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- Thank you for joining us tonight for After Dark Online ReCollections. My name is Kathleen McGuire and I'm part of the team that puts together these weekly After Dark Online programs. While tonight's program has been recorded remotely I would like to acknowledge that the home of After Dark the Exploratorium at Pier 15 in San Francisco is located on unseated territory traditionally belonging to the Ramaytush Ohlone people and pay my respect to elders past, present, and future for their stewardship of the land. Throughout our programs in February, we honored black history month by sharing underrepresented histories from black communities, as well as cutting edge work from black scientists, historians, artists and community leaders. And tonight's program, we're featuring the stories of two people who are driven by personal passions and professional expertise built collections of materials over the course of their lives. Charles Teenie Harris was the predominant, preeminent photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation's prominent black newspapers. Photographing Pittsburgh historic African-American community from 1935 to 1975 and Marion Stokes who over 30 years recorded the news 24 hours a day amassing a collection of over 70,000 videos. The collections they built are extremely different with each offering, unique lenses on history. However, the two are tied by how deeply personal and intimate their collections are. And for the remarkable value they offer those of us who interact with them in the present day to frame and reframe the way we look at the past. Later poet, educator and press founder Jalynn Harris will join us to share the story of Marion Stokes. This conversation is based on a recent essay Jalynn wrote for the first issue of the new journal Black Archives In this conversation, Jalynn shares a bit about Marion Stokes and her archival work as well as her personal complexities. Jalynn also touches on the broader importance of Marion Stokes works and questions around how history is written and who writes it and how those questions drove Marion and her own process. Up first, we will learn the beautiful story of Charles Teenie Harris and the community rooted work being done at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh to research the collection, make it widely accessible and to celebrate the deep importance of Teenie's photography. And we are so lucky to be hearing that story from Charlene Foggie-Barnett, who is the community archivist for the Charles Teenie Harris photo archive. Working with the collections, approximate 80,000 images, she helps identify photos, interacts nationally with the African-American community to collect IDs and records oral histories that result in exhibitions, outreach events, lectures like this one blogs and tours that she organized. And not only employed by the Teenie archive, she personally knew Teenie and was photographed by him from infancy through her late twenties. Among other accolades, she was recently named one of 50 women of excellence by the Pittsburgh Courier newspaper and one of 100 Pennsylvania African-American women of influence from Talk Magazine. So I'm very pleased to pass this off to Charlene.

