Project proposal for Fall 2023 Introduction to Public History Seminar.
Question:
How did Fannie Barrier Williams contribute to the discussion among black elites about how African Americans should navigate the harsh reality of the Jim Crow Era?
Abstract:
The purpose of this project is to serve as a pool of resources that can be utilized by educators and the general public alike. The project will take the form of a free-to-access website which will display a multimedia timeline that will enhance public understanding of the discourse surrounding the future of African Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Narrative:
Assignment 05 Final FBW Project Proposal (1)
Narrative Component of Project:
The hypothetical Fannie Barrier Williams Website Project is a digital history experience which combines the accessibility of online content with the sort of intellectual merit typically restricted to museums or educational institutions. The designers of the website for the Fannie Barrier Williams Website Project are aware of the changing habits of consumers. This is equally true for consumers of entertainment as it is for consumers of educational material. Most Americans, and this is especially true for members of Generation Z, access the internet through their cell phones or other mobile devices. With these internet access habits in mind, the website will be designed accordingly. Websites are typically designed for either cell phones or desktop computers.Nowadays, many websites are designed to function on either mobile platforms or desktop computers, with the ability to dynamically shift between whichever version is best suited to a particular device. The project will be pursuing a mobile-first design ethos in order to be as accessible as possible and to take advantage of the platforms which will be most frequently used by potential audiences. It will be able to be accessed on desktop computers, but its design and interactivity are designed, first and foremost, for mobile users. The medium, as it has been so often said, is the message.
Visitors to the website will encounter an interactive and engaging user-experience designed primary for uses of mobile devices. Mobile-first websites are designed around seamless scrolling, where users are expected to move their finger along the screen, causing new content to appear. This is in contrast to desktop-style websites which are focused on clicking objects and entering sub-menus. Mobile websites are more seamless and simplified.
This project will take a commonly used historical tool, the timeline, which the general public is familiar with, and provide an interactive, well-paced experience. Unlike a printed timeline, users will not be able to see the entire timeline all at once. This is a deliberate design decision. As users scroll through the project, they will be presented with a single piece of information at a time relating to the life of Fannie Barrier Williams and the intellectual debates among black intellectuals around the turn of the twentieth century. A traditional “zoomed out” timeline would be difficult to understand visually on a mobile device. The approach of presenting one piece of information at a time will be easier to see on the small screens of mobile devices. Aside from that practical purpose, presenting the information in a piecemeal fashion will alow for that information to make a greater impact on the minds of viewers.
For events on the timeline which are of greater historical significance, there will be greater attention given to the audio-visual experience. Audio clips, moving images, and enlarged text will appear to give greater attention and importance to events with greater significance. This is not a mere parlor trick, but a concerted effort to denote the significance of certain events in the historical debate amongst black Americans during the early twentieth century. Ideally, the greater pomp and circumstance is intended to make the more significant events more memorable for users of the website. By making the material more memorable, it will help to fulfill the project’s goals of expanding public awareness of the subject matter.
The key question this project explores is: “how did Fannie Barrier Williams contribute to the discussion among black elites about how African Americans should navigate the harsh reality of the Jim Crow Era?” This question raises the topic of African American social mobility in the face of white supremacist oppression. This project is informational at its core, but it does present a historical argument based upon that information. The project argues that Fannie Barrier Williams rejected the prevailing dichotomy of industrial education V.S. the immediate pursuit of social equality and promoted a viewpoint that synthesized the two positions in a pragmatic manner. Fannie Barrier Williams’ lived experience as a woman contributed to her perspective in a way that differed from the male-dominated discourse among the African American aristocracy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, namely with regard to her understanding of labor and the gendered division thereof.
This project will use digital materials, programming code, reproduced public domain photographs, and digital graphic design principles. For the external resources, there will be digital worksheets and activities for educators to use as supplements to the virtual lesson. If preferred, educators may print off these virtual worksheets for their students.
