“We had downloads from Ukraine and the Russian Federation on the same day—two countries at war with one another,” said Mark Naison, Ph.D., co-founder of BAAHP and professor of history and African & African American studies at Fordham. “It’s so exciting that people all over the world are interested in our interviews and essays.”

Downloads From Nearly Every Continent

BAAHP was founded more than two decades ago in collaboration with the Bronx County Historical Society in order to preserve the history of the Bronx and its people. The bulk of the archive contains verbatim transcripts of interviews with political leaders, educators, musicians, social workers, businesspeople, clergy, athletes, and leaders of community-based organizations who have lived and worked in the Bronx since the 1930s, in addition to scholarly essays about the Bronx. For many years, these articles lived on audio tapes and paper. In 2015, they were uploaded to a digital archive that made their stories fully accessible to the public. 

Since then, thousands of scholars, students, and strangers have accessed the digital archive from around the world. People in Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Caribbean have downloaded resources from the archive, according to data from Fordham Libraries. Online visitors in Singapore and Paris even downloaded the entire archive twice, said Naison. 

Among the scholars is Peter Schultz Jørgensen, an urbanist and author in Denmark who is using information from the digital archive to complete his upcoming book “Our Bronx!” 

“Portraying and documenting everyday life in the Bronx, as it once was, is essential in protecting the people of the Bronx from misrepresentation, while at the same time, providing valuable knowledge that can help shape their future,” Jørgensen said. “Just as BAAHP gathers the web of memory, my book is about the struggles that people and community organizations have waged and are waging in the Bronx. And more important, and encouraging, it talks about how they are now scaling up via the Bronx Wide Coalition and their Bronx Wide Plan for more economic and democratic control of the borough.”

The archive is also helpful for those who aren’t familiar with the Bronx, said Mattieu Langlois, a history Ph.D. student in Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.  

“I’m from Canada, so I didn’t know much about the Bronx,” said Langlois, who served as a BAAHP graduate assistant, ensuring interviews were transcribed correctly and uploading them to the archive. “It’s a good source of information for many people.” 

A Treasure Trove for Scholars

It’s unclear what thousands of other visitors are searching for in the archives, said Naison, but he suspects that some are scholars who are researching the history of hip-hop, a genre born in the Bronx that has influenced scores of artists, including Bronx-born rappers like Cardi B and Lil Tjay. Other scholars might be studying immigration—and the Bronx, a city heavily shaped by immigration, is a great model, said Naison. 

“The Bronx has a global reputation for music, but also for immigration and the mixing of cultures,” Naison said. “And our archive brings that to life.”

‘I Hope People Use It To Think Differently About the Bronx’ 

Brian Purnell, Ph.D., FCRH ’00, a former BAAHP research director from 2004 to 2010 who helped to facilitate at least 50 interviews in the archive, said the archive is also useful for urban studies scholars who are studying how cities have changed over the decades. 

“I hope people use it to think differently about the Bronx, to include the Bronx more deeply and broadly in urban studies in the United States,” said Purnell, now an associate professor of Africana studies and history at Bowdoin College, who uses the archive in his own research and in the classroom with his students. “I hope that it also expands how we think about Black people in New York City and in American cities in general from the mid-20th century onward.”

Naison said his team plans to upload more interviews to the archive—and that their work won’t stop there. 

“It’s ongoing. It’s exciting,” said Naison. “And to know now that people all over the world are interested in this, it makes it even more motivating to keep it going.”

The Bronx African American History Project’s (BAAHP) 10th Anniversary Conference and Concert ends not with a keynote speech, but with four hours of jazz and hip-hop performances and a dance party that lasts into the night.

“We’re all pumped up about this,” said Mark Naison, Ph.D. professor of African and African American studies, founder, and principal investigator of the BAAHP.

With three panel discussions, two talks, and a keynote address by “hip-hop feminist” Joan Morgan, the conference is fittingly packed, given how large the BAAHP has grown since 2003.

Conference organizer Oneka LaBennett, Ph.D., associate professor of African and African American studies, said the panelists come from two camps: speakers who have worked directly with the BAAHP, and those whose work dovetails with the project’s goals. Some, like Morgan, fit both categories, as LaBennett and Naison interviewed her for her story of growing up in the Bronx.

