Black Elder Citizen Science Project

slider photos:
1. Carolyne Edwards, co-founder of the Quinn Research Center gives an oral history.
2. SLAB RA Emily Thomas works with LaRita Brown to correct the census.
3. LAUSD teacher Esther Ta works with elder Hazel.
4. LAUSD teacher Isabel Cortes works with an elder to correct the census.
5. Carolyne Edwards co-founder of the Quinn Research Center and SLAB director Annette M. Kim kickoff the meeting at First AME church.

In order to rectify errors and omissions in the 1940 and 1950 census, SLAB organized a workshop in conjunction with longtime collaborators, the Quinn Research Center, to gather black elders from Santa Monica to correct census entries.

As part of our Black Placemaking interactive map to help document and visualize the thriving neighborhood that was eventually displaced by the freeway and urban development, SLAB has spent years having its students painstakingly, manually build a database of the de-classfied 1940 and 1950 census. By illuminating people’s names, ages, jobs, and where they lived, the goal is to humanize the map.

We had to manually create the database because of the idiosyncratic ways the information was handwritten on enumeration sheets, which AI still cannot handle. And then, as the Library of Congress acknowledges, we found many errors and omissions of the people from the neighborhood we knew firsthand from years of collaboration. So, with the assistance of volunteer LAUSD teachers as well as SLAB RAs, elders gathered in a lively meeting at the First AME church in Santa Monica to correct the census. They consulted with each other as well as through phonecalls to friends and relatives. This gatherin also created an opportunity to collect oral histories of the elders that are featured in our Black Placemaking Map.