A Conversation with Genesee Historical Center Archivist Colleen Marquise

Colleen Marquise, Associate Archivist at the University of Michigan-Flint, Francis Willson-Thompson Library, takes podcast listeners on a virtual tour of the Genesee County (MI) Historical Center archive collection. This historical collection has a fascinating collection of oral histories, documents, papers, etc. 

The Center has three primary collections: Flint Labor History, Civil Rights, and Community Organizations such as the UAW Local 599. The local archives also contain the most definitive collection of materials on Flint area community development. The construction of I-475 through the heart of Flint was part of the disastrous urban renewal program that wiped out Flint's Floral Park and St. John Street neighborhoods. Memories of those African-American neighborhoods are found in a collection of recorded oral histories about the people, families, and culture. 

The Center also has a remarkable collection of oral history materials ranging from musical histories of the area, including rapper MC Breed, Ira Dorsey, and others going back to Flint bands in the 1960s. 

The Genesee Historical Center has recently developed a history collection about the COVID pandemic and protests. 

Colleen Marquise shares with the podcast listeners stories about prominent Flint area historical figures such as Genora Johnson and Rev Bradford Pengelly, the colorful rector of St. Paul's Episcopal Church during the 1920s. This virtual podcast tour of the University of Michigan-Flint, Francis Willson-Thompson Library is fascinating. This episode is Part 1 of a two-part podcast.

The public can visit and listen to some local history collections online by going to the University of Michigan-Flint Library website. 

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Transcript

Arthur Busch 0:15

Okay, this is Arthur Butcher listening to Radio Free Flint. My guest today is Colle Marquis, who is an archivist at the University of Michigan Flint at the Francis Wilson Thompson Library. She calls herself the Lone Arranger. Welcome.

SPEAKER_03 0:35

Thanks for having me, Arthur. I'm excited to be here.

Arthur Busch 0:38

You uh came to my attention during the pandemic. You're a pandemic friend, because I was at home trying to research something, and it ended up with you. And actually, I was going through all papers that I thought might be kept. So that's how we met, and I am really honored to finally pin you down for an interview. Thanks. Tell me about yourself.

SPEAKER_03 1:03

All right. Well, I've been here in this position for about three and a half years now. And um I went to Eastern Michigan University to get a history degree. Um, kind of looked around at the prospect of being a history professor and said, eh, no, uh, I'm gonna go be an archivist, which is I consider the dirty work of history. That's really what I wanted to do and where I wanted to be. So I went to U of M Ann Arbor and got a degree in um science of information um with an archival focus. Uh, and then after that, I've just kind of bounced around the state until um I found what I really wanted to do, which was always work at a university and work in labor history. Um, and then this position came up and I couldn't believe my luck. Um, I was so enthusiastic they they almost hired me right away. So I live here in Flint. I think that it's important to live in the community that you collect from, try to be as involved in the community as humanly possible and constantly out talking to people and uh just love the history and love the area. No, I'm from Detroit, but I worked in Grand Rapids. I was at the um Grand Rapids Public Library immediately after graduation. Well, first I was in Traverse uh City working as a reference librarian, and then I was a hist the uh history librarian for Grand Rapids Public Library. They have a huge history department, uh, very impressive and well-known department. And that's when I eventually came here just because it was closer to my family and I happened to be eight weeks pregnant at the time, and uh Grand Rapids Public does not have maternity leave, but UAV sure does.

unknown 2:38

Yeah.

Arthur Busch 2:38

Now your interest is in labor history.

SPEAKER_03 2:41

Yes.

Arthur Busch 2:42

You came to a town with a big calling card for labor history, immense calling card for labor history, yeah. I can only think of a few cities in the country that are more associated with labor history than Flint, or as much. So you come back to a city where you can actually do what your where your heart is and your passion is and your training.

SPEAKER_03 3:04

Yep, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And I had um come to Flint when I was a kid. Every once in a while, I went to the local, you know, local 432 when I was a teenager. Um, so I knew a little bit about Flint, but being able to live here and and be a part of the community has been so different. It's like living in Detroit 20 years ago where there's this massive community and things are rising up and starting, and there's all this momentum. So yeah, it's a great place to live, even if you're not into labor history. It's just a great place to live.

