Lost in the Internet Explosion have been reliable state and local histories. With each of us able to insert our own versions of events, we can e-mail, text, tweet, and distort actions and certainly ideas to suit our views of what occurred today, yesterday, last year, your lifetime, and, most significantly, those golden or dark ages before you were born. Remember when you went to your parents’ wedding?
Daily newspapers used to keep “morgues” about the past, with ongoing updates, especially for those individuals for whom obituaries would have to be prepared. The morgues also allowed reporters and newspaper librarians to research and update any ongoing story of interest. Stories were built based on those ever rising factual pyramids, from the broadest base at the bottom to the latest development at the top, in the lead sentence, paragraph.
Today if the city or town’s surviving newspaper is on-line, you might be able to find information dating to the early 1990s, or perhaps as early as 1985. Often however the accessible information is limited to this century. The New York Times, a national newspaper, might allow you to reach back to its origins in 1851, but that is not likely to be really helpful for anyone outside of the New York City area, who wants to know about the history of the place he or she lives, works, loves, raises children, goes to church.
But the final and most dangerous step in the door closing on local history will come with the demise of hard copies of those daily accounts provided by your hometown paper. We are not talking about Podunk, folks, but major cities. For example, the last issue of the Ann Arbor News, in the City of the University of Michigan, was published in 2009. From then on, on the Internet, the newspaper publisher invites you to search the Ann Arbor News archives, but its reach to the past is limited to events after 2005. Nearby Detroit Free Press allows archive searches since 1999, and before 1922—but not for the decades in between.
What may happen as a result is a distortion of the past. For example, in 2004, Ann Arbor hosted an international conference on the 25th anniversary of the Black English case brought against that school district. The conference received national and international attention. A segment about the original trial was included in a PBS special on “Do You Speak American?”
At the time the conference was widely publicized. The 1979 decision is acknowledged to have opened the door to the acceptance of the African American vernacular as a legitimate form of expression. The local educators were legally required to and did create a program to take into account the home language spoken poor black elementary school pupils in the district. A bibliography covering dozens of pages and references, and a separate book on “Black English and the Mass Media,” appeared in the 1980s and 1990s.
By 2012, however, a search for dialect and for the case yielded only one instance of a report about the case in the Ann Arbor News. The legal action was noted in 2009 in a report about “Ann Arbor Public Schools working to correct problem of disproportionate number of black students in special education, administrator says,” Published: Thursday, March 12, 2009, 9:41 AM.
The account noted: “As a result of the state’s directive, the district formed a committee to look not only at this issue, but also the broader issue of minorities being over-represented in special education. It’s been an issue in the district for decades.
“In 1978, (NOTE: actually 1977) a court case, Martin Luther King Jr. School v. Ann Arbor Public Schools Board, also known as the Black English case, was filed after the school had labeled or tried to label as learning disabled two-thirds of the black students coming from a housing project. The court ruled (in 1979) in favor of the plaintiffs and ordered training for teachers on culturally relevant teaching and assessment strategies.”
This view of the distortion of local history is presented to prepare readers and viewers, the audience, for a series of columns, of blogs, of essays, about the informational insults and injuries to the past, by distortions of information about urban life in prior centuries.The myths and falsehoods are presented in communities across the nation, primarily to protect the status quo, politically, socially, and economically.
The distortions may be dispensed by historians selling “oral histories,” or county historical societies which fervently want to see their home communities in a positive light. For instance, the Orange County Historical Society accepted as fact that Freedom Riders came to and were welcomed in Orlando, FL. Pete Barr, a noted local citizen and candidate for mayor, claimed he was given that information by the late Charles Hawkins. Hawkins, the prominent Orlando black banker, was quoted in reliable sources like the Christian Science Monitor, until he was convicted and served time for bank fraud.
In fact, regardless what Hawkins or Barr believed, there is no evidence to support that assertion or many of the others which suggest that Orlando or Gainesville or other communities in Florida accepted non-violent pro racial integration, in the 1960s, or that freedom riders and civil rights movement activists were allowed to have their say, in the segregationist environment which flourished in the City Beautiful, before—and for some years after—the arrival of Disney World in 1971.
This view is largely autobiographical, by a white man born into a secular Jewish household of two immigrants in the Bronx, New York. He has lived, attended school, and/or worked for at least a year in 1) the Bronx, and its 2) Riverdale section; 3) Brooklyn, near 4) Brooklyn Heights; and the 5) New York City , and 6) Greenwich Village, 7) Madison, Wisconsin, 8) Honolulu, Hawaii, 9) Decatur, IL, 10) Stratford, 10) Bridgeport, 11) Fairfield, 12) and Southport, CT, 13) Ann Arbor and 14) Detroit, MI, 15) Chapel Hill, NC, 16) Orlando, 17) Winter Park, and 18) Gainesville, FL.
Among the other cities he has known in the United States by lengthy and/or frequent visits are Chicago, Nashville, Washington, DC, San Francisco, New Orleans, San Antonio, Albuquerque, and Boston/Cambridge. He had similar opportunities in Siena, Italy; The Hague, the Netherlands; London; San Jose, Costa Rica; Mexico City, Mexico. He will take into account experiences in Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Tampa, and Jacksonville, FL; Seattle, WA; Boulder, CO; Jackson, MS; Knoxville, TN; Wilmington, DE; New Haven, CT; Cambridge, MA; The Research Triangle, NC; Los Angeles, CA; Rome and Paris.
In that life time journey, Gabriel Hillel found distortions about many subjects, but the most critical have been those about race, ethnicity, class, education. In his view, political and community leaders generate myths, withhold and twist information about those subjects, to maintain order, facilitate commerce, and keep control of the hearts and minds of as many people as possible. If the United States is to thrive, investigative journalists will have to push aside the false histories, as they have done in the past, especially in the last century, to expose the “Shame of the Cities” as well as their good points, the shameless politicians and business people on the local level, and most significantly of all the maintenance of economic and racial segregation.
