More Useful Info and a Couple More Resources

Originally published by The 19th

This story was published in partnership with Them.

Reached by phone in the days following the election, LGBTQ+ movement leaders promised they are more prepared than ever to face off against a second Trump administration.

“We’re ready,” said Heron Greenesmith, deputy director of policy at the Transgender Law Center, a civil rights organization. “We did extensive scenario planning, internal and external. We did safety planning internally. We did scenario planning with partners, cross movement, inter movement, trans specific, LGBT.”

For transgender Americans, the moment feels particularly vulnerable. President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to end what he has termed “transgender insanity” and cut Medicaid and Medicare funding to health providers offering gender-affirming health care on his first day in office.

The result is that many trans Americans are reeling, feeling that the country has elected a man set on wiping them off the face of the earth.

Responding to the election, Sarah Warbelow’s voice broke.

“There’s so much love,” she said. “Love is still out there, and that is not what this election was about.”

Warbelow isn’t transgender. But her daughter is. And as the vice president of legal for the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ rights organization, the Human Rights Campaign, Warbelow will be tasked with shoring up protections for queer Americans as Trump retakes office.

Warbelow’s tone turned from teary to defiant as she talked about a slew of political ads attacking transgender Americans, many of them run by Trump and his surrogates. They don’t represent the feelings of the nation, she said.

“A majority of voters found the anti-trans advertisements were just mean-spirited,” she said.

But Kierra Johnson, president of the National LGBTQ Task Force, one of the community’s largest organizations focused on field organizing and political change, said 2024 is nothing like 2016 when Trump was first elected.

“The strategies are already in motion across movements,” Johnson said.

“Yes, we should be worried,” Johnson said, adding that Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump term written by his former advisors, makes extremely concerning suggestions about how to approach LGBTQ+ rights. “They put it in black and white. If we don’t take that as serious, then that’s on us. Whether they execute or not, that’s something else.”

Advocates said there are a number of things trans people can do immediately to protect their rights and safety before January. Here’s how the nation’s LGBTQ+ leaders feel things will go in the top policy areas impacting trans people and how trans folks can prepare ahead of January 2025.

Identification and gender markers

For people who need updated gender markers on their identification or have already obtained them, Greenesmith advised looking at state laws first if there are questions.

“The laws in your state will impact a lot of everything else, including whether or not you can get your name and gender changed to match,” Greenesmith said.

Some have expressed fears that having an “X” gender marker on a driver’s license or passport instead of the formerly standard “M” or “F” will make them a target in the new administration. Advocates advise that deciding on a gender marker is an incredibly personal decision. Some noted that removing the “X” might make one feel safer, but would be unlikely to erase the paper trail of a gender marker change in government records. In other words, if a trans person was trying to change a marker to conceal their gender identity from the federal government, updating gender markers would likely have minimal impact.

Advocates for Transgender Equality has a full ID resources library with a state-by-state drop-down menu, as does Trans Lifeline, to help people navigate local laws. Both are nonprofit civil rights organizations.

The 19th will continue to provide guidance on IDs, documents and other paperwork as organizations release it.

Freedom to be

Perhaps the greatest fear many trans people have is that simply being transgender will be criminalized. While experts acknowledge that it’s reasonable to be scared, they expressed that the federal government doesn’t have the same resources states have to target transgender people individually on the basis of identity alone.

“When you look at the data and the polling, despite what people are pontificating about at this moment, the American public supports the existence of transgender people,” Warbelow said. Because Trump has shown himself to be incredibly fickle, it’s difficult to know at this point exactly what his plans are for carrying out his campaign promises. That said, Warbelow believes that the president-elect does care, on some level, about his popularity with the public.

Warbelow also believes that the administration does not have the levers to target transgender people in the ways that states have aimed to criminalize transgender life.

Greenesmith is quick to add that worst-case scenario fears are already a reality for many of the most marginalized queer people.

“This is why we can’t catastrophize at this moment, because catastrophization is white supremacy,” they said. “All the things that White people fear, Black people, Indigenous folks, migrants have been facing for centuries.”

Andrea Jenkins, a Minneapolis City Council member who made history as the first out Black trans woman elected to public office in the United States, said that for Black trans women, that also means coming together and rising up.

“What I will say to my sisters out there is we got to stand strong,” she said. “We’ve got to organize. We’ve got to build systems of support for each other.”

