Sharony Green Public History

About (Public) Face Using Tuscaloosa as a Laboratory to Learn about Our Shared Past Dr. Sharony Green, Associate Professor of History University of Alabama Hi! My name is Sharony Green. I teach History at the University of Alabama. That’s me standing by the Thames, a river that runs through London. I like water. I grew up in Miami, Florida, a place near the sea. I also grew up fishing on Lake Okeechobee with my grandparents. I descend from people from Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and the Bahamas. Everywhere I go, I search for natural water spaces. I also love using the local environment to teach my students about our shared historical past. Some of our work involves the Black Warrior River, which runs through Tuscaloosa, the city where my university is located. My research, service and teaching often overlap and involve my interest in the complexities of the people and spaces around me. About (Public) Face, the title of this catalogue, is shorthand for my call for more historians to find value in engaging with public spaces. I invite you to discover some of my public-facing projects.

I earned my PhD in History at the University of Illinois in Champaign after earning my earlier degrees at the University of Chicago,. University of North Carolina-Greensboro and the University of Miami. I am trained to teach the entire arc of U.S. History and African American History. My specialty is the antebellum period. Transnationalism is my third field with a focus on the Caribbean Rim, which is great as I can find meaning in my beginnings in Florida, a borderland to the rest of the Americas. To the right is a photo of my mother and I at Virginia Key, once the “black” beach in South Florida. No matter the eras on which I focus, I am greatly interested in showcasing our complex historical past in my research, service and teaching. I did so in my first historical monograph by exploring the complicated interactions between black and white Americans before the Civil War. My other research focuses on a similar dynamic with people of African descent in Florida in view and the legendary writer-anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston’s postwar visit to Honduras in view.

Prior to being hired by the University of Alabama, my engagement with public history was revealed in my co- coordinating an exhibit drawing attention to black social protest and suffering in Brazil. Students enrolled in ”African Americans in the City,” my Spring 2013 course wrote and conducted research for this project. This was my very first class at UA. I taught it during my UA pre-doctoral fellowship. My students provided historical and cultural context for these posters alongside the efforts of students enrolled in a course taught by Dr. Teresa Cribelli, then-Assistant Professor of History at UA. This joint effort resulted in a UA poster exhibition that was later presented at the Birmingham Museum of Art.

This is the poster for a video that was my very first public facing project as a tenure track professor at the University of Alabama. In 2013, students enrolled in my “The Nineteenth City” class became experts on local buildings including this downtown Tuscaloosa structure on University Avenue. The building dates to the late 19th century. It used to be a bank and later, a department store. It now holds Depalma’s Italian Cafe, a popular restaurant. I challenged my students to find “the nineteenth century city” in Tuscaloosa. My former colleague Dr. Bart Elmore, who is now at the Ohio State University and spins vinyl as a hobby, did the soundtrack for the resulting 9-min video. The Crimon White, our school paper, covered our work.

Opened in 1831, the University of Alabama welcomed its first female students in 1892. They lived in the Kilgore House, a now-gone campus dwelling. After its controversial demolition in 2013, students enrolled in my “The Nineteenth Century Class” courses learned more about this structure. In 2013, Susan Reynolds, the present editor of Alabama Heritage magazine, which was once published in this historic building, discussed the house’s history. My students also engaged the land where it once sat by taking photographs of themselves in front of the shed that stood behind the demolished structure.

In 2014, another group of students enrolled in my “The Nineteenth City City” course captured visual images for a music video that premiered at the historic Jemison Van de Graaf Mansion. Dr. Robert Mellown, Associate Professor Emeritus of Art History, was our guest speaker. Bible Study, a local band, provided the music on the soundtrack. We also had a silent auction featuring student photographs of local historic spaces.

Sometimes my public history work goes beyond the physical borders of Tuscaloosa. During Black History Month in 2015, I did a campus public reading from my first book Cuttin' the Rug Under the Moonlit Sky: Stories and Drawings About a Bunch of Women Named Mae (Doubleday, 1997). This publication was inspired by women in my life in Miami, Florida, my hometown and subject of a research project involving oral histories. University of Alabama’s-then Distinguished Research Professor of English Trudier Harris read with me. The event featured an installation of 15 copies of drawings from my book in the university’s then-Ferguson Center Gallery. Album covers curated by UA Professor of History John Beeler, who frequently facilitates my public history efforts, were also presented. While there, he spun records. The gallery also played music by request from 12-2pm daily until the end of February. Members of the UA community were also invited to contribute images to a collage created by UA student Steven Scaglione. The event was anchored by that collage featuring Selma’s historic Edmund Pettus bridge.

