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ausetkmt · 8 months

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In addition to AI, the 10 Million Names Project is employing oral histories and archived documents to help identify 10 million enslaved people in pre- and post-colonial America.

When journalist Dorothy Tucker first learned about the 10 Million Names genealogical project, it helped amplify memories of long car journeys from Chicago to “Down South” in the 1960’s, where her mother’s family owned land.

The Mississippi property purchased by her great-grandfather George Trice in 1881 was special for several reasons. First, nobody’s really sure how a formerly enslaved man was able to purchase 160 acres, but Trice came up with the $800. And every time Tucker and her family drove down to Shannon, Mississippi each summer to visit relatives, it was more than just a vacation.

“I'd wake up in the morning and have breakfast at my aunt's house. I'd go a few feet down the road and have lunch at my great-aunt's house. And then I'd play outside at my cousin's house,” says Tucker, an award-winning investigative journalist with CBS2 WBBM-TV in Chicago. “It was that way all day long. Every house was owned by a relative. I thought everybody lived like this. I thought everybody had land and stuff that was theirs.”

Tucker finally got specific details about how and why that land was purchased during the final months of her term as president of the National Association of Black Journalists. In early 2023, NABJ Board Member Paula Madison, a retired NBC Universal executive, informed the group about an offshoot of the Georgetown Memory Project, the initiative that unearthed information about the 1838 sale of enslaved Africans to fund Georgetown University. The 10 Million Names Project was created to recover the names of an estimated 10 million men, women and children of African descent who were enslaved in pre- and post-colonial America between the 1500’s and 1865. By engaging with expert genealogists, cultural organizations, and family historians both Black and white, the initiative hopes to provide more African Americans with information that only formally began to be captured for their ancestors in the 1870 United States Census.

Up until that year, enslaved Africans and their descendants were only acknowledged as the property of their owners. If their existence was noted, it was in the form of sales documents or as catalogued property in civil records. Also, the relatives of enslavers often maintain troves of information about those purchased and sold off that would otherwise be completely lost.

(This database is helping to uncover the lost ancestry of enslaved African Americans.)

Much of the work will be dependent on oral histories passed down thru generations of families, and researchers of the 10 Million Names Project also hope that more white families will aid in the search by making familial records, like letters and pages from family bibles, available to them.

Tucker, who ended her term as NABJ president during that organization’s annual conference in August, revealed at the awards banquet in Birmingham, Alabama that she’d been able to learn more about her great grandfather’s real-estate ventures, through a collaboration between NABJ and the New England Historical Genealogical Society’s American Ancestors initiative.

The 10 Million Names Project was formally launched at the convention. Tucker considers it an especially timely parting gift to her journalistic colleagues. As societal divisions along racial lines widen, hate crimes continue, and attempts to ban books and curtail African American studies programs in schools and universities increase, strengthening historical knowledge is urgently important for Black Americans, Tucker says.

“I think that the ability to tell these stories and to know them is so critically important,” she says. “When you know your personal story, then as a journalist, it gives you the perspective to dig deeper when you're doing the next story, whether it’s about the school board or about Ukraine or the next elections. You know, these stories are all tools that are really good for all of us.”

How the initiative evolved

The man who is the catalyst for the Georgetown Memory Project and 10 Million Names says he’s never really been interested in investigating his own family tree.

“To me, genealogy was sort of like butterfly collecting,” says Richard Cellini, a faculty fellow at Harvard University and founding director of the Harvard Legacy of Slavery Remembrance Program. “It’s impressive because of the amount of effort invested into it. But I never quite understood the point.”

Cellini was born in 1963 in Central Pennsylvania to a Penn State University professor and homemaker mother. His Catholic upbringing steered him to Georgetown University and an eventual decade-long law career before pivoting toward the software and technology realm. In 2015, Cellini learned that his alma mater had formed a working group to explore the sale of 272 men, woman, and children in 1838 to rescue the university from bankruptcy. As a white American of European descent, he says he did not live with or know many Black people growing up, going to school or during his legal and technology careers, so the initiative opened a window in his mind.

