The 'Steenth Street Research Team attends Association for the Study of African American Life and History

The 'Steenth Street Project at ASALH (missing Brigitte Fielder)

 Professor Jean Lutes recently traveled with her three-student research team to the 107^th annual conference of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History in Montgomery, Alabama, where they participated in a roundtable on The 'Steenth Street Project, a collaborative Black digital humanities project that honors the legacy of Black author, educator, and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson.

Funded by the Idol Family Fellows Program of Villanova's McNulty Institute, the project was co-founded in 2021 by Denise Burgher (PhD student, University of Delaware, and Colored Conventions Project Fellow), Brigitte Fielder (associate professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison), and Professor Lutes. The project is bringing texts by early Black women writers to classrooms in the Philadelphia school district, producing a widely accessible digital edition of a short story collection by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and working with Hezekiah Lewis and Caleb Lucky from the Communication Department to create a series of short videos featuring contemporary Black scholars reading texts by early Black women writers.

The 'Steenth Street Project (SSP) is named after “The Annals of ‘Steenth Street,” a short-story collection Dunbar-Nelson wrote based on her work teaching Black kindergarteners at the White Rose Mission in New York City in the 1897 and 1898. The project prioritizes bringing Dunbar Nelson’s work to the people who inspired and shaped her stories, American children. The stories – which have never seen print together, as Dunbar-Nelson intended – feature the youngest residents of ‘Steenth Street, an urban neighborhood targeted for uplift by Progressive-era reformers. The stories chronicle a vibrant, working poor community where poverty, neglect, domestic violence, limited access to education, and untreated illnesses make it difficult for people to thrive.

 

During the SPP team's trip, they attended conference panels, conducted project planning sessions, and toured the Alabama state archives, The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which is the nation's first memorial dedicated to African Americans terrorized by lynching, humiliated by racial segregation, and burdened with presumptions of guilt and police violence. 

 

Other highlights of the SSP team's visit to Montgomery, a historic city that was the site of the first large-scale demonstration against segregation in the 1950s"

-- a rousing keynote address by Bryan Stevenson, the acclaimed lawyer, activist, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, and author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, selected as Villanova's One Book for 2018-19.

 

-- a panel featuring Fred Gray, the civil rights attorney who represented Rosa Parks and served as a key organizer of the Montgomery bus boycott. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called him "the chief counsel of the protest movement." Gray was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in July 2022.

-- an evening art tour and ceremony organized by Montgomery artist and community activist Michelle Browder, who has developed an arts and education campaign and erected a monument to honor the three enslaved women who were experimented on by Marion Sims, a white doctor who launched his  career in Montgomery by practicing surgical techniques on enslaved women without anesthesia and without their consent. Browder's three scrap-metal statues, built and welded from recycled parts of cars, bikes, applicances, and other objects, loom over observers, standing from 9 to 15 feet tall. In a direct counter Sims' longstanding reputation as "the father of gynecology," Browder memorializes the women -- Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey -- as "the mothers of gynecology." 

Stay tuned for more pictures and reflections from the students!