Race and Place in United States: Toward Repair

Historians regularly complain about the limitations of archives; the documentary record muffles stories of marginalized and oppressed populations and in rare instances of acknowledgement, the voices are usually those of the oppressors. As field-based architectural historians, we have long argued that the lives of oppressed and displaced populations are best resuscitated through the close examination of the physical record left behind in historic buildings and landscapes. Field quarters collapsing in pine stands, cotton warehouses slipping into river deltas, and northern tenements in redlined neighborhoods that received dozens of refugees—individuals and entire families—escaping the violence of the Jim Crow South, these are the places whose walls and floors, attics and yards silently record untold histories. In this critical moment when American history is so place-based and so contested—equestrian monuments framed as agents of Jim Crow oppression and plantations flipped to the perspective of the enslaved—our nation has a critical need for a new, more diverse generation of students prepared to engage this contested history. That preparation must include documenting, accurately reading, and then rigorously interpreting the buildings and landscapes of underrepresented people. Architectural historians, we believe, have an important opportunity . . . no, responsibility . . . to engage the contested histories of race in the United States.

According to Brent Leggs of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, only 2 percent of all historic sites in the U.S. are connected to African American communities, while African Americans make up almost 13 percent of the population. African American history in this country spans over four hundred years, from the arrival of the first captive Africans to the present. Preservation and conservation efforts focused solely on the materiality of these vulnerable cultural landscapes exacerbated representative disparities by not accounting for generations of inequities faced by Black people. Practitioners interested in remedying systemic inequities within the field of historic preservation have focused their attention on specific preservation policies—like the nominating criteria for the National Register of Historic Places, for example—as sources of the representational disparities, but a dearth of BIPOC practitioners and weak community engagement strategies for BIPOC communities have contributed to the representational gaps.

To help catalyze the sea change necessary in our field to begin repairing this legacy of harm, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has graciously awarded the Vernacular Architecture Forum (VAF) and the University of Virginia (UVA) funding for a preliminary series of three summer field schools called the Recovering Erased Histories summer institutes. In partnering with historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and African American communities, these three institutes will make a meaningful impact by catalyzing a new and more diverse wave of emerging scholars and practitioners prepared to do this work and elevate projects that center African American cultural landscapes and historic sites.

The Vernacular Architecture Forum is uniquely positioned to undertake these summer institutes. Founded in 1980, the VAF is a nonprofit organization that has long believed that physical documentation is key to understanding buildings and landscapes that leave a negligible or distorted written record. The work of VAF members is place-based, focused on specific buildings and landscapes that demand involvement with the material object. This centrality of the object, and the rigorous documentation and interpretation of material evidence, has long differentiated the work of VAF members from those scholars and practitioners exploring more traditional architectural and landscape histories. As a result, VAF members have generated whole archives of field drawings documenting ordinary buildings and paying very close attention to the smallest construction details as cultural evidence.

“The massive transition that happened for me . . . is the shift from seeing communities as subjects to embracing communities as partners.”

Methodologically, the kind of fieldwork advocated by VAF has been difficult to teach in an academic setting because it involves extensive time outside the classroom, often at sites distant from campus. And it is also important to recognize that documentation methods are changing. Close documentation of buildings still depends on traditional methods like measured drawings and photographs, but increasingly includes emerging digital capture techniques, and the cultural landscape and community engagement methods of oral histories and interviews. This means that students in these programs are exposed to three critical methodologies: the very close visual analysis required during the making of measured drawings, facility with advanced digital capture and visualization technologies, and the ethics of participatory action research that undergird community engagement best practices. The range of supplemental digital technologies available for field documentation seems ever expanding, and scholars are increasingly working with technologists who deploy photogrammetry, cloud point scanning, and Lidar, to name just a few. And most scholars now acknowledge that community engagement is essential practice and this requires following ethical guidelines for oral histories, for example, but also ensuring that parties build trust and pursue mutual benefit through these programs. The Recovering Erased History field schools will do just that, helping to ensure that this long tradition of careful field documentation continues as a critical training method for future generations of architectural historians.

Figure 1. University of Virginia students documenting historic house, Falmouth, Jamaica, 2007. Photograph by Louis P. Nelson.

Central to these Mellon-funded field schools will be a commitment to responsible community engagement. I (Louis) was trained in VAF’s very traditional methods of careful field documentation, and I spent my first fifteen years of teaching devoted to transferring that particular and hard-earned skill (Figure 1). But I soon learned that field documentation alone was not enough. For nearly a decade I taught a place-based field school in historic preservation in the extraordinary community of Falmouth, Jamaica. My graduate education had prepared me very well to document the everyday architecture of this extraordinary community, but nothing in my training prepared me either for the management of teams of twenty 20-year-olds or—more importantly—how to engage with a local community. I began that work hoping to document an important historic landscape and possibly help to preserve some of those buildings for future generations. But over those ten summers, I came to learn that places and their communities are inextricably linked. I could not document that landscape without responsibly engaging its community. I made plenty of mistakes, and I learned that good intentions are not enough. Over time I learned two important lessons which many of my generation came also to recognize. First, I came to see the critical importance of listening to and learning from local expertise with humility (Figure 2). If I wanted to understand why an eighteenth-century carpenter made certain choices, who better to ask than a twentieth-century carpenter who has worked to repair those buildings for years? If I wanted to understand why houses were organized as they were, who better to ask than their current occupants? I had long believed that the historical knowledge in archives could be supplemented by the historical knowledge in buildings. But what took me longer to realize was that local inherited knowledge was an equally important source of historical understanding. But the scholar cannot simply ask. I had, first, to earn the trust of the community. And that took years of conversations, of shared labor toward a shared goal.

