories for a certain number of years. Everyone could review their transcripts, to make sure what they said was rendered accurately. Even so, Connolly said, a fair number of people expressed “an acute unwillingness” to participate.

The project tried to “document that precarity” of Johns Hopkins workers as best it could, Connolly said, while recognizing that that precarity “got in the way of some of our archive being more frank than it wound up being.”

Still, some staff members, especially those in secure positions, felt comfortable sharing much of their lives, including what they considered major career let-downs. Albertha Mellerson, senior assistant director in the student financial-aid office, said she’d been passed over for promotions multiple times since she’s been at Johns Hopkins.

“Here I am, a black female with an M.B.A. and experience in financial aid against a white counterpart, female, who has no bachelor’s degree,” Mellerson said, according to her transcript, which Connolly provided.

At times, Mellerson said, “you feel like you’re stuck.”

In an email, a Johns Hopkins spokeswoman said that if any student, staff member, or faculty member has concerns about racial bias or other discriminatory practices, they are encouraged to report such allegations or concerns to the Office of Institutional Equity.

Norris, president of the black faculty and staff association and a supervisor in the finance department, recalled arriving at Johns Hopkins more than two decades ago. She’s a born-and-raised Baltimorean. When she relocated to an office on the main campus, she observed all the people who held leadership roles. Save for one person, Norris said, they were all white men.

At the time, Norris remembers thinking, “You’re probably not going to stand a chance in hell of getting promoted.”

Since then, Norris said, things have improved. In early 2016, the university drafted what it calls a “roadmap on diversity and inclusion.” The previous year, the institution launched HopkinsLocal — an effort to recruit and retain staff from Baltimore City’s most “distressed communities” and buy from local vendors. In three years’ time, the university has hired 1,017 people under the program, according to recently released numbers. Among other improvements, the human-resources department made its onboarding diversity training more robust, according to the roadmap.

“I think things are better,” Norris said, “but better is subjective to me.” It’s 2019, she said, and “we’re just starting to move the needle forward.”

Connolly acknowledged that the project doesn’t fundamentally change anyone’s immediate position at Johns Hopkins. But it has “pricked our moral core,” he said.

“An antiquarian agenda,” he said, “will not be enough.”

Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.