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Presumably you know something about some bad hours or days in an American city in the early 20th century. Did those events have any lasting effect on the city? Did they echo through the neighborhood in some way? Did those neighborhoods disappear, fall into disrepair, get transformed into something new? Write a short paper (about 3 pages) or make a second story map or make a podcast or build a website that highlights and analyzes something. Choose a medium to explore a coda or epilogue to your storymap.
This is fairly open ended so let me make some suggestions.
- Think about the neighborhood in which the riot happened. Do a google news search and a scholar.google search on the specific neighborhood affected and see if you find anything interesting. State of the Reunion‘s Tulsa show has a great coda about the Greenwood neighborhood after the Tulsa riot, so see if anyone has produced work on the aftermath of your riot.
- If you noticed highways cutting through your map or couldn’t find the streets described look for information about the redevelopment projects or highways or public housing developments that came decades after the riot. A good 20th century history book about the city will help: you don’t need to read it all, just find the relevant parts.
- Or see if the neighborhood is the site of recent or current conflicts over gentrification, policing conflicts. Look for scholarly articles by urban historians or urban geographers on your city and see if you recognize the places or neighborhoods named and think about how they changed. Then think about how you want to present that information — through a standard academic paper, through another storymap, through a webpage (you might have a domain, you can get one (ask me how or go the the DKC), or you can use a subdomain on my page), or in some other way that you explain to me.
- Think about the city. What are race relations in your city like at some later point? How did the city fare in the Civil Rights era? Were there other riots later? Did it become a majority Black city In the 1970s? If it did, what kind of politics and culture came out of that (see Parliament video above) (“And don’t be surprised if Ali is in the white house/ Reverend Ike, Secretary of the Treasure/Richard Pryor, Minister of Education/Stevie Wonder, Secretary of fine arts/And Miss Aretha Franklin, the First Lady”) Make a timeline (see JS Timeline if you want a pretty easy digital tool. I know it a little, but tutors at the DKC are awesome) of race relations in 1919 and those in 1979 highlighting the events that move DC from riot to Chocolate City. Write a paper comparing riots in 1917, 1967, and 1978 (Houston) or do a story map of one of the later ones, highlighting how it differs from the earlier.
- East St. Louis is not far from Ferguson; Charleston, SC has seen a whole lot of race related sorrow (Dylan Roof, Walter Scott, protests, riots) in recent years. See what kind of other research has been done on your city and think about how to connect the dots. It doesn’t have to be about riots or violence in public space, you just have to build a plausible connection. It might not even have to do with race, if you can connect the dots in an interesting and coherent way. You can be creative as long as you can explain yourself and show me that you learned something. Make in interesting. Please.
These will be individual projects, but if you are loving your group (or just some of your group) you can talk to me about how to coordinate your projects. This assignment is worth 50 points — about half of what the storymap was worth and close to 10 percent of your total class grade.
(This isn’t about DC, but it is of DC and my honey used to go into Chocolate City from the Vanilla suburbs to dance at Trouble Funk concerts and he rolled his eyes at my Parliament video (although he can’t resist their Flashlight because no one can). So this is for him. And also connects to our class discussion tomorrow. And you all probably need a little go-go in your lives about now).