Chapter 15
Building and Sustaining Africana Digital Humanities at HBCUs
Rico Devara Chapman
Building and Sustaining Africana Digital Humanities at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) is a relatively new terrain when we think of current digital humanities (DH) spaces in the academy. But as an interdisciplinary field, Black digital humanities, or what I call Africana digital humanities, has also been practiced for decades, though not under the moniker of DH. Africana DH can be traced back to the late nineteenth century with the publication in 1899 of The Philadelphia Negro, in which W. E. B. Du Bois meticulously mapped neighborhood demographics of Philadelphia’s Black Seventh Ward. And it continues into the present with projects that seek to preserve and digitize stories of neighborhoods, such as the Cascade Community Oral History Project in Southwest Atlanta and the Digitizing the Black Experience in Waller County, Texas. This chapter provides a brief history of the interdisciplinary field of Africana studies while highlighting research initiatives at HBCUs that center Black storytelling by lifting local voices and exploring Africana DH as distinct from traditional DH. Since the majority of DH labs and centers are located at predominantly white institutions (PWIs), Africana DH is often underrepresented in the discipline. But Africana DH in its various forms, as it is currently being practiced at HBCUs, can have an enriching impact on the digital humanities. It can bring a new perspective on the recovery and honoring of local history through community collaboration and storytelling using available digital tools and resources. HBCUs are often located in predominantly Black neighborhoods, offering the opportunity for graduate students and research faculty to conduct meaningful work that could potentially impact these neighborhoods in positive ways. Moreover, establishing DH programs as part of Africana studies is a natural fit because of the interdisciplinarity of both. Taking its cues from Du Bois’s work conducted at the Atlanta University Center in the 1900s, Africana DH charts a new course for Africana studies programs and departments, particularly at HBCUs. Africana DH claims Atlanta University as its institutional origin, thus HBCUs, which to some degree are absent the white gaze, are priority spaces for Africana DH.
An early exemplar of Africana DH is found in the late nineteenth century in the work of Du Bois, who spent twenty-three years at Atlanta University from 1897–1910, serving on the faculty of the history and economics departments, and, later, from 1934–1944 as chair of the sociology department. Atlanta University, founded in 1865, was the first HBCU to award graduate degrees.1 In 1900, at Atlanta University, Du Bois created a series of data portraits, “a collection of graphs, charts, maps, and tables” with a team of students, faculty, and scientists that “reflect a moment just before the disciplines had hardened into the academic specializations and structures of knowledge that we are familiar with today” (Battle-Baptiste, 13). This interdisciplinary collaborative approach to research has become a hallmark of digital humanities in the twenty-first century, as DH projects often require a team of experts ranging from city planners and computer scientists to historians and visual artists, depending on the desired outcome. Du Bois’s comprehensive study of the Black experience through imagery ranged from local Georgia population diagrams to graphs charting Black businessmen in the United States and bar charts examining African American religious affiliations. This work completed over one hundred years ago is not only foundational to current practices in Africana DH, where data visualization is critical in making research findings accessible to a broader audience, but to the field of Africana studies, whose development was also closely tied to the community.
Africana studies is an outgrowth of the Black Studies Movement of the late 1960s, a student-led movement that demanded courses, programs, and departments that focused on the African and African diasporic experience. While the creation of Africana studies is also part of a longer history of mobilization and organization by people of African descent, the student efforts that culminated in the field’s creation can be traced directly to the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s. That decade was one of the most turbulent eras in U.S. history.2 There were a number of court cases that led to the eventual desegregation of America’s white colleges and universities, such as Sweat v. Painter (1950), McLaurin v. Oklahoma (1950), and Brown v. Board of Education (1954), all of which challenged segregation at educational institutions (Chapman, 44). Students across the American South challenged racist Jim Crow laws using nonviolent direct action to desegregate whites-only lunch counters, libraries, restrooms, and department stores. The tactic of nonviolence began to wane as white racism continued to reveal its cruelty, particularly in education as white students violently resisted integration of public schools and colleges in the South. The Black Power Movement partially grew out of the need for self-defense in opposition to white terror, and college campuses were often sites of contestation and confrontations with police, some of which were protests and demonstrations to establish Black studies.
