30 Stories for 30 Years

Neighborhood Griot Honored in New Video

“We’ve come to realize we need to make a whole person before we can make an artist,” says Melvin Deal, Executive Director of the African Heritage Dancers and Drummers. For more than half a century Deal has been connecting Washingtonians with their African heritage through dance, the arts, and even trips to Africa. In order to celebrate its own 30-year legacy, the Humanities Council of Washington DC has made possible a brief documentary film about Deal and his extraordinary legacy.

The brief video will showcase Deal’s many accomplishments, focusing on the countless lives he has transformed, including being there for East of the River residents during trying times in the 1980s. The “dance griot” of DC, Deal has maintained a tradition of storytelling, educating, and teaching culture through African dance and music. He has been declared one of “Washington Living Legends and Cultural Treasures” by the Washington Post. Through intergenerational testimony, interviews with community leaders and government officials, and the words and dance of Deal himself, the documentary film seeks to embrace, promote, and honor Deal’s contributions to help shape and empower DC communities, especially those East of the River.

There was a public showing of the pilot documentary film in June, which was 30 minutes long. For more information, please contact the Ward 7 Arts Collective at (202) 399-1997.

30th Anniversary Special Grants

We want to congratulate all of the 30th Anniversary Special Grant Recipients! We have given out a total of 8 grants in the amount of $5,000 each. Save the date - Tuesday, September 21 our grantees will present their projects at the 30th Anniversary Grantee Showcase.

Wide Enough For Our Ambition

New Online Exhibit Explores the History of DC's Segregated Schools

The 2010 Washington, DC Big Read has come to a close, but the final product will be a permanent part of the Humanities Council's Resource Center. On Wednesday, May 26, Kim Roberts unveiled her online exhibit of DC's historic segregated schools entitled, Wide Enough for Our Ambition. The exhibit functions as a walking tour, a photo essay, and an engrossing story of Washington's historic struggle for racial equality in education. Roberts' text, like most meaningful humanities narratives, touches on provocative issues, and questions conventional knowledge. Specifically, Roberts explores the paradoxes that characterized the DC segregated school system during the early 20th century; a time when a substantial proportion of educators in African-American schools held the highest degree in their fields. During this time period, Washington, DC's segregated African-American schools ranked as some of the best in the nation, regularly outperforming their white counterparts.

The images for the exhibit are a combination of historic photos culled from collections at the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution, and modern photos provided by photographer, Sam Vasfi. Vasfi's images reveal the architectural character of the historic school building in stunning detail. Vasfi's unique approach to digital photography allows viewers to more of each building in a single two dimensional image than would typically be possible. There are images of schools in every DC Ward which allows the exhibit to function as an expansive survey of the city's architectural history.

The images and the text are compiled using open source museum and archival software developed by the George Mason University's Center for History and New Media. The program, called Omeka, allows a database of properly tagged images or artifacts to be seamlessly arrayed as an online exhibit. The layouts are fully expandable and customizable, which will allow for updates to the exhibit as more images or information become available.

(Above Image Courtesy of the Scurlock Collection at the Smithsonian Institution)