Arthur Busch 3:32

So local for 432, that's not a union call, that's that's a club.

SPEAKER_03 3:38

Yeah, it's an all-ages alcohol-free music venue, and now they do art shows and and comedy stand-up and stuff as well.

Arthur Busch 3:45

Your interest in in archiving, well, your job as an archive is extends really beyond the labor aspect of it. So, what I thought I'd ask you to do is is give us uh an idea of what the collection is there at this library, the general collection that you're working with. And sorry, give us a virtual tour if you would. Sure. Just tell us what the archives are in terms of just an audio tour of it that you could tell us, you know, what you have, why it's important.

SPEAKER_03 4:18

Sure. So this is an archive for the University of Michigan as a university, as an organization, and also for local history. Um, so if you're interested in how the university started or you know, provost records or any of that stuff, we have it. But what we really focus on is the cultural and social history of Flint. There's a couple of different archives here in the city, mostly focusing on General Motors, um, automotive manufacturing, and that kind of thing. Here at our at the well, it's the Genesee Historical Collection Center, located in the Francis Wilson Thompson Library, which is a mouthful, I know. Um, but the stuff we have here is going to be labor, civil rights, uh, and community organizations, is really what we focus on. Um, one of our biggest collections uh is UAW 599. They donated all of their papers, including the uh very earliest newspaper publications and uh meeting minutes of the UAW and all this kind of really fascinating labor stuff. Um but then we also have like the papers of Olive Beasley and Ed Gerby Holt, uh very, very influential in the civil rights movement here in Flint, um and just in the development of Flint in the mid-uh 20th century in general. Like you were saying earlier, Olive Beasley was on every board imaginable in Flint, even the school board. Um, and then some other things that we have. Uh one of our most popular collections right now, since there's a lot of interest in this topic, is the Community Development Committee uh paperwork, which is from the city of Flint. And it deals with all things urban renewal. It was the organization that that started urban renewal in the city, uh, identified those seven spots that they were going to transform and change, and ultimately destroyed the Southside neighborhood and the St. John's neighborhood in favor of freeways.

Arthur Busch 6:07

Yeah, we're talking about some of my listeners would know Floral Park because their parents lived there.

SPEAKER_03 6:12

It's a whole collection, it's about eight boxes, and then we also have the publications like the St. John's survey. They went and talked to every single person in St. John's and published a big survey. We have that as well. So um a lot, a lot about urban renewal in Flint is is stored here.

Arthur Busch 6:28

One of the things you have is the labor labor archives with all the with an oral history project that I think was done by Professor Neil Leighton. I'm not sure. He was one of them involved. I don't remember the other person, but tell us about that. That's fascinating. People can do that right from their desk at home.

SPEAKER_03 6:46

Yeah, if you go to our digital collections website, um, you'll see that we did a it was about a 12-year-long project where we did oral histories with everybody involved in the sit-down strike, from organizers like Bob Travis to guys who was flip who were flipping burgers for the sit-down strikers to even like cops and stooges. So everybody got interviewed and it the interviews are searchable, so you can look put in a term search. Like if you're interested in the Socialist Party of America, you can see where it pops up in every uh interview. All the interviews are on there um in audio form and in transcript form, so you can read them. It's very, very convenient and it's just a fascinating, just a gem of a collection. Um, it really gives you the sense of being there during the strike.

Arthur Busch 7:32

You've also published uh a number of things over the years. One of those was uh Janorah Johnson Dollinger, who was uh who you called the Joan of Arc of Labor.

SPEAKER_03 7:47

I wish I made that up. She was known as the Joan of Arc of Labor way before I came along. But she is my personal hero. I I think the world of Janorah Johnson Dollinger. Yeah, I can tell you lots of people.

