The Bronx African American History Project- A Short History

The Bronx African American History Project was founded in January 2003 as a partnership between Fordham’s Department of African and African American Studies and the Bronx County Historical Society. Its goal was to address the absence of source materials documenting the history of the more than 500,000 people of African descent in the Bronx. The Fordham scholars involved, Dr. Mark Naison and Dr. Claude Mangum, decided that the best contribution we could make was to start and Oral History Project, using the community contacts we had developed in more than 30- years teaching at Fordham. The response from Black Bronx residents we contacted was so enthusiastic that by Spring 2003, we were conducting more than two interviews a week. The Fordham Dean’s Office, seeing the potential of this research as a vehicle of instruction as well as a contribution to historical scholarship, provided us with four Fordham college research assistants to help film and transcribe the interviews. By the summer of 2003, several local newspapers had written articles about our research and the community response grew even greater. Literally scores of people began contacting us and asking for the opportunity to tell their stories. To advantage of this unique opportunity to give an underserved and often maligned community a voice, the Dean’s acceded to our request hire a young scholar as research director, and Fordham grad/ NYU Doctoral Student Brian Purnell joined us in that capacity With Brian on board, and additional student research assistants added, the BAAHP started doing 3 interviews a week and began developing a counter narrative of Bronx history that started to capture the imagination of Bronx schools and community organization. The people we interviewed, most of whom were senior citizens, told us stories which offered a profound challenge to the dominant narrative of Bronx history, which was that the Bronx was a beautiful place to live when it was Irish, Italian and Jewish, and that it fell prey to crime, and drugs and violence when Blacks and Puerto Ricans started to move in. In fact, our informants told us, the Bronx was a place of hope and optimism for upwardly mobile Black and Puerto Rican families from the mid 1930’s to the mid 1950’s, contained many vibrant integrated communities, and created more variety of popular music than any place in the country, if not the world during those years. They not only contributed stories, they contributed photos and documents which reinforced the accuracy of what they were telling us and they directed us to some of the musicians who made the communities they lived in such centers of cultural vitality. As a result, we hired a jazz scholar, Maxine Gordon (wife of the late jazz saxophone legend Dexter Gordon) as a research consultant and began organizing concerts to highlight the Bronx’s history of musical creativity. The new narrative of Bronx history coming out of our research, disseminated through newspaper accounts and through public events we organized, began to capture the imagination of leaders of Bronx non profit organizations and of teachers and administrators in Bronx schools who were looking for ways of counteracting the negative views of the Bronx that most people who lived in it possessed. As a result, we were invited to make presentations on our research to teachers and principals in Bronx schools, and subsequently, directly to Bronx students. By the beginning of 2006, when we had conducted over 100 oral history interviews, we had done lectures, walking tours and helped start community history projects in more than 20 Bronx schools, one of which actually created an “Old School Museum” to honor the history of the largely Black community in which it was located. As our students, faculty and research consultants travelled through Bronx neighborhoods doing programs for schools and community organizations, we noticed something striking—that there was a large and growing population of African immigrants in Bronx neighborhoods, many of whom were Muslim. To address this important migration, we hired as a research consultant, and later as a faculty member, Dr Jani Kani Edward, who had written a book on Sudanese women in exile and was an expert on the global African Disapora. Dr Edward quickly made connections with leaders of the African immigrant community and began doing oral histories with members of that important new group. By the end of 2000, our research now had a strong African immigrant component as well as an African American component. The excitement created by this research spread rapidly. As younger generations of Bronx residents approached us to be interviewed, we brought in a new faculty member to our Department, Dr Oneka Labennett, who started interviewing people who were part of the Hip Hop generation in the Bronx. This new component attracted the attention of scholars in Germany, who were studying the growing impact of Hip Hop on immigrants of color in their own country. Not only did several young German researchers join us as scholars in residence, they invited us to present the findings of our research to scholars and community groups in Berlin. These invitations led to the creation of the Bronx Berlin Youth Exchange, as well as to invitations to make presentations on our research in Spain and Italy As the BAAHP grew in size and vitality, it began to have a sizable impact on the cultural and intellectual life of the Fordham community. First of all, it gave many Fordham students exposure to ground breaking historical research as well as community activism. The student researchers we hired, as graduate assistants, as well as undergraduate researchers, had an opportunity to see history being rewritten first hand, not only by filming and transcribing oral history interviews, but by helping identify and archive historical documents. Many of these students wrote research papers based on their findings, some began writing MA theses and doctoral dissertations using our data base. Other faculty began directing their students to our oral history collection and the books and articles we published, so that the BAAHP’s research began directly influencing teaching about the Bronx in Fordham courses. Also, the BAAHP began to break through the barriers, both physical and metaphorical, separating the Bronx from surrounding Bronx communities. Not only have BAAHP interviews, concerts, lectures and forums brought literally thousands of Bronx residents and school groups onto Fordham’s Bronx campus, but the tours and events the BAAHP has organized in the Bronx have led Fordham students to get an exposure to Bronx neighborhood outside of Yankee Stadium, Arthur Avenue and the Zoo and the Botanical Gardens. At a time when anti-racist efforts at Fordham have the highest priority, no organization has done more than the BAAHP to defuse stereotypes about the Bronx and to encourage Fordham students to see the Bronx as a place with an unmatched history of resilience and creativity Today, the BAAHP stands ready to work with everyone at Fordham working to create a closer relationship with the peoples and communities of the Bronx. and to create programs and initiatives which affirm Fordham’s character as a community where people of color, and other marginalized groups, feel honored and welcome.