[00:00:05.65] TODD MICHNEY: And good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Georgia Tech Library's beautiful Crosland Tower for our symposium-- Revisiting & Archiving Civil Rights & Atlanta in the 1960s, introducing the Mayor Ivan Allen Digital Archive. And before I get started with some preliminary remarks, and to tell you the story of that archive, I just wanted to thank our sponsors-- the Georgia Tech Library, and Library Dean Leslie Sharp, and our amazing library staff-- for making this event possible. 

[00:00:36.79] Also the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, and Dean Kaye Husbands Fealing, and the School of History and Sociology, my chair Hanchao Lu, and the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and their chair Melissa Ianetta. Also I'd like to thank our partners-- The Digital Integrative Liberal Arts Center and the Atlanta Legacy Makers. So you could advance the slide. 

[00:01:05.36] So many of you are familiar with Mayor Ivan Allen Jr., who was the 52nd mayor of Atlanta. He was elected in the spring of 1961, defeating segregationist Lester Maddox in the Democratic Primary that year. And you might wonder, why was the result determinative in the spring? That was because there was no Republican challenger in the fall. And Mr. Allen had been elected as president of the Chamber of Commerce of Atlanta in 1960, the year before. 

[00:01:38.14] That was following his career as a successful businessman who turned his father's office supply company into a multimillion dollar operation after he took control of it in 1946. We're proud that Allen graduated from Georgia Tech in the class of 1933, and our Georgia Tech college of Liberal Arts, founded in 1990, is named in Ivan Allen Jr.'s honor. So we can advance. 

[00:02:05.63] I'm showing you here one of Mayor Allen's favorite measures for how far Atlanta came during his tenure as mayor. And that's the skyline-- how the skyline grew during his time in office from 1962 until 1970. And you can see, if we flip to the end of his term, how there were many more buildings built-- many of them by architect John Portman, in fact. So, in other words, Allen oversaw a fast-growing and increasingly cosmopolitan city. 

[00:02:38.27] And arguably, he did more than any other single individual to set Atlanta on its current path. You can advance. Over his political career, Alan came around to support racial equality, and, notably, he desegregated the facilities at City Hall on his very first day in office. He was also the only Southern mayor to testify in favor of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and that was at the urging of President John F. Kennedy. 

[00:03:13.51] And his tenure as all other important steps toward racial equality. For example, the integration of the city's fire department. And just to give you some context, I would mention that Atlanta had been moving in this direction since the mid-1950s, starting with the desegregation of public transportation and of public facilities under his predecessor William Hartsfield. However, this progress was tentative and uneven, especially at the outset. 

[00:03:41.99] Just to mention one example, during his first year in office, Allen acceded to the request of white homeowners in Cascade Heights to build a barricade across Peyton Road. And this was intended to slow the pace of upwardly mobile Black home seekers moving into that area. And although this barricade was quickly removed, the incident hurt his credibility with Black voters who had supported him. And it proved to be a public relations misstep that drew comparisons with the Berlin Wall, erected earlier that same year. 

[00:04:14.49] At the same time, Atlanta's civil rights reputation was understood by many as something of a work-in-progress. And I'm showing you here a cartoon from The Atlanta Constitution by cartoonist Clifford Baldowski. And it's showing Atlanta's progress as still only half-built. I would also note in this cartoon, we see Allen kind of directing the show with Black civil rights activists as helpers. In reality in actuality, they were driving the agenda and pushing the pace of reforms, but this gives you some sense of how important this role was regarded at the time. 

[00:04:51.69] And it's maybe worth thinking about when we commemorate Atlanta's importance as a civil rights center in our present day. Allen's also famous for his successful efforts to bring professional sports to Atlanta, luring the Braves baseball team away from Milwaukee and convincing the NFL to start an expansion franchise, the Falcons. And this was accomplished largely through his facilitating a new Atlanta Fulton County Stadium of which he was immensely proud. 

[00:05:22.85] But here, too, I would mention not all Atlanta residents benefited equally from Allen's economic development policies. The new stadium was built in Summerhill, which caused displacement and traffic problems and offered few benefits for residents in that overwhelmingly Black neighborhood. And in 1966, the year after the stadium was completed, civil unrest broke out in Summerhill after the police shot an unarmed Black man on top of other longstanding grievances. And, famously, Mayor Allen went personally to try and resolve this conflict. And you can see that taking place in this photo. 

