Archiving the Invisible, Recovering Community: A Conversation with Dr. Andrea Roberts

Cheyenne Symonette: Good afternoon, Dr. Roberts. How are you?

Dr. Andrea Roberts: I am good. I am here at my desk. I got here.

Cheyenne Symonette: That’s important.

Dr. Andrea Roberts: It is important.

Cheyenne Symonette: We are so glad to have you with us at Scholarly Editing the Voices and Perspective section. And whenever you’re ready, I can get started with the questions.

Dr. Andrea Roberts: Let’s go.

Cheyenne Symonette: Thank you. First question, your work with Heritage Communities has moved into a new phase with the Outsider Preservation project. How may this project change the experience of documenting heritage communities?

Dr. Andrea Roberts: I think what is so different is that I’m in a learning posture with Outsider Preservation more than ever. Whereas before I was in an informed experimentation posture, and let me explain what that means. The informed experimentation posture is more grounded theory approach to research and documentation so that I would go into historic African American communities beginning in East Texas, and I would, through participant observation, begin to understand the way that these really, very, very grassroots, not even self-identified preservationists were preserving heritage, was through the telling of stories about place. And then they were leveraging those stories in order to amplify or remind people during annual events of their connection to that place. And then they would be asked to articulate a commitment to that place that was a preservation action of some kind. So I was able to observe, and then I was informed by descendants themselves that I would interview and talk to in the region that, yes, this was the relationship between the diaspora and the place and the way that they reinforced their commitment to preserving place.

So that is a sort of informed experimentation to then think, wow, what I learned in that context is going to help me think about how to not only do it in two counties, but to extrapolate that over an entire state. And the way [I] extrapolated that or took that model of inquiry across the state was to then develop a crowdsourcing platform where people who I didn’t necessarily see face-to-face would have an opportunity to contribute their stories and memories about place origins, how the places currently, what the condition of the places currently, what are the places that they would take me to look at what remains, what’s missing and what should belong on a map that is the map of all of the historic Black settlements in Texas founded between 1865 and 1930. So there was this then virtual invitation to monumentalize Black settlements and to provide a structured form for people to fill in the kind of data that would then enable us to not only make points associated with that memory, but also to then collect all different types of documentation.

So people were invited to upload all manner of archival material, ephemera, photos that were associated with their memories of that place. The difference now is I know that there is knowledge embedded in all of these places about origins and about migration. And so now the learning posture is with Outsider Preservation. We are very, very focused on how do we invest in meaning, financially support and amplify the work of these same types of people, but in more geographies in different states of the United States as well as Canada. So the big difference is now we’re looking for all of those new exemplars of how to leverage creativity and storytelling to then draw people back from not only from a rural place to the city or vice versa, but how do you use story and memory that commemorates origins to then attract people from California back to Texas?

Because that migratory pathway for Texans during the Great Migration was primarily Detroit, Washington state, and California most of all. So the big difference is we’re looking at or inviting people to share the stories and their approaches to documenting an experience of movement as well as origin. And we have some parameters for that, right? But we don’t know exactly what we will get because when we say the word “creativity” or “art,” we know that there’s an abundance of ways that could be expressed. Film, creative, participatory archival projects are a form of creative approaches to document men in place. There’s visual art, there’s conceptual art, there’s performance art, there’s any matter of choices available. We talk about creativity. So now we’re in a much more, I’d say it’s still experimental, but very much a learning posture in terms of what we hope and what we think will attract, could be two different things. But either way we’re learning about, when we talk about historic Black settlements, what does that story look like, and what does documentation look like among people who are not professional artists or preservationists in places beyond Texas, which include California, Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, Washington DC, Louisiana. How is it the difference? How is it the same as Texas in terms of people’s relationship to proving up a place exists in their psyche and in their spirit and in the way they think about their own identity?

Cheyenne Symonette: Thank you. It’s fascinating to hear how the project has developed. Could you speak to a few pivotal moments in shifting your thinking about preservation and heritage communities?