Moving

As some trans people consider relocating, “it’s not easy for people to just do that,” said Jamison Green, veteran trans organizer and health expert.

Whether people are considering a move out of the country, or out of state, advocates acknowledge that the laws impacting trans lives in real ways differ from place to place. The 19th will be reporting more deeply on these options in the weeks to come, but Green advises that people in states with trans-friendly laws will be far safer than states with anti-trans laws, if they are able to get to affirming states because so many of the policies impacting trans lives are decided at a state level.

No matter what, “get connected to community,” he said.

Organizations on the ground are ready to greet those who do need to move, said Jax Gonzalez, political director at LGBTQ+ statewide equality organization One Colorado.

“We know that we are a sanctuary state, and that there are many families who have been coming here from Oklahoma, Florida, Arkansas, Texas, you name it, Missouri,” Gonzalez said. “We want to ensure that those folks who do come here, that we’re doing everything that we can to ensure that they are protected and can thrive in community.”

Health care

Trump has vowed to cut off federal funding to health providers offering gender-affirming care to transgender people via executive order. Many fear this will mean the end of gender-affirming care like hormones, puberty blockers and surgeries for transgender people on Trump’s first day in office.

Before panicking, experts advise that this will be logistically complicated for the administration to pull off. For one, transgender people are protected by the Supreme Court’s 2020 Bostock v. Clayton County decision, which ruled that gender discrimination and sex discrimination are one in the same, meaning if the government barred gender-affirming care for a trans man, it would have to outlaw that same care (testosterone) for a cisgender man.

Further, Green said the feasibility of the federal government tracking everyone’s prescriptions would get complicated quickly.

“The volume of prescriptions that are written in this country, it would be very difficult and time-consuming and costly to track at a federal level.”

State controls would have more access, he added. Some people have worried that the administration could threaten pharmacists, especially when it comes to prescriptions for testosterone, which is a schedule III class drug. Off-label use would not be allowed. Green, again, thinks this would be challenging for the administration.

“Most drugs are used off label, and that’s a fact,” he added. “Medicine is an extremely complex field. It’s an art as well as a science … this is why we license doctors to use their medical judgment in applying the chemistry of pharmaceuticals to their patients to help them.”

Further, Trump attempted to gut transgender health care protections in the Affordable Care Act during his first term. The fight over those protections wound through the courts, and the repeal was finalized in 2020, only to be reversed by President Joe Biden, another rule-making process and fight that took four years.

In short, advocates said it’s difficult to anticipate how health care policy will play out. But whatever happens is not likely to happen immediately, and all major medical associations back gender-affirming care for transgender people.

Green said there is cause for concern.

“But I think we have to not just roll over and let them do it,” he said. “Whatever, they think they’re going to do, we have to stay fighting for people’s health and rights and social safety.”

Marriage and family planning

Marriage will not immediately be at risk in the new administration because of legal precedent and a 2022 law passed by Congress called the Respect for Marriage Act, which requires states to recognize LGBTQ+ marriages already performed, even those from out of state.

“If something changes in the future, there will still be time to get married,” said Warbelow. “That is not something the Trump administration has the power to undo it any immediate term”

Still, a couple of Supreme Court justices have expressed interest in overturning Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark 2015 ruling that established nationwide marriage equality.

Advocates advise that for LGBTQ+ people who want to marry, now is not a bad time to do it.

“I think people need to do everything they can to fortify their families and their finances, period,” said Johnson, adding that this can be applied to marriages, adoptions, powers of attorney or wills.

Letters From An American for 11/17:

This is pretty cool to read!

November 17, 2024 by Heather Cox Richardson Read on Substack

Tonight is a break from the craziness of the news.

I often say that 1883 is my favorite year in history because of all that happened in that pivotal year, and one of those things is the way modernity swept across the United States of America in a way that was shocking at the time but that is now so much a part of our world we rarely even think of it….

Until November 18, 1883, railroads across the United States operated under 53 different time schedules, differentiated on railroad maps by a complicated system of colors. For travelers, time shifts meant constant confusion and, frequently, missed trains. And then, at noon on Sunday, November 18, 1883, railroads across the North American continent shifted their schedules to conform to a new standard time. Under the new system, North America would have just five time zones.

