The Bronx African American History Project

The Bronx African American History Project is a community based oral history project that began ten years ago as collaboration between scholars in Fordham’s Department of African and African American Studies and archivists in the Bronx County Historical Society. Because of the enthusiastic reception the project received in the Bronx’s African American community, we soon added a team of “Community Researchers” to guide the BAAHP’s work which added greatly to its effectiveness. In ten years, the project has amassed an unparalleled data base of over 300 oral history interviews and five major archival collections, but it has also spawned several community based initiatives which use the research of the  BAAHP as their justification.. This paper will examine four such community initiatives connected to the BAAHP- the effort to reconstruct a long neglected park in the South Bronx honoring two Black Bronx Korean War veterans; the effort to rename a vest pocket park and a street after Hilton White, a neighborhood coach who sent more than 80 young people to college on basketball scholarships including 3 who played on the 1966 NCAA championship Texas Western team; the creation of a community arts center in the Bronx, the Rebal Diaz Arts Collective, modeled after community arts centers in Berlin that a visiting delegation from the BAAHP spent time in; and the development of an affordable housing complex and performance space called the Bronx Music Heritage Center based on music research the BAAHP conducted which revealed an unparalleled history of musical creativity in South Bronx neighborhoods. In all of these instances, research conducted in close collaboration with community residents and community leaders generated movements which took long subaltern historical narratives and turned them into rallying points for community revitalization.