- I'd like to welcome you to the Charles Teenie Harris presentation. I'm excited to share this beautiful archive of extraordinary imagery of African-Americans in the 20th century and kind of explain some interesting stories that have come along the way with the archive. So let's get started. I call this the Teeniest archive as a play on words, but there are over 70,000 if not close to 80,000 negative images of Pittsburgh's finest photos, films and oral histories that Teenie Harris took. So it's a very lush, Teenie tiny archive. So hang on, it's going to be a lot. I'm Charlene Foggie-Barnett, as you know I'm a community archivist. And I want to point out that I've known Teenie Harris or I had known him since birth practically. The picture on your left is me as a baby that Teenie Harris photographed. I happened to have known him because my parents grew up with him. And also my dad was a civil rights leader and minister in the city of Pittsburgh. So we saw Teenie very often both socially and for community events and whatnot. This is our archivist, Dominique Leicester. She's been with us for five years and she brings a very fresh and unique attitude to the archive. And she's helped us reach audiences of a younger age and to make the relevance of this information pertinent to a wide variety of people. And this is Teenie. He's just awesome. This is a little younger than I remember him, but it just looks so much like him and he was such a handsome gentlemen. So this is a self portrait he took of himself. But this is how he started. This is Teenie Little Lover with his first camera. And actually his grandfather was also a photographer and that was one of his photography cameras we believe, but Teenie got the nickname, Teenie Little Lover because he threw his arms around an older relative and gave her a big hug. And she said, "Oh, you're a Teenie little lover" and it kind of stuck as a nickname, but Teenie was actually a diminutive man when he grew to be older and so it fit perfectly. And here he is, as a teenager on the left and on the right he's with his older brother, Woogie Harris. Woogie was really William Harris. And Woogies was someone who was an important person in the community here. He was actually a numbers Baron which is a long explanation, but the numbers were very important to the banking system of the African-American communities. When we couldn't go to a regular bank to get a loan for an education or a car home, whatever. And so Teenie actually asked Woogie to help him put together the equipment that he would need to be a photographer and Woogie was glad to do that. But Teenie was such a debonair man of style. And these are again, self portraits inside his own studio which he had, the studio was on Center Avenue in the heart of the Hill District of Pittsburgh, PA. And we always tease and say that Teenie was the originator of the selfie because he took so many pictures of himself, but he was learning quite a bit, how to work with the types of film he had and remembering that film at that time was not designed for African-American skin tones. So Teenie had to jostle around and figure out how he would make these tones as bright and as clear as possible. And I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a few minutes. He had a modest home, a home not unlike many of our homes. I had a home like this myself. But what is fascinating to me is that this is his basement slash dark room. He kept his studio just for about five or six years, and then he sublet it, but he thought he was never seeing his family 'cause if he's always taking photos when he was down at the studio. So he brought everything home and if you look at this photo in the background you can see the actual solution pans and you can see an enlarger and to the center left you can kind of see some of the boxes and sleeves and things that he kept the negatives in amid all this usual stuff that's found in a basement. So it's just fascinating that such a rich archive came from this kind of developing area. And I love to tell that to students to say, "You don't have to have the fanciest equipment "to become very successful." Initially he shot for Flash Magazine which was a weekly news picture magazine. And here on one side, you see a woman actually holding Flash Magazine. But his prowess came when he became the preeminent photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier newspaper. The Pittsburgh Courier which you can see is still in existence today was the number one African-American newspaper for a number of years. And so Teenie became what is known as their anchor photographer. And he was beloved by the whole community. And here we go, Teenie also had another nickname. His nickname was one shot Harris. And as you see, the gentleman here is Mayor David Lawrence who became Governor Lawrence. And because of Teenie was able to get in and get out and get the shot that that was pristine without a lot of fuss and rearranging and without taking up the mayor's time, the mayor nicknamed him one shot. And I'm very proud of this photo because those are my parents standing there and the mayor is swearing in my father when he became president of the housing authority as one of his community activities. So it's just so wonderful to have so many of our personal family photos embedded in the images. But this young man, we don't know who he is, but this is a prime example of Teenie's photography of adorable children. And in the moment photography, he had taken this in the K Boys Club in the Hill district, which was kind of like the boys and girls club. The little tears streaming down his face always pulls people. And the fact that his gloves, even though in the foreground they still look like they're larger than his head and it's just a beautiful shot that people request so often. I would love to know who he is and he's one of my top 10 favorite photos. And then we have these beautiful, beautiful ladies eating these delicious looking candy apples in front of a local high school in the hidden Hill District. And again, we don't know exactly who they are, but it's just such a happy joyous photo. And Teenie shot everyone. These are his neighbors actually, when he was a young man and Teenie ended up moving from the Hill District as a youngster and as an adult man he lived in Homewood in Pittsburgh, PA. And these were his neighbors, which proves that the city was actually more homogenous in terms of the racial divide than often it's touted to have been. And then he shot everything. So as you're looking at these, you're going to notice the Teenie is also shooting a wide variety of photos. He's not just one type of photographer and that's because he was a working man. He did not have the luxury of saying "I'm only going to be a studio photographer "or a wedding photographer or a political photographer." He shot everything. And some of his most beautiful work like this one are just shots that he particularly liked and they've been found in the archive. And then of course, these kinds of images where you feel like you're actually in the moment, because look at what's happening. We see the young man on the left crossing in front of these children and it I'm sure it was just, he took off and some photographers might stop that, but Teenie lets that stay in and you just feel like you're you're getting soaked with these kids, but enjoying every moment of it. This is from the YMCA, another very key point of the Pittsburgh Hill District where African-American culture breathed and lived, enjoyed, played sports had balls and parties, and just was a center of function for us. And this is a great shot of the boxing team. And then the city views. Beautiful, beautiful imagery. This one is requested by film offices across the country for use with television and feature films, Cars. Teenie loved cars. He loved a good car. The one on the left is his car. Most of those were hand me downs from his big brother Woogie and Teenie was known to have the cleanest car in Pittsburgh. But the one on the right is so interesting because as you can see it's just a line of these huge cars from that