Fifteen minutes before the time of the shift, the telegraph company Western Union shut down all telegraph lines for anything but the declaration of the new time. It identified the moment the new time went into effect in telegraph messages to local railroad offices and to the jewelers known in cities for keeping time. In offices that got the message, men had their timepieces in their hands and ready to reset when the chief operator shouted “twelve o’clock!”

In Boston the change meant that the clocks would move forward about 16 minutes; in New York City, clocks were set back about four minutes. For Baltimore the time would move forward six minutes and twenty-eight seconds; in Atlanta it went back 22 minutes.

The system was a dramatic wrench for the rural United States, bringing it into the modern world. Uniform time zones had been proposed by pioneering meteorologist Cleveland Abbe, who developed the U.S. system of weather forecasting. Having joined the United States Weather Bureau as chief meteorologist in 1871, he recognized that predicting the weather required a nationally coordinated team and worked with Western Union to collect information about temperature, wind direction, precipitation, and sunset times from across the country.

Coordinating that information required keeping time across all the stations he had set up. To do so, Abbe divided the United States into four time zones, each one hour apart, and in 1879 he suggested those zones might smooth out the chaos of the railroad systems, each trying to coordinate schedules across a patchwork of local times. Railroad executives, who were concerned that if they didn’t do something, the government would, listened to Abbe, and by 1883 they had concluded to put his new system in place.

Members of the new professional class who traveled by train from city to city were on board because they thought the need to regularize train schedules was imperative. But standard time was controversial. In the United States, people had operated entirely by the rhythms of the sun until the establishment of factories in New England in the 1830s, and most people still lived by those rhythms, their local time adjusting to solar time according to their geographical location.

Telling the time by sundial and history not only was custom, but also was understood as following God’s time. The idea of overriding traditional timekeeping because of the needs of the modern world seemed positively sacrilegious. “People…must eat, sleep and work…by railroad time,” wrote a contributor to the Indianapolis Daily Sentinel. “People will have to marry by railroad time…. Ministers will be required to preach by railroad time…. Banks will open and close by railroad time; notes will be paid or protested by railroad time.”

The mayor of Bangor, Maine, vetoed an ordinance in favor of standard time, saying it was unconstitutional, that it changed the immutable law of God, that the people didn’t want it, and that it was hard on the working men because it changed day into night. Those planning for a switch to standard time tried to ease fears by providing that Americans would operate on both local time and standard time, with both times represented on clocks.

On November 18, no one quite knew what the dramatic wrench into the future might mean.

What did it mean to gain or lose time? Many people expected “a sensation, a stoppage of business, and some sort of a disaster, the nature of which could not be exactly ascertained,” a New York Times reporter recorded. As the great moment approached, people crowded the streets in front of jewelers to see the “great transformation.”

They were disappointed when, after all the buildup, the future arrived quietly.

The New York Times explained: “When the reader of THE TIMES consults his paper at 8 o’clock this morning at his breakfast table it will be 9 o’clock in St. John, New Brunswick, 7 o’clock in Chicago, or rather in St. Louis—for Chicago authorities have refused to adopt the standard time, perhaps because the Chicago meridian was not selected as the one on which all time must be based—6 o’clock in Denver, Col. and 5 o’clock in San Francisco. That is the whole story in a nut-shell.”

—

Notes:

Chicago Daily Tribune, “At Noon today Most of the Railroads Will Discard the Old and Adopt the New,” November 18, 1883, p. 12.

Boston Daily Globe, “Modern Joshuas: They Make Clocks, If Not the Sun, Stand Still,” November 19, 1883, p. 5.

Boston Daily Globe, “At the Railroad Stations, At the Churches,” November 19, 1883, p. 5.

Washington Post, “New Time in Other Cities,” November 18, 1883, p. 1.

Chicago Daily Tribune, “Standard Time,” November 19, 1883, p. 1.

Indianapolis Daily Sentinel, November 21, 1883, p. 4, Quoted in Ian R. Bartky, Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 144.

New York Times, “Time’s Backward Flight,” November 18, 1883, p. 3. https://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5748

Robert E. Riegel, “Standard Time in the United States,” American Historical Review 33 (October 1927): 84–89.

