Who Changes the Heritage Landscape?
During my time in high school, I would walk my friend to her bus stop right across from Philadelphia City Hall every week. There we would huddle at one of the major bus exchanges in the city in front of the Frank Rizzo Statue. His statue stood boldly in front of the Municipal Services Building. For non-Philadelphians, Frank Rizzo was a mayor and police commissioner known for his racist and brutal police tactics. One of his highlights included running for reelection on the phrase “vote white.” For the latter half of my high school years though, his statue was surrounded by barricaded gates due to Philly REAL Justice protests. Finally, this past summer in June 2020, after racial justice protests following the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the city abruptly took the statue down because it had become a hazard to public health. When Prof. D’Ignazio gave me the chance to research on contentious places in the heritage landscape I knew I wanted to look at the renaming and uncommerating movement I had seen growing throughout the city.
This past semester I worked on the Data + Feminism Lab’s Audit the Streets project. I wrote a blog post on a few case studies in the city of Philadelphia that were overlooked in the original database. I wanted to look beyond just the Rizzo Statue, so I included two other sites. The total of three sites included Cecil B. Moore Ave, renamed from Columbia Ave in 1987 for the renowned NAACP activist; Taney St, named after the Supreme Court Justice who wrote the Dred Scott opinion; and the Frank Rizzo Statue. All of these places involved a great amount of activist labor in creating community organizations and navigating complicated legal processes. However, these stories often can be missed in large databases.
While I wrote the blog post for my fall research project I focused largely on the processes community movements took to rename places in Philadelphia, I wanted to look more critically at how inclusion in a database can erase the labor of activists. Using this framework, I submitted a poster to the National Collegiate Research Conference hosted by the Harvard College Undergraduate Research Association this past month with the support of MIT’s Office of Minority Education Laureates and Leaders program. I wanted to stress the importance of local knowledge and activist labor when studying commemoration across the country. One of the ways the Data + Feminism Lab is attempting to rectify this lack is by using Media Cloud to show articles about different monuments and protests when you view a place in the database.
If you want to take a look at the poster, you can find the full poster here.