era. And one trunk open and, you know, Teenie was probably on his way somewhere else and just saw this and took the shot. As someone who knew Teenie, I can honestly say, I never saw him without a camera. And I saw him with a family functions of his family and my family or whatever and he was never without his camera. But these great landscape shots and kind of pictorial imagery of Pittsburgh, PA back when we had foggy skies and the steel mills were filling the air with this dark smog, he does a wonderful job with that. And then of course I can relate to this era. This is more like the early '60s era when I was a little girl and I can remember pictures like this, people like this. And I feel like I'm standing on the street waiting for these cars to come down. And this one is very interesting and it was quite a learning process for me when I came to work with the archive. This is a photo of what was the pool at our local amusement park Kennywood Park. And as you can see, Teenie standing very close to the fence, closest to these outer ring of cars and you wonder, well why didn't he just take the camera and kind of put it over the fence and make a better shot of what he was actually taking? But this is what we deem a silent social commentary because what Teenie was actually probably letting us know subtly, if you knew the history of this pool and Pittsburgh and what was going on, this pool was segregated. And so essentially he's saying that I'm not allowed in here and there is another barrier. That this fence is an actual racial divide. And I can also attest to that. I grew up in going to Kennywood Park and I had never been in the pool and then they closed once they did desegregate it Negro League teams. Teenie himself was a Negro League player. He played for the Pittsburgh Crawfords. He was a founder of the Crawfords. So he had an angle with various teams that other people didn't because he knew these guys and so a lot of the sports fans like to access our photos of Negro Leagues and National League figures as well. And we know this is Jackie Robinson and just a great shot of him leaning on this bat in Forbes field in Pittsburgh, PA. Musicians and celebrities. I don't know who he didn't take. This is just a very small percentage of people. We have Nina Simone and Satchmo and Duke Ellington. Let's see, we have, my mind just blanked I'm so sorry. Ella Fitzgerald that's who it is. Someone my mom would say, "You know her," and entertainers like Lena Horne. And Lena was a native Pittsburgher of sorts. She was brought here by her father in her early teens and she actually grew up with my mom and her sisters. My mom's sisters to the left of Billy Eckstine's arm in the lower photo standing behind his shoulder. And this party was given by Eckstine for Lena to her off on her first national tour. And so they invited all her friends, but Teenie knew Lena and her father very well so he had a great opportunity to get in with photos that other people couldn't get. And of course, we've talked to Harry Belafonte in recent years about his meaning Teenie here and we have James Earl Jones and Sammy Davis, Jr. And then we also have unique photos like this. Teenie would get assignments from the Courier newspaper offices and he might be on his way to something else or he might see a fire and stop by. But think about the fact that he's taking this from above, he's taking this from the top of some building or a window looking down on this horrible fire that happened at the Flamingo skating rink, but actually it's a beautiful composition because of the hoses and the trucks and everything that you see, it's a beautiful, however, tragic photograph. And then there, the kids, of course you've already seen a little boy boxer, but these kids just are some of our key photos. Actually the little girl with the cake is me for my first birthday. And I love the nurse and the doctor. I would love to know if they became medical professionals in later life. And the little gentleman with the bat is one of Teenie's grandsons. And the lovely ladies. These are studio shots that Teenie took of these ladies. And as we're watching not only the beauty and the variety that Teenie shot, but are you also noticing that, let me go back one that he also shot a variety of skin tones because I was talking about earlier and he himself told us and then his children told us that he would take his hands in the solutions as some of the photos were being developed. And if he had people of different skin tones he might put his bare fingers over some of their faces and let the other parts develop up. And then after a while lift so the rest of the development would occur. And what that did was allow each person, no matter what their complexion to have their ear seeing clearly or the shine on their hair or the bracelet on their arms so that they wouldn't either fade out or muddy out. And that was something that he did that I think the black community truly appreciates because of how he kept at the dignity of these photos so wonderful for all of us not just a certain tone and complexion of us. However, this is how Teenie store his thousands of negatives. Teenie had dropped out of school in what was then called junior high. And so he had a very rudimentary way of keeping his information. As you can see a lot of these boxes will say Courier 1951 or '52 and Teenie knew what he had in those boxes, but other people trying to retrieve them might not be able to figure it out. And so when we did receive the collection after this happened, when many of his negatives were found in an unfavorable condition by a friend who had tried to help him and had taken all of the negatives out of their sleeves and actually mixed them up. They were sorting them, but it got mixed up. And some of the degradation of the film occurred because of the way they were kept. Some moisture was down in the bottom of this basement and whatnot. So we had to start again. And a lot of that was with the aid of Teenie's family. And the collection was legally brought to Carnegie and we looked at everything that they had and what they wanted to give us. And then we had to start cataloging. So we had to re sleeve and rehouse each and every one of these negatives and put them in some collectible, some retrievable order. So as you can see on the left, this is a title for one negative, and it's very long, and it's very descriptive because the information is complete because we found this information in the Pittsburgh quarrier archives, when we paired the picture with an article. Combing through nearly 80,000 images in that manner takes a very long time. And it's been going on close to 20 years. And of course, we're now keeping the negatives in good condition physically and under proper storage conditions in cold storage. We also have a paper negative. For each digital file that we have put together We use email EMu or EMu depending on where you are and how you pronounce it. And of course, that's all our digital platform information, but each photo has a paper file because there's other information that goes with them that can't necessarily be added into a digital file. So some of that is something like this. We scour the Pittsburgh Courier or other local newspapers and we put the article, the image and whatever we can find that goes with each photo. Another most important part of our work is the oral histories. And I'm going to be playing one for you soon, but we could not figure out what else we're looking at. Even if we had some information from a newspaper, but most often we don't have information. So we've had to ask people who are part of a club or part of a church, or who were members of a certain sorority or fraternity or whatnot, who are these people? Is that you? What are you doing? Why was Teenie there? That kind of thing. And this is a lot of fun though because we also get to work closely with the Harris family and we get to hear some incredible stories. And I'm gonna insert one here and hope that you can hear it. Let me turn it up a little bit. And this is someone who worked with Teenie as a junior editor at the Courier newspaper.

