Project

Flint Neighborhood History Project: Phase Two (Host Institution: University of Michigan-Flint)

Program

ACLS Sustaining Public Engagement Grants

Department

Language and Communication

Abstract

The Flint Neighborhood History Project: Phase Two is an urban memory project that documents and interprets residents’ artifacts and stories of Flint, Michigan's original Black neighborhoods. These neighborhoods, segregated by federal redlining policies and destroyed by urban renewal projects, now live in the cultural networks that connect displaced residents. Members of the project team gather, catalog, preserve, and remediate documents, images, artifacts, oral histories, art, and music. Digitized materials are prepared for long term preservation and for academic and public use through web-based spatial, thematic and narrative visualization; for critical and creative curation and exhibition in public spaces; and for research into the nexus of communal memory and received historical narratives. Project partners include the University of Michigan–Flint, the Sloan Museum of Discovery, the Neighborhood Engagement Hub, the Community Foundation of Greater Flint, the Sylvester Broome Empowerment Village, the University of Michigan Libraries Digital Scholarship Service team, and neighborhood leaders.