Team Member Names, Titles, and Institutions:

• Dan Bacalzo, Associate Professor and Theatre Program Coordinator, Florida Gulf Coast University

• Carlyn Ferrari, Assistant Professor of English, Seattle University

• DeLisa Hawkes, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and an Affiliate Faculty of the Department of English and the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Program, University of Tennessee

• Crescida Jacobs, Professor of History and Humanities and a Faculty Academy facilitator, Houston Community College

• Ramya Swayamprakash, Environmental Scholar of North America and South Asia, Grand Valley State University

OVERVIEW

This module is envisioned as appropriate for an undergraduate course that meets twice per week or once per week in a single block (but can be adapted to other day/time configurations). The format will be a combination of lecture and seminar. We envision a class size between 25 and 35 students, but the assignments and group work can be adapted for a smaller seminar-style course. The intended module level is second-year and above, and it is scalable to suit advanced undergraduate and graduate student populations.

In this module, students will learn about place through a locally-memorialized figure and interrogate dominant narratives. Through this inquiry, students will become more cognizant of legacies and the imprint they leave on places that extend beyond their immediate and surrounding communities. What value does it bring to consider multiple sites and competing visions of legacy?

Students will consider how these imprints on either silence or highlight the voices or concerns or perspectives of the existing communities. How does the legacy of a place or a person overshadow what you as a community member/ experiencer feel/think?

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

By the end of this module, students will be able to:

• Discuss what makes a community and how [biographies of] people inform our understanding/knowledge of a community. 

• Understand and articulate the significance of/role of place in shaping identity and community.

• Engage in place-based research via site visits and more traditional methods of reading books, articles, or Digital Humanities resources.

• Define narrative and legacy and interrogate these terms’ relevance to places, periods, and persons.

• Review extant narratives of place and create new stories that create more inclusive communities

WHY MAGGIE WALKER?

• To teach biography through place (and place through biographies)

• She is a well-known, hometown hero, and our goal is to defamiliarize, complicate, and nuance what is/is not known about her. Using someone like Walker also provides a model for how teaching a place through a single person can add complexities to both the biographies of a place and a significant historical figure.

GUIDING QUESTIONS

• How does place help us to understand the stories told about a person and the legacy they’ve left behind?

• What is the narrative created by critically looking at the spaces around us?

• What are your assumptions about a place (Penny’s Wine Shop, St. Luke’s Emporium, Maggie Walker Historic Site, etc.)?

• What aspects – material and otherwise – make a place?

• Does a place have a “dominant” narrative? If so, what is it? How do you find it?

• Whose legacy is attainable? Whose legacy is untouchable?

• At the end of the module, consider how your assumptions may have changed.

Session #1: Mini-bio of Maggie L. Walker

Primary Sources 

Dabney, Wendell P. Maggie L. Walker: Her Life and Deeds. Cincinnati, OH: The Dabney Publishing Co., 1927. 

Required reading list

• “Independent Order of St. Luke.”  National Museum of African American History and Culture, https://www.searchablemuseum.com/independent-order-of-st-luke

• Brown, Elsa Barkley Brown. “Womanist Consciousness: Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of Saint Luke”

https://api.drum.lib.umd.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/9abb66a8-6208-4747-8a35-815d7c601a66/content

• Caleb W Lugar, Shennette Garrett-Scott, Milorad M. Novicevic, Ifeoluwa Tobi Popoola, John H Humphreys, and Albert J Mills, “The historic emergence of intersectional leadership: Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of St. Luke,” Leadership 2020 (16:2): 220-240

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/1742715019870375

Suggested reading list (Scaled up for graduate students)

• Gaines, Kevin K. Uplifting the Race, U of North Carolina P, 1996.

• McKittrick, Katherine. “On plantations, prisons, and a black sense of place,”  Social and Cultural Geography, vol. 12, no. 8, 2011, 947-963. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14649365.2011.624280

Suggested videos: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mxonLBMpnQ

Session #1: Learning in Place

• Activity 1: Redlined Richmond  & Mapping Jackson Ward (Imaginative mapping exercise)

• In the years before Redlining, the neighborhood of Jackson Ward was referred to as a “city within a city”. Using the blank map students will complete an Imaginative Map to revitalize the neighborhood.