In 2015, another group of students enrolled in my “The Nineteenth Century City” course continued to use local buildings as entry points to learn more about our shared past. Our efforts drew the attention of a media student who made this video. Here I am standing in front of the Drish House, an antebellum mansion with some of my students and Katherine Richter Edge, now-head of UA’s Mildred Westervelt Warner Transportation Museum, Until 2018, students were able to tour this mansion.

Nick Privitera, the media student, also wrote a story about our effort for The Crimson White, our school paper.

Students enrolled in my courses also pay close attention to the experiences of people inhabiting the buildings we study. I have pushed them to think through how power is always being negotiated. Even the lowliest persons may have a way to enhance the quality of their lives. What this looks like with the young women whose families could afford to send them to female academies in Tuscaloosa before the Civil War shaped an exhibit featuring the research of another group of students enrolled in “The Nineteenth Century City” class. That exhibit was launched in December 2015 at the Gorgas House Museum, the oldest structure on campus. Historian Victoria Ott was our guest speaker at the opening of this project, which extended in the Spring 2016 semester. Built in 1829, Gorgas House was a dining hall and later, a residence as well as post office and student infirmary. Over the years, I have repeatedly taken my students to this facility whose director, Brandon Thompson, has been an amazing campus partner. Rebecca Johnson, Communications Specialist for UA Museums, has always been so helpful, too.

In 2015, following my students’ encouragement, I completed a jazz documentary on Grant Green, the legendary Blue Note guitarist and my former father-in-law. The project engages public spaces and history in postwar Detroit, New York, St. Louis, San Francisco and Toronto. This feature film premiered in the 2016 Harlem International Film Festival.

In 2016, my research on the postwar black migration to Miami, Florida, my hometown, was presented in a three-screen video installation at Tuscaloosa’s Dinah Washington Cultural Arts Center. Students enrolled in my “Bebop to Hip Hop: Music and Young America” course curated the sound meant to provide an aural backdrop to my research. The students were instructed to pick songs that they would play “on heavy rotation” if they were taking a long road trip in order to leave the past behind. By combining these elements, I wanted to publicly tell the story of how disfranchised people have gained power and improved their lives simply by moving through space. Some of my own aural efforts and those of my students are also presented here. I also presented a short film with clips of the oral history interviews used for my research. In 202, I was the recipient of PEN America’s Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History, which supported work required for my forthcoming manuscript. The University of Alabama’s Cartographic Lab made the map to be used for this research.

As mentioned, I am greatly interested in showcasing our complex historical past in my research, service and teaching. I do so with the help of others including archivists like the ones I met here in Georgetown, Colorado who aided my attempt to learn more about African American Alabamians who migrated to Colorado after the Civil War. The results were my first historical monograph Remember Me to Miss Louisa: Hidden Black- White Intimacies in Antebellum America (Northern Illinois University Press, 2015), the recipient of the Western Association of Women Historians’ Barbara “Penny” Kanner Prize for excellence in archival research. My scholarship has also been presented in public settings including an event sponsored by the Alabama Department of Archives in 2017.

In 2017, I invited colleagues at the University of Alabama to participate in a public installation to be presented in UA’s then-Ferguson Center Gallery. Our one-hour long curated presentation showed the university community how we “breathe” through the increasingly difficult headlines in our country. Titled “Breathe,” this event included a brief yoga session. My mixed-media piece, which included textiles, figured into work I’d also make in a month-long artist residency in Iceland that same year.

Miami spatial and racial research Swedish textile artist Kerstin Lindstrom my published article

In 2018, the then-Paul R. Jones Gallery displayed an exhibit of art from its collection, titled “Mecca – Atlanta, Harlem, Miami, and Beyond.” The project received inspiration from my research on racial and spatial politics in Miami via oral histories with residents of African descent. The exhibit interrogated Harlem, Atlanta and Miami, as “meccas” for certain groups, among them people of African descent. Graduate students in my “Gender, Race, and Urban Space” seminar participated.

