The Gnarled Branches of The Hill

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Since we completed a ‘rough draft’ of our display last week, my group worked on various finishing touches this week. This included tweaking its layout (e.g., should the bell ringer be the centerpiece? Should we or should we not put a paperweight on the campus map?) and writing up labels and a case summary. Like last week, a good deal of our thinking this week was concerned with our narrative/case summary. To that end, we talked a lot about the tension between having multiple items with multiple stories and one overarching case summary. We also thought a good deal about the representativeness of our display, particularly since the time frame that we’re working within (1824 - 2024) was chock-full of social change. Lastly, we also spent some time comparing our display to the one on exhibit. As a result of reviewing it several times, we tailored some of our writing and layout to somewhat match its tone/style.

In addition to working in the archives, I also spent some time thinking about Chapters 2 and 3 of The Struggles for the People’s King (2023). One bit that resonated with me from this portion was her (Yazdiha’s) theorizing of the “gnarled branches of civil rights memory” (47). According to this theory, civil rights memory, albeit somewhat nebulous, can only be truly understood if one considers the relationship between power and narrative. In both Chapters 2 and 3, Yazdiha describes how various powers/groups (e.g., members of the Tea Party, BLM) have appropriated King so as to lobby for their own rights/interests. Despite having competing understandings about King, every group described in Chapter 2 nonetheless sees King as a paragon of morality who was against prejudice/intolerance (which is ironic in light of the fact that many of them are evoking his memory for strategic purposes). 

In relation to my group’s work in the archives, Yazdiha’s theory of the “gnarled branches” of memory connects to some of the thinking that we’ve been doing about how changes outside the Hill conditioned changes on the Hill (e.g., ERA, Vietnam). To this end, Yazdiha’s model is helpful because it shows us that systems of power (e.g., SCOTUS, presidents of the College) inevitably impact social reality. In the context of the College, we can literally see this: systems of power (such as the aforementioned) have shaped who has gone to Kenyon (thinking of race, class, gender), what they have done here, and even what the College looks like (consider the history of McBride and Caples, dorms that were once reserved for women students). Perhaps like Mills’ theory of the social imagination, Yazdiha’s theory helps us to understand the history of the Hill within the history of broader society.


References

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

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