{"id":227,"date":"2017-01-18T17:11:47","date_gmt":"2017-01-18T17:11:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/?p=227"},"modified":"2017-01-18T20:38:03","modified_gmt":"2017-01-18T20:38:03","slug":"blog-post-1-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/2017\/01\/18\/blog-post-1-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog Post #1"},"content":{"rendered":"

I remember the box being set in front of me, the anxiety and excitement swelling within. \u00a0Because our box had been chosen for us, I had no idea what it had in store. \u00a0It was almost like opening a treasure chest or scratching off a lotto scratcher, but rather we were opening a box of the George P Johnson Negro Film Collection hoping for a wealth of information and content. \u00a0I was hoping for some good “material,” based upon the definition of material that “(in various\u00a0non-physical\u00a0<\/em>applications) something which can be worked up or elaborated, or of which anything is composed.” I was hoping for something that would spark a passion in me, something that would trigger a flow of ideas and give me a really strong concept of the time George P Johnson lived in. \u00a0I wanted my box to have something\u00a0in it that would\u00a0give me an “aha” moment\u00a0that\u00a0I’d simply know I wanted that in the exhibit.<\/p>\n

Once the lid was flipped my eyes were drawn to the scrapbook in the front. \u00a0The three of us, Aidan, Geena, and I, paid due respect to the folders and started with a folder of clippings from Billboard Magazine, but none of those really stood out.<\/p>\n

When we finally opened the scrapbook in front, you could tell there was something a bit more substantial about it. I remember commenting that I could almost smell the glue stick he used to paste the newspaper clippings into the book. The black pages felt like construction paper I’d played with as a child for meaningless crafts, but this scrapbook was much more important. As we flipped through, the three of us searched for a meaning behind why he put the articles in the book in the way he did and why he chose the articles he did.<\/p>\n

Because the finding aid described the collection as primarily being about Black film, we were surprised to see articles written in Negro news about instances of racism with no mention of the film industry or movies at all. Many articles were written about the KKK in Los Angeles or explicit racism at USC. George P Johnson would clip newspaper articles about the same story from multiple sources and annotate little scribbles about where he got the article and when. You could tell that above race film, George P Johnson cared deeply about documenting the racism felt by black people nationwide, and this is important because oftentimes, in the modern day, these narratives about racism concentrate in the South. It was different to be confronted with the racism that existed and prospered in Los Angeles or Mexico at the same time.<\/p>\n

I think the scrapbook gave me context into what George P Johnson was concerned with. He was concerned about the condition of black people America in general, outside of the film industry, and he felt a duty to document it. \u00a0Interacting with the scrapbook, with all of the work he put into it, gave me more of a sense of him as a person and his intentions.<\/p>\n

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I remember the box being set in front of me, the anxiety and excitement swelling within. \u00a0Because our box had<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh150w17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}