When Georgetown President John DeGioia invited alumni to weigh in, Cellini wrote an email asking one simple question that had nothing to do with the university. He wanted to know, “What happened to the people?”

Cellini says a senior member of the working group wrote back to say that research had concluded that all of the enslaved men, women, and children had died fairly quickly after arriving in the swamps of Louisiana where they had been transported.

“And I remember just staring at that email, even though I didn't really know much about the history of slavery or African American history, and just thinking that just doesn't make any sense,” Cellini says. Curiosity drove him to form an independent research group, funded initially through his own credit card and then from other Georgetown alumni who eagerly offered financial backing. To date, the Georgetown Memory Project has fully identified 236 of the 272 enslaved people sold by the university's leaders. Of those identified through archival records, the project has verified more than 10,000 of their direct descendants.

“The 1838 slave sale at Georgetown brought home to me, again, they were real people with real families and real names,” Cellini says. “More than 50 percent of them were children. William was the youngest, and he was six months old. And Daniel was the oldest at 80. Len was sickly, and Stephen was lame. I mean, this is all from the original documentation. From that moment on, I just couldn't get it out of my head.”

The gathering of history

The genealogists and historians connected with the project suggest that the richest vein of information may well be in the oral histories they’ve already begun gathering through hundreds of interviews. They contain fascinating stories like the ones that Kendra Field’s grandmother Odevia Brown used to tell about her African American and Native American forebears in Oklahoma. When Field was in high school, she never really liked history classes, but she always loved her grandmother’s stories.

“It wasn't until I got to college that I realized, thanks to a wonderful professor, that my grandmother's stories were history,” Field says. After the death of her father, Field began to travel back to those historically Black Oklahoma towns to explore her African American and Creek Indian heritage. Now in her career as a historian, author and professor at Tufts University, Field also has taken on the role of chief historian for 10 Million Names.

Technology, including the use of artificial intelligence programs, is allowing project investigators to do quicker, more efficient searches for information. Field says that can happen by identifying the location of plantation ledgers, advertisements, and receipts from auctions. “Particularly, there's been a lot of advancements made in optical character recognition, which allows researchers to identify names and handwritten records,” Field says.

Prior to this, a researcher had to find the document, transcribe the information, and then pivot to another database to go deeper. But with the development of other genealogical data sets such as Enslaved.org, locating individuals and making connections becomes much easier. “So that means we can move closer to that 10 million much more quickly than we would have been able to even a decade ago,” Field says. Also, the collection at the Library of Congress, “Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938” has yielded important clues from the estimated 2,300 people interviewed during that project.

(The search for lost slave ships led this diver on an extraordinary journey.)

Though identifying 10 million people who were never meant to be known as human beings may sound like a staggering task, the people behind the initiative believe it’s a totally attainable goal—even amidst all the current cultural and ideological turmoil in American society. That’s because, Cellini says, there are certain inalienable truths in this world.

“John Adams said that facts are stubborn things. You know, our Black brothers and sisters have always known their history and white people have always tried to prevent Black people from learning that history. What's new here is that white people are now trying to prevent other white people from learning this history.”

Cellini believes that Black Americans aren’t the only ones who want or need to know the full story. “It's white people who hunger for knowledge of that history, as well. It’s our duty to engage in determined resistance, to strike repeated blows for the truth. And nothing is more stubborn than facts.”

And like journalist Tucker, Cellini believes the search is infinitely for the benefit of the whole of society.

“The hard part isn't the finding,” Cellini says of the effort. “The hard part is the looking. But when we look, we find. And when we find, the whole world changes.”