In 2019, students in my “Antebellum America” class curated “Space Matters,” an interactive exhibit inside the University of Alabama’s Gorgas House Museum. We used maps animated by undergraduate Kat Flandermeyer, as well as videos and music to tell the nuanced stories of Sarah Gayle, wife of John Gayle, Alabama Governor (1831-1835) former enslaved man-turned architect Horace King and Alabama Senator, slaveholder and businessman Robert Jemison Jr., three historical figures, from Tuscaloosa's history before and during the Civil War. APR, the local NPR-affiliated, provided coverage. The event was later presented online as part of a national public history conference. New York Times best-selling author Dolen Perkins- Valdez was our featured speaker at a culminating Gorgas House event.

During the initial weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, I created an installation of hand-sewn or painted art pieces I’d made at home. They were presented online. The installation site was a tiny house built on the side of my home using a kit. Dr. John Beeler and our colleagues Dr. Richard Megraw and Dr. John Ratliff assembled. My work was among several pieces curated in an online presentation in About Places Journal.

In 2022, students enrolled in my “Antebellum America” class created a 63-foot burlap with individual pieces that were displayed as a work-in-progress on April 1, eve of Slow Art Day, and then hung from the Gorgas House Museum later in the month once finished. I also invited students from my “America Since 1865” class to look slowly at the work when it was displayed in UA’s quad in front of former Woods Hall, too. UA Professor of History John Beeler helped facilitate out effort. The organizers of this worldwide effort presented our work in this feature story. For more on this project, which involved several historical buildings and the students learning about several historical antebellum actors, see this website. Dr. John Beeler aided the entire effort.

For several years, students enrolled in various classes have visited UA’s historic Bryce Hospital to learn more about the complexities of our shared past with Bryce historian Steve Davis leading the way. The facility is presently being transformed into a UA welcome center. The structure will be used for other campus activities, too. To see some of my students’ interactions with this building, which opened on the eve of the Civil War, see my blog posts here.

Since my arrival at the University in 2013, my students have also been encouraged to think about enslaved and freedpeople in Tuscaloosa whose experiences were not well- chronicled. The audacious work of my colleague Dr. Hilary Green, now-Professor of History, Davidson College, has been very helpful for past, current and future public projects.

Given my scholarly training in film and theatre, my public engagement approaches are sometimes creative and experimental. Such was the case with this short featuring excerpts from a short story I wrote and footage captured on, among other places, Orange Beach, Alabama. I directed this short. Dr. John Beeler captured the images. We did so during Spring Break, which found me also visiting sites in Florida and Alabama earlier visited by Alabama native and legendary writer anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, the subject of one of my forthcoming manuscripts.

In 2022, students enrolled in my “Music and Race in the UK” class, a University of Alabama study abroad program at the University of Oxford’s Worcester College, were asked to respectfully deconstruct colonial postcards into mock album covers using a link on the Oxford’s famous Bodleian Libraries website. Some of their efforts will be presented online. Among our goals will be finding meaning in our difficult shared past with the cross-flows of postwar music and colonized subjects in view. Some of this course’s aims dovetail with my ongoing Miami research, which includes attention to my ancestral ties to the Bahamas.

About (Public) Face Dr. Sharony Green, Associate Professor of History, University of Alabama My blogs: http://thenineteenthcenturycity.blogspot.com https://sagreen1.wordpress.com/ https://sharonygreenblog.wordpress.com/ Others Internet presence: https://sharonygreen.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/SharonyGreen Select interviews: Discovering Alabama ESPN’s SportsCenter Girl Scouts of North Central Alabama Delta Bohemian National Public Radio Select public talks: 2016 – “Interracial Intimacy in Antebellum America,” Dinah Washington Cultural Arts Center, UA College of Arts & Sciences 2017 \"Family Ties: Hidden-Black White Relations in Antebellum Alabama\" Alabama Department of Archives and History 2019 - “Space Matters: The Black Bahamian in Key West and Beyond,” Key West Art and Historical Society Special thanks to many people including my students, department chairpersons and staff, campus and off campus partners, and Drs. Julia Brock, Hilary Green, John Beeler, among others, for their support. For updates, visit my public history website.