The "Say My Name: Identifying the African Americans Enslaved at White Hall" project is funded by the Academic Affairs Cross-College/Interdisciplinary Collaboration (CCIC) Project at Eastern Kentucky University.
The primary goals of this project are to:
- Recognize and honor the names and lives of the African American individuals and families whose work contributed to the growth and maintenance of White Hall, in particular, and Madison County, in general. White Hall was the home of Cassius M. Clay.
- Engage students, faculty, and staff from departments across EKU in the effort to provide access to historical documents and create a public-facing online resource that enriches the local history of Madison County and the Commonwealth.
- Cultivate relationships with members of the local community and region to strengthen our understanding of White Hall’s history and enhance EKU’s connection to and presence in its service region.
- Build a foundational historical record that will transform our understanding of the past through its content as well as those involved, students in particular, through the very process of its creation.
By engaging with the “Say My Name: Identifying the African Americans Enslaved at White Hall” project, EKU students, faculty/staff, and/or community members will complete the following objectives:
- Research and transcribe historical documents associated with White Hall to create an accessible online resource and exhibit documenting the names of the enslaved. This will be housed through the existing Digital Collections in the Research Center for Special Collections & Archives (RC-SCA).
- Identify community members who are descendants of the enslaved people who lived and worked at White Hall.
- Invite community members to attend a White Hall Descendants Event, tentatively slated for April 2025, at which preliminary interviews will be recorded.
- In tandem with the White Hall Descendants Event, develop a multidisciplinary art installation in the upstairs gallery space at White Hall. The installation, tentatively titled Hear/Here will include multiple video projections, with an accompanying soundscape, utilizing documents collected from White Hall in combination with video footage and audio recorded on site. Video of the historical, often handwritten, documents, projected alongside footage of the interior and exterior landscapes of White Hall will be combined with a soundscape including ambient sounds from inside the residence as well as external sounds on the property itself.
Student work on document transcription, interview collection, documentary film production, and other aspects of the project put experiential learning at the forefront of this effort. As a result, this project is the perfect vehicle for students to develop job-ready skills and to make a positive impact on our local community.