- [Woman] In many instances, a reporter would send Teenie out and myself as junior editor to cover a particular event and we would sort of write and get ready for the picture coming in, but then when we'd see the picture, the picture would write the story because tinny was just that good. He was perceptive. He would get on a scene and within seconds he would understand what was happening. He would see where the lighting was the best to get that person. He would catch their personality. He was intuitive enough to understand that this person thought they were a big shot or that this person was a very gentle person or that this person had a shy side. He was fairly perceptive and when he would come back with those pictures all of us at the time that I was writing, when I wasn't working for advertising, I would at those pictures and say, "Wow, this is a whole different story." And so you think that the reporters wrote the stories, but a lot of times Teenie's picture wrote the story.

- That's one of our favorite oral history collections. We use it quite a bit because it really talks about Teenie, but at the same kind of energy Teenie had. I'm wondering if you could guess who this shot is because of a lot of what Teenie did was to share photos of people as they were becoming major celebrities or stars or whatever. And if you don't know what this is George Benson the famous guitarist, when he was a pre-teen actually playing here in the Hill District probably in Hawaii. This is a legislator, very famous Pennsylvania legislator. He's K Leroy Irvis, who was known as the lion of Harrisburg and one of the first black speakers of any state. But this is his off time and he is actually, this is his hobby. And there is a, there are a lot of photos of him with aviation and other books and biopics of him. But this is Leroy when he was teaching my neighbors. These guys were the people that lived on my street and my brothers standing on the right. And he took these kids and not only taught them how to build these planes, but how to fly these planes and took them to flying fields. So it's just amazing what he photographed. These are firemen and in almost all these photos that you're seeing, you're seeing my father-in-law's in this one he's the third one from the front, but I wanted you to see that my proximity with Teenie was very close and very often. This is my cousin's wedding at Holy Cross Church and it was probably 1963 and I'm the little flower girl. So when I say, I know how Teenie would come in and get things arranged and whatnot, it was very fast and very furious. But one of my jobs was to tell people, "Teenie's here, Teenie's here, hurry up, "he's not going to be here, but for a minute." When I came to the museum as a volunteer to tell my oral histories and my stories I was sharing this information with them and they were delighted that they could talk to someone who really knew how Teenie was. This is an important set of photos because this is what the destruction of the lower Hill District of Pittsburgh looked like. It's a very sad photo on the left as they built this structure on the right. But what that did was displaced the lower Hill District residents and to split our community So that families and businesses that were right down the street from each other were now moved out to different areas. But here we have, once the building was built some of the ecumenical community and Philip Randolph who's standing in the middle and my dad who was a Bishop at the time is standing third from the right. They tried to come together with the priests and rabbis and whatnot to try to restructure the utilization of this building. Teenie did everything, all these beautiful shots. The fireman is just impressive to me. And it goes on and on as he cheers us on. But we produce beautiful exhibitions from all of these great negatives. And because we work off the negative itself and not from any other source or resource we can get a nice true image. And we've been using for a number of years after one of our biggest retrospective shows in 2011, 2012 we were given the rep space to, but that's what we call the lobby gallery in the Carnegie to use themed exhibitions. One was on hair, one was on elections. Some were on cars, somewhere on civil rights, some were more on the oral histories. And then we have external exhibitions that we've done at the August Wilson center in downtown Pittsburgh, beautiful shots there. And then we'd done some very nice work abroad. In new castle, England, we've done one about oral history collections in Pittsburgh called, not as it is written, Black Pittsburgh in voice and image. I had the privilege of going over and speaking on this. And guest curators. We always include a guest curator with our shows so that we can ask questions of someone like myself who has some close relationship with a topic. Of course, that's Michael Keaton right there in the top middle, native Pittsburgh guy when he came home one year to see Teenie photos we grabbed him and said, "Hey, would you like to do an exhibition with us?" We have Sean Gibson with the gray shirt on, who is part of the representation of the Josh Gibson Foundation. We have Bradford Young, who's a filmmaker. And we even have a gentleman in the lower left with the blue jacket whose father had a gas station in the Hill District and he was one of his workers, but he eventually became the Gulf Oil executive in the area. And so he could talk to us from soup to nuts about cars and the automotive industry and whatnot. And so we try to get a variety of people so that we can reach a variety of patrons. And we've done a lot of outreach which is my primary job to go out and make certain that people know about Teenie and know how much they can use him. Education is a key part of what we do as well. And whether it's for high schools or colleges or even adult education, we continue the process but we also have some very cool special opportunities. If you'll notice this is the Carnegie Science Center which is one of our sister museums in the Carnegie system. But on the left, you see a little a building and that's a train scape building as you can see on the right. And this curator asked us to come and talk about what the Crawford Grill a very famous institution here in Pittsburgh for jazz and jazz musicians beginning, they wanted to put the building in. But if you look, you'll see on the left a little teenie tiny man in the street with a camera, and that's a Teenie tiny Teenie depicted taking photos of the Crawford Grill and there are thousands of his photos of the Grill, mostly internally of course that we have in the archive. We've worked with Pittsburgh Opera for an actual opera on Josh Gibson that had nothing but imagery from Teenie Harris as their set design and various other plays and opportunities. We've had Calm come and talk about how much he loves Teenie. And we work with film companies when August Wilson's "Fences" came to Pittsburgh. It was a real joy to work with their set designs and their makeup and costuming to make it look like 1957 Hill District and it was a real cool moment for me because it was August Wilson's play made into a film, but they couldn't flesh it out without Teenie Harrison imagery. August is from the Hill District, Teenie's from the Hill District, I'm from the Hill District and I felt like I was able to help bring the voice of these great people that came out of my hometown together. In the set they built the Pittsburgh Courier offices and that's Teenie's family holding the clapboard. And they also, as an homage to Teenie they built a Harris studio, which was not originally in the script to thank him for all the imagery that he offered for them to do the films. And we're working with subsequent, "The Marini" and subsequent films of August Wilson's plays that Paramount is doing. And then we have an inordinate amount of Tuskegee Airmen in the Pennsylvania, Western Pennsylvania area. And so we have had photos that Teenie shot of them and their exhibitions in our airport and various parts around the city. And we're also proud to say that Teenie is featured in the national museum of African-American history and culture in Washington, DC. And he has his own kiosk. And one of his cameras is in it. And a lot of his photography is around the building as well. But what we're very excited about to share is the fact that we are now back to a dedicated Teenie space in the Scape Galleries at the Carnegie Museum of Art. And as you can see, when you look through the gallery you can see Teenie looking at you and mean when you get there, you get to take a beautiful shot standing next to this guy. We wanted to not just put photos in the gallery and just have any kind of subject up, but we wanted to pinnacle what Teenie was about. And so we called the exhibition in sharp focus and we kind of took off from a very broad and wonderful quote by the historian Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Who often says this sentiment, that if there are 42 million African-Americans, then there are 42 million ways to be black. And that is exactly what Teenie has done. Teenie is the proof of our community. We know about slavery, the reformation period, Jim Crow, civil rights, black nationalism, the Obama era and now Black Lives Matter. But the majority of what ties all of that together is the middle ground, the middle space of what was actually happening in our communities. And those are not stories that are often told because they don't seem as sensational or as impactful, but they are the connective fiber and they are proof of who and how we lived. So we broke this theme down into three separate categories to start the conversation. One was access and opportunity. One was multifaceted identities, and one was social networks. So we are using those as we can tour intermittently mid COVID in the gallery and also on digital platforms. And this is what gallery looks like. We have beautiful seating. We have our beautiful, what we call Teenie blue walls because the blue tone, that very pale blue makes these black and white photos pop. And it just has always worked so we were excited to do this again. And as you can see, actually these two are photographers and videographers in their own right here in the city of Pittsburgh. And they knew Teenie. One of them knew Teenie. And so they're just studying his work. And we have a replica of his not only one of his speed graphic cameras which is the one he used the most. He used it far after other press photographers stopped using a great big camera like that because he loved the product he got, he loved the negative that he got. And so you can see some negative prototypes and whatnot. And we also had innovative technology. We have this touch screen and we can't use it right now because of COVID. But what it does is populate all 80,000 of these images in either a transcendence of the year or from infancy to an older age or by tone of the photo or by theme or by accession number. And then we also have the iPads where you can import specific names. You could put in anything you're looking for and pull up an image and you can even add information for us to get back in touch with you to talk about what you have found or to ask for an oral history from you or for you to correct a name spelling or a place or whatever. So we just love Teenie. We are so proud of him. There's so much more that's going on that we do with Teenie. And I just don't have time to keep talking about it, but we love Teenie, we appreciate him and we are lifting him up so that he becomes, we hope an international figure of incredible photo journalism and his historian and humanitarian aspects. You know, a lot of what he's doing not just telling our stories, but telling them in such dignified ways and without his keen eye and the confidence of the community because we all knew him pretty much and we trusted how he would take the shot or utilize the shot. We might not have had this beautiful remembrance in our own personal and broad black history without Teenie Harris. So we're very, very proud of our Teenie.

