Professing Activism: An Interview with Marcia Chatelain

Hello and welcome to the University

of Pittsburgh Humanities podcast,

a series devoted to exploring the

humanities, their intersections

with other disciplines, and their

value in the public world.

I'm Dan Kubis, assistant director of

the Humanities Center at Pitt.

My guest today is Marcia Chatelain,

associate professor of History at

Georgetown University.

Dr. Chatelain's research focuses on

a wide range of issues in African

American history, including African

American migration, women and

girls' history, and race and food.

Her first book, Southide Girls

Growing Up in the Great Migration,

focuses on the experience of the

Great Migration for young African

American women, a group of

people that scholars frequently fail

to recognize or fully explore.

Dr. Chatelain describes herself as a

scholar and activist and frequently

emphasizes the connections between

the two.

She makes an effort to bring her

research and scholarship to a wide

audience through social media,

podcasts, and frequent appearances

on national radio and television

programs.

She also invites students to bring

their nonacademic experiences into

the classroom, setting aside several

minutes in each class for students

to talk about their current concerns

and connect them to course material.

In 2014, she gained national

attention for creating the hashtag

FergusonSyllabus on Twitter

and urging educators at all levels

and in all fields to focus classroom

discussion on the events surrounding

Michael Brown's shooting.

The inspiration, she says, came from

thinking of all the students in

Ferguson who wouldn't be able to go

back to school as planned and

all of the empty desks and

classrooms that would sit waiting.

She was also inspired by her own

experience as an undergraduate at

the University of Missouri, where

she first learned the essential

connections between scholarship and

social change.

I began by asking her about this

early experience with activism and

academics and how she thought about

the relationship between the two.

Like many students, I went to

college with a major in mind

and definite plans for the future.

And when I went to the University of

Missouri to study journalism,

what I discovered was that my

student activism was far

more interesting to me than

journalism. Organizing people,

helping them on campaigns, helping

groups strategize how they were

going to get to the next steps.

One of the things I realized that it

was all teaching, and I loved it.

And I loved the opportunity

to get in front of a group of people

and teach them a skill that would

help them figure out their lives

in clear ways.

And so, my love of

organizing became a love of

teaching. And it was in that moment

I decided that what I really

wanted to do was stay engaged in the

life of the university as a

professor.

So on one hand, you're kind of

interest in activism

grew in for you into being a

professor and into a scholar.

But you've also said too that to be

a good activist, you need to be a

good Historian.

Do you feel the other side of that is

also true?

So I think the number one thing

that I always say to activists

or any kind of group that's trying

to solve a problem is to say-- I

always say you have to read a

history book, and you have to read

the paper.

The history book will give you the

context on how you got there,

and the paper will make sure that

you're staying relevant and using

the language that's circulating

in any type of community or

field. So I think that one of

the keys to linking

the experiences we have on a college

campus to making a difference in the

world is helping our students

understand that all of the skills

that they learn on campus are

about solving problems,

whether it's their own sense of

purpose or whether it's fighting

injustice or whether it's making a

product. All of these skills

that we learn here are applicable,

and I think that that's why the

humanities provides us such a gift

because the humanities are about

thinking through challenges

to the human person and

really developing into someone

different at the end of the process.

I mean, I love the way you talk

about reading the history book and

then reading the paper, because one

of the things you have on your

website, there's a really great--

a class of yours broadcast on

C-SPAN.

But you did in class.

And I think you do this not just in

this class, but all the time.

You spend some time in the beginning

with students talking about what's

happening. Talking about the world,

and then kind of you talk

and then you have a kind of a

lecture or traditional kind of course.

So it seems like in the

classroom for you, that's

what you do in a sense.

You have kind of like this what's

going on in the world, what's going

on newspapers, and then what are we

thinking about? What are we learning

about today?

When I started my teaching career, I

knew that I would always be teaching

difficult topics, whether it's about

race or sexuality or difference

or injustice.

And one of the things that I did

immediately was to create

this 10 to 15-minute period

in the beginning of class I called

hot topics or news and views or

sharing and caring, whatever

I call it. But it's an opportunity

for students to talk about whatever

they want to talk about.

