Preserving, Teaching, and Sharing a Fuller History of a College and Its Community

One day in 2020, shortly before the pandemic hit, the phone rang in Yves-Rose Porcena’s office. Porcena is the vice president for equity and inclusion at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. A liberal arts college for women, the school was founded in 1889 and named for the mother of a businessman who’d served as an officer in the confederate army.

The colleague on the line was in the library, taking inventory of holdings.

“The archivist says, ‘You know, we have a bunch of books that were donated by the Daughters of the Confederacy. I don’t want to get rid of them, but I’d like to have some context around them,” Porcena recalls, explaining that such context would benefit students who might otherwise be alarmed if they came without warning upon one of these volumes. Discovery of these books’ provenance came around the same time that Agnes Scott College was taking stock of a different kind, undergoing an annual accounting of its pursuit of social justice and greater diversity.

Soon, the school’s president, Leocadia I. Zak, put Porcena in charge of a committee tasked with mining the school’s past and illuminating stories and histories there that were less known, if at all. Unearthing these untold narratives might help the college move into a thriving, equitable, and transparent future for its entire community, which includes residents of the city in which it is located.

Transformed Future grew from that initial seed. An initiative led by Agnes Scott and supported by a Mellon Foundation grant over three years, it brings together students, faculty, and in some parts, members of the broader Decatur community who are otherwise unaffiliated with the college to undertake historical preservation, curricular development, and community building within the college and in partnership with the City of Decatur. Transformed Future includes initiatives that aim to bring awareness to making curricula more inclusive; certification programs and training on diversity, equity, and inclusion; a women’s leadership conference; Juneteenth celebrations; and more.

“We talk about having a diverse community, but what does that look like?” asks Renae Jackson, the equity and engagement director for Decatur and the city’s liaison for Transformed Future. “Who’s in our community currently, and who used to be?”

The answer has changed in the past four decades, as Decatur’s Black population has fallen from roughly 41 to 20 percent of residents. Discriminatory policies such as redlining, in which banks refused mortgages to aspiring Black homeowners, harmed what was once a robust community of color, Jackson says. Demographics shifted further when authorities put rapid transit stations in Decatur’s Black neighborhoods, dislocating families and paving the way for gentrification and the homogenization that accompanied it.

Emotional ties to a place, however, can withstand being uprooted. Folks who have left Decatur physically find memories that remain anchored there. To celebrate Decatur’s bicentennial in 2023, the city has launched the 200 Stories Project, inspired by StoryCorps. This oral history project enlists Decatur residents past and present, as well as Agnes Scott students and faculty, to interview other people from all backgrounds about their lives in and out of the city. These interviews will make up the foundation of what Jackson calls an “ongoing community story vault.” Agnes Scott faculty and students will conduct historical research, help archive interviews, and create a related interactive digital map. When complete, the stories will provide a nuanced depiction of Decatur, illuminating its histories as well as the ways racism has affected its evolution.

The 200 Stories Project will “lift up those things that we tend to bury, that we tend not to want to address,” Jackson says. “How do we examine our past and take the moment now to heal from those harms from the past, and how do we become better?”

That pressing question drives the initiative’s other elements, like new course development. Robin Morris, chair of history at Agnes Scott, is in the process of creating one for the fall 2023 semester. Her undergraduates will sift through old syllabi, catalogs, and other materials that might illuminate whose voices were embraced on campus and whose were suppressed or ignored.

Morris wants students to analyze: “What classes are offered? What languages? When did the school start offering courses that even looked at Asia? When did the school start offering courses that looked at Africa? What was the library buying? What speakers were coming to campus?”

Arguably more important than the answers are the omissions—they constitute an erasure. What books did the school not order? Which speakers did it fail to invite? Whose faces are missing in yearbook photos?

Take the example of Samuel Harper. Though his name is not engraved on any facade at Agnes Scott, he is vital to the school, says Porcena. “The bricks in the bell tower were put down by an African American craftsperson. None of us here today knew that. Nobody talked about it.”

When Agnes Scott students have something joyous to mark, such as landing a job, they ascend the iconic tower to ring its bell.

“Who else was involved in building this place? Who else should we be finding out about?” Porcena asks.

Excavating such stories and integrating them into the classrooms of today is critical, so that students  “don’t just hear about the founders who have money, but they hear about the other people—the cafeteria lady who helped [for] 30 years,” Porcena says. “People call this school ‘predominantly white,’ but there were always Black folks on this campus working in the cafeteria, cleaning the dorms. We want to find their stories. We want to find descendants who can tell us about their contributions. And we want our students to learn about it. That’s one way to think about decolonizing the curriculum.”

Another is to engage faculty to examine their own syllabi and to consider how they may marginalize or privilege certain voices and, furthermore, what reparative steps they can take so that syllabi and courses are more inclusive and diverse.

Erica Harris, a professor of biology at Agnes Scott, will lead an intensive four-week summer workshop on this topic. To illustrate how a biology class curriculum might be decolonized, she invokes Charles Darwin and suggests students consider not just his discoveries on evolution, but how he got to the Galapagos Islands in the first place. Who funded him? What elite affiliations did he enjoy that eased his journey?

“What made people scientists back then was their social status,” Harris says. “They usually were associated with a society—Charles Darwin with the Linnean Society. But those scientific societies, they were white men only. White women barely had a chance. … Who goes down in history is the one who has it the most documented, who has the most funding.”

That has been true, too, at Agnes Scott. Yet, as Morris points out, it is the invisible laborers who keep the lights on and offer students friendship and support. She wants her students to talk with the security guards and groundskeepers, for example, and to preserve their stories to demonstrate who made it possible for white students to matriculate and to live day to day.

“When we’ve talked about any college as an all-white institution, that erases so much of the labor and so much of the community that existed,” Morris continues. “Putting these stories back in—we’re really getting a fuller sense of not just the labor, but also the whole community. It can challenge us to see our present and our future in more meaningful ways.”

Agnes Scott is a much different place than it was a hundred years ago, when it served a largely white, affluent population. Now, more than 60 percent of its undergraduates are people of color; 35 percent are Black. But in spite of that change, the school’s mission remains the same.

“Agnes Scott was founded as a school to offer education to people who were marginalized because of their gender,” says Porcena. “Those were women. In my thinking, that mission has not changed today. It’s a diverse group of women, it’s women who are marginalized. It’s students who identify as female, transgender, or nonbinary. So we’ve opened up the door, but the mission remains to be committed to educating women.”