#Africans #Black Lives Matter #Black Lineage #american freedmen #Black Freedmen #Black Americans #10 million enslaved Americans' names are missing from history. AI is helping identify them #10 million names project

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beautybysheek · 1 year

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🚨 TODAY 🚨 #MediaLounge returns for our monthly virtual session with #membersonly as we dive into the stories of award winning journalists @_lajanee_ and @china_lovelace of @theshaderoom hosted by myself @sheek_tv 🔥🔥🔥 You DON’T want to miss this! Tap in with two of the industry’s leading ladies in entertainment news! Find out how you can pursue your dream with the #mediagirls 💗🗣️ Members log in and sign up #itsFREE! Join our community today for additional access to major media resources, contacts, and databases! www.mediagirlsontour.com #registernow #shaderoom #media #atlmedia #losangeles #news #entertainment #blackgirlmagic #womeninmedia #blackgirlsinmedia #blackwomen #writers #art #blackwomeninmedia #womenonair #community #nabj #journalism #workshop #mediagirls (at Atlanta, Georgia) https://www.instagram.com/p/CoZ4a02un-7/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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abcnewspr · 1 year

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ABC NEWS ANNOUNCES RACHEL SCOTT PROMOTED TO SENIOR CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT

ABC News president Kim Godwin sent the following note to the news division announcing Rachel Scott as senior congressional correspondent.

Credit: ABC/Danny Weiss Good morning, ABC News –

I wanted to share the exciting news that Rachel Scott has been promoted to senior congressional correspondent. Rachel has had a meteoric rise at ABC News, and with this promotion, she rightly takes her place as a senior member and leader of our unparalleled and formidable Washington team.

In just two years covering Congress, Rachel has brought sharp, incisive reporting to a historically busy period at the Capitol. Rachel’s first day on the beat was Jan. 6, 2021, when she unexpectedly found herself providing live coverage of the unprecedented attack on the Capitol. She stayed with that story through the second impeachment of President Trump and, more recently, with expert coverage of the Jan. 6 hearings. Rachel has also led our coverage of the negotiations and ultimate passage of multiple pieces of significant legislation, including the American Rescue Plan, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Respect for Marriage Act, and the first major gun safety legislation in decades. Rachel is an integral part of our powerhouse political team, most recently working the ‘Big Board’ alongside Rick Klein and Nate Silver during midterm election night. And just this month, she provided superb, tireless coverage of the historic speaker fight through all 15 votes on the House floor.

Rachel has also repeatedly brought her trusted voice to reporting outside the Beltway. She has received numerous awards for her relentless coverage of the state of abortion in America, both pre- and post-Dobbs, in communities across the country. She was also on the front lines during the racial unrest following George Floyd’s murder, providing weekslong, on-the-ground live coverage of the nationwide protests surrounding police brutality and COVID-19’s impact on communities of color. Rachel boldly pressed Russian President Vladimir Putin on human rights abuses in 2021 during a press conference in Switzerland. She also reported extensively on the 2020 presidential campaign trail, traveling thousands of miles covering both the Democratic Party primary and former President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign. Her work earned her three of the most prestigious journalism awards all in one year, winning a Peabody for her coverage of abortion on “Nightline”; an Edward R. Murrow Award for her podcast series “Accountable,” which she hosted with senior White House correspondent Mary Bruce; and the inaugural Emerging Journalist Emmy Award. She has also been recognized with the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) Emerging Journalist of the Year and Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list, both in 2020.

Rachel is an exceptional teammate and colleague, and I look forward to seeing more impactful and thoughtful reporting from her. With another consequential election season right around the corner, Rachel and the entire Washington team’s straightforward journalism couldn’t be more valued.

Please join me in congratulating Rachel.