And one of the things that it does

it shifts the power balance in the

classroom so that students feel like

they're invested in the process.

And it also gives an opportunity for

students to bridge that divide

between the classroom and the

outside world.

So the beginning of the semester,

students might just announce bake

sales or parties that they're

throwing for their clubs.

And by the end of the semester,

they're looping back to what we

learned in class.

And they'll say, I read this thing

in the New York Times, and it

reminded me of this lecture, and

it builds communities

within the classroom.

So students are learning about each

other's interests, about what's

important to each other.

And then what's amazing

is that when we have difficult

dialogue, there's a level of trust

among the students.

What it seems like you're doing your

classes and in your writing is

trying to kind of use what we're

doing here in universities to impact

the world outside of universities.

It seems like one of the other ways

to me that you've tried to do

that is through media.

Through your own appearances in

places and that-- you've become

more visible since--

and I'll ask you about the hashtag FergusonSyllabus

in just a moment. You become more

visible now. But it wasn't just that

it's not as though-- because you

were doing things on MSNBC

and things like that before that

happened.

Do you consciously try to

do that, to use the media to reach a

wider audience?

So the reality is, is that about

one-third of Americans will have the

experience of a college.

Right? And even fewer Americans will

ever have an experience of going to

a school like Pitt or Georgetown

or the University of Missouri.

And so, for the population

that doesn't quite know what we do

here, I think it's important for

academics to use platforms like

television, like social media, like

radio to bring people

closer to the things that we do on

campus. And I really believe that

when you have an ability to

bridge that divide and to do

those acts of translation, you

help people understand the

importance of what we do.

And so, I think that

going on television and

talking about a topic in a nuanced

way and then

making a reference to a book or

a piece of work that people can do

the deep dive into.

I think that that's part of our

role, right?

We have to stand up for not

only what we do but also its

capacity to help people.

And so, I think television

is fantastic.

And at the same time, I think that

we have a responsibility to be

really responsible for the platforms

that we create and for the things

that we say on those platforms.

Yeah, that's interesting.

I mean, I like the phrase you use

after translation too, because so

much of what we

hear about the media is the way the

content is packaged in a certain

way. It's geared towards soundbites,

whereas things that you do and we do

in the university might allow

for more-- those platforms might allow for more

nuance and things.

Do you have to consciously think

about translating in a way that is

effective to both

it's going to be effective on TV,

but it's still going to have the

kind of that nuance and subtlety

that your work does from the

university?

I don't want to be a caricature of a

college professor.

I don't want to be, you know,

Professor Elbow Patches who says

inaccessible things to people that

no one could connect with.

Rather, I see my role in the public

is to say history

has these great things for us to

learn. And I'm going to give you a

little bit of it, and I'm going to

hope that you come closer to it,

because I've presented something

that's accessible, that's relevant,

that's exciting.

And I think the reason

why there's such a tension because

so much of what we do in the

university is about a slow growth

process and so much about media

as being fast.

But I don't think they have to be

in conflict with each other.

I think rather we have to

use what the other has to offer

to really provide people an

opportunity to educate themselves

if they don't have access to formal

education.

And that's a great-- I mean, that

reminds me exactly of some of the

success of the hashtag

FergusonSyllabus which you created.

Could you just say a little bit

about that and how that came about

and what-- it's been about a year

and a half now since that.

As you've watched it develop, what do you take from that? What were

successes and

things, and what are the other things that you could do based on that experience?

#FergusonSyllabus was just my very

small attempt to organize academics

to devote the first day of classes

to teaching about the tragedy in

Ferguson.

And it was my way of saying that

our students are being shaped by

this moment and that they really

need to use universities as a

resource to understand the

complexity of what Ferguson

taught us as a nation and as a

world. And so, in organizing

academics to think critically about

that issue, what was starting to

happen is that people were forming a

community around

their identity as an educator,

whether it's on the college level or

K-12 level.

And it was, again, bridging that

divide between those two worlds that

rarely interact, but we still have

the same interest.

