srmeyer

In this next week, I will be wrapping up my internship with Roanoke College’s Center for Studying Structures of Race. I will be leaving this internship with a ton of knowledge about Roanoke’s racial history and how much hard work it is going to take in order to erect our own public monument for the enslaved laborers who contributed to the college. I have been listening to and transcribing an interview between Dr. Jesse Bucher and architect Mabel O. In the interview, Wilson gave a very in depth discussion about what UVA’s process was like erecting their enslaved laborers memorial. In addition, our last speaker was the influential Henry Louis Gates and he gave an incredible talk about the history of Reconstruction and answered many questions from the audience members. Gates ended his talk by saying, “We say that history often repeats itself, but it only repeats itself if we let it.”

I have been incredibly inspired by my work with the Center and I even completed a painting in my other coursework reflecting on Roanoke’s history of enslaved labor. I am by no means done with CSSR. I will continue to attend the collaboration meetings between the Center, Creative Time, and a variety of community members but this time, not as an intern but as a Roanoke College alum. I can’t wait to see the work that the Center for Studying Structures of Race continues to do.

The Center for Studying Structures of Race has been engaging with some exciting things! Next week, we will be wrapping up our lecture series “Monuments, Memorial & Memory.” The series has featured prominent artists, architects, and scholars including Charles Gaines, Mabel O. Wilson, Dr. Whitney Battle-Baptiste, Nicholas Galanin and Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. These individuals’ works addresses the role of monuments and memorials in society and the lectures invite the Roanoke College’s community and the broader public to examine the intersection of art, public memory, and history.

This lecture series precedes the planning of a significant ongoing project. CSSR is partnering with Creative time to erect a permanent memorial on Roanoke’s campus commemorating the enslaved persons who built the college and contributed to the wider region. Creative Time is a prolific fine arts organization that has commissioned and presented public art projects with thousands of artists across the nation and around the world.

These lectures have been incredibly informative and engaging as we have heard from spectacular individuals who think about monuments, memorials, and history in new ways. Architect Mabel O. Wilson explained her role in creating the University of Virginia’s memorial to enslaved laborers. Contemporary artist Nicholas Galanin discussed his installation works that engage with monuments with colonial narratives in the U.S. and abroad. In one work, Shadow on the Land, and Excavation and Bush Burial, Galanin excavates the ground in the shape of the shadow of a statue of Captain Cook in Sydney, Australia. The concept of the work is to dig deep enough to bury these monuments and white supremacist narratives.

This week at the Center for Studying Structures of Race has been exciting! We recently received a camera and lighting equipment to photograph our archives. I have been spending a lot of time going through all of our processed objects and books and photographing them. It has been super fun learning how to use the camera and equipment to take high quality photos of a ton of different types of objects. This is the first step in creating a digital archive for CSSR. This digitized archive is going to be incredibly helpful in organizing our collection. Having high quality images of objects to reference is important because right now we only have object descriptions with no photos. The photos added to the digital archive will allow us to quickly find certain things we are looking for and know exactly what is in our collection. This archival work is especially important because we are receiving new acquisitions almost weekly!

As my internship continues on, I have been tasked with an exciting yet challenging project for the Center for Studying Structures of Race. For the last two weeks, I have been helping the Center get its Instagram page up and running. We are planning on posting events such as conferences and guest speakers as well as other research, projects, and information that the Center wants to post on social media. This process has been interesting because the Center is so new and I have not really had PR type experiences. I think using social media is a great way to get people, especially younger generations, engaged with public history. However, it is tricky to cater information about topics like race on a public social media platform. Our goal is to provide digestible and informative posts about structures of race without inserting personal opinions.

I have also been reading White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness by Maurice Berger and Nineteenth-Century Brick Architecture in the Roanoke Valley and Beyond: Discovering the True Legacies of the Dyerle Builders by Michael J. Pulice. White Lies is a phenomenal book that has short, personal stories from Berger about his encounters with ideas about race in the United States. The other text is super informative about nineteenth-century brick work especially as it relates to structures at Roanoke College such as the Administration Building, Monterery House, and Bittle Hall.

Right now, I am crafting visually engaging posts about the Administration Building at Roanoke, the dedication plaques on the Admin Building, and artwork relevant to our annual themes. Canva has proven to be a great program to create Instagram posts. I have been learning a lot about the program and other information about PR. Below is a snapshot of a post I have been working on and the two texts that I have been engaging with.

I just completed the first two weeks of my internship with the Center for Studying Structures of Race. The Center is directed by Dr. Jesse Bucher and aims to examine and provoke discussion around the long history of race in the United States and in Southwest Virginia especially as it relates to Roanoke College. In only two weeks, I have already learned so much about the history of race in the Roanoke valley and at the college. Much of the college’s success in its early years relied on enslaved laborers, a reality that the college had addressed last year with the erection of plaques on the columns of the Administration Building recognizing these enslaved workers. However, the Center emphasizes that a continuous discussion about slavery and institutional racism pertaining to Roanoke College is essential.

Last week, I spent a number of hours looking through the Center’s archive which houses a great number of objects and texts from Confederate organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy as well as offensive racist imagery present in a number of everyday objects like kitchen utensils, postcards, and toys. We are working on photographing these objects to update our archive and think about ways in which we can use these things as vessels for education rather than for hate and intolerance.

I am including a picture I took of the Administration Building at Roanoke College because I have spent a lot of time this week contemplating my place in and relationship to spaces like this one; a physical environment that was built by the hands of enslaved people. How can I appropriately appreciate spaces that have been integral to my academic experience while also recognizing their tumultuous histories?

-Samantha Meyer ’22