Dr. Andrea Roberts: I would say one of the pivotal moments, going back to the initial field research, I use the word “field” in quotes, the research that was an initial attending of a homecoming celebration, a homecoming, not a football celebration. We’re talking about a homecoming in which people are going back to the home place or the home seat where their ancestors originally created free Black settlements. So I’m attending this homecoming, and I’m noticing as people are approaching the table and during the offering period, there are a number of people who are lining up, and they’re all homecoming presidents. That means each of them is a president of a homecoming that occurs at a different free black settlement in the area, and they’re all announcing their event. And by doing so, they are asking them also to attend because then they will contribute to the upkeep of their cemetery and continuing to hold that annual event.

So it’s a sustainability exercise, it’s a network exercise, it’s something that they’ve done. And they said, “Oh, we’ve done time 75 to 80 years,” and you do the math and you’re like, “Wow, that just happens to fall right after or during the Great Migration.” So this was their instrument for bringing people back. But during this time, they took up the offering, they made announcements, and they did something else really, really important, which was to ask who remaining in the audience is associated with a remaining settlement in the area? They would explicitly say “Who is here from let’s say Indian Creek?” And then one person would say, “I am, I’m here to speak for Indian Creek,” and would go up and say a few words about I represent this many families, and we were Indian Creek.

And so that was a moment that was pivotal for me to realize how embodied place was, how much that person was carrying the evidence that that place existed. And that thinking of these homecoming moments as more than celebrations, but ways to actualize or to make more concrete that a place existed was through what I heard, what I saw when they walked to the beginning, to the front of the church. And also when I saw in the program that they still had the same places listed for years, I then went and found programs from previous years and I noticed, “oh wow,” so they will still call the names of places that probably don’t have any population anymore believing in that place. So it was all these expressed commitments and embodiment that then began to have such an effect on me that I began to seek out working with individuals or scholars in performance studies. So performance studies became critical to my thinking about place. It gave me a lexicon for understanding cultural performance.

And then if we carry that to the present, then my call to the public through Outsider Preservation Initiative for creative art-inflected approaches to historic preservation is rooted then not in whimsy, but in observing this happen on a particular scale in a particular way. And then really wanting to continue to foster that and to see what the remix is, and not because I remixed it, but to see what is the, Im thinking I say “remix,” but I’m thinking what happened with Dominican, Puerto Ricans and African Americans in the basement of the projects in 1977? And then what happens when you bring it above ground? And then what happens when you put it in a recording studio and have an official recording studio? What happens then? And so it’s that same kind of, I think, pivotal moment of trying to both use my approach as a form of preservation. I’m trying to preserve this sensibility of thinking and amplify what African Americans already do, and then invite more to engage in that approach to preservation of celebrating the embodiment and directly associating with place. That’s the pivotal piece here. We have amazing expressions of public history, but the rootedness in place and in landscape and in buildings is where there’s often a grand disconnect in our discussions in public history. And so that’s a pivotal moment that’s echoing across the work.

Cheyenne Symonette: Your research emphasizes connecting, collecting, and co-creating as central to effective engagement. Can you talk about how your experience helped you develop that framework?

Dr. Andrea Roberts: So I would say one of the ways that that triad crystallized was not at the beginning. It wasn’t a, “Oh, I’m going to develop this Atlas and it’s going to be about connecting and co-creating solutions and about collecting.” The collecting was clear, but when I was trying to determine in an educational space, what was this progression happening, it was connecting with descendants and connecting is significant. It’s whether I’m connecting with them on the phone, through email, at organized events that they organize or that we organize—that is myself and my student research team—or that descendants as ambassadors of the project were organizing. Those were all the connecting piece, building relationship. And also part of building that relationship was not just, “Hey, let’s have these events,” but what are you already doing as a descendant, right? What is it that, what is your project? And how can I create a spirit of or a trust that there’s going to be some reciprocity in this relationship? And so that’s the connection piece, which takes time and it takes people watching you, frankly.

