Project proposal for Fall 2023 Introduction to Public History Seminar.
Key Question:
How was Fannie Barrier Williams a part of ongoing efforts to improve Black and women’s lives in America?
Keywords:
Rights, education, program of assistance, uplift, timeline, museum display.
Abstract:
Fannie Barrier Williams had many achievements throughout her life, as she graduated from the Brockport School, and was a major contributor to the improvement of Black & women’s rights as she fought for both. She fought to make Black individuals equal to their white counterparts through creating organizations of help such as the Fredrick Douglass Center. Fannie Barrier Williams also improved Black individuals lives through her assistance in the creation of the Provident Hospital. The goal of this timeline is to show Fannie Barrier Williams’ achievements with historical events that occurred in the same years. This timeline is trying to connect a younger audience to historical events that Fannie Barrier Williams was a part of and how significant her life was to the improvement of Black and women’s lives in America. The project is going to take sufficient time and money to complete and will need assistance from consultants who will be identified once they are hired. In the end there will be a need for a great source of secondary and primary information in order for this museum display to be authentic and engaging.
Narrative:
Leaving a Legacy: Fannie Barrier Williams
Fannie Barrier Williams is a highly important person for not only American history but Brockport history. Fannie Barrier Williams’ importance is through her ability to focus on others and not herself. Fannie Barrier Williams helped to uplift women & individuals of color. How did Fannie Barrier William’s interaction with settlement houses such as Fredrick Douglass’s house improve the lives of African Americans and women? The way in which the information will be exposed to the public will be through the utilization of an interactive Museum exhibit. The exhibit will have a traditional museum display with period correct articles and items. There also needs to be an interactive aspect to the exhibit. The interactive experience portion of the exhibit will be broken into two separate phases.
The first phase in the interactive learning experience is important that the individuals who come to the museum learn something from the exhibits. The exhibit will have an interactive timeline that will show the important milestones in Fannie Barrier Williams’ life along with impactful events that happened in the same years. The goal of this is to show that Fannie Barrier Williams was able to partake in a period of history in which there was mass social change for women and individuals of color for the better. The second aspect of interactive learning will be based around the use of social media for the exhibit. The idea is to make a social media account for the exhibit, such as twitter, this will allow for those that visit to interact with the exhibit by writing a one sentence/character limited post about what they learned, their interpretation, etc. and then post what they learned to the twitter page. The individuals will then have the ability to go through other people’s interactions with the exhibit and see what others have gotten from the exhibit.
These major topics will be the catalyst for which the timeline will be focused around. The first topic on the timeline will be that of Fannie Barrier Williams Birth. This topic will go on further to discuss her childhood and how she grew up in Brockport which at the time was one of the more progressive cities in the United States. The Second Major topic of the timeline will be focused on Fannie Barrier Williams Education and how she graduated from the Brockport State Normal School. Fannie Barrier Williams would graduate with a degree in teaching and go on to become a teacher in Missouri and Washington D.C. The next topic of the timeline will focus on Fannie Barrier Willliams’ move to Chicago. The move to Chicago is centered around her marrying her Husband S. Laing Williams. The next topic of the timeline is going to focus on Fannie Barrier Williams and her work in helping to establish the Provident Hospital in Chicago which would go on to be the first black hospital in Chicago. A major topic that will be focused on in this project proposal will be Fannie Barrier Williams work with forming the National League of Colored Women which would go on to have services available for Black women. The final topic of the timeline centered around Fannie Barrier Williams is her involvement in the formation of the Fredrick Douglass Center which was an organization of help for people of color. The goal of the timeline is to show that Fannie Barrier Williams was improving the lives of African Americans and Women and the progression of America in accepting these progressive ideas that individuals like Fannie Barrier Williams were fighting for.
This timeline will be created to help educate children/young adults about an individual that fought for the betterment of African American & Women’s lives. This will be achieved through the timeline’s ability to connect with the viewers by being engaging and allow the audience to have a greater understanding of a prominent figure from Brockport’s influence on improving African Americans & women’s lives along with events in America that improved the lives of women & African America. The timeline will be able to connect to its audience through the timeline’s ability to be interactive and allow for an enjoyable format for learning.
In order to complete this project and have an interactive timeline there would need to be substantial funding for the projects in order to achieve the goals. I believe that the timeline needs to be interactive and if it is going to be interactive and digital there is a need for a program to either be utilized or created. With this comes time and money. I believe that the timeline needs to be interactive in order to maintain the audience’s attention. One way that this can be done is to include videos, maps, photos, readings that the audience themselves navigates at their own pace. As a result of this there needs to be more than one display. I believe that if I were to start in January 2024 it would take a month to a month and a half to find and develop an interactive experience for the audience. After that there is a need for a physical display to be developed in order for the digital display to pop. With this there is going to be a need for an individual/company that is going to construct the structure/display that will house the digital interactive component of the timeline.
This would probably take 2-3 months to interview and choose a company and then give them adequate time to create the display. Along with that I would like to incorporate physical objects that are from Fannie Barrier Williams or from the Historical events that correspond to important events in her life. This will require the acquisition of items that will be displayed, and the museum displays to be purchased and the time it takes to make and ship the displays to the museum. All in all, it will take about 6 months in order for this display to come together and be ready for a proper audience.
In order for all of this to be possible there is going to be substantial funding for this to be completed. I believe that in order for all of this to be achieved there would need to be around $55,000 dollars in funds. I believe that it will probably cost around $5,000 dollars to create a interactive timeline. Then there is going to be a $10,000 dollar cost to find a way to display this digital information. On top of that, in order to construct a display to house the digital timeline screens and hold the physical historical objects will cost about $20,000. Then there is the need to obtain physical objects. I believe that in order to buy or lease these historical objects it will cost at least $20,000. In total I believe that it will cost $55,000+.
I believe that there will be a need for consultants when constructing the physical display and when creating the digital timeline. I do not have anyone in particular as to who will be the consultant as they will be chosen when they are hired.
There will be a need for more research to occur in order to have more information for the timeline to be more interactive. The more information we have on Fannie Barrier Williams the more information we can display resulting in more learning and a more interactive display. In order to have more information we will rely on information from secondary sources. The sources that will be used to display a wide range of information will be Mary Jo Deegan’s Book Biculturalism, Self-Identity, and Societal Transformation. This book focuses on Fannie Barrier Williams’ influence in organizations of help for Blacks in America. Another secondary source that will be used to help display information will be Wanda Hendricks’ book Fannie Barrier Williams: crossing the borders of region and race. This novel will allow us to have a better understanding of her life and will tie right into the timeline information already listed. Another secondary source that will be utilized for information will be Transcending the Politics of Respectability in the Progressive Era: Fannie Barrier Williams, Intersectionality, and the Power of the Pen by Moore-Sloan and Sashir Pasha. Another source of information will be the new woman of color: the collected writings of Fannie Barrier Williams by Mary Jo Deegan. We have already looked at this in our class, but I believe it will be vastly important to this project as we can show firsthand information from Fannie Barrier Williams in the display. Another source of information I plan on utilizing for this project is the article “Fannie Barrier Williams” by Mary Davis Crowe which gives an overarching view of Fannie Barrier Williams and her life. This will give us more information on Fannie Barrier Williams to better display her life in a more truthful and authentic way. As the project moves forward there will be more information added and utilized.
