By Elliott Nace | Staff Writer
The university’s history department will host a worship and presentation event about senior history majors’ research on African American history at Toliver Chapel Missionary Baptist Church in Waco on Wednesday. The Toliver Chapel Student Showcase, which will shed light on the volume of topics found in the study of African American history, seeks to expose presenting undergraduates and attendees alike to the kind of work commonly found in the academic world.
Ralph and Bessie Mae Lynn Chair of History Dr. Ronald Angelo Johnson, whose section of the history department’s capstone seminar will present on Wednesday evening, said the capstone seminar intends to offer students an alternative experience to writing a term paper, and instead invites them to present their research to a larger audience in real time.
“This capstone is a way to affirm that as they get ready to leave Baylor, our students have something to say beyond the classroom, beyond writing a paper that only they and the professor will see,” he said. “We want the work that our students put in to go into the archives — the reading of existing history — and then adding their voice to it. We want that to be showcased, to be offered to a wider community.”
Baylor grants students early access to the experience of sharing their findings with the academic world at the undergraduate level, which shapes them ahead of becoming a full-fledged researcher in the field of history, Johnson said.
“Not only do I want our students to showcase their research to other people, but I want other Baylor students to know that you can do this as well,” he said. “I want that to be our mantra around here, that undergraduates have something to say even before they graduate.”
Each section of the capstone seminar adapts its area of focus to the expertise of its instructor. Johnson, whose research primarily focuses on the wide reaches of African American history, said his goal was to guide the class’ projects without intruding upon his students’ ability to innovate and find new academic connections.
“African American history is not some subset of U.S. history; they are one and the same,” he said. “All the projects that people will hear [about] on Wednesday evening, the students chose those. They researched them on their own … History is not something to simply be listened to. History is something that is made, and we really try to help [students] and empower them in this capstone seminar over the semester to make history, not just intake it.”
Dallas senior Bella Masters, a student in Johnson’s class, will present her research on the 1936 Hall of Negro Life, a significant art exhibition celebrating the Texas centennial in Fair Park, Dallas, that was deconstructed a year after its founding.
“The Hall of Negro Life was one of the first African American-designed and operated museums in the country,” she said. “My research has been about the hall and its destruction, but also its rebirth — fighting the erasure of history and then rebirthing it to what is currently the Dallas African American Museum, which is on the same location as the original Hall of Negro Life.”
As a double major in both history and museum studies, Masters said her research within the capstone seminar has helped her realize how museums inform the trajectory and presentation of otherwise suppressed history.
“A lot of the resources that I found because of the erasure surrounding this history were articles from Black newspapers,” she said. “It was the African American community that preserved this history and prevented it from being erased, and those articles were written from all over the United States about something that happened in Texas for a couple of months, which is proof of just how impactful museums are, specifically for minorities and African American history. That is something that has really been solidified to me throughout this whole research process, and will impact my future work in history and also in museums as well.”
According to Johnson, the decision to host the event at Toliver Chapel Missionary Baptist Church stemmed from what he views as an undeniable link between African American history and the church community in which he grew up.
“The Black church in itself is both historical, but it is also history-making,” he said. “Much of the political and sociological changes within the African American community in some ways either derived from the Black church or occurred within and around the Black church. For me to place research done at Baylor, a Baptist university, in a Baptist setting, seems like such a wonderful thing to do … History and worship go together within the Black church context, and so I’m so proud of the Toliver Chapel community who embraced this.”
The event’s name on campus flyers, “How We Got Over,” references influential gospel singer Mahalia Jackson’s rendition of the hymn “How I Got Over,” which Johnson credited as an indication of his students’ work on acknowledging the Black community’s overcoming of adversity throughout American history.
“From the Christian research perspective, it seems to fit that we’re telling the story of how God brought people through things, and connecting it with a hymn that is quite popular and familiar within a Black church community,” he said. “This ‘How We Got Over’ is in itself a historical praise experience. It’s not just lyrics, but it’s about a lived experience where God brought us through something.”
