Trudi Sandmeier 00:00
Today on Save As:
Kira Williams 00:01
We shouldn’t have to make any piece of Black history weigh a few tons and be covered with bulletproof glass as a means to protect it. There should be actual conservation protections put in place.
Trudi Sandmeier 00:18
Welcome to Save As: NextGen Heritage Conservation, an award-winning podcast that glimpses the future of the field with graduate students at the University of Southern California. I’m Trudi Sandmeier.
Cindy Olnick 00:29
And I’m Cindy Olnick.
Trudi Sandmeier 00:30
So Cindy.
Cindy Olnick 00:32
Yes, Trudi?
Trudi Sandmeier 00:33
Here we are in Season Five.
Cindy Olnick 00:36
Welcome to Season Five. Can you believe we have been doing this for four years, and we’re still doing it?
Trudi Sandmeier 00:43
It’s an amazing fact. We have over 50 episodes and more than 16,000 downloads so far, and still counting.
Cindy Olnick 00:53
That’s crazy. And you know who we have to thank for that?
Trudi Sandmeier 00:56
Who?
Cindy Olnick 00:56
Our listeners …
Trudi Sandmeier 00:57
Of course.
Cindy Olnick 00:58
… who’ve joined us on this journey and continue to tell us how much they love the podcast.
Trudi Sandmeier 01:04
Well, we love it too.
Cindy Olnick 01:05
I’m in full agreement. I do, I love it.
Trudi Sandmeier 01:08
So we’re kicking off this season with new alumna, Kira Williams. She just finished up an internship with the African American Historic Places L.A. Project, which is a joint project with the Getty Conservation Institute and the City of L.A.’s Office of Historic Resources, which is totally amazing, and they’re doing fantastic work. And that really ties into what she ended up writing her thesis about.
Cindy Olnick 01:35
Yes, yes. So her thesis shines a light on Black heritage sites at risk, and I got to do a little field trip for this one. So let’s get to it. Here’s my interview with Kira Williams.
We are here on a sunny and very warm day at a very groovy place. I’m here with the wonderful Kira Williams. Kira, say hello to our listeners.
Kira Williams 02:08
Hi everyone. I’m Kira Williams. I’m a recent graduate from the USC Heritage Conservation Program.
Cindy Olnick 02:14
All right, Kira, Where are we exactly?
Kira Williams 02:17
We are at St. Elmo Village in Mid-City, City Los Angeles. I chose this place to do our interview because I am currently writing the Historic-Cultural Monument nomination for St. Elmo Village, designated locally in the City of Los Angeles.
Cindy Olnick 02:33
Okay, and is this part of your Getty internship?
Kira Williams 02:36
Yes, the graduate interns have the opportunity to write a nomination for a Historic-Cultural Monument on one of the sites that we’re choosing for our project.
Cindy Olnick 02:43
And then the program itself is managed by another alum, near and dear to our hearts, Rita Cofield.
Kira Williams 02:51
Yes, Rita is my supervisor actually. We both went to the USC Heritage Conservation Program.
Cindy Olnick 02:58
Yeah, all right, so we’ll come back to that in a bit, but let’s talk about your thesis.
Kira Williams 03:03
So the topic of my thesis, the main research question, was, how can we preserve African American heritage sites without putting them in any danger. And by danger, I mean from like racial aggression or physical damage from racial aggression.
Cindy Olnick 03:20
Yeah, which is insane that that’s even a consideration. And you did a couple of case studies?
Kira Williams 03:25
Yes, the case studies that I chose were the Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights March campsites and the Emmett Till memorial signs in Mississippi.
Cindy Olnick 03:37
So tell me a little bit about the march sites.