- Thank you so much for that introduction to Teenie and to your work, Charlene. I encourage everyone to head to cmla.org/teenie and explore this truly amazing collection. Now we'll be moving on to learn about a very different kind of archive. The one built by Marion Stokes over the course of her life as she recorded the news. I was honored to join Jalynn Harris in conversation to discuss Marion. Jalynn is a poet, educator, editor and press founder from Baltimore, Maryland. She founded SoftSavagePress for the sole purpose of promoting visual and literary works by black people. She earned her MFA from the university of Baltimore where she was the inaugural recipient of the Michael F. Klein fellowship for social justice. Her work has been featured in Transition Magazine, Scalawag Magazine as well as elsewhere. Her first collection of poems "Exit Through the Afro" is available through SoftSavagePress. Jalynn and I's conversation is based on a recent essay she wrote for the first issue of the journal Black Archives which I encourage folks to check out. The essay titled Recorder Through the Eyes of the Beholder is there a response to a film recently released about Marion Stokes. And in addition to sharing the work Marion did probes the importance of her archiving as well as the complex effects that had on her. So here's Jalynn. Thank you for joining us Jalynn. It's really an honor to have you here. And especially after Jalynn has been teaching all day. So we're really thrilled to have her with us after a long day of doing that work, but to get us started could you tell us a little bit about yourself and in particular, your writing and the press that you operate?

