George P. Johnson Materializing

During my introduction with the special collection pertaining to George P. Johnson, I had the interesting opportunity to peruse through a scrapbook of articles pieced together that featured information on the major publishing houses of colored news, along with an extensive collection of articles compiled about any colored individuals in the news. Something that particularly struck me about the content of these articles was the prevalence of racism in the areas we do not usually associate as being historically racist, such as California. Some of the articles that referenced the marginalization of colored people mentioned incidents that occurred at places like the University of Southern California. Experiencing history like that in a context that made it feel so real and close to my own world helped me to foster a deeper connection to the world George P. Johnson worked so tremendously to preserve. It also helped bring into the focus the context of the race film industry, and helped give me insight into why there was a basis for the development of race film.

After spending time unboxing materials from the George P. Johnson special collection, I found my reaction to who Johnson was to be something along the lines of clarity. When I read the oral history about his life, I was struck by the tumultuousness and vibrancy of his livelihood; it seemed to me that his upbringing, his career, and his described relationships contained enough material for several people over. Despite that initial sense of Johnson, I found that by looking through his collection, in particular several of his scrapbooks, I gained insight into another part of his life: his fastidious preservation of anything and everything related to colored people during this era. The physical material itself maintains invaluable information surrounding this period in history on this specific matter, but on a microcosmic level, it reveals a facet to Johnson as someone who regardless of the external events in his life, still took the care to preserve a narrow section of history that he valued.

In that sense, I felt that the materiality of the objects I saw encompassed more than just the physical, in line with theories, such as the ones described in the Chicago School of Media Theory’s article, which expresses symbolic meaning surpassing physicality. In one sense, these objects maintain value for the rarity of their existence, a purely physical attribute. But the manner in which it preserves who George P. Johnson was, and the attitudes and atmosphere surrounding race, film, and race film in the early 1900’s, creates the magnitude of worth. This intangible capturing of Johnson’s life and person, as well as the race film industry, within these objects emphasizes some of the points made in Conn’s article on “Do Museums Still Need Objects?”; artifacts, when presented effectively, can tell an immense amount of a narrative without requiring mountains of educational programming. As we move forward with the exhibit, I believe we will have the opportunity to select carefully from the volumes of objects in the collect, while also being able to employ the technique of history museums that Conn describes. He states that history museums seek to uplift visitors, not through impressive art and science that awes us, but rather by showing how far humanity has come. From my brief interactions with the collection, I believe that the material we have access to will allow us to capture the man and the environment in an educational and impactful way.