[00:06:00.72] Two years later, following Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in Memphis, Atlanta hosted his funeral. And the Kings were actually residents of Vine City, with a house on Sunset Avenue at that time. And partly through Allen's efforts, Atlanta remained calm as civil unrest rocked more than 200 other US cities in the wake of Dr. King's death. In sum, Ivan Allen served as Atlanta's mayor during a momentous and crucial moment in the city's history, a time of rapid social change and economic development that we would do well to revisit and ponder. 

[00:06:38.91] And, I would mention, I had an opportunity several years back to teach a seminar for our history and sociology undergraduates here at Georgia Tech on 1960s Atlanta. And we tackled some really important topics in that seminar. And we also had a digital focus. So we were already using this archive that I'm about to tell you more about and looking for new ways to tell this story. So, for better or for worse, depending on one's perspective, the policies pursued during this time set Atlanta on the course to become the international city that we all know today. 

[00:07:19.41] So what is this Mayor Ivan Allen Digital Archive all about, you may be wondering. So just to look at this timeline, you can get a sense of what happened to make this possible. And the first thing that happened was that Mayor Allen's administrative papers were found in the basement of Atlanta City Hall around 2014. 

[00:07:39.74] And through the foresight and amazing partnership of our Ivan Allen College Dean at the time-- Dean Jackie Royster, who's here, if we could salute and acknowledge Dean Royster. And also through Paul Crater who's also with us, who is the Atlanta History Center's Director of Collections Development-- and also through the support of the Allen family. And we have a representative of the family here, Blaine Allen. So thank you to all of you. If we could just salute their foresight and their amazing support of this project. 

[00:08:21.40] So we found these papers in City Hall. We digitized them. So we selected particularly historically important documents-- about 30,000 pages worth-- to be scanned. And I would mention that the relatively recent discovery of these papers means that they were not available for some of the most important scholarly treatments of Atlanta's recent history. And I have a books in mind here like my colleague Ronald Bayor's Race in the Shaping of 20th Century Atlanta and Kevin Kruse's White Flight. 

[00:08:51.54] And this partnership with the Atlanta History Center and Ivan Allen College allowed our student workers to scan those in-house at the Atlanta History Center. And this was done on a grant from IAC's Digital Integrative Liberal Arts Center, which was in turn funded by the Mellon Foundation. So historians in recent decades have begun adopting computational-- by which I mean computer-based-- approaches. And this is part of a larger digital humanities field that's been gathering steam since the 1990s. 

[00:09:26.15] And one use of computers is to navigate digitized archival collections. And if you think about this, to digitize the papers is wonderful and it saves you having to go in person to an archive and to request boxes and wait for those and to physically flip through the folders. But if you can imagine doing dozens of keyword searches, that still fairly laborious. So we were looking for ways to improve the search experience and efficiency and enable people to find the materials they are most interested in looking at more quickly. 

[00:09:59.91] So we aspire to develop a computer-driven user interface-- or UI in the parlance of computer programmers-- that could distinguish between the various persons, organizations, places, and dates-- the so-called named entities-- in the contents of the collection. So this is called named entity recognition. So if we could advance. We first turned to Georgia Tech's talented computer science majors, and we had a team of six of them for the 2017 to 2018 academic year. 

[00:10:33.58] They built a prototype search interface using free and openly available open source software. And then, with the arrival of my colleague Brad Rittenhouse-- as Dr. Brad Rittenhouse is coordinator of the DILAC lab-- we took the opportunity to continue developing this user interface by forming a vertically integrated project, or VIP team. And this was along with Georgia Tech librarian Wendy Hagenmaier as an additional faculty advisor. And we have Wendy here as well in attendance. 

[00:11:11.90] What is this VIP program? It's a national program, but it's run out of Georgia Tech. And the goal of it is to bring together undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty on projects with longer timelines. So we collaborate all together for a minimum of three years, and this project has been running since early 2019. And we've had 31 very talented student programmers here at Georgia Tech contributing their skills and their knowledge to developing this interface and refining the software that supports the project. 

[00:11:46.71] In 2020, we won an NEHODH or National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities Grant. And that has further supported the project's development. And the goal has been to develop this interface into a general-use tool that could be used with any digitized archive. And we've named this Archiviz, so you can keep an eye out for that at the conclusion of our project, which runs through February 2023. And this grant money allowed us to hire a full-time graduate research assistant in Ines Acosta for two years. That really moved the project along. 