- Yeah, I'm so honored to be here. Thank you for inviting me. It is a pleasure to have something that's not grading to do right now. So yeah, I'm Jalynn and I started this publishing company like two years back called SoftSavagePress. And the very first publication we did, it was called "Canary." I'm also a book designer and educator and a poet. And I started SoftSavagePress because I wanted to make "Canary" quite frankly that was the heart of it. And I wanted a place where black folks, black quire folks, black femme identified folks could have their literary and visual work represented. So I decided on "Canary" and the name is after Rita Dove poem Canary about Billie Holiday, one of my favorite poems and my favorite poets. And so Canary is a literary survey of black femme riding from Baltimore to North Carolina, South Africa. There's an interview with a South African erotic writer in the middle of it. So that's that's our publication. And then the second publication we put out was my own chat book called "Exit Through the Afro." And I like to describe this book as it's a speculative museum and vast. So on the cover, we have Ida B Wells and Francis EW Harper, and they are some of the co-creators of the national association of colored women. And I put them on the cover because they are really the impetus for, the first poem I wrote was a love letter between them. So it's speculative in that. A lot of my work is speculative in that I imagine other futures or histories of real or imagined characters. So historical people who have lived or characters in books that I've read and make it gay.

- Well, thank you for that, sharing that piece of your work. And it's interesting too, 'cause I feel like there is a connection to Marion Stokes who we're gonna talk about and her work revealing a history that might've otherwise been lost or a different kind of history, but I guess to get us started, could you tell us a little bit about Marion Stokes and what she did as a collector and an archivist?

- Yeah, so Marion Stokes was born in 1929 at the beginning of the great depression. I think we're all kind of familiar with what it is like to experience our own depression now. I think it's super important to position an understanding of like her life in such a time of scarcity, her being born. And so professionally, she was a librarian who was also a socialist, who then was recruited by the communist party to join them. And she wanted to defect from the States. Her first husband and her son, she had one child. They tried to seek asylum in Cuba, but they only got as far as Mexico and had to come back to the States. And not too long after they came back in 1978, the Iranian revolution began. And in 1979, the 24 hour news cycle started, which even for me to be so young to think like TV used to turn off. Like there was a time when it began that TV didn't stop. So she was keeping close tabs on the revolution and noticed that, and some of the early reports the news broadcasters had mentioned that they were along with the American hostages, there were like 444 hostages that there were some who were CIA agents. But then later on in the reporting, there was no other information about these CIA agents. So she's like, "Okay, so what's true, "what's really happening?" And that sparked, as I mentioned in the essay a type metaphorical hostage situation between her and her screen, because then for the next 30 years, she taped the news both locally and nationally, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And she amassed 70,000 tapes. It's like the thing about that number. I've never had 70,000 anything. So later on after her death her son took all of the tapes and gave them to an archive in San Francisco and now there are publicly available. So that's both short long of her legacy.

