Kaden Todjo
Research Mentor(s): Matthew Lassiter
Mentor Department: History
Authors: Kaden Todjo, Matthew Lassiter
Session: Session 5 (2:00pm – 2:50pm)
Presentation Type: Poster 31
Abstract
Almost seven decades ago, Radical African-American organizations emerged in Detroit during the period of the contemporary civil rights movement, which lasted from 1957 to 1973. This period had 188 fatal shootings and other homicides by law enforcement, as well as trends and episodes of police misbehavior and violence. Government agencies were held bent on surveilling radical groups regardless of the violation of civil rights. However, it is vital to understand that without surveillance these groups would have gone lost to history, as they often lacked organized records. Currently, there is a strong desire to investigate this almost-lost era, which has sparked investigations into historical and contemporary conditions of state violence, mass incarceration, police brutality, immigrant detention, racial criminalization, wrongful convictions, and resistance to these forces in the modern United States. In this project, we aim to construct a nationwide public database consisting of visual and textual archival documents that have been “F.O.I.A.’d†that connect the dots of official misconduct and provide resources for community groups and reformers. We employ these “F.O.I.A.’d” FBI papers, as well as an established method for arranging such documents, together with other themes concentrating on comparable issues under the same tent, to create an overarching database to produce an overlying database to devise an ambitious and innovative expansion of the research agenda. The method we are employing is first analyzing and taking inventory of existing research documents and news articles, tagging them with searchable keywords and other information in spreadsheets, otherwise preparing them for database availability. Then, we will apply the organized data to a collective and cohesive nationwide public database. This would provide users with not only the tools to research what has been hidden from the public and form historical patterns but also a well-researched record of the physical and social conditions in America’s past, specifically Detroit in the 1950s and 1970s.