In the late 1960s and 1970s partly due to the affirmative action policies that resulted from the student protests, there was an influx of Black students to predominantly white colleges and universities. This increase in Black student enrollment, in turn, allowed for the collective organization necessary to mobilize for the canvassing, demonstrations, and takeovers that would lead to the establishment of Black studies departments and programs (Chapman, 44). Unsurprisingly, Black college campuses were also sites of contestation and assertiveness through which ideas of Black self-empowerment began to take root. Students at HBCUs throughout the nation, particularly the South where most HBCUs are located, joined civil rights organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Congress of Racial Equality, among others, in order to ally themselves with larger collective actions.3 Oftentimes, the conservative administration of these campuses discouraged involvement in such actions. However, many faculty members were supportive of the student demands for more courses that related to the Black experience and introduced courses in the various humanities disciplines such as African art, Black political thought, and African history. Entire academic programs also began to emerge. Howard University offered one of the first African studies programs at an HBCU, and Black studies programs and institutes were established at Jackson State College and Clark College in 1968. Through these student efforts and those of their allies, between 1968 and 1971, over 500 Black studies programs, institutes, and departments were established at dozens of colleges and universities throughout the United States (Chapman, 44). Africana studies, one outgrowth of Black studies, coalesced as an interdisciplinary academic field of study that centered on the research, interpretation, and presentation of the history, culture, and life of people of African descent throughout the world.
Africana Digital Humanities
Africana DH grows out of Africana studies, as well as the Du Boisian legacy of interdisciplinary collaborative research. Africana DH studies the Black experience through the lens of various disciplines using digital and computational tools. Though many of the tools originate in the Global North, Africana DH claims African ancestral communicative technology as its true early beginnings, where healing, recovery, and fulfillment of purpose was its primary role as opposed to industrial, commercial, and military technology uses as found in the West (Somé, 61). African ancestral communicative technology recognizes the role of spirit as a technological concept while also informing technology. Some of these technologies were embedded within the people themselves as griots, healers, and conduits of information from early lineages meant to serve the individual and community. Malidoma Patrice Somé notes that “technologies in the indigenous world are developed in order to fulfill basic human needs, such as community, health, harmony, and a sense of meaning and purpose in life” (71). This point of view is in direct conflict with many Western technologies that surveil Blackness. Ruha Benjamin, in her book Race After Technology, opines that “the plight of Black people has consistently been a harbinger of wider processes—bankers using financial technologies to prey on Black homeowners, law enforcement using surveillance technologies to control Black neighborhoods, or politicians using legislative techniques to disenfranchise Black voters” (32). André Brock links spirit to Black interiority and reflexivity in Distributed Blackness, “demanding full engagement with a world structured to displace Blackness” (80). Likewise, Africana DH centers Blackness and is less about the computational tools and more so the epistemology that connects an African identity with technology.
Africana digital humanities recognizes that the African continent has a long and ancient history of technological innovations that have spread throughout the diaspora. Africana DH also acknowledges that enslaved Africans were the technology used to build modern white supremacist colonial empires. Jessica Marie Johnson, in her essay “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads,” notes that these ancestors continue to aid in the Black freedom struggle and “have themselves taken up science, data, and coding, in other words, have commodified themselves and digitized and mediated their own black freedom dreams, in order to hack their way into the system.” Africana DH, though global, starts locally and extends throughout the diaspora, respecting the process of recovery with the use of tools and processes that incorporate material and immaterial indigenous technologies. Africana DH aligns with postcolonial DH as asserted in Roopika Risam’s book New Digital Worlds by having a basis in tools and methodologies designed with local practices in mind. “These practices,” Risam asserts, “favor the particular over the universal [and] offer the promise of a more expansive humanities that takes advantage of the technological means of digital knowledge production to create space for underrepresented communities to populate the digital cultural record with their own stories” (Risam, 9). Africana DH goes further by acknowledging that the process of knowledge recovery and production happens before digitization and computation, allowing communities to be empowered regardless of technological prowess.
