Excavating History and a Homeplace: An Interview on W.E.B. Du Bois’s Impact, Influence, and Legacy¹

1. Phil Sinitiere conducted this interview on 16 August 2018 in the W.E.B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and over email during the fall of 2018. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

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Notes

1. Phil Sinitiere conducted this interview on 16 August 2018 in the W.E.B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and over email during the fall of 2018. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

2. Whitney Battle-Baptiste, Black Feminist Archaeology (New York: Left Coast Press/Routledge, 2011), 135–162.

3. bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1990), 41–50.

4. Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert, eds., W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2018). For the data portraits, see the Library of Congress’s digital archive of the African American Photographs Assembled for 1900 Paris Exposition, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/anedub/.

5. The term “material memory” is from Laurence Olivier, trans. Arthur Greenspan, The Dark Abyss of Time: Archaeology and Memory (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2011), 34.

6. For local and national stories about these events see, for example, Scott Jaschik, “Walking on Campus. … While Black,” Inside Higher Ed, September 18, 2018, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/09/18/incident-umass-latest-which-calls-campus-police-suggest-racial-profiling; Hayley Johnson, “Anonymous tip sent to UMPD about claims of an ‘agitated Black male;’ University employee was walking to work,” Daily Collegian, September 15, 2018, https://dailycollegian.com/2018/09/anonymous-tip-sent-to-umpd-about-claims-of-an-agitated-black-male-university-employee-was-walking-to-work/; Spencer Buell, “Someone Called the Police on a Black UMass Amherst Employee for No Reason,” Boston Magazine, September 17, 2018, https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2018/09/17/black-umass-amherst-employee-police/; Hayley Johnson, “Racist message written in Melville bathroom,” Daily Collegian, September 24, 2018, https://dailycollegian.com/2018/09/racist-message-written-in-melville-bathroom/; Michael Connors and Rithika Senthilkumar, SGA holds forum to address racial injustice on campus, Daily Collegian, September 28, 2018, https://dailycollegian.com/2018/09/sga-holds-forum-to-address-racial-injustice-on-campus/.