Arthur Busch 8:00

She was in the women's brigade that assisted the men who were inside the factories, and the women organized themselves and had red berets and all that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_03 8:10

Yep, red armbands. Um, Jenora Johnson's story actually starts before the sit-down strike, about 1930, um, when she met her husband Kermit Johnson in high school. They both went to uh Central High, and she met Kermit's father. And Dad Johnson was a socialist and wanted to talk about all these ideas with Jenora. He could tell Jenora was very bright. Um, she was from a very wealthy family and was very religious at the time. Well, she was working for a doctor's office. The doctor got a mailer and said, damn, red literature and threw the mailer away. Well, she picked it up and she brought it to Dad Johnson and wanted him to explain it to her. And that started her just transformation into the Jonah Bark of Labor. Um, it was around 31 that she dropped out of high school and married Kermit, and they almost had a baby, they had a baby almost immediately. And then she had tuberculosis. So after going to the TB hospital, uh going to Hurley, she spent her entire time reading about religion and about socialism. Uh, she said, I all I had to do was read. That's all there was available to me. Uh, and after she got out of the hospital, she actually began the social the chapter of the Socialist Party of America here in Flint in 1935, along with Kermit and his father.

Arthur Busch 9:29

And she also helped organize all these people to to you know bring food and and organize a lot of things behind the scenes at the uh uh during this period of conflict with General Motors in the 30s. Interestingly, another one of your pursuits and public publications is uh Jay Bradford Pengalley, was the rector at uh St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Flint, Michigan. Tell us just a brief minute about him, and I'll say before you get going, I lived on Pengalley Road, which was named after him. I was born and raised in that neighborhood and on that street.

SPEAKER_03 10:12

He was a character in Flint. Um he came to Flint from New York. I believe it was New York, I might be wrong, and then Michael Madden at the Flint Public Library will send me an email if I am. Um, and he came to Flint to be the rector, um, but he was so much more to the community. He ended up buying the Patterson Motor building that was right next door to the church. Um, and that's where he decided to set up basically all the leftists in Flint. So there was the Proletariat Party, the Communist Party, the uh International Workers of the World. Um, and then all of the craft unions all had their offices, including the UAW and the Socialist Party, all had their offices in Pengali's building right next door. And what a lot of people don't know is that there is a tunnel underneath that goes from the church to the building. And that's really how a lot of the people moved food back and forth because there was a kitchen in the church. There wasn't one in the Pengoli building. Was really funny, and what what Bradford likes to do is he's a very funny guy. Uh, he put all these leftists in one building and gave them one telephone to share. One. So they had to get along. It was his humor. Um, something else he did is when he published he published some stuff for the church, he would publish, like, this is the 83rd anniversary edition, and there would just be this huge celebration for the 83rd celebration of the church or the birthday of the church. He did funny things like that. Um, but he was deeply involved in in um the leftist movement and the workers' movement here in Flint.

Arthur Busch 11:47

Um what makes him sort of uh I don't know what an iconoclastic individual is that he was the he was the rector of this church, and and the church included as its you know its overseer, Charles Stuart Mott, and the rest of the money people in Flint, who had many of whom had you know are investors in General Motors from its earliest moments. And so the people that he's hosting are you know the people that Charles Stuart Mott is is trying to battle and who are who are opposing him and his political uh desires. And you might remember Mr. Mott. I don't want to take your thunder here, but Mr. Mott did run for mayor of Flint way back in like I think it was 1911 or 12, or right in there. And uh, or no, there was a socialist that was elected, then Mott came along, and the guy's name was Minton, which is another street in my neighborhood. Great neighborhood. I forget his name, as his first name, but he was the mayor of he became the mayor of Flint and was a socialist. Well, Mr. Mott, of course, and his comrades in the capitalistic uh movement of America, they uh were seriously concerned about these socialists because they were talking about you know ownership of and directing capital and impairing their ability to invest and so on. And as a consequence, uh Pingali is hooked up with his crew, that the Motley bunch that's living in tar paper shacks out in front of Buick. And so they are right uh diametrically opposed. As Mott then organized a coalition to defeat the socialists, he became the mayor of Flint. And what was kind of strange about it was that he tried to get re-elected because he was proposing at one point a privatization of public utilities, like dumps. They didn't have dumps and they didn't have hot water and you know, all this kind of stuff. So what happened was the uh Mott ran again after his first term was only there twice, but he got defeated. And I don't think that didn't ingratiate him any more to the socialists than he started with. And and Pen Gallie standing there in his church is the top, you know, really the front man of the church. So this isn't an I I could not there's very little, if anything, that I know of written about this relationship.