[00:12:25.75] But even as we peered behind the curtain to examine the historical documents or the primary sources that explain how Mayor Allen and his administration made their decisions, and even as we applied the power of computing to make exploring these papers easier, we recognized they did not tell the full story of Atlanta in the 1960s. And let me explain what I mean by that. As valuable as these official records are-- and we strongly believe in increasing public access to facilitate understanding and dialogue-- we recognize that these papers represent the perspectives of people who were in power. 

[00:13:02.29] If you think about it, not everyone has an equal opportunity to preserve their experience and their point of view. And this is especially true for low-income communities and communities that are marginalized by race, gender, and/or sexual identity. Therefore, from the very beginning, we took it as part of our project's mission to increase accessibility to these historical records, to give voice to divergent perspectives and interpretations on these historical events, and to produce a tool set or software that can be applied to other sets of digitized historical records, including those generated by local communities. 

[00:13:40.03] So, in November 2019, right before we won the NEH grant, we sponsored with DILAC funding a community researcher workshop, where we brought 30 citizen activists from around Atlanta to Georgia Tech for one day to explore the Mayor Ivan Allen Digital Archive and to test drive our user interface. And among other community groups, we specifically reached out to the Summerhill Neighborhood Organization, expecting they might be particularly interested to look behind the scenes and also to offer their own recollections of the events surrounding the construction of the Atlanta Fulton County Stadium and talk about the difficulties that had created in their neighborhood. 

[00:14:21.30] And so, by bringing individuals of diverse backgrounds together to discuss history, memory, and how to use archives to preserve history, we got some really valuable feedback on how to make our search interface more intuitive, more useful. And this was really an invaluable experience that we hope to continue and reproduce moving into the future. So my colleague Brad Rittenhouse will be here during the lunch break in one of the other rooms on this floor with the interface available. 

[00:14:54.91] So if any of you would like to try this out and pop some terms in there and see what results we can get, I'll encourage you to do that. And if I can find him before the lunch break, I will introduce him or we'll direct you to that room if you're interested in doing that. But, in the meantime, we have a video where we can show you how this interface can be useful. And this is an iteration from several years back. So it's actually come a long way further than you can even see in this demonstration video. But we can just roll this so you can get some sense of really what we did here and why this is helpful. 

[00:15:33.62] [VIDEO PLAYBACK] 

[00:15:34.06] - So, to demonstrate the capabilities of the interface, we'll do a search related to Jack Adair, who was a real estate developer in Atlanta in the 1950s. So first, we would put a keyword search term into the bar here. I'm coming up with 105 results. You could actually look through the individual documents in this viewing pane here in a more traditional way of using a digital archival collection, but the capability of the interface we've designed is such that we can visualize the connectivity between different named entities in the document. 

[00:16:17.17] So for example, if we look under person we can find Mr. Adair here and see in which of these documents containing the search term Adair Mr. dare himself is connected. We might get some sense of what his civic roles were, using the folder topics with the original archival collection. So we can grab his node and pull it out, zoom in, And we can see some of the different causes or organizations in which he might have been involved like the Urban Coalition, Central Atlanta Progress, the Citizens Advisory Committee for Urban Renewal, racial matters in Southwest Atlanta. 

[00:17:03.13] And that might not be surprising because we know the neighborhood of Deer Park I had a lot of racial tension in the 1950s. So we might look at one of these documents. In fact, you can get to the documents by clicking, and we see here a letter from Mayor Allen actually congratulating Mr. Adair for his role at the Southwest Atlanteans for Progress meeting. He's congratulating Mr. Adair and then also speaking in some pretty explicit terms about demographic transition. 

[00:17:42.35] Mayor Allen goes far so far as to say that it is not any deliberate attempt on the part of the city administration to establish the Southwest section as the colored part of town. So that might give us some sense of Adair's involvement in different efforts around town, but we might also be curious about his own business and his own real estate development company. So if we click that, we can get a sense of which documents connect both Mr. Adair and his company. We might also be curious, how does that connect to the actual neighborhood of Adair Park. 

[00:18:27.39] And so we would add a third node, pull that out, and see there's actually seemingly very little connectivity between all three. In fact, there's just one document that's in common between all three that we could look at. But this might generate some other research questions that we would want to pursue. 

[00:18:49.52] [END PLAYBACK] 

[00:18:50.83] TODD MICHNEY: I think we have a couple of minutes break before we hear from Dean Lesley-- Sharp to introduce our first keynote speaker who's Brian Foo. So I think we'll just take a minute for people to get situated. And we'll look forward to our first keynote speaker. Thank you, everyone.