This grantee profile is part of our EMS assessment report, “Our Stories, Our Commonwealth.” Read the executive summary or the full report for more information about Expand Massachusetts Stories. You can also visit our web page highlighting key information from our assessment.
Shortly after Erika Slocumb submitted her application to the doctoral program in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at UMass Amherst, a chat with a friend over a beer led to one of the defining projects of her career. As Erika mused about potential dissertation subjects, her friend, an educator at Wistariahurst, an historic house museum and cultural center in Holyoke, mentioned a nascent project at the museum: an investigation into the community’s Black history.
The museum’s archivist had come across a plaque for the Monarch Club, a Black men’s organization which was established in Holyoke in the 1940s, which provoked the institution’s curiosity about what else might be buried in the archives that could illuminate Black history in Holyoke. Wistariahurst brought Erika on to do an archival dig to, as she describes it, “find out what they had in their collection that could contribute to a broader history of Blackness in Holyoke.” Materials were sparse, however. But rather than ending the project there, Erika and the Wistariahurst team pivoted and adopted a new approach: an oral history project to collect stories from Holyoke’s contemporary Black community. A 2019 project grant from Mass Humanities enabled Erika to lead this next phase to “document what has been omitted from the history of Holyoke, so that future generations can have access to the rich history of Black Holyoke,” as they wrote in their 2019 grant application. At that point, Erika didn’t identify as an oral historian. “I just knew that I liked speaking to older folks about their experiences,” she says. But the work with Wistariahurst enabled her to get specialized training with Annie Valk, an oral historian at Williams College.
In 2022, buoyed by the success of the oral history work and the public exhibition that followed, Wistariahurst submitted a successful application for an Expand Massachusetts Stories grant, which enabled Erika to do a deeper investigation of three Black families who’d lived in Holyoke in the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries. Combining archival research and oral history interviews with living members of the families, the project culminated in a new exhibit and a Juneteenth celebration hosted by the museum. Erika’s contributions to EMS-funded projects didn’t end there, however. After a 2020 virtual Juneteenth event, Kaymarion Raymond, an artist and activist, got in touch with Erika about a project that was getting underway in Northampton. Erika became the project director of the Lesbians of Color Oral History Project, an EMS-funded oral history initiative to explore and document the lives of lesbian and queer women of color who lived in Northampton and were active participants in the community’s lesbian feminist movement in the 1970s and 80s.
This body of work has functioned as a container for Erika to practice the kind of community-centered scholarship that has become core to her professional identity. She describes herself as a “conduit” for telling stories that belong to the community. Those stories may come from oral histories with living folks, or they may come from stitching together a historical narrative of a person’s life from all of the little “pieces of them that they’ve left behind.” (In our conversation, she enthuses about archival research: “One of the things that I love is looking at ledgers, because it tells you when this person got hurt, when they needed a new dress, when they built a house for someone down the street because that person owed them money.”) But either way, the works starts with, and stays grounded in, building deep relationships with the community members involved. About the oral history work with Wistariahurst, she says, “The interviews that were happening built on the relationships that I had already been building for two years prior to the oral history project…. We [Black and brown people] know that people come, and they steal our things, they steal our space, they steal our stories. So you have to build that relationship. And building a relationship takes time, especially within marginalized communities.”
“I am who I am because of Mass Humanities, because of the funding. Because of being able to build the community.”
Ultimately, her practice is rooted in a deep love for the people in her community, and a commitment to ensuring that the public record reflects them in their full humanity. She says, “I love Black people. This is why I do it. It’s because I love my people.” She goes on to add, “Black history is, for me, a spiritual thing. It’s a holy thing. I want to, in all the ways that I can, pull our history into public space and to have these repositories of history recognize the importance of Black history in a way that I think it hasn’t, historically.”
Erika sums up the value of Mass Humanities generally, and Expand Massachusetts Stories specifically, to her professional trajectory this way: “It started my career.” Through this work, she trained as an oral historian, learned how to create archives, gained experience making history tangible and legible across generations. She’s been able to bring her dissertation research to the public. “As an historian, I am who I am because of Mass Humanities, because of the funding. Because of being able to build the community. To be able to do the work that makes it possible for the thing that I think makes the most sense for doing historical work — which is working with community historians, working with people on the ground who know the history, who live the history…. I don’t have to dream it, because it exists.”