Kira Williams 03:39
There are three privately owned sites. And the marchers who were marching with Dr. King in the ’60s, they kind of found out about these sites that could be used as safe camping grounds throughout the 54-mile march. I went to public school in Texas, and throughout all of my years in public school, I’ve never heard of these campsites. I vaguely heard about the march and that it happened, but I didn’t know much detail. But I’ve never once heard about these campsites that played such an important part in the story of voting rights in the United States. I was focused more on the campsites rather than the actual route itself, because the route has been designated as a historic byway, but I want to focus on the actual homesteads themselves. So there’s the David Hall Farm, the Rosie Steele Farm, and the Robert Gardner Farm. Some of them aren’t in great condition. They’ve been kind of forgotten pieces of history, and I wanted to bring them back to the light, but I wanted to do so in a way that would put them back on the map, but without putting a target on them.
Cindy Olnick 04:47
So you researched the campsites. You talked to some people. You talked to the property owners as well, right?
Kira Williams 04:53
Yes. I talked to Dr. Cheryl Gardner Davis, who’s the daughter of Robert Gardner, who owns Campsite 3. And I talked to Divine Hall, the granddaughter of David Hall, the owner of Campsite 1.
Cindy Olnick 05:03
And, what did they have to say about, you know, the condition, or if and how they want to preserve it.
Kira Williams 05:03
Some of the families of the campsites were open to turning the sites into interpretive centers. Others of them are also open to letting people camp at the site so they can get the full experience of what the marchers experienced that night. But there is a lot of safety concerns about people knowing exactly where the homes are. There’s no security there. They’re kind of in the middle of nowhere. So just worrying about the safety of the campers, but also the safety of the families is a big concern.
Cindy Olnick 05:40
Have any of the sites been targeted before?
Kira Williams 05:43
Campsite 2, the Rosie Steele Farm. There was a store and a house on the site that mysteriously burned down, and nobody knows exactly what happened to them. After the march happened in the ’60s, the families did have kind of some retaliation against them, like they had trouble taking out, loans at the bank.
Cindy Olnick 06:05
No way.
Kira Williams 06:07
People would come to their campsites with guns and threaten their families and say that they shouldn’t have done what they did.
Cindy Olnick 06:15
Unbelievable. There is some research already out there about the sites, the campsites in particular, and there’s a documentary, right, that you used in your research?
Kira Williams 06:24
Yes, it’s called “54 Miles to Home.” It was created by Philip Howard. He is the program manager for the Civil Rights People and Places project at The Conservation Fund. He did a little documentary, it’s about 25 minutes long, where he interviewed some of the family members from the various campsites, and he went to the sites and kind of walked around and got some feedback from the families on what they believe should happen to the sites and their lives since their parents or grandparents helped the marchers.
Cindy Olnick 06:54
And, you talked with him as well, right?
Kira Williams 06:56
Yes, I did talk to Philip. He’s very lovely. He gave me a lot of resources and information on what they’re currently doing with the campsites. They’re preparing for the 60th anniversary march in 2025. They’re very excited for that. They’re starting a visioning document that will kind of give an overview about the whole story, not just the campsites themselves. But he wants to start with Marion, Alabama, which is where Jimmie Lee Jackson was killed, and that’s kind of what sparked the voting rights march.
Cindy Olnick 07:26
Who was Jimmie Lee Jackson?
Kira Williams 07:27
He was a 26-year-old man who was from Marion, Alabama. A reverend was arrested in Marion, Alabama, and people got together at his church to kind of envision what they can do to protest the arrest of him. And the police showed up, and it turned into a riot, and a lot of people got hurt and arrested. And Jimmie Lee Jackson was killed in the wake of all of that.
Cindy Olnick 07:55
And then how did that sort of spark the voting rights march?
Kira Williams 08:00
So people were protesting Jimmie Lee Jackson’s murder, and someone had the idea to take his body and carry it to the governor and place it there and put it in his eyes. So instead of doing that, they decided to just do the march from Selma to Montgomery, to the capitol, and go directly to the governor and say, This is what you’re doing. We need voting rights. We need civil rights now.
Cindy Olnick 08:29
Well, that notion of making people see what they’ve done to people is sort of core to your other case study, right? What’s that?
