Course Description
This course offered a hands-on opportunity for students to develop new skills as community organizers by learning from the best teachers possible: residents who have been serving their neighborhoods and building grassroots power in Southwest Baltimore since the 1990s. As a community-based learning course partnered with the Center for Social Concern, and co-taught by professors, archivists, cultural curators, and longtime residents, including the founder of Fayette Street Outreach, Ms. Edna Manns-Lake, the course leveraged the narrative power of storytelling to help rewrite a multigenerational history of community organizing in a part of the city long neglected by local government and threatened by open-air drug markets, criminalization, and housing speculators.
Through community immersion, including story circles, oral histories, community archiving, local meetings, and guest presentations, students learned how to identify, navigate, and build upon neighborhood assets. Students also collaborated with a community partner to co-design and complete a neighborhood project by the end of the semester. Dispelling myths, learning truths, documenting history, and honoring decades of struggle in the face of massive odds, students helped rewrite the narrative of Southwest Baltimore, centering humanity and resilience among resident-activists who stayed and fought for their community.
Jeneanne Collins is a poet, writer and community artist. She was a Community Arts Fellow with the Inheritance Baltimore – Billie Holiday Center for Liberation Arts (BHCLA) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and holds an MFA in Community Arts from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). She spent the last year collecting oral histories and facilitating intergenerational events throughout Baltimore City, working with storyteller, griot, BCPS English teacher of 46 years and Elder-in-Residence Charlie Dugger as well as writer, producer, educator and Artist-in-Residence D. Watkins. Her most recent collaborative project is a multidisciplinary installation and walk of remembrance honoring the Black ancestors of the JHU Homewood campus.
Tonika Berkley is the Africana Archivist for Special Collections at JHU Sheridan Libraries and is co-director of the Inheritance Baltimore’s Community Archives Program. She has her MAA in Applied Anthropology/Heritage from University of Maryland-College Park and her BA in Sociology/Anthropology from the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. Ms. Berkley is an archivist, historical researcher, museum educator, humanities facilitator and curator, and has worked for various museums and institutions in Baltimore, Washington, DC, and Philadelphia, including the Walters Art Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Industry, The Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture, and Scribe Video Center.
Daniel Cumming is a historian of the twentieth-century U.S. and a former postdoctoral fellow at The Chloe Center in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship at Johns Hopkins University. He was also a fellow with Inheritance Baltimore: Humanities and Arts Education for Black Liberation. His scholarship explores the intersections of housing policy, public health, environmental justice, racial capitalism, and metropolitan history. Dr. Cumming is a former National Fellow with the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, and he has held research fellowships with the Hagley Museum and Library, the National Library of Medicine, and the Maryland Center for History and Culture. He taught at Carver Vocational-Technical High School prior to graduate school.
Ms. Manns-Lake is the President and Founder of Fayette Street Outreach. Fayette Street Outreach is a nonprofit all-volunteer organization founded in 1993. The goals of Fayette Street Outreach are to work towards building up our community so that we meet the economic needs of our community, to help our youth to build a brighter future for themselves, and to help heal our community from the violence that is happening within our society.