• What does a community like Jackson Ward need to self-sustain, revitalize, etc.?

• Use attached map of the Jackson Ward neighborhood and the  captioned walk through Jackson Ward

• Activity 2: Reflection Exercise (1-2 page reflection assignment)

• What are your assumptions about Jackson Ward?

• Assignment of teams and ancillary locations

• St. Luke’s Building 

• Former site of St. Luke Herald and original location of St. Luke Penny Savings bank

• Currently apartments and St. Luke’s Legacy Center, a non-profit organization whose mission states they are “committed to empowering our community.

• The location of the building is just on the other side of I-95, and might be useful for this group to consider readings about urban renewal in Richmond.

• Memorial statue at Maggie Lena Walker Memorial Plaza

• Former site of St. Luke’s Emporium

• Evergreen Cemetery (buried at family plot)

• Virginia Women’s Monument at the Capitol Grounds

• Penny’s Wine Bar 

• Key questions:

• Why are Black spaces needed?

• What do you notice about the Jackson Ward neighborhood?

• How do you see/not see Maggie Walker’s legacy maintained through/in this space?

• This might be more appropriate for grad students or students 21 and over. This could be paired with Niya Bates, “Monticello is a Black Space.”

• Perhaps this could be an option for undergrad/underage students as long as they don’t go inside. Students could read Bates’s essay and discuss the importance of Black spaces.

• Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School

• Consider purpose of original school (Jim Crow era school for African Americans) and current-day usage of the space (more elite school for academically gifted without a specific racial component)

• Consider narratives of exceptionalism, and specifically the question about attainable legacies.

Session #2: Site Visit(s)

• Site visit to Maggie L Walker National Historic Site

• Activity 3: Written reflection (1-page prose or poem) 

• Who was Maggie Walker? Who is Maggie Walker today? Who is her legacy for?

Session #3: Presentation Day

• Activity 4: Team Presentations

• [Format up to student groups – can be oral presentations, podcasts, or some other form of reporting on their site visits and research for ancillary locations. Students need to address guiding questions as part of their presentations.]

Session #4: Discussion of Legacies

• Activity 5: Closing Reflection Assignment:

• How have your assumptions about this place changed? (1-2-page written reflection)

Choose Your Own Adventure

• Towards the end of Session #1, students will be given an overview of the module and broken into groups, which will be given the task of visiting/researching different sites that explore the legacy of Maggie Walker. (Each group should choose a different site. See annotated list of choices.)

• During Session #2, ALL students will visit the Maggie L Walker National Historic Site together. Afterwards, groups should arrange to visit their secondary sites. The module will include suggested readings that may be specific to particular sites, and which may help frame students’ thinking.

• During Session #3, teams will give short presentations relating to their secondary sites. Format is up to individual groups, but the presentations should address the guiding questions for this module.

Annotated Bibliography:

• Andrea Roberts, “Performance as Place Preservation….” (2018)

• Koritha Mitchell, “Identifying White Mediocrity and Know-Your-Place Aggression: A Form of Self-Care” 

Black Feminisms (Context for Maggie Walker’s lived experience)

• Elise Johnson McDougald, “The Task of Negro Womanhood” (Carlyn)

• Published in 1925, this essay espouses a kind of “uplift” rhetoric and shows the kinds of expectations upwardly mobile Black women had to navigate.

• bell hooks, “Homeplace (a Site of Resistance)” (Carlyn)

• In this essay, hooks talks about how Black women used their domestic spaces as safe havens to protect themselves and heal from the racism in society. This essay can provide context for how Maggie Walker (and other Black women) used their homes.

• Marita Bonner, “On Being Young—A Woman—and Colored” (Carlyn)

• Like McDougald’s essay, this essay was also published in 1925 and paints a picture of the pressures thrust upon Black women. Though her meditation might be considered bleak, Bonner articulates what we now call misogynoir and intersectionality. 