And it was also an opportunity to

just say that the academic community

has a role in this moment,

that we don't wait for the moment to

fade, and then ten years later, we

provide analysis. As it's

unfolding, we provide the context,

we provide the nuance, we provide

the spaces for people to have the

really good conversations about

what scares them, what inspires

them, what confuses them.

And so, one of the things that I

found from #Ferguson

Syllabus is that other academics

now use Twitter as a space

to organize around teaching

on various issues.

And so, if you go on Twitter right

now, you can see CharlestonSyllabus,

and you can see BaltimoreSyllabus

and ChicagoSyllabus.

And it becomes a shorthand

for a type of activist process

of learning and sharing resources

and information among

a wide community that we will never

reach in a classroom - right? -

which is Twitter.

Yeah. More than that.

That effort actually

developed to the point where there

was a long list of books

for people in a variety of different

fields, and even in the sciences

too, in the way

the natural sciences engaged

the topic too.

So it expanded well even

beyond kind of like subjects where

you would initially think that the

subject was was

kind of a good fit.

What I wanted to do was really

disrupt the notion of the cast of

characters, the people who

definitely weigh in on these issues,

and then the people who are allowed

to kind of stay in silence.

And so, one of the things that I

loved was getting

a tweet from a math professor

whose students did analytics on how

the hashtag was used and how it

spiked during certain periods of

time.

The number of teachers

in the sciences who talk about tear

gas and its uses

against civilians and its

consequences, the number of people

who are in the architectural fields

who wanted to talk about the built

environment, and what does it mean

to be an exurb like Ferguson.

All of these people are not

the types of people who are called

in during these moments, but they

were demonstrating to their students

that regardless of the topic you

teach or the topic that your

interest, you have

a responsibility in these moments

to use your academic training to

think deeply about

a very complex issue.

And that was really exciting to see

the true interdisciplinary

nature of Ferguson Syllabus.

Yeah. Well, one of the other even

more recent kind of places where

you've had a chance to kind of talk

about kind of issues

in the university this type of

broader social issues of your

position as a faculty member

is at Missouri.

At your alma mater.

And in just last November,

you published in the Chronicle of

Higher Education a piece about

your experience there.

And you talked about the activist

group, Concerned Student 1950,

and some of your own

experiences in the late nineties

when you were a student there

in Columbia. When

you look back now

at that movement

and in your experience, how do you

compare the two?

What they were going through

and are still fighting for there,

and what your experience was when

you were there.

One of the ways that I look at it is

that student activism

organizing has changed a little

bit, maybe around the central

issues, maybe the strategies.

But what has changed is that the

platform for student organizing

has fundamentally

been uprooted by social media.

And so, the struggles are

the same, the questions are the

same, the challenges are the same.

But now, I like to think of it as

a giant megaphone that can

now be amplified.

And so, when I think about student

organizing in the late nineties

when I was a student who was working

around the issue of hate crimes,

for us to get media attention,

it required us to write a press

release, maybe send it over email,

hold a press conference, really

hope that the state

media would come and

ask us questions.

For us to organize with students

from different campuses was a huge

coordination effort.

And now I see students at the

University of Missouri, who are

asking some of the similar questions

we were asking in the nineties, now

have an opportunity to

tell their story, to control

the narrative in many ways, and

then to create a reaction

which students from campuses

that don't know where Missouri is--

will never set foot in Columbia

can now organize in solidarity

with them. That is amazing.

And so, I think that student

activism,

the tools of organizing, and the

tools to get your message out

have fundamentally changed, then,

the process in which universities

engage student activists.

So it's a whole new world in some

ways, but I think at the core

of it is this idea that

colleges and universities have to

be something different.

That we know the challenges

of the outside world, but we do

something here that is distinctly

different and, I think, distinctly

hopeful.

And when our universities and our

colleges fail to meet that promise,

this is the core of

activism among students and

among the various constituent

groups. And so, I think it's a

really exciting thing to see

how effective students at the

University of Missouri have

been in creating a platform

in which to tell a narrative of

the college experience.

