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Introduction the Story of a Collaborative Project Luke Eric Lassiter 03-470 02 Intro 1/7/04 1:10 PM Page 1 Introduction The Story of a Collaborative Project Luke Eric Lassiter On a cold afternoon in early January 2003, a group of Ball State Uni- versity faculty and students gathered at the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry to talk about beginning the collaborative ethnography that lies before you—the brainchild of retired seventy-seven-year-old Indiana state legislator, Hurley Goodall. After making some introduc- tions, I asked Hurley to talk about the work that lay ahead: “I won- dered if Hurley could talk a little about his vision for this project and how it is we’re here now. .” “Okay, I’m Hurley Goodall,” he began. “I’m a native of Muncie, and that’s one of the reasons I’m extremely interested in what you’re doing. On behalf of the community, I’d like to thank you. .” Hurley pulled out a piece of paper from a folder that sat on the table in front of him. It was a selection from his own writing. “I would just like to read you part of the original Lynd plan—to tell you why this project is being done.” Hurley began reading: “In 1929, Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd [published] . what they called an ‘objective study’ of American society. The method they used was to come and live in that American community, observe the people, the institutions, and forces that made the community work. The effort was also designed to show how com- munities change over time, but also how certain things did not change. The choice of the Muncie community was determined, in part, by pop- ulation. .” Hurley looked up from his reading. “And this is the part I’m inter- ested in,” he said, “. a homogeneous native born population, a small foreign-born and Negro population that could basically be ignored.” “That was the standard the Lynds set,” said Hurley after a short pause. “So, in essence, the African American community here . was 1 03-470 02 Intro 1/7/04 1:10 PM Page 2 2 / Luke Eric Lassiter completely ignored by that study. And, hopefully, some of the things you’ll be doing will fill that void.”1 When Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd first published Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture in 1929, it was immediately heralded for its unprecedented survey of a “typical” American city. With few ex- ceptions, social scientists had never attempted an American-based study so broad in its scope.2 Influenced by anthropologists such as Clark Wissler (who wrote the book’s foreword), the Lynds used anthropologi- cal research methods to organize their fieldwork (long-term participa- tion and observation in one locality).3 The Lynds also used the theoretical approaches to culture in use among the day’s social anthropologists to organize their writing: they split their study into six broad cultural cate- gories (with each receiving treatment in individual chapters)—Getting a Living, Making a Home, Training the Young, Using Leisure, Engaging in Religious Practices, and Engaging in Community Activities—categories that social anthropologists used as guiding categories to explain human behavior cross-culturally.4 Wrote the Lynds: Whether in an Arunta village in Central Australia, or in our own seem- ingly intricate institutional life of corporations, dividends, coming-out parties, prayer meetings, freshmen, and Congress, human behavior appears to consist in variations upon a few major lines of activity: get- ting the material necessities of food, clothing, shelter; mating; initiat- ing the young into the group habits of thought and behavior; and so on. This study, accordingly, proceeds on the assumption that all the things people do in this American city may be viewed as falling under one or another of [these] . six main-truck activities.5 At a time when anthropology had its sights set on non-Western tribal peoples, Middletown became a sociology classic, and remains so today. It has never gone out of print. The Lynds chose Muncie because they perceived it to be a rela- tively homogeneous community. In many ways it was. In the 1920s, Muncie was a medium-sized city “large enough to have put on long trousers and to take itself seriously, and yet small enough to be stud- ied from many aspects as a unit”; was relatively self-contained and not “a satellite city” of a larger metropolis; and had “a small Negro and foreign-born population.”6 Although Muncie’s black population was indeed a small percentage of the overall Muncie population, im- portantly, the Lynds missed that Muncie’s black community was growing at a faster rate, and was indeed larger, as a proportion of 03-470 02 Intro 1/7/04 1:10 PM Page 3 The Story of a Collaborative Project / 3 overall population in Muncie, than in such major cities as Chicago, New York, or Detroit.7 One can almost excuse the Lynds for missing this, especially be- cause, in recognizing their omissions of “racial change” in lieu of their focus on the larger “base-line group,” they acknowledged that they were ignoring significant heterogeneities such as race, and thus en- couraged that “racial backgrounds may be studied by future work- ers.”8 Several researchers took up the Lynds’s call, focusing on different racial and ethnic groups in Muncie, including its African American population.9 But even so, when one reads the corpus of Middletown literature—for this literature is much larger for Muncie than for any other town of its size—one still may be struck by how the contributions of African Americans to the larger Muncie community are so often cat- egorically ignored, even dismissed. The most recent study of Middle- town, Back to Middletown: Three Generations of Sociological Reflections, does just this, for example. The author, Rita Caccamo, writes that “[o]nly a small group of intellectuals associated with the college is ac- tive in the fight for civil rights.”10 As we argue in the following chap- ters, black Muncie has been at the heart of a vibrant civil rights movement in the city for the past several decades, continuing to this day (albeit in different forms). To place that civil rights activity solely in the hands of college professors is to seriously—to inexcusably—miss the role of Muncie’s African American community here. For civil rights activists like Hurley Goodall, who, with many others, has spent nearly his entire adult life organizing the African American community around civil rights issues, such omissions of the African American community and their contributions forcefully echo “the standard the Lynds set.” From Idea to Project: Some Background This book is thus an attempt to fill the void about which Hurley Goodall spoke on that January afternoon. It is, however, only a small part of a much larger effort to document the history and contributions of the African American community to Muncie—a small part because Hurley, for one, has collected community photographs, church histo- ries, newspaper clippings, and individual narratives for well over three decades. In addition to this, he has written extensively about Muncie and the African American experience here; much of these writings re- main archived in Ball State’s Archives and Special Collections. 03-470 02 Intro 1/7/04 1:10 PM Page 4 4 / Luke Eric Lassiter Hurley and Fredine Goodall. Photo by Daniel Gawlowski. In 2001, Hurley and I began to discuss combining his own research and writing with an ethnographic perspective. But the roots of this con- versation had begun much earlier—specifically during a museum ex- hibit on early African American pioneers and farmers in Indiana, an exhibit organized for Muncie’s Minnnetrista Cultural Center (a local museum) by folklorist and ethnographer Elizabeth (Beth) Campbell. Both Hurley and I served as consultants for the project, and through Beth, Hurley and I first met. Soon after this time, all three of us were also involved in a project sponsored by Ball State’s Virginia B. Ball Cen- ter for Creative Inquiry—a unique and innovative educational pro- gram privately funded by Virginia B. Ball that allows Ball State faculty and students to design a collaborative and community-based project on which both the students and faculty focus solely for one semester (with no other course commitments for both faculty and students). The project, entitled “Transformations” and headed by Ball State English professor Lee Papa, brought together students, faculty, and community members to explore their memories of Muncie’s 1967 race riots, on which they focused to build an ethnographically and collaboratively based play.11 Beth and I were hired as consultants for the ethnographic part of the project; Hurley as a consultant on Muncie’s black commu- nity. It was during this time that I learned of Hurley’s extensive collec- 03-470 02 Intro 1/7/04 1:10 PM Page 5 The Story of a Collaborative Project / 5 The Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry is currently located in the Kitselman Mansion, owned by Ball State University. Photo by Daniel Gawlowski. tions and writings on Muncie’s African American community, a collec- tion that served as the basis for a third project in which Beth and Hur- ley, in particular, put together a photo exhibit entitled “The Other Middletown.” With all of this in mind, Hurley, Beth, and I began to envision an extension of the “The Other Middletown” project: a Ball State Univer- sity seminar that would bring a student-based and ethnographic per- spective to Hurley’s work. In collaboration with Hurley and Beth, I proposed the project to the Virginia Ball Center, and with their gener- ous support (in cooperation with the Muncie Commission on the Social Status of Black Males, the Center for Middletown Studies, and the Community Foundation of Muncie and Delaware County, Inc.), we de- signed a collaboratively-based project to involve local experts, ethnog- raphers, and Ball State students to add to and complete this part of Goodall’s work for publication.
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