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Abstract
Lucy F. Simms was an educator who made the improbable possible for thousands of Black students in Virginia at the turn of the twentieth century, but she remains almost entirely unmapped in academic histories. This essay describes a community-university-K-12 partnership that produced a permanent exhibit and companion website that preserves Simms’ story, the school named in her honor, and the men and women whose lives were transformed by that space. It also explores the vitality of local spaces to the recovery of Black women’s lives and the value of digital and physical modalities in biographical and archival recovery projects.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 It wasn’t until 2017, two years after the project we describe here began, that Simms was selected to be one of ten Virginians represented on the Emancipation Proclamation and Freedom Monument in Richmond, Virginia, thanks to the activism of several of our community partners (Wetzler, “State Approves”). The first book on Simms was also written by an independent scholar associated with our project; it was published by the local historical society in 2020 (MacAllister, Lucy Frances Simms).
2 Armstrong, “From the Beginning,” 11.
3 Mellott, “Simms’ Legacy Lives On,” 9.
4 Known as the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, the originator of the infamous Atlanta Compromise, author of Up from Slavery, and antagonist of W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington has been featured (at last count) in more than 83,700 scholarly articles and books.
5 MacAllister, Lucy Frances Simms, 122.
6 Edwards, Charisma, xv.
7 See Barnett, “Invisible Southern Black Women”; Altman, “Searching for Black Women in the Archives: Part 1”; Hartman, Wayward Lives; and Battle-Baptiste, Black Feminist Archaeology. See also Edwards, Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership, xv; Carby, Race Men, 5; and Chatelain and Asoka, “Women and Black Lives Matter.”
8 Lipsitz, “The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race,” 17.
9 Ibid., 13–14.
10 Ibid., 11.
11 Lewis, In Their Own Interests, 91–92, qtd. in Lipsitz, “The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race,” 11; Battle-Baptiste, Black Feminist Archaeology, 170.
12 Toliver, Keeping up with Yesterday, 56; MacAllister, Lucy Frances Simms, 88.
13 Walker, Their Highest Potential, 1.
14 Unpublished student interview with Ruth Toliver, qtd. in Godfrey and McCarthy, Celebrating Simms: The Story of the Lucy F. Simms School.
15 Elkton, which is thirty minutes from Harrisonburg by car, has been identified by scholars as a likely sundown town. See https://justice.tougaloo.edu/location/virginia/.
16 Allen, The Way It Was Not the Way It Is, 6.
17 Ibid., 106.
18 Toliver, Keeping up with Yesterday, 105–107.
19 Ibid., 106–107.
20 Ibid., 106.
21 Metz, “Interview with Mary Frances Awkard Fairfax.”
22 hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 4.
23 On JMU’s pro-confederate history, see Mulrooney, “What’s in a Name? The JMU Quad as a Lesson Plan”; on community concerns about some of the university’s prior efforts at community engagement, see “JMU Professor Susan Zurbrigg Leads Local Community and Civic Engagement.”
24 Godfrey and McCarthy. “Celebrating Simms: Complicating the ‘Single Story’ in Community-Engagement Projects.”
25 Toliver, Keeping up with Yesterday; Allen, The Way It Was Not the Way It Is; Harper, The Legacy of Lucy F. Simms School (short film). See also “What is Mutual Aid?”
26 Frisch, qtd. in Cauvin, Public History, 216. See also Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 125.
27 Benson and Nagar, “Collaboration as Resistance?,” 583.
28 Godfrey and McCarthy, Celebrating Simms: The Story of the Lucy F. Simms School.
29 Lipsitz, “The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race,” 10.
30 Godfrey and McCarthy, “Celebrating Simms: Complicating the ‘Single Story’ in Community-Engagement Projects.”
31 Godfrey and McCarthy, unpublished surveys. 2018, 2019.
32 “Simms Exhibition at HHS 2021.”
33 Godfrey and McCarthy, Celebrating Simms: The Story of the Lucy F. Simms School.
34 Digital Scholar, “Omeka,” Digital Scholar, August 22, 2021, https://omeka.org.
35 Alpert-Abrams, Bliss, and Carbajal, “Post-custodial Archiving for Our Collective Good.”
36 In the seven years since we installed analytic software on the website in 2016, the website has had approximately 5,400 unique users. In contrast, the traveling exhibit that we launched in the fall of 2021 has had 18, 259 unique users in about ten months.
37 Johnson, “Markup Bodies,” 58. See also Caswell, Harter, and Jules, “Diversifying the Digital Historical Record.”
38 Risam, New Digital Worlds, 4.
39 INCITE!, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded.
40 Earheart, “Can Information Be Unfettered?,” 314; Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered.
41 Earheart, “Can We Trust the University?”; Miller, Wheeler, and White, “Keywords: Reciprocity”; Cushman, “The Public Intellectual, Service Learning, and Activist Research,” 330; Polanco, Historically Black, 2-3.
42 The Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium, a project funded by the Mellon Foundation, responds directly to this problem by creating and supporting a network of social justice-oriented digital humanities work in regional public universities that are Hispanic Serving Institutions, Minority Serving Institutions, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and Tribal Colleges and Universities. ”About,” DEFCON, Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium, accessed March 06, 2022. http://digitalethnicfutures.org/about/
43 Levin, “DH GIS Projects.”
44 @CCP_org, “Black Digital Humanities Projects & Resources.”
45 Corner, “The Agency of Mapping,” 215; Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” 1242.
46 Hooks, qtd. in Riggs, Black Is… Black Ain’t.
47 Risam, “Navigating the Global Digital Humanities.”