Strategies
The history of public housing in the United States covers nearly one hundred years and its results have varied state to state, and city to city. To communicate the broad brush strokes of this history to students in a meaningful and memorable way, this unit incorporates lots of visual materials to convey the historic changes. Students view an original PowerPoint presentation using archived photographs of Richmond’s first housing projects, archived film footage of President Johnson signing the Fair Housing Act in 1968, and the award-winning documentary film The Pruitt-Igoe Myth.
Close readings of 4 archived news stories from The Richmond Times-Dispatch (1951-2013) provides great material from which to ask the questions:
- Is there something about this that doesn’t sit right with you?
- Whose story is being told?
- Who is being silenced?
The close reading discussion would end with an essay response to the prompt: “You are a journalist from Hillside Court who has been asked to write a news article for a local paper about Mayor Jones’ proposal to tear down all public housing. Who would you interview and how would you go about choosing an interviewee? What do you think they would say about the Mayor’s plans? How could your news story address popular stereotypes and misunderstandings about life in projects like Hillside? What would be the first paragraph of your news story?”
The unit culminates in a hands-on project that begins with oral history interviews and ends as voluntary community service. Students should know that public history is outward-facing; for everything that a public historian takes from a community, (personal stories, in this case) something needs to be given back. In writing about the Baltimore oral history project she undertook in the 1970s, historian Linda Shopes lists four rationales for projects of this kind:
- The encouragement of cooperation between professional historians and lay people
- The use of history to build community identity and pride
- The presentation of community history to the public
- The encouragement of appreciation and respect for the participation of nonelite (sic) groups in the community’s history.1
1 Linda Shopes, “Oral History and Community Involvement: The Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage Project,” Presenting the Past: Essays on History and the Public, eds. Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier, and Roy Rosenzweig (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 249.
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