And then the collecting piece is the virtual platform, but it’s also the countless emails I get from people who say, “Hey, let me tell you the story of my fifth great grandfather or grandmother,” and then they proceed to tell me everything that– they just heard I’m someone who collects these stories and they may have never seen the Atlas. And so they have no idea. They just know there’s this project and there’s this person who says their stories. And so the connecting happens in all these different ways. And then that’s when we begin to curate what we collect, which is sometimes time consuming, but it’s because some people come at it all different ways. And then the co-creation piece, of course, is the sense that this is a reciprocal relationship, meaning because you are providing your cultural patrimony to us, right? You are giving us your story, you’re giving us your history, you’re giving us evidence of place, what are we giving you back? And how do we also make this about a level playing field?

So the co-creation of solutions to the challenges using the data is a big part of our work. Meaning if we have all these points on a map and we overlay it with the EPA areas of disadvantaged, environmental, environmental places throughout Texas, we have done this. There’s a map of all of the places with the least or the most endangerment according to the EPA and that they’re most socially disadvantaged. And if you overlay that on top of freedom colonies, you often don’t get a match because it’s looking at concentrations of people of color and concentrations. The EPA is, and of course there’s a disbursement of freedom colonies in such a way that people would say, well, there’s not a lot of population there, but if you do go there on homecoming will see two hundred and fifty people invested or a hundred people invested in this place. And so the EPA map doesn’t really talk to the freedom colony map, and our service is to amplify the visibility and to explain the nature of stakeholdership and citizenship. So the co-creation comes from they shared the descendants, their stories that make the places visible, and we in turn make them strategically visible in planning and development and environmental processes with the data they shared with us. So that’s the connecting, that’s the collecting and that’s the co-creating solutions or at least co-creating spaces where those ways of thinking about place become visible.

Cheyenne Symonette: How do the enacting of these principles, how do they empower communities to tell their stories?

Dr. Andrea Roberts: I think I’d like to mention the simplest way that I think it does. I think that there is something in being a type of place and introducing a typology of places. And what I mean by that is it means something when you say something is a historic black town, there’s a record that it was platted, a record that there was a mayor, that they had a certain type of social and political organization to them, and that’s a recognizable black place typology. Another is a enclave in a city, a neighborhood in a city. We say, oh, that’s a black neighborhood. But this concept of an intentional historic black settlement that may have never been platted, never may contain a number of people who don’t have evidence clear evidence of their land ownership that’s recognized, but they call themselves a place. They have a named place. They may have an anchor site also associated with it. I think that there’s a significance and a power in the naming of freedom colonies and historic Black settlements as an important black place typology.

And it’s important not only for people in cultural landscape studies like myself, so you have people who are in geography who are studying black ecologies and black geographies, and they have this naming of spaces, and they’re trying to elevate even spaces, not even places. And there’s a grand body of work that has contributed a great deal in the way that I’m articulating place and landscape. But I would say also that where it pushes back is in making visible these places very strategically in right now, processes, which I vehemently critique the heck out of. But in between time and in the meantime right now, there’s a need for a way to name these places and make them visible and processes that undermine their existence. So the empowerment comes with people who have come to me and said, “I’m just like, Shankleville, we’re an important settlement too.” So they see particular settlements being elevated and they think to themselves, “Well, we’re just as significant as that.” But there wasn’t even a “that” for them to point to for many years to say they’re just as significant as that.

So there’s some rising to the top of settlements and then there’s the rising to the top of settlements and towns and communities that are becoming, that are coming up on the radar of environmentalists. So you have Sand Branch community right outside of Dallas that has been dealing with water quality issues or no lack of access to water for years. Same in Tamina, which is in Montgomery County, which is outside of Houston, Texas. So you have all of these ways that this identity is sort of amplifying the degree of the injustice happening and that it’s a trend and that it’s part of a pattern, and it’s not something only happening to one place. I have found that people have begun pursuing historical markers and not just saying, “We are Dixie community,” but “We are Dixie Freedom Colony.”