The intended audience for this project are people who wish to enrich their understanding of African American history, which, ideally, would represent a reasonable section of the America population. In addition, there is a secondary market focus for this project: Middle and High school educators and their students. This project should matter to its intended audience because it will provide an engaging introduction to a meaningful turning point in the history of African American activism and Civil Rights in the United States. In many ways, the debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century proved foundational for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, led by the likes of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It will enhance their understanding of a topic of cultural and historical significance. This content is meant to be presentable to a general audience, meaning its accessibility and digestibility is prioritized over mituatia and depth. It is meant to be a starting point to inspire further study, but if it fails in that goal, it will still succeed in providing an accurate and honest overview of the historical subject matter.
Budget:
This website is projected to cost around 3,000 dollars for its initial design and launch. All of the images, text, and graphic blandishment will need to be prepared. If a preexisting website plugin is utilized, this cost can be reduced. If one is not used, a web designer will need to be contracted. After its launch, it will cost approximately 100 – 200 dollars annually to keep the site on the web through domain hosting. A website and accompanying educational materials would only take a few months to design and release. It could be published and ready to use by the public as soon as the summer of 2024.
Concerns:
Despite the undeniable merit and educationally accessible glory of the hypothetical Fannie Barrier Williams website project, there are, like any project, potential issues and concerns that ought to be addressed. The greatest and most significant of these possible concerns is the intangibility and fragility of online content. The internet changes at such a rapid rate that content can rarely keep up with those changes. The movement from web 1.0 to web 2.0 during the 2000s devastated many first-generation websites, rendering them obsolete, as did, more recently, the end of the Flash Player plugin. It is possible that the content of the Fannie Barrier Williams website project will be made inaccessible as a result of technological developments. This would defeat the very purpose of the project, by making its accessibility literally impossible. An imperfect solution to this issue, one not faced by in-person installations, would be to regularly submit backups and mirrored versions of the website onto Archive.org, the premiere free-to-use digital archive on the internet.
Literature Review:
As this project is meant to be educational and to expand public awareness of Fannie Barrier Williams’ role in turn of the century African American discourse, it will be necessary to support the historical information on the website with relevant secondary projects. Of course, Fannie Barrier Williams herself will be a main focus, with her own primary sources supported by biographical accounts of her life being adapted such as Fannie Barrier Williams: Crossing the Borders of Region and Race by Wanda A. Hendricks. In a broader sense, contextualizing Williams’ unique role and intersection between her racial and gender identities will be supplemented by the work of Darlene Clark Hine1 and Lauri Johnson.2 For Williams’ role as a black woman specifically, which is worth examining both among other intersections of identity and in isolation, Wanda A. Hendricks’ work is relevant to mine for information and intriguing perspectives.3 Though Williams had her own unique perspective on racial, economic, and social issues, she was more sympathetic to the arguments for industrial education proposed by Booker T. Washington than she was W.E.B. Du Bois. As such, contextualizing the politics of Washington will be important for ensuring that the public is better able to understand, even if they don’t agree, with the perspectives of historical actors.4 As for scaffolding the diverse perspectives of the debates between industrial education and full equality for African Americans, a literature review by Jan Miller of this controversial subject matter, otherwise known as an annotated bibliography, will be useful for this purpose.5
Conclusion:
With the above mentioned plans of an interactive mobile-first website, supported by a flexible budget and ample historical sourcing, the Fannie Barrier Williams website project will appeal to educators and the general public alike. Since the principle of accessibility is at the core of the design of this project, it will be both economically viable. If more people can access the project, it will be easier to generate data of user interest which can be used to gauge the viability of future virtual public history education projects. This accessibility serves the additional purpose of increasing public awareness of an important, though often underrepresented, figure in American history: Fannie Barrier Williams. Ultimately, the Fannie Barrier Williams website project will prove to be a viable means of communicating the role of Williams within the cultural debates among African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century.
1 Darlene Clark Hine, Black Women in American History, Brooklyn (NY: Carlson Pub., 1990).