Kira Williams 08:39
The murder of Emmett Till.
Cindy Olnick 08:41
So Emmett Till is a very famous figure in the civil rights movement, but for people who might not be familiar with what happened to him, can you just summarize it?
Kira Williams 08:52
Emmett Till was a 13-year-old child from Chicago. He lived with his mother, and he went on a trip to visit some of his cousins in Mississippi. And his mother was very wary about sending him on his own, but she decided that since he was going with family, it would be okay. And she warned him about his behavior because the South is a much different place than from up north in Chicago, where they were from. So she warned him to be careful how he interacted with white people because she didn’t want anything to happen to him. And she gave him a ring that was from his father. His father was in the army, and he passed away.
And Emmett Till went to Mississippi, he was with his cousins, and he went to a small, little grocery store called Bryant’s grocery and he allegedly whistled at a white woman who was the owner’s wife. And that night, the owner of the store and his brother-in-law went to Emmett Till’s grandfather’s house and kidnapped him in the middle of the night, and then they tortured him and murdered him. A few days had passed when they finally found Emmett Till’s body in the Tallahatchie River, and the only way they were able to properly identify him was through the ring that his mother gave him.
Cindy Olnick 10:04
Oh, my God.
Kira Williams 10:05
There was a lot of pieces that sparked the civil rights movement, but I think the most influential was when Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Bradley, had an open casket funeral for Emmett Till, because she said that she wanted everyone to see what was done to her child, because just holding the funeral or letting the police department bury Emmett Till wasn’t going to let everyone know what racism had done to her child. His brutal murder sparked the civil rights movement, in my opinion, because everyone was able to see, either in-person or through the pictures that were printed in Jet magazine, what exactly was done to this child.
Cindy Olnick 11:44
Yeah, it took media. You know, just like George Floyd’s murder. One of the memorial signs for Emmett Till is surrounded by bulletproof glass now.
Kira Williams 12:02
Emmett Till was obviously a victim of this racial aggression that I wanted to talk about in my thesis. But so are his memorial signs, oddly enough. There have been several signs that have been put up to honor Till’s memory, whether at the grocery store that he was at or at the site where they found his body in the river. Several of these signs have been vandalized, whether uprooted and thrown into the river or riddled with bullet holes. These signs have been vandalized, kind of similar to the way that Till was vandalized. And I didn’t want this to happen to the campsites if we put more attention on them. So, I was kind of comparing the ways that these signs were put up and not really protected as they should have been, because they’re honoring pieces of Black history, pieces of sensitive Black history, and the campsites are also pieces of sensitive Black history. Yes, it’s, I believe it weighs a few tons and it is protected with bulletproof glass. And that’s great that they did that so it doesn’t get shot up again. But that’s not conservation in my eyes. We shouldn’t have to make any piece of Black history weigh a few tons and be covered with bulletproof glass as a means to protect it. There should be actual conservation protections put in place.
Cindy Olnick 13:17
You also researched Indigenous sites and tribal lands.
Kira Williams 13:21
A lot of Indigenous sites just aren’t put on the map. People don’t know where they are in order to protect them, and while I think that’s a great idea, I feel like for Black History, a lot of people already don’t recognize it, or they tend to forget about it. So I feel like if we don’t let people know where these sites are or that they exist, they’ll forget about these pieces of history.
Cindy Olnick 13:43
Well, therein lies the rub. So what kind of conclusions did you draw, or recommendations did you formulate?
Kira Williams 13:51
My main conclusion was to involve community in the work that we’re doing. The campsites are in residential areas in Alabama, and a lot of people don’t even know that they’re there. So letting people in the community know that these sites with such an important history are in their neighborhood, and asking them what they think we should do with the sites and how we can further incorporate them back into their neighborhood and their everyday lives is kind of the most important thing we could do as conservationists.
Cindy Olnick 14:20
Absolutely, and with the campsites, you’re dealing with private property, and some of the Till sites as well, like the grocery store. So how does that work? I mean, I guess it’s all up to the owners, really?