And so there’s an identification with this that gives people the sense they’re less alone and that they have that they are a legitimate place type. And that is something that many people are looking for when they’re trying to engage in place preservation, historic preservation of a particular site, or when they’re just simply trying to protect and steward the place. And it’s something that they use when they pursue grant applications and when they’re talking to local funders or when they’re talking to the Department of Transportation and saying, “No, you can’t come through here.” Yes, there are stakeholders even though you don’t see them right away. And they say, “Well, look at that map, look at Dr. Roberts map and see we are as something.” So that is the role that we’ve begun taking on, I’d say in the last three years, not just the last three years, but I’d say it’s been pretty recognizable by people in let’s say, historical state historical commissions, the Texas Department of Transportation.

It’s become routinized for them to call me or for people applying for landscape for landmark status, or for historical markers, rather to call and say, “Hey, can you vouch?” Which is a complicated space to be in. There’s a way that my project is endeavoring to expand and include more people in being recognized rather than to only amplify the most rare and pure and pristine and preserved in amber. We’re instead not, we’re not interested in being gatekeepers. We’re interested in expanding the number of places that are recognized and cherished and appreciated and protected. So there’s that, too.

Cheyenne Symonette: What are some unique affordances of doing this historical and heritage work across digital and public platforms?

Dr. Andrea Roberts: Could you say more about that question? I mean, I feel like I understand what you’re asking me, but I really want to make sure I understand what you mean by affordances. Just say a little more.

Cheyenne Symonette: A quick example would be just thinking about how you said family members of descendants reach out to you by email to share stories. And I think about how without, I don’t know, access to that sort of technology, the internet email, those stories perhaps would not be so easily shared with you or even thinking about being able to disseminate this information through projects like the Atlas, things like websites and such.

Dr. Andrea Roberts: Yeah, that’s a really interesting question because that’s often a critique that happens. People have an idea that to understand these places, it means that you must in person find the people who live there who are the oldest to get the most authentic substantive understanding of the place. And if you don’t do that, everything else is counterfeit. Meaning anything that you get from someone who doesn’t live there or has only done their own research, or they live there part-time, or they’re someone who has access to email, website, social media, that those are the people who are not as close to the origins. And so they’re a counterfeit. Yes. So what it enables is someone who lives in Maryland but whose roots are in Austin, Texas, and they may have grown up in Maryland, and then they have this relative who lives in Austin, Texas, and you had told them stories and who made newspaper clippings about the all black school that they taught at or about how they attained a property, all of that material that they may have shared with someone in Austin, I mean in Maryland, that person in Maryland can upload it to the Atlas, and they’ll know that the Atlas exists as a space where they can do that, and that does happen. So the big affordance, I think, is it becomes a Black world of worlds of where people from throughout the diaspora can reconstitute that sort of ecology that made up a place to them, because for some people they can seed into our particular property, my family’s home place, other people will talk all about the church.

So the platform gives people an opportunity to ensure that they are able to come at this in a way that is accessible for them and not as exacting. We also create in that space a way for them to not have to fill everything in. So if you don’t know everything, that’s okay. We are able to kind of bricolage the truth of the place over time, and that never stops. So once we have demonstrated that a point exists on a map and we have some history of that location, we don’t have to say, “We are finished.” Now we can say: “We have this information and you have more.” And so the Dropbox at the bottom of the Dropbox associated with each point says, if you have more to share more here so that there’s no ending of the storytelling. So if you’re trying to get something into a published book, the book is finished. If you’re saying there is a National Register for Historic Places, a documentation process, you have performed that process, it meets its criteria. You’re finished. If there’s a historical marker, it is a marker that the transportation department has put up, and it’s in metal, and it’s stuck in the ground, and you are done. We are never finished. We are always welcoming the story to continue.

So I think that’s one of the biggest affordances of doing the work in a digital space and also leaving visible, even those that we haven’t necessarily approved or that still are a bit, let’s say, missing certain information, we use a different color for each of those points, and that enables us to respect the contribution. So someone has left a tribute for their ancestors in a way they’ve made a space in this digital sphere for their ancestors and for us to say, “Well, it doesn’t meet our criteria, so we’re just going to go ahead and not show,” it seems disrespectful to me. So we leave it visible even though it’s a different color. And blue indicates that we can substantiate location, place physical existence of concentration of African Americans and of a building or natural feature or family of the same name associated with the name of that place. We can check all these boxes for all those in blue, and there’s still many more that we will turn blue over time. So it’s very purposefully open, the process, and I think that’s something we can do in the digital sphere that a lot of other media can’t.