“We have people who have a direct relationship with the BAAHP, scholars doing research on the Bronx, and activists and organization leaders like Nancy Biberman, who is the founder of WHEDco, the Women’s Housing & Economic Development Corporation,” LaBennett said.

The BAAHP started out 10 years ago as an academic effort to create a database for scholars and people in the community to access the Bronx’s African-American history, and rebut perceptions of the borough as a run-down, drug-infested urban wasteland. In the process, it tapped into an undocumented legacy of the vibrant, grassroots music scene that was born in neighborhoods like Morrisania and spread to the rest of the country.

To date, staff have conducted more than 300 interviews, including stories about the amazing jazz, doo-wop, and hip-hop scenes that flourished in the oft-forgotten borough. The musical aspect of the conference will also feature a world premiere of the “Bronx Suite,” an original composition by trumpet player Jimmy Owens.

None of it would have happened without an army of volunteer collaborators from the community, said Naison. He estimates that half of the interview subjects contacted the BAAHP, requesting to be interviewed.

The year 2003 was also the right time, he said.

“I don’t want to say I was this great genius who knew what he was getting into,” said Naison. “But I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, to have time on my hands, and to have a great institution, Fordham, backing me in our quest to give the Bronx people their own voice,” he said.

“The worst of the crack epidemic was over, the crime rate was starting to go down, neighborhoods that had been devastated were now the sites of new housing and shopping centers,” he said. “People were not only ready to tell their stories, but they actually believed there was a chance that people would listen.”

One of those people was Bob Gumbs, a U.S. Army veteran who publishes books on African-American history, who joined the project in 2005. He recruited 15 people to be interviewed, and also contributed his own history of living in Morrisania from 1941 to 1968. On Lyman Place in his neighborhood, it wasn’t unusual to see Thelonius Monk stop by to visit Elmo Hope, an influential bebop pianist.

“I remember hearing people on the block playing trumpets, practicing their drums. That had a lot to do with the identity of Lyman Place, where I grew up,” he said.

It was partly through the project that Gumbs discovered that all of Morrisania was well known for its arts and culture. At one time it had been called the Harlem of the Bronx. He began to realize that his history was a small part of a larger picture of what was happening in the Bronx.

“It’s important for those of us who lived there to show how there was another part of Bronx history that was as good as any other [history]in New York. We might have been poor, but we felt that we were equals.”

The BAAHP has been tied to the Bronx County Historical Society from its inception. Peter Derrick, head archivist for the society before retiring in 2010, said Fordham provided the society with copies of the BAAHP interviews and with student-workers to help him catalogue and summarize them.

“Like most historical societies, we don’t have a lot of money to do our own projects. The BAAHP allowed us to have something we wouldn’t have been able to get—if we hadn’t had Fordham leading the charge,” he said.

Like Gumb, Derrick grew up in the Bronx in the 1950s. But his experience growing up in the area north of Fordham Road was very different, as the population was 99 percent white.
“It was very stable community, and then all of the sudden, in the 1960s, we heard of all this crime and drug use going on. I think a lot of the white people in the Bronx blamed the blacks and the Hispanics for doing something wrong,” he said.

“What I’ve learned from these oral histories is, African Americans moved to the Bronx and worked hard and led normal lives, and up until the mid-50s and early 60s, they experienced the same sort of life as the white folks who moved to the Bronx. This problem of crime and drugs haunted both of our communities.”

Brian Purnell, Ph.D., FCRH ’00, assistant professor of Africana Studies at Bowdoin College and a former member of Fordham’s Department of African and African-American studies faculty, is returning for the April 6 celebration. Working on the BAAHP research team from 2004-2010, he said, proved to be both a professional and personal once-in-a-lifetime experience. It brought him back to both the church where his parents got married and the tenement where his grandmother first resided when she emigrated from Barbados.

“I was a graduate student writing my dissertation and an oral-historian-in-training at the time,” recalled Purnell. “Working on that project was one of the best professional experiences I could have asked for.”

Purnell said the collected oral histories of the BAAHP will be invaluable for researchers looking to understand life in the Bronx.

