Case Study: The Charles & Jeanette Chipman ARCH
Maryland · Delmarva Peninsula · Salisbury
The very first Archive for Racial & Cultural Healing is a project of community members in the Georgetown neighborhood of Salisbury, Maryland. It took shape in 2021, began in 2022, and is ongoing.
Salisbury is the county seat of Wicomico County, on Maryland's Eastern Shore.
Since 2022, community leaders in Georgetown have been organizing step by step to build out an archive that documents the incredible history of Black life in Salisbury. The range of tasks includes everything from debating its goals and building a consensus, to meeting with neighbors to broadcast & solicit participation, to securing the funds for suitable equipment to digitize paper documents as well as record interviews, to celebrating Juneteenth, and holding community ‘Oral History Days’.
The archiving efforts in Salisbury are based out of Georgetown’s The Charles H. Chipman Cultural Center.
It is for this reason that this inaugural archive is called (in shorthand) The Chipman ARCH.
A strong foundation of Memory Keepers
The couple Charles and Jeanette Chipman were pillars of the Georgetown community from the turn of the century until their passing. They were both educators by profession, and in their lifetime had already begun a process of archiving the incredible community they were a part of.
Left: The condition of the John Wesley Methodist Episcopal Church in the 1990s.
Right: Today, the church is home to the Chipman Cultural Center, which holds gatherings & programming in the multi-use spaces of the historic building, as well as rent the facility for private events.
After retiring from his educational career, Chipman and his wife focused their attention on preserving the building and property of the former John Wesley Methodist Episcopal Church. They imagined it for use as a cultural center where culture, art, and Black history could be displayed and shared in Salisbury. They established the Chipman Foundation to fundraise and oversee the center’s restoration, and operations. The Chipmans purchased the building then immediately donated it to establish the community center.
Mr. and Mrs. Chipman in an undated photo. Both were lifelong educators in Salisbury's segregated (as was all the U.S.) school system. They left countless examples of civic engagement, including the purchase of the John Wesley M.E. Church building to be used as a community space.
As just one example of the fruits of the Chipman Archive, a number of extraordinary photos have been collected that document the vibrant congregation that once worshipped there.
Black Salisbury — Then & Now
Georgetown and an adjacent community called Cuba are considered two slices of the same neighborhood. And it was historically one of Salisbury's most populous Black neighborhoods and certainly the most prosperous. In the first decades of the 1900s, Georgetown was the center of a Black business district.
An artist's modern imagining of the John Wesley Methodist Episcopal Church, in the style of postcards of other parts of Salisbury that were popular in the early 20th century. Courtesy of The Chipman ARCH.
Terrorism in Salisbury
Black life in Georgetown has also experienced direct attack. It was ten years after the Tulsa Massacre (1919) —and following the stock market crash of 1929— that mobs of white citizens by the thousands began to terrorize Black communities across Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
Racial animosity reach a climax for Salisbury in 1931. A very young man named Matthew Williams was accused of provoking an altercation at his work, an altercation which had left him wounded and hospitalized. A mob of white Salisbury residents assembled that evening and abducted him from the hospital. They stabbed, hanged, mutilated, and burned his body beyond recognition... proudly on the Court House lawn. This was just one of some 6,000 - 8,000 lynchings in the United States, but it was also particular in that of the young age and quiet demeanor that Matthew seemed to be.
It was to research this historical atrocity that first brought Dr. Charles Chavis, Jr. to Salisbury, and he would end up visiting many, (many, many) times again, both to the community of Georgetown and the State Archives of Maryland.
Dr. Chavis' years-long investigation into boxes and folders revealed how much of Georgetown's historical record has been missing. In particular, exactly what evidence there was to a municipal conspiracy beneath Williams' murder — which the municipality, over the decades, seemed to have forgotten about.
Within 10 years following the lynching of Williams, a less apparent —but no less harmful—attack was levied on the Black neighborhood. Despite the clear and active business prosperity of Georgetown, the neighborhood was marked for the placement of two future highway thoroughfares. No longer needing to resort to direct violence, the white community of Salisbury implemented a land displacement strategy. In the coming decades, almost every building in historical Georgetown was demolished.
In fact, today there is only one building still standing from the old Georgetown: the John Wesley M.E. Church building, now the Chipman Cultural Center. Less than 120 feet from the Chipman Center, Business Route 13 and the four-lane/ divided-median W. Salisbury Parkway (Route 50) cross each other. You can see the metal railing of a right-of-way in the first photograph on this page.
Watch above: In 2021, Dr. Chavis produced the short film
Hidden In Full View regarding the experience of finding evidence that was both clearly known and yet forgotten. [TRT 07:25]
Partnerships
The relationships of trust built between The Chipman Center and Dr. Chavis have led to other opportunities for the ARCH. The grounded, grassroots work of The Chipman Center became an unparalleled teaching opportunity for Dr. Chavis' history classes. And in turn, The Center has found ways to advance the ARCH by leveraging the talents, enthusiasm, and research curiosity of students.
In the course of two years, the Georgetown community hosted a handful of Field Study trips for students coming from Morgan State University and GMU. Students spent up to one week on the Eastern Shore with their professor, following a highly organized schedule and division of tasks for assisting at the Chipman Center and conducting oral history interviews that the Chipman ARCH had prioritized.
Students also had the chance to visit and meet curators of other Eastern Shore historical sites.
Looking Ahead
As of August 2024, the work of archiving is approximately 85% done. Continuing to work with students, The Chipman Center will extend its efforts to create an online, digital collection of many of its newly gathered materials. Using the open-source package Omeka reduces the infrastructure costs; and the Omeka platform happens to have been developed at George Mason University by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media.
At the present moment, the intention for this digital outgrowth of the community archive is so that neighbors might be able to digitally contribute their stories to The Chipman ARCH, as well as contribute records or scans that are already digital.
The Chipman Cultural Center has produced an exhibit with an early peek of some of the archival material from their ARCH.