- Yeah, 70,000 tapes too, is just unbelievable to imagine because physically too those tapes take up space. And also just to call attention to that San Francisco institution the internet archive, which is archive.org that just does amazing work of bringing resources together and making them accessible for free. And it sort of feels like an ideal place for this collection to have landed. So I'm curious too, in the essay one of the first ways you describe Marion is as a freedom fighter. And you're making a very clear connection, I think between the political history that she had continued to have throughout her life, as well as her collection. So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about what her intention was for that collection and what drove her in this consuming obsession as she documented so many different forms of the news?

- That's a great question. I mean, her intent was to expose the news for the way that news information, which is like positive fact is always, I think it's safe to say always like filled by some type of rhetoric or argument or position. When she notices very first discrepancy between there's this conversation about CA agents being hostages and then they're not anymore, it was like, okay so then what is real? And there's actually a quote that she says that, she's the used to co-host the show Input with her second husband, the man who became her second husband, so talk show and she said, "Those empower able to rewrite their own history "from their own bias." And that quote is kind of like her intention and her vision around taping the news. I think she was trying to insert her own power or reverse power rather, meaning by being able to see the news from all sides all the news outlets and what the information they were reporting and delivering, whoever then got to see the tapes that she had been archiving and collecting could kind of reverse the looker who was being seen is what I'm trying to say. Like the news, a lot of times the function of the news is to witness someone else or some other situation and her intent was if we have all of these mirrors rather we can look at the news and decide for ourself what is true. So in that way, she's kind of trying to revert the power.

- And you have many really beautifully written quotes and sort of concepts that appear in this essay. And one thing I'm interested in sharing with the audience is this quote around how Marion is treated in a documentary that came out around her. And then it, you say the viewer is encouraged to understand the various forces she was struggling under, the intimate relationship between capitalism and hoarding, the dialectic between her pursuit of freedom and how it tethered her to her work and the myriad ways black people react to the traumas of our material realities. So that also makes me curious, how do you think that Marion's identity as a black woman also played into what drove her to collect and make sure that there are more lenses on history than the most dominant ones?

- Yeah, I mean, Marion her identity as a woman, as a black woman, she really understood what it meant to be under gaze and how gaze was an image of herself was manipulated, could be manipulated rather by dominant, like that's dominant voices. She had been looked at her whole life just like she had looked at TV and I think she really wanted to look and assess for herself and she enacted that by taping so much and, Marion came from Richard addition of, she wasn't activist also, she wasn't just someone who just sat around and taped for 30 years, before she was doing this big archival work she was a part of activists, socialists and communists communities where liberation freedom from capitalism was the primary objective. So that also was born out of a understanding that like she was being held captive, her identity was being held captive and decided for herself based on dominant sis at white male centered dogma. Really, honestly, I would say but, so hegemonic thought like, so this was her way of being able to say, "No, I'm looking, I'm seeing you." And when this archive becomes publicly available then we're watching you. You know what I mean?

- Right. And I'm curious too, something that comes up quite a bit in your essay is the tension between the clear pursuit she had and a very clear vision she had, but then this other side of it, in which like people can very easily call her a hoarder and not recognize that vision. So I'm curious, thinking about the overarching history of activism and the activist as someone often has a personal pursuit as how they're forcing, sorry, can I go back and read the question so that I frame it a little bit more succinctly? So continuing on that thought, I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit more about the tension that sort of arises in the essay where it's very clear that Marion had a clear vision for what she wanted of this collection and also what she wanted to create for people to use in the future in order to be able to see history in a broader way, and also sort of decide for themselves what the historical record is. And that is an act of personal activism and sort of the other side of that people interpreting that as maybe hoarding or as something that wasn't recognized while she was alive. So I guess what I'm trying to get at too, is that tension between activism as a sort of personal act to create change, but one that also has a great personal toll to it. So I'm just wondering if you can talk about that duality and the complexities of this kind of work.