#oneabcnews

Kim

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blackdiasporanews · 9 months

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People, Places and Things

via Birmingham Times

#the birmingham times #birmingham times #birmingham #birmingham alabama #lisaraye #lisaraye mccoy #black owned #black owned media #nabj #alabama

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cyarskj1899 · 4 months

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The 'Montgomery Riverboat Brawl' spoke to millions in 2023 The summer was defined by a viral video that will be remembered in 100 years

Read in Andscape: https://apple.news/ALokjdw_ZQPSDiu8ava57PA

Shared from Apple News

Year In Review

The 'Montgomery Riverboat Brawl' spoke to millions in 2023

The summer was defined by a viral video that will be remembered in 100 years

For many Americans, New Year’s Eve is a time for reflection, celebration and dedication. Whatever the previous 365-plus days have sent our way are looked back upon with some level of wisdom hopefully gained, while the upcoming calendar is anticipated in the most innocent way possible. The entire event is capped off with a tradition popularized by a newspaper man but invented for the sea.

What you see in Times Square these days at the behest of Ryan Seacrest, and before that Dick Clark, is the brainchild of Adolph Ochs, who owned The New York Times and started the practice in 1908. Now commonly known as a ball drop, it’s an extravagant twist on a technological marvel that was initially invented for an entirely different purpose: marine chronometers.

Time balls, as they were known, helped boats set their clocks when they came to town. When ships pulled in, they knew what time it was, literally.

As 2023 comes to a close, there is not a more apt metaphor for what was the story of the year in Black America. A hundred years from now, its legacy will still stand.

The “Montgomery Riverboat Brawl” likely won’t be forgotten in the yearly cycle of another league or awards season. The when and where is as important as what happened that afternoon in Alabama.

To begin August, the National Association of Black Journalists’ national convention descended upon Birmingham, Alabama, a welcome sight for folks in town. The annual confab for the industry was met with open arms and the sense of community was about as good as it had been between town and function since I’ve been doing this job. Black people had a ton of fun with each other, shared generational experiences per usual, and because of where it is, returned to many historical places that are a part of our shared lineage, such as Selma, which is about 90 minutes away from Birmingham.

Quite a few folks took the trip. Little did they know that barely a week later, the city most famously known for the Edmund Pettus Bridge and Bloody Sunday of 1965, would be back in the news via a previously humdrum Facebook business page.

During that span in Birmingham, Major League Baseball unveiled the logo for their next special regular-season game, this time at the oldest ballpark in America. The game will officially be called MLB at Rickwood: A Tribute to the Negro Leagues. It’s a genuinely magical place, for sure. As the state capital, Montgomery is home of the Montgomery Biscuits, the Tampa Bay Rays’ AA affiliate, which will be playing against the Birmingham Barons two days prior to the MLB game at Rickwood Field.

Rickwood Field hosting of MLB in 2024 a chance to reinvigorate Birmingham

The Birmingham Times, the local Black community weekly, dedicated its issue to the NABJ conference entirely, with the headline reading, in part, “Birmingham welcomes the voices of a generation.”

Indeed, it did.

In a summer in which blockbuster flicks made $500 million a pop, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé gracefully allowed us in their orbit in their different ways, and hip-hop celebrated its 50-year anniversary, the place known as the “Cradle of the Confederacy” sparked one of the most important historical moments this journalist can think of in many years, on many fronts.

You could teach an entire university class about the multiple layers of generational trauma unleashed in the confrontation. The immediacy of the news connected to the history of the site and the legal untangling that followed (six people were charged in the incident, including Reggie Bernard Ray, known best as the Black man swinging a chair) are the kinds of things people make entire seasons of longform podcasts about. If I were an author, I’d write a book about it.

Montgomery itself is like a choose-your-own-adventure of the most horrifically f— up racist s— you can imagine. All the American classics are there: First confederate capital. Vicious redlining and economic apartheid for generations. Domestic terrorism. It took 200 years for them to elect a Black mayor. That was four years ago.

In specific to the brawl, it’s borderline bizarre how on the nose the whole incident was. The night before, 45 held a campaign rally at that very spot. On the very day of the fight, a group of Black women concluded a two-day healing event with a ceremony sharing their happiness and thanks by laying flowers in the water at the Riverfront.