And at the same time, it's kind of

heartbreaking to think of how little

has changed in that period of time.

Yeah. I mean, on one hand,

the quick results with the

resignation of Tim Wolfe and

then kind of the programs being put

in place and things like that, these

are things, perhaps, that

would not have been as easy to

achieve.

But before, it was so

easy to make a story, a local story,

a national story.

There's some question that remains

about, like are the resignation

or the programs things that are

really going to address what the

core of the problem is?

And I think that's when we move back

to the humanities.

I think that deeper engagement

into the narratives that come out of

the humanities, the research that

comes out of the humanities, the

problem-solving approaches that come

out of the humanities, that's the

way forward. This is how we dig

ourselves out of any kind

of problem.

The question is, will there be an

investment in those ways

of thinking as a

practical tool the way that we think

of the sciences?

Yeah.

It's a really interesting point.

I want to ask you a little bit about

your research and,

in particular, the book Southide

Girls, which I really enjoyed

getting a chance to read [crosstalk].

Oh, thank you.

And I wanted to ask you about-- you

mentioned kind of the humanities,

and in your work-- so your

background is in-- you have

bachelor's degrees in journalism and

religious studies.

Your doctorate is in American

civilization, so it's explicitly

kind of an interdisciplinary

program. Now, you're in the

Department of History.

When you think of the humanities,

what does that mean for you in your

work?

Is it an important part of how you

think about the work that you do?

I think everything comes down to

story. And even though

I did not pursue my dreams of

becoming a journalist, journalism,

at the core, is about telling a

story in a way that

compels people to

stay with you.

And I think that in

the era of online journalism,

keeping people's attention, keeping

them connected, actually moving

them towards action are the ways

that we try to frame that story.

Right? So I went from training

about the stories

in journalism and then

adding on to that religious studies,

which are about deep stories about

meaning. Right?

People searching for this.

And then going into a

PhD program that is about

telling a story from many lenses.

And now, being in a history

department where I'm

trying to help my students

understand that many

stories can be happening at the same

time and that what we do

in history isn't to

dispense facts.

We actually are providing an

opportunity to learn about a frame.

And so, one of the examples I always

use to my students is that if

we tell the story of the Montgomery

bus boycott, one frame

says there was this bus boycott

in Alabama, and Martin Luther King

came in as a leader.

That's one frame.

You can tell that story by saying

Rosa Parks was this activist with

deep roots from the 1940s.

She settled in Birmingham,

and she did Martin Luther King a

favor by letting him be in charge

of a bus boycott.

Right. Both of those are accurate

tellings of the same moment,

but it's about how you're framing a

story. And so, when I think

about my academic work, I always

think, whose frame

am I going to use to

tell a really good story

about the past?

And then I think about that

frame and say, "How come

we haven't heard this framing

before?" And engaging those

two questions allows me to

do the type of scholarship that

makes me super excited about

history.

Well, that and this kind of-- you're

talking about why haven't we heard

about this frame before?

It seems like

the work that you did in South

Central was bring out the story of

the story of African American girls

in the first wave of the Great

Migration. It was

exactly that. You were giving voice

to this kind of group of people that

traditionally had not had a voice

on the historical record.

And that seems too to be--

some of the reviews-- in the review

of Til Death

or Distance Do us Part that you

wrote that seems to be the thing

that you valued about that book too.

And it was giving a kind of a more

complex story to one that we've

had in the past.

When I set out to do my book,

I thought to myself often,

"Do we need another Great Migration

book?" There's plenty of great

ones out there.

And at the same time,

after my book came out, people

said, "I never thought about

this population.

I never thought that there was a

question that was still embedded in

this thing that we thought we knew

everything about." And that is the

exciting discovery part of history.

That's why it's wonderful

to teach history.

It's wonderful to advise graduate

students in history because

after we've thought we've figured

everything out, there is still

something there that allows

us to be so expansive in our

thinking that

after it's done, you think to

yourself, "I can't believe I ever

thought about this moment without

this idea."