Black Wall Street:

• Alexia Fernández Campbell, “The Rise and Fall of Black Wall Street,” The Atlantic, August 31, 2016. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/the-end-of-black-wall-street/498074/

• Beyond Tulsa: The Historic Legacies and Overlooked Stories of America’s ‘Black Wall.

  https://time.com/6050811/tulsa-black-wall-street/

• https://www.bunkhistory.org/resources/the-forgotten-stories-of-americas-black-wall-streets/connections?type=place&res=5157
  Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal by Shennette Garrett-Scott (2019)

• Selden Richardson, Built by Blacks: African American Architecture and Neighborhoods in Richmond. The History Press, 2008.

• Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17(2): 251-274. https://www.sfu.ca/~decaste/OISE/page2/files/HiggenbothamRace.pdf

• John Ingham, “Building Businesses, Creating Communities: Residential Segregation and the Growth of African American Business in Southern Cities, 1880-1915,” The Business History Review 77 4 (2003): 639-665.

• https://www.jstor.org/stable/30041232?seq=8

• Gertude Woodruff Marlowe, A Right Worthy Grand Mission (Washington D.C.: Howard University Press, 2003). 

ANNOTATED LIST OF PLACES IN OUR OWN COMMUNITIES

Jimi Hendrix Park https://seattle.gov/parks/allparks/jimi-hendrix-park

This is a public park located in Seattle’s Central District, a historically-Black, multi-racial neighborhood and Hendrix’s home community. Across the street from this park is the Northwest African American History Museum. A brief, 8-minute walk from Seattle University’s campus, this park can generate such questions as:

• What story does this park tell (about Hendrix, about Seattle, about the Central District)? What do you notice (sights, smells, sounds)? 

• How does Seattle’s Central District reflect/not reflect the African American community?

• How does Seattle University reflect/not reflect the Central District of Seattle?

• Framing reading, Sarita Cannon, “Red, Black, and Blue: Jimi Hendrix’s Musical Self-Expression” in Black-Native Autobiographical Acts: Navigating the Minefields of Authenticity

Alex Haley Heritage Square https://www.knoxvilletn.gov/government/mayors_office/black_history/noted_knoxvillians___connections/alex_haley

Alex Haley Heritage Square is located in Morningside Park in East Knoxville, the historically-Black area of Knoxville, and is within walking distance from the Beck Cultural Exchange Center, an African American cultural center and museum. Haley’s Square is also a short drive from Cal Johnson Park which is across the street from where Nikki Giovanni’s grandparents’ home was located before urban renewal.

What does the proximity of East Knoxville’s memorials to Black communities and prominent figures to each other tell you?

• What narrative does the Alex Haley Heritage Square put forth? Do you relate to the narrative, and if so, how?

• In what ways does the Alex Haley Heritage Square speak to East Knoxville’s past, present, and future?

Williams Academy, Black History Museum https://www.leecountyblackhistorysociety.org/our-history/

J.S. Williams was the Supervisor of the Colored Schools in Fort Myers, FL. The Williams Academy, Black History Museum is named after him, and is located in Dunbar, a historically black neighborhood in Fort Myers, FL. Students would start at the museum, similar to how our module begins at the Maggie Walker Historic Site. However, there are fewer ancillary locations associated with J.S. Williams (there’s a high school named after him, and a grave site, and there may be other locations.) But students might also think about the Dunbar neighborhood in general and/or the history of schools for African American children in relation to this person and how he is positioned within competing narratives of place.

Houston Black Pop Culture Place Analysis

Students will compare the places where several black Houston pop artists (Beyonce, Lizzo, Megan Thee Stallion, Travis Scott, Bun B, DJ Screw, Slim Thug, et al) lived and created music in the Bayou City. Questions to consider include:

1. What neighborhoods do/did these Houston music artists lived, went to school, and created music?

2. What comparisons could we make about the impact of place on the artist’s music or influence?

3. What role does place, memory, and legacy intersect between any two of the artists, their work, musical style, lyrics, or video? 

Black History Tour of Grand Rapids 

In 2017, the Downtown Grand Rapids Inc. (DGRI) and GR Walks released a 

2-mile, self-guided tour of Black History in downtown Grand Rapids. The tour 

was the result of community engagement, especially with local historians. 

Featuring 11 points of interest including stops like Fountain Street Church which 

hosted Malcolm X and Langston Hughes, the tour was narrated by the former 

City Commissioner and Urban League of West Michigan President Joe Jones. 

Tour: https://www.grwalks.com/