Cheyenne Symonette: Your Outsider Preservation Initiative seeks to unsettle traditional modes of knowledge gathering through mutual co-learning. How does your project aim to change our approach to pedagogy?

Dr. Andrea Roberts: So one of the things that I had the benefit of experiencing when I moved to Virginia was to meet a woman named Carmen Smith, who is a electrical engineer. She’s African American woman. She lives in Fluvanna County, very, very rural area that is about, I’d say a forty minute drive, forty-five minute drive from Charlottesville, Virginia where I’m located. And she was hosting an event at the Rosenwald School that she has owned and rehabilitated herself, along with a few family members. It’s through that experience of seeing someone who did all of these things to much of her own money, no association necessarily with local historical groups, except maybe to allow them to hold an event in her building, an archive room that she created herself. Because the archive room is amazing; because it’s not about necessarily having exact items from people in the community, but she finds proxy items that look much like what she remembers from growing up there, particular types of farm implements, for example. And so I’m offering all this because my experience of watching Carmen then made me really interested in what’s the appropriate way to work with a Carmen, what is their appropriate role for a university to decide to come in and support or align yourself with Carmen while also ensuring that there are learning objectives that you’re committed to for your students.

So I had a master’s course called “Rural Planning and Preservation Practice.” Very much taught first half in the classroom, second half in the community. And so in partnering with her, one of the things that I taught the students to do is how do you scope a project and partnership? So while I had parameters, they were also listening to her talk about what matters to her, what she envisions, and as they were, let’s say, working through a particular file or a book that had a ledger of students who attended the school in the forties, she was able to point out family names and then say, “Oh, by the way, I have this other book with funeral programs.“ So then the scope of our project were the funeral programs, and then these ledgers, well, if you think about that in the space of a semester, that’s really way too much to try to map out and think about. And so then they were charged with thinking, “How do we scope this aspect of the project in terms of storytelling in a story map? How many family names do we match up here? How much space?” And then it became not only that, but “How do we make sure that there’s some aspect of this continuing in future semesters?”

So they then became responsible for thinking of how does someone pick up this baton? “How do fellow students pick up the baton the next semester, the next spring semester? So the teaching then became so much about accountability, so much about having to interact directly with the person, the descendant community member, and then also making them future, forcing them to be future thinking, where ordinarily it’s my job to make it all seamless so that the students sort of step in to this black box, that everything makes sense, and they’re just step in and they scan some items and then label them and just step back out and write about it. And it’s very clean and pristine and neat, but it doesn’t equip the students to understand how things actually work with descendants. What’s the negotiation? What’s the power differential? It doesn’t force them to deal with any of that.

And so that’s the difference in my mode of teaching that’s changed over time is allowing students to get involved in the scoping and the negotiation, which very often is anathema to academia where you’re supposed to keep up the pretense that, and it really is a pretense that everything that you’ve organized in your syllabus and all of the things that you’ve set out to do are going to go exactly as planned every time. And so I’ve divorced myself from that pretense, which is dangerous for a lot of people who are worried about the teacher teaching evaluations and student complaints about order and whatnot. But that is, I think the big shift that I’m making or attempting to make in preservation education is allowing for this type of interaction and molding of the project between student and descendant.

Cheyenne Symonette: Whether from your students or descendant communities or the wider public: what kinds of reactions would you like to see in response to the Outsider Preservation project?