Trump Acts Cordial With Biden While Gaetz, Gabbard, and Hegseth Score Nominations | The Daily Show

It is OK and great to stop the video at the 8:30 mark. After that it gets seriously stupid. But before that it has a lot to say that is true and said in a semi comedic way. Hugs

Service Member Flagged Hegseth As “Insider Threat”

Service Member Flagged Hegseth As “Insider Threat”

November 15, 2024 Extremists, Fox News

The Associated Press reports:

Pete Hegseth, the Army National Guard veteran and Fox News host nominated by Donald Trump to lead the Department of Defense, was flagged as a possible “Insider Threat” by a fellow service member due to a tattoo on his bicep that’s associated with white supremacist groups.

Hegseth, who has downplayed the role of military members and veterans in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack and railed against the Pentagon’s subsequent efforts to address extremism in the ranks, has said he was pulled by his District of Columbia National Guard unit from guarding Joe Biden’s January 2021 inauguration. He’s said he was unfairly identified as an extremist due to a cross tattoo on his chest.

This week, however, a fellow Guard member who was the unit’s security manager and on an anti-terrorism team at the time, shared with The Associated Press an email he sent to the unit’s leadership flagging a different tattoo reading “Deus Vult” that’s been used by white supremacists, concerned it was an indication of an “Insider Threat.”

Read the full article. Last month Hegseth sat for an interview with anti-LGBTQ Christian nationalist Kirk Cameron.

"This falls along the line of Insider Threat and this is what we as members of the U.S. Army, District of Columbia National Guard and the Anti-Terrorism/Force Protection Team strive to prevent," Gaither warned of Hegseth's assignment at @JoeBiden inauguration. AP obtained the… pic.twitter.com/8rJRN8N2dg
— Tara Copp (@TaraCopp) November 15, 2024

BREAKING: Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, was flagged as a possible "Insider Threat" by a fellow service member due to a tattoo he has that’s associated with white supremacists.
-AP pic.twitter.com/m5AWjKYbQt
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) November 15, 2024

CBPP Statement: November 14, 2024 – For Immediate Release

Republican Economic Proposals Would Harm the People Trump Promised to Help

Statement of Sharon Parrott, CBPP President, on key priorities for the 2025 policy agenda

While the new President and new Congress will not take office until early next year, they have already put forward an agenda — through Project 2025, Republican budget plans, and campaign proposals — that would increase poverty and diminish opportunity. Their proposals would raise costs for basics like housing, food, and health care and take health coverage away from people; slash funding for schools where our children learn, roads and bridges we use to get to work, and scientific and medical research that improve our health and strengthen our economy; double down on tax giveaways for wealthy households and corporations while imposing tariffs that fuel inflation; and further widen already glaring differences in people’s well-being and opportunity across income, race, and ethnicity.

These policymakers campaigned on promises to make the economy work better for people without big bank accounts who are trying to get ahead. But their proposals to date seldom match those promises.

Instead, a policy agenda designed to advance economic opportunity and racial justice and help families make ends meet would:

Make it easier for people to afford housing, food, health care, and prescription drugs.
Support children and families with an expanded Child Tax Credit, especially for children who don’t get the full credit today because their families’ incomes are too low; more affordable child care; and investment in our schools so that all of our nation’s children get what they need to thrive.
Invest in the things that will keep the economy strong and growing, including basic building blocks like roads, bridges, and research, as well as protections that keep our communities’ food, air, water, and workplaces safe.
Support these investments with a fairer federal tax system that requires wealthy households and corporations to pay their fair share and strengthens our fiscal outlook.
Create an immigration system that recognizes the critical role that immigrants and their families play in our communities and the economy, eschewing harsh deportation regimes that separate families and embracing reforms that provide people with a workable opportunity to gain legal status and a pathway to citizenship.

This kind of policy agenda would build toward a nation where everyone — regardless of their income or their background — can get the health care they need, afford to put groceries on the table, live in safe homes and strong communities, and have the income, education, and child and home care they need throughout their lives. And it would reflect the truth that our nation succeeds only when all of us succeed.

We are eager to work with policymakers who put forward policies that advance this agenda and we — together with our partners — will work hard against policies that make people less economically secure, less healthy, and have less access to opportunity.

Peace & Justice History for 11/18:

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorynovember.htm#november18

A Russian ballistic missile with cluster munitions kills 11 people and injures 84 in Ukraine’s north

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-missile-attack-sumy-5cd4f9fe2cee1ae8aed67d63c22b0703

Russia has been doing this, dealing out pain to the people of Ukraine while Biden refused to let him use the weapons to hit Russia making them feel the same pain. Biden now says OK when it looks like in three months there will be no choice but to give Russia what it wants or fight to the last person and lose anyway. It is sick, but tRump is a Russian / Putin toady. We failed to live up to a promise we made to Ukraine because of Biden’s out of touch fears from the 1950s. Hugs

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By SAMYA KULLAB and ILLIA NOVIKOV

Updated 4:36 AM EST, November 18, 2024

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KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A Russian ballistic missile with cluster munitions struck a residential area of a northern Ukraine city, killing 11 people including two children and injuring 84 others, officials said Monday.