Figure 2. University of Virginia students learning mortar techniques from a Jamaican mason, Falmouth, Jamaica, 2007. Photograph by Louis P. Nelson.

And those years of conversations led to the second critical lesson: that this work must be framed through reciprocity. Field-based documentation in historically marginalized communities can easily be extractive. We ask our community partners to step up and help us with our understanding, with our work. But too rarely do we ask them how we might help them meet their goals. I get field drawings for my next book. My students get superb training for their future career. What does the community get? At the very least we must return our work to the community. These landscapes are their heritage. But even more, we must commit to research structures that actually benefit the communities in ways that they might identify. We need to compensate them for their time. We need to write grants in partnership with them so grant funds meet community-identified needs. The massive transition that happened for me—and that has happened for so many of my generation of field-based scholars—is the shift from seeing communities as subjects to embracing communities as partners. This means that field-based work cannot continue to center the ideas, the methods, and the products of the scholar. That requires humility—often in short supply at universities—and a whole new set of relational skills that I never learned in graduate school.

“Having spent my childhood sitting at the feet of community elders, I was wise in the ways Black people imagine place and space.”

These field schools seek to transform not only how we work but also who does that work. This can only happen if we open the doors to invite more Black, indigenous, and other people of color into the profession (Figure 3). The relational skills that Louis learned in the field came more naturally to me (Niya). When I matriculated in the architectural history program at UVA in 2013, I entered with a background in African American studies and two lifetimes worth of stories from my grandparents’ Black rural Southern community. Having spent my childhood sitting at the feet of community elders, I was wise in the ways Black people imagine place and space—the quiet pride of living in a house and attending a church built by grandpa’s hands, the sweet smell of blossoming fruit trees in spring that were planted when subsistence gardening was all our families had, and footsteps over a network of dirt roads and abandoned road traces that were ghosts of a bygone landscape of segregation and resistance. As a Black woman, I possess an education and a set of epistemological approaches that cannot be learned in an academic program. However, my folk education was enhanced by a new set of skills and the language to articulate material histories, taught to me by Louis Nelson, Richard Guy Wilson, Sheila Crane, K. Ian Grandison, and so many other notable scholars of architecture and place. During that time, several things became glaringly obvious to me, including how precious few people looked like me in my classes, at conferences, and generating scholarship within the field, and the perceived divide between practitioners and the communities that we study and inhabit. A third, more practical, set of challenges surrounded how I could leverage my preservation training to protect the intangible histories of my grandparents’ communities. My work has focused on changing how architectural historians and historic preservationists engage with Black communities, Black history, and Black material culture within the confines of existing praxis (Figure 4). However, if we are truly going to seek justice for BIPOC communities, we have to share power and elevate scholar-practitioners from the grassroots of those marginalized places. This requires a reimagining of how we train historic preservationists—from pedagogy, to recruitment, to training, and execution. The field schools are a necessary first step (Figure 5).

Figure 3. Jobie Hill and Niya Bates investigating an outbuilding at Pharsalia, Nelson County, Virginia, 2019. Photograph by Peter Hedlund.

Our present political moment has made painfully clear the desperate need to document disappearing buildings and landscapes of historically marginalized communities, especially those of African Americans. In addition to the range of pressures on communities and their buildings that comes from structural racism, underemployment, over incarceration, etc., many historic African American communities are further jeopardized by climate change, pollution, and other environmental factors. African Americans have undergone multiple displacements, from enslavement to the Great Migration. In response to these challenging conditions, VAF and UVA will partner with communities on three summer programs that will focus exclusively on the histories and lives of African Americans. This choice reflects our confidence that this subject matter will attract a range of potential applicants. As people come and go, as ways of life change and disappear, documentation of how people used to live and work, or how people adapt to new circumstances, offers an important interpretation of place and history that cuts across the grain of traditional narrations of place.

Figure 4. Descendants of Monticello’s enslaved families washing artifacts and learning archaeology, Monticello, Virginia, 2018. Photograph by Niya Bates.

To that end, each team will include a scholarly expert on African American history and culture. VAF has long remained committed to cross-disciplinary partnerships, and this is a great opportunity to partner with scholars who might not think about buildings and landscapes as historical evidence. It is our hope to attract those individuals from HBCUs. Each field school will also depend on reciprocal partnerships with their local community to ensure first welcome and then reciprocity. While we expect that field schools will engage their host communities throughout the course of the program, and when appropriate inviting local community members to participate in the program, each school will host public sessions in order to return their findings to the community. Each program will also be responsible for printed and/or digital deliverables, an investment in and for the community. And for long-term preservation, the documentation of each field school will be submitted to the Historic American Buildings Survey of the National Park Service, which deposits its records in the Library of Congress, where it is available, online, free of charge and without copyright restrictions, far into the future.  Publication on VAF’s website and in its journal will further disseminate the field schools’ documentation. 

Figure 5. Alumni of Buckingham Training School speaking with University of Virginia Students, Buckingham, Virginia, 2019. Photograph by Niya Bates.

The VAF Recovering Erased Histories summer institutes will bring attention to the study of dispossessed peoples through an understanding of their material lives. They will promulgate a methodology that is time-consuming, yet uniquely suited to investigating situations in which the written record is inadequate. The Vernacular Architecture Forum will share an expertise that has resulted in groundbreaking work over the last forty years and will ensure that it survives into the future. Most importantly, we will be equipping students, academics, and practitioners to engage rigorously the contested place of African American history in our national discourse.