Project preserves history of Okemah community

By Barbara VanDenburgh

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Making space for Black joy is what Carla LynDale Bishop, assistant professor at The Sidney Poitier New American Film School, is doing with her “Mapping Blackness” project — an immersive digital archive of historically Black communities often left off maps.

The work blends traditional documentary storytelling with immersive media like augmented and virtual reality, 360 video and geotagging, made with the help of the ASU Meteor Studio and ASU Prep students. 

“It has interactive features, it’s mobile based and web-based where you can interact with it on location in some of these communities or on your computer and get transported to some of these historical communities and hear first-hand accounts about the people who lived there and grew up there,” Bishop said.

The intergenerational project trains youth to interview elders in their communities and results in a living, breathing archive of historically Black communities. Bishop’s work incorporates stories, photographs, narratives and 3D renderings of communities whose legacies must not be forgotten.

Bishop has mapped communities in Texas and Ohio, and recently the Okemah community in Arizona.

To celebrate Black History Month, Bishop showcased the project as part of a two-day Black History Month event. The festivities kicked off at the Media and Immersive eXperience (MIX) Center in downtown Mesa with a free public outdoor screening of the 1978 musical fantasy “The Wiz,” a Black film classic starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson in a spin on “The Wizard of Oz,” in which Dorothy isn’t a Kansas farm girl, but a Harlem schoolteacher.

“Black history includes celebrating Black joy, Black excellence and Black talent. ‘The Wiz’ is full of that,” Bishop said, and she also sees in “The Wiz” resonance of her own work in her “Mapping Blackness.”

“The lyrics to the song ‘Home,’ sung by Diana Ross in ‘The Wiz,’ exemplify the nature of home in Mapping Blackness,” Bishop said. “What is home in relation to Black communities, especially if that home no longer exists? Mapping Blackness explores the notion of place-based storytelling and community storytelling, centered on what home means in the Black community.”

At the event, Bishop debuted the Okemah stories. The historically Black community was established in the 1920s in southeast Phoenix and was one of the few places in the Valley where Black families were able to own land and build homes. Today, it is an industrial-zoned area, full of barbed wire, big rigs and building equipment, cut through by the I-10 freeway.

“It is important that people know that these communities existed. They are a part of Black history, American history, and made great contributions to society.”

Carla LynDale Bishop, Assistant Professor, Sidney Poitier New American Film School

“Okemah was (designed) with a purpose, built by total strangers who barely knew each other to create a community with culture and values,” said Doris Lamkin Burt-Johnson, president of the Okemah Community Historic Foundation. “Okemah was a sense of a community that created a feeling of belonging that was supportive and valued.”

“We basically just wanted it to be a celebration of the community and of recognition and a way to honor them,” Bishop said.

Bishop said the weekend was a true community celebration, incorporating kids’ crafts, refreshments and additional screenings Saturday afternoon of joyous Black film classics “Cooley High” and “Five on the Black Hand Side.” She hopes the focus on home helped people think about Black history not just as events from a history textbook, but as community and togetherness.

She also said she hopes the event and her project demonstrates how emerging filmmakers can use their skills in service.

“I hope to do more work with undergrad students, and I designed a course to train students how to use media as a service — as a way to use their filmmaking and production skills to give back to their communities.”

“It is important that people know that these communities existed. They are a part of Black history, American history, and made great contributions to society,” Bishop said. “‘Mapping Blackness‘ is a place for these stories, their histories.”

 

 

A version of this story originally appeared in ASU News.
Photos (in order of appearance) courtesy of James L. Boozer Jr. and Carla LynDale Bishop
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