Africana DH is the study and exploration of history, literature, sociology, politics, and the arts using technology as a means of recovery, healing, and knowledge production. “Recovery rests at the heart of Black Studies,” as Kim Gallon suggests, and Black digital humanities “troubles the very core of what we have come to know as the humanities by recovering alternate constructions of humanity that have been historically excluded from that concept” (44). Africana DH can function as a tool to reclaim the histories in danger of being lost. Collaborating with communities to gather stories of past and present that have shaped their lived experiences can potentially have a healing effect, whereby residents find new meaning and a sense of purpose in preserving local history. Working-class and elder members of long-standing Black communities face imminent displacement because of gentrification, which brings with it increased taxes and rent, making it near impossible to live in the communities that are now becoming safer, more pedestrian friendly, with more food options and amenities that cater to a younger and oftentimes whiter clientele. I am not suggesting that white is wrong and Black is right, but rather that Black residents have lived through and sustained their neighborhoods through what can be considered one of the most devastating epidemics of the late twentieth century: crack cocaine (McIlwain, 150–51). Now that inner cities are becoming attractive to millennials and Gen Zers, who detest suburban life and commuting, Black residents who held on to property in what were once considered slums are finding it difficult to maintain their homes and may be forced to abandon their beloved neighborhoods at a time when they should now enjoy its newfound conveniences. Atlanta, Georgia, where Du Bois conducted over two decades of interdisciplinary research in the Atlanta University Center, is facing such challenges and can benefit from Africana DH with its emphasis on recovery, healing, and community collaboration, with technology being a means not an end.
Taking a cue from Du Bois, who “pioneered the nation’s most sophisticated quantitative research on race and the black population,” (Battle-Baptiste and Rusert, 32) Africana DH can be vital in sustaining the history and integrity of communities whose residents and stories are rapidly being displaced. Some of these communities, such as those in Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Houston, and Nashville, are now changing because of gentrification. Moreover, many HBCUs reside in historic districts, and their campuses are often sites of memory and conscience. Their stories are important to preserve and tell through DH tools such as mapping, data visualization, digital exhibitions, and virtual reality experiences. These tools can help capture the rich oral tradition passed down through family tales while also adding layers of context, allowing the user to engage in historical and contemporary moments virtually. Africana DH challenges traditional DH by affirming the role of spirit as a necessary indigenous technology that moves through time and space, allowing the user to experience narration in new meaningful ways.
Africana digital humanities centers the local, recognizes the power of interdisciplinary collaborative approaches that are community-oriented, and values ancestral communicative technology demonstrated through storytelling. Projects exemplary of Africana DH have been conducted at two different HBCUs—one public, one private; one located in urban Atlanta, Georgia, at Clark Atlanta University (CAU) and the other located in rural Texas at Prairie View Agricultural and Mechanical University (PVAMU). These two institutions by no means represents all HBCUs, but they do give one a sense of the work that is important as it relates to digital humanities and place. Both projects sought to preserve local stories using DH tools, community involvement, and partnerships. Both projects align with Risam’s assertion that “digital humanities, as a field, can only be inclusive and its diversity can only thrive in an environment in which local specificity—the unique concerns that influence and define digital humanities at regional and national levels—is positioned at its center and its global dimensions are outlined through an assemblage of the local” (Risam, 359).
CAU is located in the historic Atlanta University Center (AUC), which is also home to Morehouse College, Spelman College, Morris Brown College, the Interdenominational Theological Center, and the Robert W. Woodruff Library. CAU was founded in 1988 after the consolidation of Atlanta University (1865), the nation’s first institution to award graduate degrees to African Americans, and Clark College (1869), the nation’s first four-year liberal arts college to serve a primarily African American student population.4 PVAMU is located roughly forty-five miles outside Houston, Texas. It is the first state-supported college in Texas for African Americans and the second oldest public institution of higher education in Texas, established during the Reconstruction Period after the Civil War in 1876.5
At CAU, an oral history project that sought to preserve local history using digital tools was conducted in collaboration with the City of Atlanta’s Historic Preservation Division, the Atlanta branch of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), and the AUC Robert W. Woodruff Library. The project, titled the Cascade Community Tour, demonstrates how partnerships between municipalities, nonprofit organizations, and higher education institutions can foster cooperation and promote intergenerational dialogue within communities that experience rapid demographic changes. The Cascade Community of southwest Atlanta is well known for being a bastion for African American leadership and consists of a treasure trove of historic sites and living history. As the city changes, it is important that the history of this vibrant community be recorded, shared, and celebrated. The Cascade Oral History project reflects the aims and approaches of Africana DH by centering Black storytelling, ensuring local participation through community collaboration, and making accessible the digital record to a broader audience. Merging oral history and digital humanities, the project employed graduate students to conduct interviews and offered a digital humanities course the following fall semester with the focus being the Cascade Community. It was important that students connect with the community in a way that allowed for an appreciation of local stories while incorporating DH tools. The more than forty interviews conducted of community residents are archived and available to the public from the AUC library so that “data might be made more accessible to the populations and people from whom such data is collected” (Battle-Baptiste and Rusert, 13).