The two children killed in the strike on Sumy late Sunday were a 9-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl, the regional prosecutor’s office said. Six injured children are in critical condition, it said.

The attack damaged 15 buildings, including two educational facilities, the prosecutor’s office said. A search and rescue operation continued Monday, on the eve of the war’s 1,000-day milestone.

Sumy lies 40 kilometers (24 miles) from the Russian border.

Also Sunday, U.S. President Joe Biden authorized for the first time the use of U.S.-supplied longer-range missiles by Ukraine to strike inside Russia, after extensive lobbying by Ukrainian officials.

The weapons are likely to be used in response to North Korea’s decision to send thousands of troops to support Russia in the Kursk region where Ukraine mounted a military incursion over the summer.

It is the second time the U.S. has permitted the use of Western weapons inside Russian territory within limits after permitting the use of HIMARS systems, a shorter-range weapon, to stem Russia’s advance in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region in May.

The first reaction from Ukraine to the long-awaited decision from the U.S. was notably restrained.

“Today, much is being said in the media about us receiving permission for the relevant actions. But strikes are not made with words. Such things are not announced. The missiles will speak for themselves,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address.

Earlier, Zelenskyy said that Russia had launched a total of 120 missiles and 90 drones in a large-scale attack across Ukraine, including Sumy. Russia deployed various types of drones, he said, including Iranian-made Shaheds, as well as cruise, ballistic and aircraft-launched ballistic missiles.

The attack, which targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, came as fears are mounting about Moscow’s intentions to devastate Ukraine’s power generation capacity ahead of the winter.

Ukrainian defenses shot down 144 out of a total of 210 air targets, Ukraine’s air force reported.

“The enemy’s target was our energy infrastructure throughout Ukraine. Unfortunately, there is damage to objects from hits and falling debris. In Mykolaiv, as a result of a drone attack, two people were killed and six others were injured, including two children,” Zelenskyy said.

Two more people were killed in the Odesa region, where the attack damaged energy infrastructure and disrupted power and water supplies, said local Gov. Oleh Kiper. Both victims were employees of Ukraine’s state-owned power grid operator, Ukrenergo, the company said hours later.

The combined drone and missile attack was the most powerful in three months, according to the head of Kyiv’s City Military Administration, Serhii Popko.

One person was injured after the roof of a five-story residential building caught fire in Kyiv’s historic center, according to Popko.

A thermal power plant operated by private energy company DTEK was “seriously damaged,” the company said.

Russian strikes have hammered Ukraine’s power infrastructure since Moscow’s all-out invasion of its neighbor in February 2022, prompting repeated emergency power shutdowns and nationwide rolling blackouts. Ukrainian officials have routinely urged Western allies to bolster the country’s air defenses to counter assaults and allow for repairs.

Russia’s Defense Ministry on Sunday acknowledged carrying out a “mass” missile and drone attack on “critical energy infrastructure” in Ukraine, but claimed all targeted facilities were tied to Kyiv’s military industry.

Although Ukraine’s nuclear plants were not directly impacted, several electrical substations on which they depend suffered further damage, the U.N.’s nuclear energy watchdog said in a statement Sunday. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, only two of Ukraine’s nine operational reactors continue to generate power at full capacity.

The Russian military said Monday it intercepted and destroyed 59 Ukrainian drones overnight over several Russian regions. Two were downed over the Moscow region that surrounds the Russian capital, and three others over the neighboring Tula region. A total of 54 drones were destroyed over the Bryansk, Kursk and Belgorod regions on the border with Ukraine, according to a statement by the Russian Defense Ministry.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said the drones shot down outside of Moscow were heading toward the capital.

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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

SAMYA KULLAB

Kullab is an Associated Press reporter covering Ukraine since June 2023. Before that, she covered Iraq and the wider Middle East from her base in Baghdad since joining the AP in 2019.

