Footsteps of Collective memory

 My group spent this week planning where to place our objects in our case, and writing labels for each item along with a cumalitive summary. This process has been so thought out, to an extent that suprises me.   The reason for this extensive thought is that fact that the way we frame our case will directly affect interpesetations of it, and collective memories of it. Our case is based on the past 100 years of Kenyon, and the 200 years ahead. We have decided to put an emphasis on the Old Kenyon fire, because it is a big event in the schools history, and happened right around the time we start to focus on. Putting an emphasis on this fire has a big affect on how our case is framed. For example, the center peice of our case is a bell clapper. It is facinating to look at, but hard to connect with the rest of our archives. That being said, we found out the clapper was from Old K before the fire. So the way we are framing it is that this clapper was in Old Kenyon before the fire, and can serve as a memory for that time.  This is a great starting point for us as we then have interviews from the fire, and many ciggarate related archives as we move forward in time. We also use this Old K fire to look through its rebuild, and the develpoment of the rest of modern campus. It was a tragic moment in Kenyons history, but need to dive into it, and use it to move forward into Kenyons development for this specific study. This frame helps people see how far this campus has come. We see the buildings change over this time period, but we also see important social change. 

In the reading for this week of Hajar Yazdiha’s The Struggle for the People’s King, we read about how people use collective memory differently for their own benifits. Yazdiha gives examples of many groups of people that have interpreted and used Dr. Kings memory. They do this is many different ways, and it is interesting to think about which groups accually line up with Kings values and ideals, which we did in class. An example of this from the text is the use of civil rights movement collective memory for non black causes, specifically within the reagan adminisration. "President Nixon began the rollback a decade earliar, blocking the enforcment of the Fair Housing Act and calling desegragation a form of unfair reverse racism. " (Yazdiha 49). The important part of Yazdihas argument isnt whether or not people are telling the truth. Of course there are groups whos collectve memory stand much more in line with Dr. Kings actual values. Her point is that it doesent matter if it is the truth. Framing these memories in such ways will lead to people beliving what they belive over time, even if it isnt the absolute truth. There are extreme cases like the Nixon example above, but this phenomenon occurs on a specturm. 

This is the same idea as grappling with how to set up our archive case. We need to deciede how we want people to interpret it, and what our truth is going to be. As a group, we have been able to have lots of freedom with this project, which is why we can present it in the way that we imagine the past 100 years and the next 200 years of Kenyon. Our truth may be different from soemone elses. That can be wonderful, or it can be harsh.  I would like to think that our choices of archives will represent Kenyon in an respected and authentic way, following in the footsteps of previous collective memory. 

Yazdiha, Hajar. The Struggle for the People's King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement. Princeton University Press, 2023.