Yeah. One of the things that's

really interesting to me about your

book is that you acknowledge a

number of-- so that the

accomplishment is that giving voice

to this group of people that hasn't

traditionally had one.

You bring up a number of

difficulties in that effort.

So when you want to do that, when

you want to write about-- and you

say when you write about African

American life and culture, you're

writing about a group that is not a

dominant group. So it's already kind of

not as much

of a trace in history from that

group. You're writing about a subset

that doesn't have much of a voice,

even within that non-dominant

group.

How did you go about kind of

overcoming these?

It seems like it takes a lot to

creativity [crosstalk].

It's terrible as

a scholar because you have

a hunch, and you want to do this

project. And you're thinking to

yourself, "How am I going to figure

this out." And that's again,

I have friends who are management

consultants, and they have to figure

out problems for corporations.

And how often I say, "I figure out

problems for the historical record."

And it's the same kind of thing.

It's research.

It's making connections where

they're not seemingly there.

And so, to write a book about

a population that struggles with

the question of literacy and access

to power, I had to

kind of go

back and think about the different

institutions that intersected with

girls, who ran those institutions,

what kind of record keeping they

had, and could I get access

to those records?

And so, the big archival

discovery that

allowed my book to take place

happened because I started

to think to myself, "Surely

I wasn't the first person to ever

come up with this idea of African

American girlhood." And it wasn't

until I went back to look at

dissertations and master's thesis

from the thirties and forties that

there was this great archive.

These items were never

published, but the research was

there. I had to kind of get over

myself and say, "Oh, I didn't invent

this idea?" Other people had

this question.

It just didn't have a platform to be

answered broadly and widely.

And then, the second thing was

one of the reasons why I thought

this project was harder than it

maybe should have been was

because so many people hadn't

consulted the materials on girls

that I just thought they didn't

exist.

And one of the things that I often

say about my book, I don't know if

it's good or bad, but I do know

this. It gives an opportunity

to show what happens when

we are open-minded about what

is possible in history.

And I think that its archival

contribution is

its strongest thing because

it says, "Oh, just because

you looked up on JSTOR and Google

and someone didn't cite something,

it doesn't mean it's there." And

then it turns the question back onto

itself. Why didn't anyone think of

this?

Yeah. And one of the other things,

too, is that you, at times for

example, thinking of

the E.

Franklin Frazier book,

The Negro Family in Chicago,

there are some cases where you need

to go back in your book and kind of

rewrite some of the sources.

Because his

frame was one where he was writing

specifically about the value of

the patriarchal family structure,

which kept the interviews

that he did

from allowing these voices of the

girls to kind of come through it in

his full way as they could have.

And so, it's a different kind of--

it's not like the voices are lost.

It's just that they're not being

told they--

They just weren't being used.

That's right. Yeah.

And that's weird, right?

Because Frazier was such an

outstanding scholar,

regardless of what you think of his

views.

And so, when I looked at

Negro Family in Chicago, A Negro

Family in the U.S., there's so few

references to girls

that I thought this was the final

story. And it wasn't until I went to

the actual archive, that

I discovered, Oh, he had interviewed

all these girls. He just didn't

think it was important.

And I think that that is part of

what history pushes us

to do. Right.

We can decide who and what

is important, not necessarily

the people who are publishing or

other historians.

And it's those interventions that,

you know, make me super excited

again to do this type

of work. Yeah.

But I also want to ask you about

kind of one thing I noticed about

the book

is that it's framed I don't

t's framed with the Obamas.

The very first s

shave to do with their family.

I wonder if you could just tell

us because I love the story so

muchthe story you open the book with

about your work with the Girl Scouts

in Oklahoma.

And when you brought up the

Obamas and particularly Sasha and

They like lost it.

ell

us that story, and then why was it

that it was so important for you?