Two hours later, the pop-off heard around the nation went down. All of course happening at the very spot where enslaved people were brought to town. The very dock. On a boat, likely of the same name.

Of course, there are a million wild things that we could talk about the proceedings but those are for other avenues. What I simply cannot get over is how direct the line is between the very specific interaction of these people and where they came from most immediately.

Riverboat dock worker involved in viral Montgomery, Alabama brawl charged with assault: records

The white folks were friends and family of an owner of a mini-mart in Selma, having a lovely day until they decided to get drunk and basically show their behinds. There are a trove of angles, deep dives, rumors and other things about this specific unfolding that are one thing. Here’s one, two, three, four … nine, if you need that.

But I can’t get past the riverboat. The carrying joke of the moment is that the boat was named the Harriet, like Tubman, making the whole situation much funnier as a solid pop culture joke of what happens when you get your a– whipped. The reality, while far more grim in its origins, not unlike the pugilistic proceedings themselves, makes me laugh a lot more.

That riverboat is named the Harriott II. It’s ostensibly a lovely time just like any other water cruise deep in the American South. It was dedicated in 2008. When it arrived, a lot of people showed up to watch. It aired live on local news. Sure, great. It was named after a boat that famously was the first riverboat that made the trip from Mobile to Montgomery to pick up cotton. … OK. In EIGHTEEN TWENTY ONE. Good lord.

The beatdown boat is named after a boat which a.) definitely carried enslaved people, but b.) was clearly a literal part of the economic engine that fundamentally disenfranchised Black Americans economically, nevermind tried to destroy us humanistically. And guess what that boat was likely named after? You guessed it.

Well, you can just continue down the river, a.k.a. the supply chain in those days. There were not one but two slave ships, each at one point named Harriott or some variation thereof, that were active in triangular trade. Naming a boat after any of these vessels is certainly a choice.

There was a time when those white men would have been fully within their right to effectively single out and proceed to hurt that boat captain to their heart’s content. And way further back than Jim Crow. Look up Virginia’s “casual killing act” of 1669 if you want to ruin your day. But these days, not even close. Those same negroes who you dragged across the ocean on boats named Harriott are now jumping out of boats named Harriott to administer the fade of a lifetime when you wrong our people.

As many of my friends from other lands say often: Only in America.

Perhaps most satisfying about that entire ordeal is that so much of it was very specifically a function of social media. We learned about this through various posts that not only showed but featured incredible contextual narrative provided inherently from those documenting it. We learned everything we know about the offending parties from their posts earlier in the day.

Aaren Rudolph, aka Aquamayne, has a whole new future to consider. The fact that this news was spread, nevermind occurred, due to just the regular tendencies of Black folks just trying to be themselves and stay prudent is incredible to me. Black Twitter, which was once ruled dead but now has come to include basically the combined algorithms of our diaspora across platforms, had a legit rebirth. We told y’all the truth, showed it, too, and people just had to wear it.

Alabama has been about that action. Fun fact: The Black Panther Party began in nearby Lowndes County, too. None of this is news in terms of the resistance, but it was also a reminder that while we have a collective experience that we share and cherish, there is also very much the importance of understanding individual communities for themselves.

Yet, as my FYPs say — a win is a win.

SZA and the year quite like no other

It was a role reversal that was almost too fantastical for Forrest Gump, which won six Academy Awards but these days is widely regarded as hokey but touching. Too over the top, too conveniently aligned with too good of an emotional ending. In the 1994 Tom Hanks movie, Gump, the main lovable character from Greenbow, Alabama, plays college football, becomes an All-American and meets the president.

Perhaps the most laugh-out-loud scene comes when the title character makes good on his word to pay back his best friend. Their shrimp company blows up and Benjamin Buford Blue’s mother faints on the porch when she gets a check from a white man from a fictional town in Alabama.

