On July 24, faculty, staff and members of the community crowded into Temple University’s Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection in Sullivan Hall for a historic presentation: We Remember and We Recall: North Philadelphia Oral History Project. The presentation featured a series of interviews with stories from current and former residents of North Philadelphia, including Marilyn Baker Alston, Rev. Joseph Williams Jr., Karen Warrington, Lovett Hines, Stanley Straughter, Louis Massiah and Denise Ripley. The project gave them a voice to share the rich history and culture of life in the community as they have experienced, dating back to as early as the 1930s.  

Aslaku Berhanu, librarian at Blockson, filled the event’s tables with carefully selected materials related to North Philadelphia’s history, including a collection of Rev. Paul Washington, a prominent voice for social justice in the 1960s, who once opened his Church of the Advocate to the Black Panther Party's National Convention. They also included materials from Leon Sullivan, a minister, civil rights leader and social activist, as well as some archives of Philadelphia's Freedom Library founded by John Churchville, a civil rights activist and Black nationalist.

The event marked the kickoff for the Scribe Video Center’s North Philadelphia History Festival, a four-day program celebrating the emergence and impact of African American and Puerto Rican communities in North Philadelphia during the 19th and 20th centuries. During the four days, historic sites along Ridge Avenue, North Broad Street and other locales were transformed into living exhibits created by artists, historians, curators and other cultural workers. 

Diane D. Turner, curator of Blockson, was inspired to create the We Remember and We Recall project after she found footage focused on the Columbia Avenue riots in North Philadelphia. She knew in her heart that the neighborhood was full of rich stories beyond poverty and crime.

“In mass media and popular culture, there’s always an emphasis on poverty and crime without putting it in any other context,” Turner said. “Beyond the poverty and crime, there is culture, people, stories and neighborhoods that have wonderful things happening.”  

The Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection is one of the nation's leading research facilities for the study of the history and culture of people of African descent. (Photography by Ryan S. Brandenberg)

The project received grant support from the Alston-Beech Foundation, and Turner worked with Serkkadis Alemayehu, the educational technologist of the Blockson Collection, to gather the oral histories, pull excerpts from the interviews and document them for the project.  

In one of the interviews, Karen Warrington, a dance historian and former ballet dancer, described her neighborhood at the 1500 block of Fountain Street in the 1940s and 1950s as comfortable, surrounded by Black professionals, including dentists and doctors. However, she did not know what the term middle class meant because she felt people always seemed to talk about Black people as being poor. It took her discovering African dance and connecting to the information about Africa to find her authentic self. She explained that as a Temple student, she visited Nigeria and was featured on television for her sense of African culture and dance.  

“It is important to document and tell people’s stories because through oral history, you are getting primary source material,” Turner said. “Oftentimes, the African American community is presented as monolithic, and it isn’t monolithic; it is very diverse.”  

“Some of the oldest Americans are people of African descent, so we continue to honor Charles Blockson’s legacy to document, preserve and disseminate the Black experience,” she added.  

Alemayehu added it was a great honor to work with Turner on the Blockson project, where they produced more than 20 interviews.  

“These interviews allow us to see how essential it is to document our histories and the history of our parents and grandparents so that their voices are captured, presented and available in places like the Blockson Collection,” Alemayehu said.  

For example, Marilyn Deloris Baker Alston, a teacher and social worker who grew up at 12th and Oxford in the 1930s, explained in her interview that her uncle Joseph Baker, a Temple journalism alum, became the first Black owner of a PR firm in the country, Joseph V. Baker and Associates.  

Rev. Joseph Williams, who grew up at 18th and Norris in the 1940s, described in his interview how he knew on Sundays after church he was going to have a good southern home-cooked meal, often featuring roast beef, fried chicken, collard greens and potato salad. It was an after-church tradition, which often brought families together in the community.  

“There is so much that you get to learn by connecting with families, recording their histories and witnessing the beautiful community they worked so hard to build,” Alemayehu added.  

The We Remember and We Recall: North Philadelphia Oral History Project is ongoing, so anyone who lives or had lived in North Philadelphia and is interested in sharing their stories can reach out to the Blockson Collection at (215) 204-6632 or by email at blockson@temple.edu.