Numbers Don’t Lie

With thanks to Tengrain at MPS:

No Landslide Nor Mandate for Red Hats

Could “Rosie the Riveter” Be Chinese American?

Despite having their citizenship withheld before the war, Chinese American women in the Bay Area made significant contributions to the wartime labor force.

Could “Rosie the Riveter” Be Chinese American?

By: H.M.A. Leow

Amid the social upheaval of World War II, women entered the American workforce on an unprecedented level. And, for younger Chinese American women in the San Francisco Bay Area, the war made it possible to smash not just entrenched gender barriers, but racial ones as well.

“To a large extent, the war provided an entry for Chinese American women into the larger American society, something for which their ancestors had struggled a hundred years,” writes historian Zhao Xiaojian, who argues that second-generation Chinese American women “grasped the wartime opportunity to enter the larger American society” by joining the Bay Area’s defense industry.

“Partly because of a scarcity of English-language sources on this topic, some scholars simply have assumed that Chinese American women did not share the experience of ‘Rosie the Riveter,’” she reports. But she uses newspapers, company records, and oral histories to push back on this view.

Many Chinese American women already worked out of economic necessity. Yet racial discrimination and social isolation typically restricted them to jobs in Chinatown enclaves.

“It was difficult for many Chinese American women to go outside their communities to work, even when they wanted to,” Zhao explains. “The decades-long isolation had also limited the ability of immigrant Chinese working women to communicate with the outside world.”

During the war, women were also encouraged to adopt domestic roles—preparing “nutritional food” for their families and “show[ing] our fighting men that we are… absolutely behind them.”

But World War II still marked a major turning point—especially for younger, unmarried daughters of Chinese immigrants. Many of these women had either a high school or college-level education.

“With relatively few household responsibilities, in contrast to their mothers, they had the freedom and independence to work outside the home,” Zhao writes. “Since most of them were already living in the Bay Area before the war, these younger Chinese American women were among the first American women to join the Bay Area’s defense labor force.”

In fact, Zhao’s research turned up only four women who were older than forty during their wartime jobs. Still, those wives and mothers capably juggled their duties at home and on the home front. (snip-More; it’s a worthy click!)

Portico’s Part in Telling the Story of Emmett Till

The Emmett Till Memory Project teaches new generations about the tragedy that kickstarted the Civil Rights Movement. Preserving its digital assets is vital.

Emmett Till Headstone

Photo by Dave Tell via ETMP

Portico’s Part in Telling the Story of Emmett Till

By: Sara Ivry

On a late August day in 1955, Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi. A fourteen-year-old African American from Chicago, Till stopped with his cousins at Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market to buy chewing gum. There, Till whistled at the clerk, a brazen act that violated the norms of the Jim Crow South and so angered the clerk’s husband and brother-in-law that they killed the boy.

The events and locations that tell the story of Till’s life and death have been memorialized in different ways and forms over the ensuing decades. The Emmett Till Memory Project (ETMP), an app, is one of them. It uses digitized archival documents, photos of those involved and of sites central to that fateful August day, and more so that users may educate themselves about who Emmett Till was and why his death still resonates. The ETMP’s digital assets are vital to ensuring the ongoing preservation of Till’s memory as well as his legacy.

That’s where Portico comes in. Dedicated to digital preservation, Portico has partnered with the ETMP to ensure the safekeeping in perpetuity of these digital artifacts.

Historian Dave Tell, a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas, as well as the co-founder and director of the Emmett Till Memory Project, spoke with JSTOR Daily’s Sara Ivry about the Project and why its partnership with Portico is so critical.

Sara Ivry: How did you first learn of Portico?

Dave Tell: Kate Wittenberg reached out to me as part of the DEI efforts of her organization, specifically, a pilot project to support the preservation of archival content about under-represented topics that might be at risk. Kate contacted me about the time that we were massively reorganizing the Emmett Till Memory Project. She asked if she could just come along and preserve the site as it existed. I said, “Well, yes, you can, but we’re also trying to make it way better.” She sat in on development meetings over the last few years with us and has been an integral partner, not only in helping us think about preserving the site but helping us make design decisions that would render the site preservable.

Can you describe a little what the site was before you revamped it and what you were trying to do in the renovation?

The short story is we went live in October of 2019, and then in the pandemic, we used our last $10,000 of grant money to pay a DEI consultancy to tell us what we did well and what we did poorly. They did this entire audit, focus groups, they talked to the family, they talked to scholars. They looked at analytics, and they came back to us. Essentially, they told us great content, very bad design, which in retrospect is not surprising. Everyone on the project had been a content expert; we had never had design people on board. We had never had UX people.