- Yeah, I'm still sitting with that tension in the essay between, and I guess the dialect that capitalism creates between hoarding and freedom. Because to be honest, I was drawn to her story because I a lot of the time see artists who are deeply struggling mentally, who create these beautiful works of art or in our case, an archivist, when it seems like what they're dealing with emotionally, personally, mentally is overshadowed or seen as a necessary means to an end of their work. And watching the film, it's very clear to me that everyone who's clos to her, her caretaker, her son, her ex-husband, or her husband at the time, excuse me, also his children who were also on the film, like they all recognize her as someone who is obsessive compulsive, that she is controlled by this need to collect. And to me it seems that she's deeply suffering. And as someone who is an artist who uses words, poetry prose as outlet, I really relate to that suffering and I also relate to the suffering being lauded when it produces something valuable. And there's this really intense tension for Marion and her story because she is a hoarder. She doesn't just collect 70,000 tapes, in the film We also learned that every time Apple has a product she has three, four, five, six, seven of them. She's collecting other things. Like, it's not just this one thing that she's pursuing and there's also not this clear intention about, she has an idea that this work will exist and live on in some way, but there's no necessarily plan for that. And I think it's super important to recognize that her son, Michael he's the one who makes sure his mother's legacy isn't just the fact that she's suffering under obsessive compulsive need to view, watch record news. And the folks in her life are also for lack of a better word, enablers or supporters whichever one who make her recording possible. They're the ones who switched the tapes, they're the ones who make sure she's back in time when she's too old to drive. You know what I mean? Like there's a community of people surrounding her who are making sure that her compulsion to collect is possible, you know? And then when she passes that her memory is such that she is an archivist and all the 30 years of work that she does is not lost. I think sitting up the tension between witnessing in memory from those who have known her, that she was suffering in her life because the material controlled her. And that's the thing about capitalism though. Like capitalism is the incessant accumulation of material with no end in sight. For her, there was no end in sight. The sight ended in death. And that's the same thing with capitalism. Capitalism has to die in order for the material to stop being collected. I think a lot about historical materialism teaching us that material creates ideas instead of the ideas created by material. I'm just saying all of this because that's the tension that I see in the film and this it's just the question that I'm still mewling over about what came first, you know?

- Yeah, that's a lot to ponder and I feel like it also I really liked the way you talked about her in relationship to your own experience as an artist. And that also sort of makes me think about how Marion was a librarian and library sciences guided by super strict rules, it has tons of parameters. Most collecting institutions have super clear policies and then they're followed to a teeth. So there's something very interesting that she posed to create this very personal collection that reframed her traditional career and almost reclaimed it from those parameters that are prescribed. I do have some questions related to that, although I'm not too much go into it. But I guess maybe the question out of that is there are these archives that exist that document the news in that constrained way. Like there's an archive at Vanderbilt that records the 7:00 PM news from the three major stations every single night. And I think the intention of that collection is like, Oh, and now you can go back and you can see how the news covered certain things and it does sort of unearth histories. But I'm wondering like, what is the value and what is the power of this collection being Marion's personal vision and it being driven by a person and a person with a very complicated and complex background and experience?

- Yeah, it's a complexity. I don't mention her to be a hoarder to like to dismiss her archive, but just to create a a wider view of complexity about we suffer as people and we also create great, beautiful things. So for Marion as a librarian and as an activist, and then those are things that deeply inform her archival intention and her vision. Like it's I guess the rhetoric there are the argument her as the rhetor is, because it's not attached to corporation or institution it's through the lens of, I mean I don't like the word neutrality, but I guess liberation from the standpoint of a black woman's eyes, her lens, her as looker, her as curator, as broadcaster, as, you know, as author and an actor. And that's what the news positions those who are not in sight, like, it makes those who the news is about actors while those who tell the news their authors. And Marion because she's not attached to institutional corporation, she's the author and she is intent is trying to allow other people authorship.

- Yes, I guess we have time for one more question and you've touched on this, but I guess I'll just sort of pose it in a very direct way, which is that Marion is dealing with a few different entities that claim neutrality. She's dealing with collecting, she's dealing with archives, and she's dealing with the news. All three of those sort of entities often position themselves as neutral. Do you think neutrality is possible in these kinds of organizations or sort of professions?

- Yeah, I just don't believe it. I've never seen it. If nothing for the fact that, I teach English and I teach . Like there's the author, there's what I write, there's what I have channeled through all the ways that words come about. And then there's the purpose that I intend, but then there's audience and there's context. And those two things that the audience, all the text is living, archive is living, art is living for a reason because it it's changed based on the time, the context and the audience of people. So there's nothing, there cannot be any neutrality because of that. And then the author themselves or themselves, comes from an S point of view. There is a point of view, whether you're writing in first, second, third person. Or if you're filming something or if you're using a a source primary, secondary tertiary, you know what I mean? So neutrality cannot exist, at least I don't believe it can exist.

- And Marion, I think very clearly believed it didn't exist and showed that through this life pursuit.

- Yeah, and I think that is definitely like a part of her thesis that there's no neutrality. There's not just the news. The news is not just facts, the news is not just information because the news has such a powerful way of shaping our cultural knowledge, our cultural history our collective knowledge, our collective history. Marion was like very much so pushing against that and being like, okay, well, these are, this is the material. And these things shape our ideas and now as authors who can overwhelm view of all the materia, think for yourself, like what is true.

- And that that's such a fantastic sort of thought to end it on which is think for yourself and think about what is true. So thank you so much, Jalynn I really appreciated this conversation.

- Thank you so much for having me.