Kira Williams 14:30
Yes, the owners make the final decision. So we shouldn’t do anything that they are not okay with. But if they’re okay with community getting involved in the process, then I think that’s really important. That way everyone in the community can benefit from the history of these sites and learn about what happened and use them to teach the future generations.
Cindy Olnick 14:52
How then could these places be protected from people who might do them harm?
Kira Williams 15:00
I think local designation is a start, and then you could potentially move up to the state level of designation and then potentially be listed on the National Register of Historic Places. And that will give a level of protection, especially against developers or people who want to tear down the site if they don’t know it’s important. I think that’s a start.
Cindy Olnick 15:21
Okay. And involving community then ties back to what you’re doing now at the Getty, right?
Kira Williams 15:27
Yes, with the African American Historic Places project, we involve community a lot in our work. Go into the neighborhoods, tell them more about our project, and then ask them for feedback on our project, and ask them what places are important to them, so we can incorporate that into our project and potentially help them designate those sites.
Cindy Olnick 15:48
Cool and what are your projects? Are they mainly nominations for designation or other things?
Kira Williams 15:53
Some nominations, but also giving community the tools they need to learn how to designate and giving them the opportunity to get in the room with people who could help them designate, or other important people in conservation and preservation so they can further learn the tools that they need to keep the places in their neighborhood alive.
Cindy Olnick 16:17
Making preservation and conservation more accessible, right? Which is also part of your thesis.
Kira Williams 16:22
Yes, I wanted to think of ways that we can involve the community in these processes without them having to, like, go to grad school and get, like, these advanced degrees and …
Cindy Olnick 16:36
No offense taken. No, but I get it. I get it. Not everybody can or should go to school, but people need to be able to do this.
Kira Williams 16:44
I mean, the reality of it is that this higher education is very expensive, and I don’t believe that everyone needs to get this higher education to care about the places within their community. In fact, the people who live in the communities probably have the most expertise on what we can do to save their specific community. So we need to be going to them and not necessarily caring about all the background stuff that we learned in school and all of the technical terms. We need to go into the communities, ask them what they need, and then provide that.
Cindy Olnick 17:17
A hundred percent. Although we’re still doing it in the framework of all the technical stuff and the stuff that you need to know. You went to school and you learned all this stuff, and now you can use it in service of the communities, you know.
Kira Williams 17:30
Yes, I can use what I learned in school and teach other people without them having to pay all of the money, because I don’t do it for the money. I do it because I care about the community, and I care about these historic Black spaces that could potentially be lost.
Cindy Olnick 17:44
How did you get involved in this field?
Kira Williams 17:47
My undergrad degree is in sociology, and I took an urban sociology course, which kind of then got me into urban planning, and then urban planning led me to conservation. When I was applying for grad schools, I saw that USC had a dual degree in Urban Planning and Conservation. It was like, I’ve always kind of liked history and old buildings and architecture, so this seems kind of right up my alley, so I’ll give it a try, and then I kind of just fell in love with it.
Cindy Olnick 18:17
We hear that a lot, like, I didn’t know this was a thing, yeah, and it has so much to do with urban planning and the larger built environment, yeah. So any surprises along the way in your research?
Kira Williams 18:28
So I focused on the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and it very clearly correlates between the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson and the murder of Emmett Till because they were all high-profile cases that kind of sparked movements. I was very surprised with how there was a recent push for the preservation of African American cultural sites, and how that kind of came out of the murder of George Floyd. That’s an interesting correlation to me. When I think of what happened to George Floyd, my initial thought isn’t heritage sites, the Black Lives Matter movement, civil rights, the lack of equity in this country, police brutality, I just didn’t initially connect those things with the preservation of African American heritage sites. But like people say, history repeats itself. So if we don’t protect these sites and these histories, then things will then repeat itself, as we can see is happening. And I know re-teaching these histories and putting them back in the public eye isn’t going to solve all of the systemic issues, but it will give visibility to these issues and kind of be used as a teaching tool on racial justice in this country.