The design only works for people who already know the story, they told us, which of course was a devastating blow to us. They also said this reads as if it was written by a middle-aged white guy and I’m like, “Well, I wrote it and I’m a middle-aged white guy—so fair enough.”

So, we hired a woman named Renee Payne out of the Rhode Island School of Design who runs a graphic design firm called included. She specializes in computer design for veterans of the Civil Rights movement; her clients include the families of Andy Young, Harry Belafonte, and family of Malcolm X. She assembled a team of young designers of color, and I said to them, “Nothing is sacred here. Let’s make this as good of a project as it can be,” and they reimagined it from the ground up.

When exactly then did Portico come on board?

Kate came in in the middle of this revamped process, and one of the specific things she encouraged us to do was to avoid third-party dependencies. The example that I understood was if you embed a YouTube video, your content is only as secure as YouTube, which you have no control over.

We really thought long and hard about what technologies we could preserve, and Kate and her colleague Karen Hanson pushed us to think about what exactly we’re preserving. The technologies we are currently depending on do not last forever, right? We changed our mindset. We don’t want to preserve this project so that like it will look the same for everyone into the future, but we want to preserve the assets.

Make images preservable, the text—the component parts.

Eventually we’re going to have a lot of immersive stuff on there. It’s only halfway there now. Portico helped us understand better to preserve the components that make up immersive pieces. In the future, people can use whatever technology is then current, use our same data, and create their own project.

I hadn’t thought about the built-in obsolescence of technology, and that we have to account and plan for that in the design of an app or site as well as in the design of an archive. Had you considered that before Portico got involved?

No, I’m a humanist by training, so when I first started thinking about digital preservation, probably a decade ago now, my gut instinct was we make the website just like a book. It’ll sit there unchanged forever. And Portico has been instrumental in changing the way I think about preservation—that first of all, forever might not be the goal.

Emmett and Mamie Till-Mobley on the exterior of the house they lived in from 1950–1955. Photo by Dave Tell via ETMP

Second, what gets preserved is not necessarily the sort of same experience that our users have today. What really matters and what needs to be preserved is what we have. The Emmett Till Memory Project has amazing artifacts. We have hours of audio with the family that they’ve given us permission to use that no one else has. We can tell the story in incredibly intimate ways and that’s super important. When you open this app, you’ll hear the voice of Reverend Wheeler Parker, Till’s cousin, narrating the story as all this stuff flashes on the screen behind you—I don’t care if the flashy, immersive technologies are preserved forever. But I care deeply that the audio files—and the voice of Rev. Parker—gets preserved. Someone else can build their own tools with that stuff. My ability to make that distinction is a testament to Kate and Portico.

Why is digital preservation of these assets critical in any case?

It’s almost hard to answer this question without going into cliche other than to say: Ignoring the past is a critical component of white supremacy. Full stop. What we want to do and what the family wants to do is tell the story—not that telling the story is sufficient for the change that they and I want to see, but it’s a critical part of the change that they and I want to see.

The Interpretive Center—what’s the first line of their mission statement, “We believe that racial reconciliation begins with telling the truth,” right?—that’s a sentence that accurately describes the vision of the Till family and it certainly describes my vision.

What was the origin of this app?

If you start from the murder of Emmett Till in August 1955 you have to count 49 years and 11 months before the state of Mississippi dropped a single dollar on the Till story. Eighteen citizens of Tallahatchie County thought that was ridiculous; they put up a commemorative sign that got shot, defaced with acid, spray painted.

Tallahatchie Civil Rights Driving Tour sign, ca. 2015. Photo by Pablo Correa via ETMP

In 2014, I got invited to go down, I’d been writing about Till for a decade and a half by then, and the question was: How do we tell Till’s story in the context of vandalism?

It’s easy to shoot a sign in the middle of the country. It’s harder to shoot an app.

What are some of the assets on the app that stand out to you?

My favorite by far are the hours of audio, oral history we have of Reverend Parker that was taken in his church in Chicago. We also drove him from site to site; we put a microphone on his lapel and on the sun visor of the car. And we just asked him what these sites meant to him as we went from place to place. All that audio’s not up yet, but we have it. (snip-a bit More)