At PVAMU, the Digitizing the Black Experience in Waller County, Texas, project resulted in an interactive online map with an app portal that preserved and made more accessible the history of that county. The project’s aim was not simply historic preservation; rather, the goal was to recover the historical impact and cultural contributions of the Black residents of the county: Waller County, Texas, has a long storied history going back to the antebellum period that includes the experiences of enslaved Africans, freed people, and second-class citizens during the Jim Crow era. An equally important part of Waller County’s historical narrative and the Black experience in the area is the story of Prairie View A&M University. (In more recent times, Waller County is where Sandra Bland was stopped by police, taken to jail, and found dead in her cell on July 13, 2015.) The project centered Black storytelling, a pillar of Africana digital humanities, as well as acknowledged the process of recovery that is essential to preserving and constructing new narratives that incorporate local voices, which is in line with Roopika Risam’s observation that “local practices are good practices” (Risam, 143). The project incorporated topographies of local history into an interactive online map that functions as a voice-narrated three-dimensional virtual tour of historical markers and sites around Waller County and the campus of Prairie View A&M University.
Both the CAU and PVAMU projects are in keeping with Kim Gallon’s claim that “recovery rests at the heart of Black studies, as a scholarly tradition that seeks to restore the humanity of Black people lost and stolen through systematic global racialization” (44). The examples of DH work at these two HBCUs symbolically represent the past, present, and future work of digital humanities in predominantly Black spaces where recovery is vital to survival.
Africana studies and digital humanities combining into Africana digital humanities identifies the presence of a global African world with a shared historical experience that stems from slavery and colonialism that make up the African diaspora. This unique historical and cultural experience can be seen in foodways, architecture, spirituality, language, and technology that undergird the significance of Africana DH in a local context. Africana DH takes on a scholar-activist posture as did its Du Boisian forebears. It resists racism and seeks also to challenge traditional DH by acknowledging the communicative power of spirit as a technology. Africana DH seeks to offer insight into marginalization and displacement by addressing the issues of race, class, gender, and place in predominantly Black communities. Safiya Noble correctly states that “this turn or institutional shift away from the interrogation of exploitation often leads us to focus primarily on cultural production, such as collecting and curating artifacts of culture among those communities underrepresented in traditional DH work; it leads us to digitize Black culture, but not use it in service of dismantling racist systems that contain and constrain freedom for Black bodies” (Noble, 29). Africana DH takes up the challenge to “interrogate colonialist and neocolonialist politics through project design to intervene in the epistemologies of digital knowledge production,” (19) making it possible to center the local and acknowledge the global African diaspora as seen in shared African retentions that exists in communities. Africana DH exists as a continuum of the Black freedom struggle and not only digitizes the Black experience, which is significant and necessary, but also challenges traditional thinking around digital humanities by centering Black voices and prioritizing accessibility.
Notes
Atlanta University founded in 1865 and Clark College founded in 1869 merged in 1986 to form Clark Atlanta University.
See Chapman, 42. In the early stages of the discipline’s growth, the term “Black studies” was widely used until the 1980s when the designation of “African American studies” became more commonplace, although most programs and departments would have used African American studies to broadly mean the study of African-descended peoples in the United States and abroad. As more programs, centers, institutes, and departments emerged, some being called “Black studies,” “African and African American studies,” “Africana studies,” and “Pan-African studies,” there arose the need to be more specific in scope.
HBCUs are institutions established before 1964 for the expressed purpose of educating African-descended peoples. There are 102 HBCUs that exist today.
The institutional history of Clark Atlanta University is detailed at https://www.cau.edu/presidents/institutional-history.html.
For the college history of Prairie View A&M University, see https://www.pvamu.edu/about_pvamu/college-history/.
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