“This is a unique project insofar as its outcome has been to resuscitate a community that was once thought lost, and to bring variety, diversity, and voices to an experience that was thought to be homogenous and one-dimensional,” he said.

“There is no singular black experience in America; neither is there one in the Bronx. Some of them are hopeful, and some of them are painful. And all of them are powerful.”

Michael Latham, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill, said the BAAHP has been a boon for both Fordham and for the Bronx; particularly in the way it has involved Fordham undergraduates in doing original research in the borough.

“The Bronx benefits by having its experiences documented and preserved, and those become part of the cultural memory of that community,” he said.

“Our students benefit by having an engagement with research and exposure to ways of life that really expand their horizons.”

Naison was interviewed by the New York Times on the BAAHP in 2003. In the story, he said, “So much has been written about the falling apart, but not about the community that fell apart, and the excitement of being part of it, the joy.” Today, 10 years later, he says he feels the BAAHP has succeeded in unearthing joy in the South Bronx.

“So many people in the Bronx today have this negative image of the Bronx of yesterday, which is reinforced when they leave the Bronx. People say ‘You’re from the Bronx? That must be scary!’” he said.

“So when we talk about all the people who moved out of Harlem in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s to the Bronx for a better life and found these stable, multi-generational, multiethnic communities that produced all these amazing types of music, it gets people excited.”

For more information about the Bronx African American History Project’s 10th Anniversary and Concert on April 6, visit www.fordham.edu/BAAHP

Shhh…. Don’t tell anyone, but there’s going to be a big party on April 6 at the Rose Hill campus.

The Bronx African American History Project’s (BAAHP) 10th Anniversary Conference and Concert ends not with a keynote speech, but with four hours of jazz and hip-hop performances and a dance party that lasts into the night.

“We’re all pumped up about this,” said Mark Naison, Ph.D. professor of African and African American studies, founder, and principal investigator of the BAAHP.

With three panel discussions, two talks, and a keynote address by “hip-hop feminist” Joan Morgan, the conference is fittingly packed, given how large the BAAHP has grown since 2003.

Conference organizer Oneka LaBennett, Ph.D., associate professor of African and African American studies, said the panelists come from two camps: speakers who have worked directly with the BAAHP, and those whose work dovetails with the project’s goals. Some, like Morgan, fit both categories, as LaBennett and Naison interviewed her for her story of growing up in the Bronx.

“We have people who have a direct relationship with the BAAHP, scholars doing research on the Bronx, and activists and organization leaders like Nancy Biberman, who is the founder of WHEDco, the Women’s Housing & Economic Development Corporation,” LaBennett said.

The BAAHP started out 10 years ago as an academic effort to create a database for scholars and people in the community to access the Bronx’s African-American history, and rebut perceptions of the borough as a run-down, drug-infested urban wasteland. In the process, it tapped into an undocumented legacy of the vibrant, grassroots music scene that was born in neighborhoods like Morrisania and spread to the rest of the country.

To date, staff have conducted more than 300 interviews, including stories about the amazing jazz, doo-wop, and hip-hop scenes that flourished in the oft-forgotten borough. The musical aspect of the conference will also feature a world premiere of the “Bronx Suite,” an original composition by trumpet player Jimmy Owens.

None of it would have happened without an army of volunteer collaborators from the community, said Naison. He estimates that half of the interview subjects contacted the BAAHP, requesting to be interviewed.

The year 2003 was also the right time, he said.

“I don’t want to say I was this great genius who knew what he was getting into,” said Naison. “But I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, to have time on my hands, and to have a great institution, Fordham, backing me in our quest to give the Bronx people their own voice,” he said.

“The worst of the crack epidemic was over, the crime rate was starting to go down, neighborhoods that had been devastated were now the sites of new housing and shopping centers,” he said. “People were not only ready to tell their stories, but they actually believed there was a chance that people would listen.”

Bob Gumbs returns to his neighborhood on Lyman Place in the Bronx, where he recalls seeing Thelonious Monk and other jazz musicians decades ago. Photo by Patrick Verel

A Bronx Suite
Watch a video of musician Jimmy Owens, who will perform on April 6 here.

