Jodi Skipper

When residents and tourists visit sites of slavery, whose stories are told? All too often the lives of slaveowners are centered, obscuring the lives of enslaved people. Behind the Big House gives readers a candid, behind-the-scenes look at what it really takes to interpret the difficult history of slavery in the U.S. South. The book explores Jodi Skipper’s eight-year collaboration with the Behind the Big House program, a community-based model used at local historic sites to address slavery in the collective narrative of U.S. history and culture.

In laying out her experiences through an autoethnographic approach, Skipper also seeks to help other activist scholars of color negotiate the nuances of place, the academic public sphere, and its ambiguous systems of reward, recognition, and evaluation.

The dominant discourse preferences the experiences of African Americans who take trips to sites linked to slavery outside of the USA. This paper expands research on roots tourism, by centring the experiences of those who travel to slavery-related sites in the USA. Documenting the case of the Behind the Big House Tour as a response to the Annual Pilgrimage Tour of Historic Homes and Churches in Holly Springs, Mississippi, this study examines evidence for African diasporic roots tourists who acknowledge sites at which their ancestors were enslaved as home sites. Results suggest that this level of acceptance occurs when African Americans come to feel a sense of belonging. The study identifies two general conditions needed to facilitate this process: access to slavery-related sites encouraged by historic site owners or managers and reunion with enslaved ancestors and descendants of those who historically lived and worked at slavery-related sites.

When archaeologists from the University of Texas at Austin approached landowners near downtown Dallas about potential archaeological excavations on their properties, St. Paul United Methodist Church was in the midst of a capital campaign to restore its historic building. It was the only active reminder of the North Dallas Freedman’s Town, an independent settlement of black landowners that formed in the years after Emancipation. As owners of one of the few remaining structures built by that freedman’s community, the church community wanted to be more visible in its most recent neighborhood, the Dallas Arts District. Many church members hoped their apparent invisibility would soon become a thing of the past, and saw archaeological research as one potential answer to that problem. The St. Paul community graciously accepted the archaeologists’ offer while challenging them to better situate the church’s history within the history of the Arts District neighborhood. My work was the response to that appeal. After six years of archival research and six months of formal planning, my interpretive exhibition From Freedman’s Town to the Arts District: Celebrating the Legacy of St. Paul United Methodist Church opened in Dallas. The main purpose of this exhibit was to make the St. Paul Church story more visible to its local community and to strengthen its relationship with the Arts District. The exhibition did that, to some extent; but not without the direction of a church community skillful at facing the challenges of the present by looking to the past in order to map its future. This article explores how St. Paul transitioned from its North Dallas Freedman’s Community to the Dallas Arts District, and the specific strategies employed to survive these developments. The St. Paul community secured Dallas Historic Landmark Status as a direct response to neighborhood transformations and uncertainty about its place amid a new arts district, and also participated inmemorializing the Freedman’s Cemetery, an early burial ground for Dallas’s freedman’s communities. These two examples, among others, illustrate a pattern of proactive and responsive measures taken by the church community to minimize the instability it faced. The church deploys cultural heritage politics, what I define as the strategic manufacturing of community identities as a form of political mobilization, within contentious political and social landscapes, by asserting a claim to a noteworthy past in the present. This article’s specific concern is with how the church became more visible in its changing community and how it has utilized cultural heritage politics to resist and integrate into wider community transformations. These acts of resistance and integration are examined through its (1) hybrid identification as an arts church, (2) consent to archaeological excavations, and (3) collaborative relationships focused on the historic preservation of its church structure. Building upon emerging scholarship in critical heritage studies, I discuss St. Paul’s

ABSTRACT In summer 2002, archaeologists from the University of Texas at Austin excavated a shotgun house site adjacent to the historic St. Paul United Methodist Church in Dallas, Texas, once part of a flourishing North Dallas freedmen's community. Church members were connected to this site which once belonged to the Cole family, whose head was a former church trustee. That fall, I came to the church as a response to the church community's desire to learn more about their historical connection to the former freedmen's community, and to share their story with the Dallas community through the recovered artefacts. This article is a self-reflexive account of my journey. It explores lessons learned about how archaeological research can better accommodate community partners, in the long run. This leads to what I consider a more thorough examination of historic preservation, through community engagement, with archaeologists as public servants.

Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History. Edited by Karen L. Cox. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2012. Pp. [xii], 315. $74.95, ISBN 978-0-8130-4237-4.) Editor Karen L. Cox takes readers on a journey to the controversial world of southern tourism in Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History. This collection examines the history of southern tourism through case studies organized into four sections--"People and Places," "Race and Slavery," "War and Remembrance," and "Landscape and Memory." The essays focus on the ways that tourist sites refashion as much as they remember. This book is traditional historiography, but it is also valuable to practitioners in the fields of public history, historic preservation, and critical heritage studies, which must also deal with the challenges of documenting and interpreting the past in ways that appeal to the public. The real strength of this collection is its focus on how these various tourist sites change over time and what those changes tell us about the many Souths one may find when passing through the region. The economic impact of tourism is balanced with attention to the intangible aspects of culture. The authors grapple with the erasure and distortion of race, class, and gender often found in southern tourism. Cox's command of southern history and her expertise in the study of southern popular culture make her introduction to and her editing of this collection cohesive and comprehensive. Destination Dixie is the third anthology to focus on tourism in the South, an emerging field for exploring southern identity and culture. The collection does not break new theoretical ground, but it refines and expands the field to focus on the distortions often found in southern tourism. Destination Dixie was preceded by Southern Journeys: Tourism, History, and Culture in the Modern South (Tuscaloosa, 2003), edited by Richard D. Starnes, and Dixie Emporium: Tourism, Foodways, and Consumer Culture in the American South (Athens, Ga., 2008), edited by Anthony J. Stanonis. Along with various monographs on southern tourism, these edited collections speak to the growing importance of the field. Two essays in the section "People and Places" explore how literary places--specifically, the boyhood home of Mark Twain and the apartment where Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone with the Wind (1936)--were originally preserved and marketed without acknowledging the racial complexities of the texts that made the authors famous. Barclay Key shows how the racism that Olympic athlete Jesse Owens faced in life continued during the posthumous attempts to commemorate his legacy in his boyhood home of Lawrence County, Alabama. Michael T. Bertrand demonstrates how Elvis Presley's boyhood home in (East) Tupelo, Mississippi, complicates the crass grandeur of Memphis's Graceland and the relationship of class and southern identities. The first essay in the section "Race and Slavery" examines how North Carolina's Somerset Place plantation reaped the economic benefits of historic preservation and tourism while ignoring slavery. …

This is work is intended to serve as a foundational, transdisciplinary text for the field of Southern Studies and includes contributions from scholars in Anthropology, Ethnomusicology, History, Literature, Sociology, African American Studies, American Studies, Gender Studies Native American Studies and Southern Studies as well as a documentarian and scholar activists working in Latino rights and Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) rights. Navigating Souths builds upon the theoretical frameworks of the New Southern Studies, the Global South and Nuevo South as well as other dominant trends in the fields of the contributors and that of Southern Studies, most particularly contemporary critical theory. Other works, most notably Tara McPherson’s Reconstructing Dixie (2003), Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn’s Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies (2004), James Cobb’s Redefining Southern Culture (1999) and John Lowe’s Bridging Southern Cultures (2005), have broadened conceptions of the region and challenged scholars to engage in greater interdisciplinary exchanges. The essays in this work build upon the foundation provided by these and other works and provide working models for both collaborative and individual application of transdisciplinary approaches to the study of the South.

The hanging of a noose on the University of Mississippi’s statue of civil rights pioneer James Meredith in February 2014 was framed by university administrators as the act of a few deviant white students, but our analysis suggests otherwise. A historical review shows the university’s long-standing resistance to meaningful change and a continuing lack of transparency following racist incidents. Visual analysis shows that the university remains saturated with monuments, place names, and other symbols of racial dominance. Narratives of marginalized people on campus, including some of the authors, reveal the corrosive effects of normalized white supremacy. The authors’ analysis suggests that, instead of an aberration, the noosing aligned the statue with the prevailing symbolic environment. This study builds bridges between sociological analysis and critical race theory and demonstrates the importance of group processes in understanding and responding to racist incidents on campuses.