So a few things. I started this project before there were Obamas. And I often tell people that because I think when you're in graduate school, especially when you're doing a Ph.D. in history, it can just seem endless and kind of terribleecause you just don't know where this is going to land. Yeah. And other fields as well. It's super terrible. But so you start a project because you have an inkling, you have a hunchomething is important to you and you follow it through and you don't know how the times are going to shift to accommodate the possibility of your work. So when I first started writing this book, there was no Michelle Obama on a national stage. There was no AfricanAmerican first familyThere were no spokespeople for the outhide of Chicago the way that the Obamas

were. But there was this interest that I was just kind of plugging along with. And then when the world kind of knew the Obama family, everything changed. Our framing of Chicago, our framing of the South ide, or understanding of the deep impact of reat igration cities. Everything changes. And so I talk about this experience of volunteering with girls where I used to teach because for me, I was thinking about a world in which these girls knew nothing but the Obamas. Rightnd how this fundamentally changes ideas of AfricanAmerican people, of AfricanAmerican women and men. And for them to have two daughters, these AfricanAmerican girls now have a different relationship to girlhood. And it's just because these people are who they are. And so after the election, I did a little current events thing with them. And I say, ho's the president and who's

the first dog? I saho are the first daughters? And they like lose it because Sasha and Malia to them is so emblematic of how they want to see themselves in the world. And here are these two little girls and they have their cute little coats and they're at the inauguration. And seeing this fundamentally changes everything, just like the Obamas existing fundamentally changes everythingrom my research I had no hand in it. I mean, I voted for him, but I had no hand in that. The mes can shift and then your scholarship shifts. I think about all of those people and you might have known some who studied Arabic before 911 and everyone thought, How weird is that? Who's going to ever need someone who speaks Arabic to do anything? And then the national and international dialog changes. And then

there's a need for people who speak Arabic, who understand different cultures. Nothing changed in that person, right? But the climate changes. And so when I was thinking about a title for the book after I saw Mrs. Obama introduce herself in her little documentary piece during the Democratic National Convention, and she called it Southide Girl. I said, kay. Stop the presses. I've got a new title for the book. And I wanted to end on the complicated note of what it means for AfricanAmerican girls today to live in a world in which the Obamas exist. But we also see the persistent legacy of racism, of inequalityand of poverty. And so I end with Mrs. Obama giving a eulogy for a girl who's killed in an instance of gun violence on the south side of Chicago. And to really kind of link the hopefulness of Mrs. Obama's

entry into the national stage, but also the very seriousness of the role that she has to play in a world that we still haven't seen yet world in which girls can live free from harm and free from danger and really able to project all of their full possibilities into the world.

Yeah, it's a complicated endingI mean Michelle Obama identifying herself with the young girl who was killed in Chicago is one that symbolizes kind of progress and in so many ways a lack of progress.

Exactly. And I think that's the thing that is hard. Sometimes there's an impulseI think within my field to make these hopeful stories because there is so much hope. But one of the reasons why I love the reflections of girls from Great Migration, Chicago, is that everything is complicated. They're leaving the South for a better life in the North, and then they get there and it's not quite what they wanted it to be. And I think that that ambivalence, those mixed emotions, I think they're so embedded in college, too. And what I see in my students. You're super excited to get to collegehen you have to go and do it. It's like being a professor. You're really excited to get a job and they're like, Oh noctually have to do this job now and I have to do it well and I have

to care and I have to show up. It's the hopefulness and it's the promise. And when it happens, it's so beautiful. When we get students to where they want to be, it's amazing. And when the experience falls short or when we fail them, it's devastating. And I think for many of these girls leaving the South to pursue this new opportunity of a greater sense of freedom was amazing. But the reality of what Chicago was like for a girl during the Great Migration is also crushing. And so I think that in order to appreciate the depth of history, we have to allow for the possibility that both of these things can exist at the same time.

Yeah, well, I would say that's one of the things too, for me in reading your book that really came through is that kind of all of the hope and the promise that existed in that migration. It was stronger in your work because you never lost sight of the fact that there was a lot of disappointment, hardship and things like that. So I really enjoyed the chance to hanks so much for joining us.

Thank you.

It's my pleasure.

And

that's it for this edition of the

Year of Humanities podcast.

For more information on the Year of

the Humanities, visit our website at

humanities.pitt.edu.

Thanks for listening.