One of those people was Bob Gumbs, a U.S. Army veteran who publishes books on African-American history, who joined the project in 2005. He recruited 15 people to be interviewed, and also contributed his own history of living in Morrisania from 1941 to 1968. On Lyman Place in his neighborhood, it wasn’t unusual to see Thelonius Monk stop by to visit Elmo Hope, an influential bebop pianist.

“I remember hearing people on the block playing trumpets, practicing their drums. That had a lot to do with the identity of Lyman Place, where I grew up,” he said.

It was partly through the project that Gumbs discovered that all of Morrisania was well known for its arts and culture. At one time it had been called the Harlem of the Bronx. He began to realize that his history was a small part of a larger picture of what was happening in the Bronx.

“It’s important for those of us who lived there to show how there was another part of Bronx history that was as good as any other [history]in New York. We might have been poor, but we felt that we were equals.”

The BAAHP has been tied to the Bronx County Historical Society from its inception. Peter Derrick, head archivist for the society before retiring in 2010, said Fordham provided the society with copies of the BAAHP interviews and with student-workers to help him catalogue and summarize them.

“Like most historical societies, we don’t have a lot of money to do our own projects. The BAAHP allowed us to have something we wouldn’t have been able to get—if we hadn’t had Fordham leading the charge,” he said.

Like Gumb, Derrick grew up in the Bronx in the 1950s. But his experience growing up in the area north of Fordham Road was very different, as the population was 99 percent white.
“It was very stable community, and then all of the sudden, in the 1960s, we heard of all this crime and drug use going on. I think a lot of the white people in the Bronx blamed the blacks and the Hispanics for doing something wrong,” he said.

“What I’ve learned from these oral histories is, African Americans moved to the Bronx and worked hard and led normal lives, and up until the mid-50s and early 60s, they experienced the same sort of life as the white folks who moved to the Bronx. This problem of crime and drugs haunted both of our communities.”

Brian Purnell, Ph.D., FCRH ’00, assistant professor of Africana Studies at Bowdoin College and a former member of Fordham’s Department of African and African-American studies faculty, is returning for the April 6 celebration. Working on the BAAHP research team from 2004-2010, he said, proved to be both a professional and personal once-in-a-lifetime experience. It brought him back to both the church where his parents got married and the tenement where his grandmother first resided when she emigrated from Barbados.

“I was a graduate student writing my dissertation and an oral-historian-in-training at the time,” recalled Purnell. “Working on that project was one of the best professional experiences I could have asked for.”

Purnell said the collected oral histories of the BAAHP will be invaluable for researchers looking to understand life in the Bronx.

“This is a unique project insofar as its outcome has been to resuscitate a community that was once thought lost, and to bring variety, diversity, and voices to an experience that was thought to be homogenous and one-dimensional,” he said.

“There is no singular black experience in America; neither is there one in the Bronx. Some of them are hopeful, and some of them are painful. And all of them are powerful.”

Michael Latham, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill, said the BAAHP has been a boon for both Fordham and for the Bronx; particularly in the way it has involved Fordham undergraduates in doing original research in the borough.

“The Bronx benefits by having its experiences documented and preserved, and those become part of the cultural memory of that community,” he said.

“Our students benefit by having an engagement with research and exposure to ways of life that really expand their horizons.”

Naison was interviewed by the New York Times on the BAAHP in 2003. In the story, he said, “So much has been written about the falling apart, but not about the community that fell apart, and the excitement of being part of it, the joy.” Today, 10 years later, he says he feels the BAAHP has succeeded in unearthing joy in the South Bronx.

“So many people in the Bronx today have this negative image of the Bronx of yesterday, which is reinforced when they leave the Bronx. People say ‘You’re from the Bronx? That must be scary!’” he said.

“So when we talk about all the people who moved out of Harlem in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s to the Bronx for a better life and found these stable, multi-generational, multiethnic communities that produced all these amazing types of music, it gets people excited.”

For more information about the Bronx African American History Project’s 10th Anniversary and Concert on April 6, visit www.fordham.edu/BAAHP

The Bronx River Rats, of course.

