“Disability Ain’t Where You From; It’s Where You At”: A Case Study of Vasco Hale, Race, and the Power of Place in Teaching Twentieth-Century African American History

This paper explains how students in African American studies use geography to understand the intersection of race, disability and place in the lives of African Americans in Alabama and West Virginia during the Great Depression of the 1930s.  The relationship between race and labor in iron and coal mining districts like Birmingham and Fairmont have been the subject of a spate of literature, thus enriching our understanding of the African American experience in the early twentieth century.  At the same time, recent scholarship in disability studies have attempted to de-medicalize the social and cultural scaffolding surrounding their subjects by increasingly interweaving race, gender, sexuality, age, and region into their lived experiences. To their credit, these works have pointed up the complex realities that existed within African American communities in the years leading up to World War II.  But a more interesting question remains:  where were the actual physical sites where notions of race and disability discussed, debated, and reconfigured?  Through classroom readings and discussions, students are alerted to new ways of thinking about these issues through recent works on historical geography and conducting actual fieldwork.

Examining the neighborhoods and hospitals of Birmingham, Alabama, and Fairmont, West Virginia, from 1930 to 1941, the paper explains how one instructor in particular has gotten his students to look at how the manner in which race, place, and work shaped perceptions of disability through the examination of various sources housed at the Birmingham Public Library, the West Virginia State College Archives, and the National West Virginia and Regional History Collection. The paper contends that only by exploring the intersectional environs of race, work, and place, and how those physical sites shaped how black people viewed issues of disability and inequality will we have a multifaceted portrait of African American identity in the twentieth century.