Martin Pimentel is a Senior double majoring in History and Political Science. He was awarded a Summer 2019 Independent Grant which he used to conduct research on Post-Civil War rumors under Dr. Jason Ward.
While history is intrinsically the study of the past, I’ve always believed that the most important job of a historian is to explain the present or to inform the future. I first began my research project, which will ultimately culminate in my honors thesis for the History Department, seeking to explain the rise of fake news and racial animus during the 2016 election. I ultimately discovered the existence of a method of urban surveillance, known as rumor control centers, that were developed in the wake of a massive series of race riots across the country in the late 1960’s. These centers where primarily used as call stations, where concerned citizens could call in to report rumors of impending race riots. The rumor control center then had two functions: 1) it had an investigative unit that would discover if the rumor were true and then report back to the caller, in an attempt to prevent panic, and 2) it would report credible rumors to the police, who would then take measures to try to preempt a riot. As in 2016, I found an intriguing combination of racial tension and rampant rumors and disinformation that led to a novel form of public surveillance. Through the Undergraduate Research Grant, I was able to travel to Detroit and Austin to study the rise and fall of Detroit’s rumor control center.
I first traveled to Detroit to conduct research in the archives of Wayne State University. At Wayne State, I explored the papers from two collections: the Detroit Commission on Community Relations Recordsand the Jerome P. Cavanagh Papers. Detroit’s Commission on Community Relations was the city’s government agency responsible for overseeing the rumor control center. Through their archived records, I was able to study the call logs, internal correspondence, and policies of the center. From these documents, I was able to draw a number of interesting conclusions. For example, the rumor control center was intended to target the poorer, predominantly African American areas of the inner city in an attempt to create an early warning system to prevent race riots. However, I found through the rumor control center’s call logs that most of the calls into the center reporting rumors of impending race riots originated from wealthier, predominantly white, suburban areas. As a result, the rumors provided little actionable information, explaining why Detroit’s rumor control center quickly fell out of use.
After visiting the archive in Detroit, I traveled to Austin to conduct research at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library. At the LBJ Library, I studied the federal government’s role in promoting and supporting the establishment of rumor control centers across the country, and specifically in Detroit. I primarily used the unclassified and declassified files from one of President Johnson’s presidential commissions: the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, colloquially known as the Kerner Commission. I went to Austin expecting to find that the federal government had played an active role in promoting and establishing rumor control centers, largely because the existing scholarship on these centers has acknowledged the significant role that presidential commissions have played in encouraging cities to establish these methods. However, my research in Austin ultimately led me to conclude that the federal government was in fact quite hesitant to prescribe city-level solutions to race riots.
I felt particularly fortunate to be able to research my topic in two different archives, because the experience in each place was unique. The Wayne State archive was a university archive, which meant that the resources were relatively limited in scope (although it is undoubtedly the best place in the world to study Detroit’s rumor control center). The LBJ Library, on the other hand, is part of the National Archives and Records Administration, which is a government agency. As a result, I found that this archive had significantly greater resources, while the archivists were all experts in their respective fields. Moreover, researching in Detroit was different than in Austin because, since my research is specifically about Detroit, there was far more information relevant to my thesis in Detroit. Archival research at Wayne State was thus a relatively simple task, because all I had to do was examine the records of the rumor control center. My research in Austin was more supplemental in nature, and as a result I had to comb through a lot more irrelevant information to find the sources that are important for my work. However, I personally felt that the experience that I had in Austin was a more authentic example of the research experience for professional historians, and I found it immensely valuable.
As I write this post, it is truly overwhelming to think about how much I have learned in such a short time. I only spent 10 full days in the archives this summer—five days in Detroit and five in Austin—but I feel like I have learned so much more than I have in my three years in classes at Emory. There is something exhilarating about researching a topic that no one else has studied and looking at sources that no other historian has looked at. As I begin the process of writing my thesis, I will always be indebted to the incredible experiences that I had in the archives this summer, and to the Undergraduate Research Program at Emory for enabling me to have those experiences.
Visit the Undergraduate Research Programs website to learn more about applying for Independent Research Grants.
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