Fordham’s unofficial faculty band will be back at it for their Fifth Anniversary of Dr. N’s Rhythm Review on Saturday, April 2 at 7:30 p.m. in the McGinley Center Ballroom. The event is a fundraiser for the University’s Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP).

Who can resist coming out for an event that promises rock, rhythm & blues, and old soul favorites by actual Tenured Professors? This year there is even a dance contest.

You won’t want to miss this:

Or this:

So far, those faculty performing include Mark “Notorious Ph.D.” Naison, Ph.D., professor of African and African-American studies, Paul “Dr. Blues” Cimbala, Ph.D., professor of history, Christophe “Daddy” Chalamet, Ph.D., associate professor of theology and Asif “Punk” Siddiqi, Ph.D., associate professor of history, but there are likely to be some other add-ons (perhaps even a dean, who knows?)

Fordham’s student acappella group, the Satin Dolls, will open the set. For an idea of what you are in for, read a review here. Tickets are $10, $5 with student i.d., and all proceeds go to the BAAHP.

–Janet Sassi

“We at the Bronx African American History Project are very excited to offer this opportunity to the students and community organizations we work with,” said Mark Naison, Ph.D., professor and chair of African and African-American studies. “I strongly recommend that Fordham students and alums with interest in the non-profit world attend this seminar as jobs in fundraising and development are always available even in a recession.”

Fordham alumna Molly Neville (FCRH ’06) and Tricia Keck of OAC Productions will lead the seminar. Neville once served as an event planner for the BAAHP and has had a successful career as a fundraiser and event planner in the Boston metropolitan area since graduating from Fordham.

Lunch will be served but space is limited. Those interested in participating should call (718) 817-3748 to RSVP.

—Gina Vergel

Anna Kwakyewaah Pollard, who owns a medical supply firm in San Diego, gave her presentation at the close of Africa Week 2010. The festival included a health fair, film screening, lectures and performances to showcase African culture on campus.

Kwakyewaah Pollard, a nurse who grew up in the African country of Liberia, said she began looking into owning her own business while working at a hospital.

“I always had a passion for helping others, but also saw an opportunity to get into an area that was potentially fruitful,” she said. Today, Kwakyewaah Pollard’s business employs 20 people and has the potential to enter the New York market. But it wasn’t an overnight success story.

“I had to apply for certification, get funding, find a good location, figure out marketing strategies and more,” she said. “Before I got final approval, I had to store supplies in a warehouse for nearly a year. That was tough—having to pay for storage in addition to my mortgage and other bills.”

Kwakyewaah Pollard often speaks at community events for minorities in California on how to run a successful business. She highlighted statistics that put black-owned businesses into perspective:

•    In the United States, black-owned businesses make up less than 5 percent of all companies.
•    Black-owned businesses are 20 percent more likely to fail within their first four years than white-owned businesses.
•    Black-owned businesses tend to start with less capital, and are four times more likely to be denied credit than are   white-owned firms.
•    In addition, African-Americans are less likely to benefit from the multigenerational family and social ties that often lead to business partnerships among white-owned firms.

“So you can imagine that being African is a huge challenge,” she said. “I remember people asked me why I was opening a business. They said I already had a good job as a nurse. I told them I was doing this so that someday we could do better for ourselves.”

Attitude is important, Kwakyewaah Pollard said. For example, when asked if her accent posed challenges, she said it provides just the opposite.

“My accent is a blessing because when people hear me speak, they ask where I am from,” she said. “Instantly we have an ice breaker.”

Kwakyewaah Pollard, who said she is the sole female owner of a medical supply firm in the San Diego area, offered encouraging words for women in the audience.

“You can do anything,” she said. “Take your time and put all of your effort into it. I’m living proof.”

The theme of Africa Week 2010 was “Culture and Democracy: Using Culture as a Tool to Enhance the Growth of Democracy in Africa.” The Department of African and African-American Studies sponsored the event with the African Cultural Exchange, a student club.

Jane Kani Edward, Ph.D., postdoctoral fellow and director of African immigration research and the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP), organized the festival with Kojo Ampah, a third-year student at Fordham College of Liberal Studies and the chair of the Africa Week planning committee.

The Bronx African-American History Project documents the history of people of African descent in the Bronx.