SPEAKER_03 14:32

Yeah, there's well, and that's a big problem just in Flint in general, is the lack of secondary sources on on historic topics like this. Um it'd be a fantastic book, Arthur, if you're in the writing game.

Arthur Busch 15:39

Yeah, well, uh right now I'm just doing podcasting. Uh but I'm fascinated by Pengali. You can uh can bet on that. Uh but what what what I found interesting was when Pengelli left the church, they said he went to become a real estate investor. So I suspect what happened. This is my speculation without any real backup on it. But I think Mr. Mott probably showed him the gate and told him, if you want to buy this old automobile factory, uh, we're all about that. And you can go about investing in real estate and we might even help you. And that was another way to keep this guy under control. So that's my speculation, but it's that's exactly what it is. I'd like to see Mr. Mott's diary on this subject, but I interviewed a guy who's the only person I know that actually read that diary, Ed Renihan, who did uh the biographer for Mr. Mott.

SPEAKER_03 16:33

That'd be fascinating to know his thoughts on the on the subject.

Arthur Busch 16:36

He didn't really have much to say to me on the record for Mr. Kingelli. Any event. So, one of the things that that I found fascinating about what you're up to is the fact that uh of what you're interested in in preserving history, because archivists are really important. Agreed. They're more than junk collectors. And your your situation, uh at least what I could gather, your interest in archiving things have to do with collective public memory.

SPEAKER_03 17:10

Yes. Um, my my big focus in research is uh collective public memory versus established history. And I think that nexus point, especially in Flint around the water crisis, is is extremely poignant. And you have to think about archives as storehouses for these public memories. And they are the places where the written history, the established history become gets created. So they're the archives really are the shepherd of what is remembered, what is preserved, and then what is um taken by historians and analyzed and brought to light. What are these pieces? The biggest problem, I think, is that normal, everyday people don't think they're important enough to have their stuff put into archives and they don't know how wrong they are. Um but the a great example would be um in the 90s when Bill Clinton came to Flint and there was that massive car wreck on 475 because the traffic was stopped and a truck didn't didn't didn't stop in time. We have their take the tapes of all the 911 calls. So what you have in the archives is not only public memory, but public trauma that needs to be faced and dealt with as well.

Arthur Busch 18:24

Um, which is I remember that accident well because I handled the criminal case and prosecuting the truck driver who did that. Wow. And ultimately convicted him. Um that was a story you could write a book about that case in and of itself. Um in any event, um your um your uh I when we're looking at this thing called collective public memory, you actually get to shape the kind of history that gets kept and read and and maybe handed down to the generations.

SPEAKER_03 19:02

The archivists have been doing that for forever, and we just didn't do it purposefully enough to not to include everyone. So if you look at archives of the past, it's a lot of rich white dead guys because they were the ones who had the sense to keep their stuff. I'm important enough to remember. Um, and other people didn't because they weren't important enough in our society, according to the society, um, to be remembered. And that has changed wildly in archives. Um, right now, uh, and doing a collection of oral histories of musicians in Flint, and it's working musicians, black musicians, uh, brown musicians, every musician that you could find, the punks, the jazz guys, trying to collect a much wider swath of society to give a better, um a better look of what that society was at that time period. That's something that's very important to to um to archivists today. So in the past it was keep everything. Uh today it's learn what to what needs to be thrown away because you're going to be collecting a lot more than you were before.

Arthur Busch 20:04

I'm gonna come back to that, but another publication that you you had was MC Breed, the Flint Rap Legend, and what about him? Well I mean, this is quite a diverse uh interest set here. Uh, how did you come about writing about MC Breed, the rapper?