The hanging of a noose on the University of Mississippi’s statue of civil rights pioneer James Meredith in February 2014 was framed by university administrators as the act of a few deviant white students, but our analysis suggests otherwise. A historical review shows the university’s long-standing resistance to meaningful change and a continuing lack of transparency following racist incidents. Visual analysis shows that the university remains saturated with monuments, place names, and other symbols of racial dominance. Narratives of marginalized people on campus, including some of the authors, reveal the corrosive effects of normalized white supremacy. The authors’ analysis suggests that, instead of an aberration, the noosing aligned the statue with the prevailing symbolic environment. This study builds bridges between sociological analysis and critical race theory and demonstrates the importance of group processes in understanding and responding to racist incidents on campuses.

The dominant discourse preferences the experiences of African Americans who take trips to sites linked to slavery outside of the USA. This paper expands research on roots tourism, by centring the experiences of those who travel to slavery-related sites in the USA. Documenting the case of the Behind the Big House Tour as a response to the Annual Pilgrimage Tour of Historic Homes and Churches in Holly Springs, Mississippi, this study examines evidence for African diasporic roots tourists who acknowledge sites at which their ancestors were enslaved as home sites. Results suggest that this level of acceptance occurs when African Americans come to feel a sense of belonging. The study identifies two general conditions needed to facilitate this process: access to slavery-related sites encouraged by historic site owners or managers and reunion with enslaved ancestors and descendants of those who historically lived and worked at slavery-related sites.

America’s history of racial segregation has played a critical role in shaping what is publicly acknowledged, remembered, and preserved, and what is silenced or forgotten. Such issues shift into community challenges of recognizing and addressing the history of slavery while working in the context of heritage tourism. My role as observant-participator provides me a unique lens through which to explore how members of the Holly Springs, Mississippi, community address these issues through the Behind the Big House education program. In this article, I examine issues confronted as this community attempts to define its past in the present and create a more racially inclusive future, through reconciliation tourism.

The hanging of a noose on the University of Mississippi’s statue of civil rights pioneer James Meredith in February 2014 was framed by university administrators as the act of a few deviant white students, but our analysis suggests otherwise. A historical review shows the university’s long-standing resistance to meaningful change and a continuing lack of transparency following racist incidents. Visual analysis shows that the university remains saturated with monuments, place names, and other symbols of racial dominance. Narratives of marginalized people on campus, including some of the authors, reveal the corrosive effects of normalized white supremacy. The authors’ analysis suggests that, instead of an aberration, the noosing aligned the statue with the prevailing symbolic environment. This study builds bridges between sociological analysis and critical race theory and demonstrates the importance of group processes in understanding and responding to racist incidents on campuses.

What happens to Black institutions when Black residents have left the neighborhood, but not the building?
This is the question that must be asked when a historically Black institution has stayed in place after its
community has moved to outlying suburbs. Here I focus on the St. Paul United Methodist Church in Dallas,
Texas, and investigate the founding of the church, as well as its long, complex history.
Over the years, the city of Dallas has destroyed the sense of unity of this neighborhood by putting in
freeways and a housing project. Eventually, it became diffi cult for Black residents to stand the traffi c in, and
marginalization of, their community, and they left. Arts institutions and other high end developments moved into
the “empty” neighborhood. In just under two decades, the neighborhood became the Dallas Arts District.
The determination of the St. Paul United Methodist Church to stay in the Arts District presents a quandary.
What should Black institutions do when their neighborhoods become primarily White areas? My work on this
topic intersects with questions about gentrifi cation, urban planning, racial discrimination, and surprisingly,
archeology, which has become a tool for the St. Paul United Methodist Church to argue its standing to remain
in the Arts District, and indeed, in Dallas itself.
Telling the story of the St. Paul United Methodist Church required analyses in areas of architecture,
ethnicity, local history, public archeology, and constitutional rights; here, the right of a government entity, the
city of Dallas, to engage in a taking of property. Most important, however, is the culmination of this research:
that through archeology, one Black community has learned how to use its past to cement a place for itself in
the future.