My research centers around the life and work of William H. Holtzclaw, the founder of the Utica Normal and Industrial Institute in Utica, Mississippi. Through archival research and reconstruction, I seek to understand the complex forces which Holtzclaw navigated in order to conduct his work in Jim Crow Mississippi.
As the co-director of the Holtzclaw Institute on campus, I am actively involved in the preservation and presentation of Holtzclaw’s story to the public. Through a new museum, scheduled to open in early 2021, I hope to engage our local community, as well as outside visitors, in a more in-depth study of Holtzclaw’s impact on Southern Black Education.
In addition to a recently completed rhetorical study of Holtzclaw’s autobiography, The Black Man’s Burden, I am currently researching Holtzclaw’s use of the Utica Jubilee Singers as a fundraising arm of the college through the nationally syndicated broadcast of a weekly radio program on NBC in the 1920s, The Utica Jubilee Hour.
My other research interests include digital humanities, incorporating technology into the STEM writing classroom, and the intersections of gaming and composition.
My Researcher Stance
James Banks’ 1998 article, “The Lives and Values of Researchers: Implications for Educating Citizens in a Multicultural Society,” remains insightful because very often researchers attempt to obscure their own backgrounds in a misguided effort to appear neutral. As Banks argues, research is not a value-neutral proposition and we must be aware of how our own backgrounds can contribute to biases. Being transparent in our researcher stance also allows others to read our work with an eye toward potential blind spots, or at least an understanding of our perspective. I’m reminded of a course I took in grad school where we read about the idea of reflexive theology — the notion that often faith practices are unexamined and are rooted in how one is enculturated. When faced with a problem, we tend to opt first for our ‘reflexive’ beliefs. I think Banks would agree and that carries into the research that we do, the research questions we ask, and even how we engage (or not) with the communities in which our research takes place.
I grew up in a rural community in New Mexico and my folks were very much interested in living in harmony with the land (it was the 70s and Mother Earth News was very much my folks’ aesthetic). I was the oldest of five children and my mom especially was highly involved with my education. Neither of my parents went to college (my mom went back to school after all the kids graduated), but they wanted us to go. Even though we didn’t have a lot growing up, books were omnipresent in our house. My mom read to me constantly and listened to me read to her. Books, then, were treated with reverence in our house. We didn’t have a television, so they were a source of adventure and exploration. I vividly remember reading every article in our old set of the Encyclopedia Americana again and again. We had a 1956 edition, so the articles about space exploration were particularly both hopelessly out of date (one day, we’ll visit the moon!) and incredibly hopeful about the future (by 1980, we’ll colonize Mars!). When I was 9, my grandmother downsized her home and gave us her complete collection of National Geographic magazines in the little slipcovers from the 1940s to the mid-1980s. I devoured every issue and worked on many family research projects from those magazines (I should perhaps explain that my mom had us write up reports on whatever topic we wanted to explore for presentation to the family. Nerdy, yes.). But before I turn this into some sort of literacy narrative, let me just say that growing up, books were definitely how I learned about the world.
Another facet of my childhood that has impacted how I view the world comes from an awareness of exploitation that was drilled into me at an early age. We spent a lot of time talking about how Native peoples were mistreated (in NM, reservations were all around us), how corporations were stripping the land, how our consumer culture was putting the world in crisis. While I rejected the sort of idealized homesteading that my parents were wanting to build, I did grow up seeing my place in the world as one where my task was to help others. For a long time, my self-worth was wrapped in what I could give or do for someone else. There are dangers in this though, as it’s far too easy to fall into the trap of missionary thinking (the white savior trope) or building an identity around sacrifice as a sort of self-congratulatory end to itself.
I have a strong connection to archival and preservation work because I think it’s really important for communities to have a sense of who they are and where they come from. Perhaps some of this is rooted in my own quest for identity. I could perhaps draw connections between my family’s hoarding tendencies and my archival work (justified neurosis?) or an attempt to capture what can be easily lost (nearly all of my childhood photos and memories were burned in a wildfire at the ranch), but I’ll save you the armchair psychology and point to what I think is my real drive for this sort of work which stems from the excitement of discovery when I uncover some long-forgotten piece of history or make a connection between two people or ideas that might not have been drawn before. I also love sharing this with my students and showing them how to question the archives for their own burning questions. At the risk of sounding hokey, I’m on this path because I like to think that the work I’m doing matters and is contributing in some small way to making the world more just.