In the following scene, there’s a reversal from when we are introduced to her as part of a generation of Black women whose lone job it is to serve white men shrimp in dining rooms dating back to plantation days. Now, Blue’s mother is the one getting served shrimp and it’s a white woman doing it. The joke obviously being that after years of having no option but to serve white folks, it was time for that to change. The role reversal is so swift and direct that you can’t help but laugh.

Montgomery, the town affectionately known as “The Gump,” is now ground zero for one of the most serious but somehow hilarious exchanges of the year. Last month, the man who threw his hat in the air — signaling he was in distress to his fellow people — held a press conference. One of the humans in the altercation has pressed charges against the boat co-captain, but the city has not.

“It was just so shocking. Now, for me to get charged for something I do every day, it’s my job? It’s just shocking to me,” Damien Pickett II said in November. “For me to get charged for something I do on the regular [to] make people happy, put smiles on their face?”

The last five years in the United States of America have felt like quite a bit of a reckoning. Over time, the long slow institutional battles we’ve fought to untangle have come to light, and many people understand what an uphill battle there is for any sort of sanity in society, nevermind justice.

For a non-fictional event to play out so poetically, violently and publicly — while leaving many feeling like the result was satisfactory — speaks directly to the lived existence of millions of humans who call this country home by choice or by force. ChatGPT could not have created a scenario this complete.

Someday many years from now, someone will consider acting a fool on the dock again. And on that day, deep inside, something will tell them that’s probably not a smart plan.

When the ancestors speak to you, it’s a good idea to listen. Lesson learned for 2023.

Clinton Yates is a tastemaker at Andscape. He likes rap, rock, reggae, R&B and remixes — in that order.

Sent from my iPhone

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ginevrakirkland · 7 months

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Twitter Write was a beta program with 80+ great writers working on bringing blogging to Twitter on a product we called "Notes". We interviewed writers for Spaces, Notes, and events like NABJ, published advance excerpts from their books, and generally had a blast talking craft with other writers. Listen to one of the Write Spaces I produced. I also worked closely with another writer on building the Help Center for Notes. (Naming looks off after the rebrand.)

#Twitter #Twitter Write

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africanamericanreports · 2 years

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On Monday, the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (ACEJMC) voted to demote UNC-Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media to “provisional” status, stating that the school has fallen short in meeting the council’s standards for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

#unc #journalism #nikole hannah-jones #education #equity #inclusion #diversity #african american #nabj

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vanceb · 2 years

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🔁 @babj_md If you’re really about this sports media career, you’re in for a treat and wealth of knowledge. All of these women on this panel has not only experience in the field, but they’re the pulse of the next generation of sports journalists across the country. Panel starts tomorrow (April 30) at noon (12 pm). Hit up @babj_md to register. #journalism #media #sports #sportsjournalism #nabj #babj #ESPN #baltimore #dmv #panel (at Baltimore, Maryland) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cc8RrD7LWH8/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#journalism #media #sports #sportsjournalism #nabj #babj #espn #baltimore #dmv #panel

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xtruss · 8 months

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This historical photograph shows an enslaved African American family or families posing in front of a wooden house on a plantation in Hanover County, Virginia. Photograph By G.H. Houghton, Library of Congress

10 million Enslaved Americans' Names Are Missing From History. AI Is Helping Identify Them.

In addition to AI, the 10 Million Names Project is employing oral histories and archived documents to help identify 10 million enslaved people in pre- and post-colonial America.

— By Rachel Jones | August 31, 2023

How the Initiative Evolved

The man who is the catalyst for the Georgetown Memory Project and 10 Million Names says he’s never really been interested in investigating his own family tree.

The Gathering of History

And like journalist Tucker, Cellini believes the search is infinitely for the benefit of the whole of society.

“The hard part isn't the finding,” Cellini says of the effort. “The hard part is the looking. But when we look, we find. And when we find, the whole world changes.”

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