Cindy Olnick 19:51
Absolutely. So let’s talk about St. Elmo Village. Why did you want to come here?
Kira Williams 19:57
So Rozzell Sykes and his nephew Roderick Sykes, they came to Los Angeles, and they saw this site that was essentially a junkyard, and it had some bungalows on the site. And they decided, in the wake of the Watts uprisings in 1965 they wanted to give the community a space to release their frustrations through art and creativity. So they came to the site, fixed it up, and they actually were raising money and got help promoting St. Elmo Village from then-Councilman Tom Bradley, and invited the community to come in and take art classes, do like pottery classes and just have a space to engage with their local community.
Cindy Olnick 21:06
All right, let’s take a walk. What are we looking at here?
Kira Williams 21:09
So there are ten Craftsman bungalows as well as garage spaces that are used for local community art classes and events, and the grounds are all painted with a beautiful, colorful mural that depicts the surrounding community that come to St. Elmo Village.
Cindy Olnick 21:26
And do people live here?
Kira Williams 21:28
Yes, there are a few artists-in-residence that live in some of the bungalows here.
Cindy Olnick 21:34
When you see it from the street, you sort of know something’s going on, because it’s all of a sudden, there’s this burst of color and this great mural on the front, and you know something’s going on.
Kira Williams 21:46
And St. Elmo, also, during the summer, offers a spot for a Getty Marrow Undergraduate Intern. So if you’re on the younger side and would like to experience St. Elmo in its fullest capacity, that would be a great opportunity.
Cindy Olnick 21:59
You can live here during your internship?
Kira Williams 22:02
You can’t live here, but you can work here. Okay, so we’re walking to the back courtyard of St. Elmo Village, where there’s an even larger mural on the ground.
Cindy Olnick 22:17
Oh my gosh. Real bright colors.
Kira Williams 22:20
The African American Historic Places project that I’m working on at the Getty, they had their kickoff event here at St. Elmo Village.
Cindy Olnick 22:26
Oh, excellent.
Kira Williams 22:29
We can go back to the pond. I think it’s open.
Cindy Olnick 22:33
The pond.
Kira Williams 22:35
So the pond was built in between 1974 and 1975 by community children here at St. Elmo Village, and it’s dedicated to Billy Preston.
Cindy Olnick 22:46
The musician?
Kira Williams 22:47
Yes.
Cindy Olnick 22:48
Oh, wow. Love Billy Preston. Oh, this is lovely.
Kira Williams 22:55
And there’s koi fish in the pond that were named by the local community kids.
Cindy Olnick 22:59
There’s koi fish, orange, little, tiny ones. Hi! Do you know how many people live here?
Kira Williams 23:06
I think there’s five artists-in-residence. There’s also an apartment building right next to the site that also houses some artists.
Cindy Olnick 23:15
And I’m looking, I shouldn’t be peeking in windows, but they’re right here. It’s like this old cabin. Oh, we can go in? Oh, my gosh. Oh, so this is like a gallery space.
Kira Williams 23:27
This is like a studio, and there’s a little dark room.
Cindy Olnick 23:31
Dark room! Remember that? Film. And there’s big black and white pictures on the wall.
Kira Williams 23:39
This is when Diana Ross came to shoot her special for NBC in 1977.
Cindy Olnick 23:46
Oh my gosh. So these are all pictures of things at St. Elmo Village?
Kira Williams 23:50
Yes.
Cindy Olnick 23:51
Oh, excellent. Oh yeah.
Kira Williams 23:53
There’s Mayor Tom Bradley. And this is Rozzell and Roderick.
Cindy Olnick 24:00
Excellent, with actor Jeff Bridges, looks like. Way back in the day. Lots of books, gorgeous bookcases, really beautiful historic images, fantastic.
Kira Williams 24:13
Oh, and there’s Public Enemy when they came.