Dr. Andrea Roberts: I would like people to take “Outsider” that element of the term “Outsider Preservation.” And I would love for them to take it in every direction they could possibly conceive of. For example, “Outsider” has the word “outside” in it. I would love for people to entertain what it is to be a steward and to work in the natural outside world, to think about land art, to exhibit art in the land, to invite people to experience the land in these settlements in particular ways. I think about and was somewhat inspired by the organization Outdoor Afro. And I thought to myself with Outdoor Afro, what they already do is develop this approach to experiencing the outdoors that not only is safe for African Americans, they do curate these events, but they also infuse a consciousness about how the formerly enslaved may have used the same pathways that they’re hiking on. And so I want to invite that consciousness about the outside world into this conversation about Outsider Preservation to make it not simply about interiors or buildings or even organized places, but to think about the natural landscape, cultural landscapes that encompass the natural. I would like them. I would like to see people think about Outsiderness in all the ways that they can think about it because part of my reasoning for doing this work is to face my own outsiderness often felt in academic spaces, even in some African American spaces showing up as academic Andrea Roberts, even in some business spaces or in preservation. It was my sense of outsiderness in my thinking and embodiment that really led me to want to pursue this.

And this is the space that I want to create, beginning with African Americans descended from formerly enslaved people who created these communities, but it is an invitation for people to take that Outsider concept in all the directions they could possibly take it. And I also want to see very grand, brave, and brazen expressions of celebration of joy and of remembrance of these often little-known places and their founders. I want to see grand celebrations of people that maybe didn’t seem so grand. So, for example, I’d love to see commemoration of the founders of the settlements, the more than fifty-two African American settlements created in Nova Scotia by Black loyalists who were formally fighting for the British in the United States and Virginia and from Maryland and the Chesapeake area. And I’d love for people to become a part of our efforts to begin to tell some of that story of migration and placemaking, and I’d love more migration stories. So we’ve been looking at origins, but I want people to kind of talk about migration and freedom seeking. So both the intentional and the involuntary migration of Black bodies through space and time. So I’m inviting an expansive exploration of place with joy and with people hopefully bringing every aspect of their Outsiderness that they have experienced or felt to the way that they engage with this initiative and the projects or art they create.

Cheyenne Symonette: You’ve alluded to this with your discussion of embodied experience of the sorts of future projects that bring people to the space, spiritually, physically engaging with that. How else can the reader become involved with your work?

Dr. Andrea Roberts: So I’ve been talking a great deal about either our former Atlas or about the grants and a little bit about preservation pedagogy, but I will say that there are some other ways to engage with the project. There are four pillars of the Outsider Preservation Initiative. Of course, there is the development of a new portal that has an entryway for researchers and another for the general public and one that’s only for descendants. So a sovereign digital space for descendants to engage with one another. We have, of course, the grants that we’re making available to people with small-scale, capacity-building projects around the arts and preservation, as well as larger-scale, art-activation projects that are about revitalizing and precipitating return. And then we have the preservation pedagogy that we’re excited to partner with people who want to center the descendant in their teaching and course planning and supporting that, collaborating with folks on that. And finally, building communities of practice. So we’re really excited about people who want to dig deep into one of the challenges or opportunities that they see in these communities.

So there’s people who are very attuned to and expert in Black land retention, and that is a dimension of this preservation of African American settlements that is African Americans being equipped to or supported in legally owning land, or even devising new stewardship schemes that are different than flat-out ownership, but give them a continued tie or say, in the future of a given space, there are people who are in that conversation, and we’d love to be, we’d like to offer Outside Preservation initiative as being a key partner in creating a space and time for symposia, for film festivals, for all manner of events that would make it possible for those in those conversations to come together, not only around that issue, but how that you tie that issue and make it accessible to descendant community members. So communities of practice and learning and discovery are what we want to foster from a research perspective and also from an engaged research perspective through the communities of practice piece. We’re asking any and everyone to engage with us in any of those ways in the offering of expertise of support and collaboration.

Cheyenne Symonette: Finally, is there a question you would like to be asked that you’ve never been asked before?

Dr. Andrea Roberts: There’s a lot of questions suddenly coming to mind. Does any of this make any difference at all? What is the purpose of this? No, I don’t know. I wonder if there, in the course of my thoughts, I’m more interested in if other questions have popped up for you as I was speaking. But I welcome the opportunity to continue to talk to people about what Outsider Preservation means and what it can mean. So I welcome the opportunity to continue to answer the question, “What is outsider preservation?”