SPEAKER_03 20:24

Well, when I first came here, um I was shown around by my predecessor, a man named Paul Gifford, and he showed me this really unique collection that's the local recordings collection. So not only is it uh music from people that lived in Flint or are from Flint, but music that was recorded in Genesee County specifically. And I thought this was fascinating. So um none of our finding aids had ever been published before online. So I tossed it up online. Well, then I get contacted by a document. Um, who made the movie? Um, it just won a local Oscar, actually, uh, the MC Breed and Bootlegs story. And she saw that I had recordings she hadn't seen before and came in. Oh, so this really is very, very important. And uh this is an amazing collection. I knew it was an amazing collection. And so she got very got me interested in MC Breed, and I learned more and more about him. And uh ended up meeting Ira Dorsey, um, and it really sparked this project that I'm working on now, which is the Music Oral History Project. Um, I'm trying to get Ira in here, uh Ira Bootleg Dorsey, but um he is busy. But I've gotten a couple of other rappers and things like that. And that's the thing about the original recordings collection is that it was almost all um uh country western or churches. There was some rap in there on tape. Um, there was a lot of metal, a lot of metal music in Flint in the 80s. Um, but it hadn't been collected really purposefully. Somebody had come in with this collection. So now we're trying to add oral histories, um, flat stuff. So anything like concert posters or venue uh signs, things like that, um, and the music. And that's it.

Arthur Busch 22:08

So anybody that's been to the anybody that's been to the Flint IMA with their tickets, and I've seen a bunch of those uh since I've been doing this project, uh podcast project, uh find Colleen.

SPEAKER_01 22:20

Yes, please do. Please do.

Arthur Busch 22:24

Yeah, no, uh Radio Free Flint's interviewed some of these musicians and got their histories. In particular, Joel Bai, for example, is one of the Blue Hawaiians, a popular group, and talks about how he got started and the history of who he worked with and some of the great legends in Flint music, uh, which I'd be happy to donate uh that podcast to you.

SPEAKER_03 22:48

Uh but I also that I've been trying to track down. I've been calling that guy for like six months now.

Arthur Busch 22:53

Oh, he helped me start Radio Free Flint, and we we started with a single group, and that was Musicians Corner, and we only allowed Flint musicians to be in it. And so between Joel and Libby uh Glover and Dave Tomalovich of Mustards Retreat, Libby's a graduate of Flint Southwestern, they were two of the people that were first uh on board to help get Radio Frequent started. So maybe we can help you. All right, let me move on from there. Uh you decided that rich white guy history isn't necessarily the only history we should say. And he went on to do another really fascinating project uh with the pandemic. Tell us about the pandemic, and I'm particularly interested in uh activism, Flint activism. I just did a podcast with Ben Poley, a professor at Kettering, uh, who embedded himself with some activists and then wrote a book about it. Uh so I'd be interested in what your project is and how that works.

SPEAKER_03 24:04

Sure. Uh the project is called Archiving Pandemic and Protest. Uh, we started it about two years ago when we noticed that a lot of archives were collecting stories of the pandemic, uh, but they weren't focusing at all on the uh social and political unrest. At like there was nothing about that in there. And we felt like the two were too linked to ignore one and then just focus on the other. Um, but we also noticed that these organizations were collecting mostly digitally. And we knew that that wasn't going to work well for our community. We needed to get out in front of people with a physical item uh that they could sit with, look at, and then return. So the idea was that we didn't want off-the-cuff comments, we didn't want off-the-cuff responses, and we we wanted them to sit and think about it, and we wanted it to be physical in case of problems with connectivity. Um, you know, Flint is famous for having some kind of dead zones when it comes to internet, especially with people's access to internet. And so what we did is we created a zine that has prompts in it. And the prompts are things like um, did you do any kind of protesting? What did you do? And it's supposed to be apolitical. Um, and we did get a wide range of responses from the COVID denier to the Black Lives Matter protester. Um, and we got them all in these these handy dandy packets. Well, also um on the the the zine on the back it says, if you have anything else you can donate from this time, specifically art and activism pieces, we would like to see them. Um, and so that created just a deluge of protest from Black Lives Matter posters, um, signs, photographs, poems. And then when the pandemic really picked up more and we realized this project's gonna have to go much, much longer because the pandemic is going much, much longer, you can see a shift to just pandemic, to people focusing on writing just about the pandemic as Black Lives Matter gets further and further from their memory until January 6th happens, and then it's all back to politics. Um, but it's it's just a way of again purposefully collecting these stories. Um, the stuff we have from the 1918 flu epidemic, we have by chance. We don't have them because somebody said somebody's going to be really interested in this. We have one diary that talks about it. Um, but now because we get this purposeful collection of stories, we have about 25 different zines that run the gamut um digitally and physically in format. So hopefully that'll be useful to somebody when they have the next pandemic 100 years down the line.