Cindy Olnick 24:16
Oh yeah.
Kira Williams 24:17
They just came to visit with the kids and perform a little bit.
Cindy Olnick 24:20
All right, and this looks like one of the garage spaces.
Kira Williams 24:24
This is where they hold their adult and children’s art classes.
Cindy Olnick 24:29
So many certificates and commendations for all the great work that is done here. Wow, ooh, there’s an organ and a piano. Wow. This is great. Fifty-fifth anniversary this year, started in 1969. Little cafe and gift shop. Wow. I mean, there’s just art everywhere.
Kira Williams 24:55
Some of the art on the walls was made by Jacqueline Alexander Sykes, who is the current owner and operator of St. Elmo Village. And some of it is from Roderick Sykes, her late husband. And some of the art on the wall is also by some of the artists-in-residence. Patrice Cullors, one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter, she was actually an artist-in-residence here at St. Elmo Village. And after the murder of Trayvon Martin, her and some like-minded individuals came together and used this as a space to mourn and as an activist space. And out of that moment came the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement here at St. Elmo Village.
Cindy Olnick 25:36
Wait, so are you saying the Black Lives Matter movement was basically born here at St. Elmo Village?
Kira Williams 25:41
Yes, it was born here at St. Elmo’s.
Cindy Olnick 25:42
No way. Come on. Why doesn’t everybody know that?
Kira Williams 25:46
I don’t know. Yeah, it’s not really a well-known fact, But I think it’s an important one.
Cindy Olnick 25:52
Okay, Well, Kira, is there anything else you’d like to share?
Kira Williams 25:56
I just want to reiterate the importance of community and the work that we’re doing, and you should make the opportunity to go into your local communities that you’re working in and ask them how they feel about the work you’re doing, and get their feedback and input on the work you want to implement before doing it.
Cindy Olnick 26:13
And there’s an art to that too. You can’t just, you know, engaging, especially because the field is still so white, you know, it’s like, how do we build relationships and trust over time and work our way up? It’s a very long game.
Kira Williams 26:26
Yeah, having partners within these communities that you’re working in is important to helping build up the trust in the communities and making sure that the work you’re doing is actually equitable and effective.
Cindy Olnick 26:42
All right. Well, Kira, I just want to thank you for taking time out of your busy last week at the Getty and sharing both your thesis research and this lovely, lovely miracle of a place St. Elmo Village with us.
Kira Williams 26:56
Thank you so much for having me. This was a great opportunity.
Trudi Sandmeier 27:03
Thanks so much, Cindy for taking a field trip with Kira. It was a fun episode to listen to.
Cindy Olnick 27:11
Yeah, that place, St. Elmo Village is amazing. I highly recommend it if you haven’t been there already, I’m probably the last person to know about it. But do, do go see it if you get a chance. It’s fantastic, right in the middle of Los Angeles.
Trudi Sandmeier 27:25
So this was just the beginning of Season Five.
Cindy Olnick 27:28
Yeah, we got more to come. We’re working on them as we speak.
Trudi Sandmeier 27:32
Tune in next time when we have a chat with alumna, Mary Ringhoff about a really cool, perhaps little known ghost town in Death Valley.
Mary Ringhoff 27:42
It really is a tangible way to connect you with the past, and it’s so rare to have something that’s that hasn’t been messed with.
Cindy Olnick 27:50
As always, for photos and show notes about this episode, go to our website at saveas.place,or you can click the link in the app there, you know with the podcast app.
Trudi Sandmeier 28:11
Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of Save As. Please, if you haven’t already subscribed, we would love a review and tell a friend. This episode was produced by Cindy and Willa Seidenberg. Our original theme music is by Stephen Conley. The song we used in this episode, Lament for Emmett Till is by Ala Ni with lyrics based on a poem written in 1955 by activist and journalist Claudia Jones. Additional music for this episode is by Tom Davies. Save As is a production of the Heritage Conservation program in the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California.
