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V. P. Franklin Self-Determines His Legacy
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V. P. Franklin Self-Determines His Legacy

If you want to be remembered properly, you would do well to write and publish your own story. If you are fortunate enough to have the editorship of a journal and enough influence over your association’s board, you can really secure your reputation for posterity.  You can throw a festschrift, an event where scholars come together, your students and colleagues, and present papers honoring you and praising your contributions to knowledge and society.  All the leading scholars have them. Typically they are organized by their graduate students, and some major press tends to publish the papers, gambling that a market exists for honoring you. But when you have juice and think enough of yourself, you can spend the Association’s resources on your greater glory.  After all, ASALH could publish five rising scholars making new contributions to knowledge or honor yours at the same cost.

In this sense, V.P. Franklin has proven wise.  Rather than leaving it to others, he took care of himself. We can assume that the Summer 2017 issue of the Journal of African American History, “The Scholarship and Social and Educational Activism of V. P. Franklin,” meets his approval.  From his photograph on the cover, the contributors, to the ads running in the back, the special issue is the editor’s monument to himself.  No other editor in ASALH’s illustrious history has had such recognition.

Indeed, Franklin has one-upped Carter G. Woodson in the house that he built.  Our founder never had a special issue devoted to his work during his life or since.  As he got older, he started to allow people to write about him, and when school children honored him with a book of short statements about his importance, it became one of his prize possessions.  The teacher took the care of putting the handy-craft “book” in leather, and it served as his unpublished festschrift.

And it is in this light that we should understand V. P. Franklin’s role in ending the Woodson tradition of self-publishing. It was not about ASALH or Woodson, it was all about V. P. Franklin. Over the years he had had lots of difficulties in the production process of the journal, and among my jobs was smoothing things over with the company contracted to layout and copy edit the journal.  Often unreasonable and intemperate, V. P. was always accommodated, but things became impossible, and the vendor wanted to quit.  Not knowing a publisher from a printer, he also wanted new accommodations, and he went to university press behind my back as president and got bids.  He did not know what was at stake. It was all about V. P. Franklin–his wants and needs. He gave no thought to what it meant to tradition.  An advocate of black self-determination, he put his black self first.


Vote Right with Woodson
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Vote Right with Woodson

Our journal was independent and more profitable until a crew of people, led by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Gilbert Smith, Sharon Harley, and Mr. Self-Determination, VP Franklin, decided that a century of self-publishing was enough.  To achieve this feat, they misrepresented the truth about the finances and ultimately disenfranchised the membership, and now the JAAH is under the management of the University of Chicago.   Yes, we still own Woodson’s journal but now we are so mis-educated that we need managers to make the very same arrangements we had been making.  Go figure.  You have seen the first product of the University of Chicago and the ink covers the page the same way it did when we directed a printer to do it.  They changed the font on the cover, but gee we could have done that too.  And the pictures look just as cheesy as always.  That is the nature of black-and-white images on non-glossy paper.

For Officers

ASALH is currently electing new folks for the board–though not enough of them.    For officers, please vote for Lionel Kimble and Kaye Wise Whitehead.  They were right with Woodson.  Unfortunately, no one would run against Evelyn and Gilbert, so just don’t vote for those positions.  And please do not vote for Barbara Dunn.  I have known her for years, and supported her for most everything.  Yet despite being an advocate of Woodson’s Mis-education of the Negro, folks she was a leading spirit of selling out tradition.  Hurt my heart, but yes, it’s true.

For the Executive Board

Among the people who sold out Woodson who are running for re-election are Janet Sims-Wood, Sharon Harley, James Harper II, and Dorothy Bailey.  Please do not vote for them.  Let them go about their business. They have done enough damage.

In general, I am for people I know are right with Woodson.  Lionel Kimble has organized a slate, and I am for that slate.  I also am For Anita Shepard of the Jacksonville Branch.  She is Right with Woodson.  Please vote for her or one of the following on Lionel’s slate.

 

JAAH Assimilated by Chicago
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JAAH Assimilated by Chicago

How Much Is Due to Ignorance?

When the regime running ASALH started down the road towards selling out to a university press, they did not fully comprehend the concept of a publisher for a scholar journal.  They thought of ASALH as having a white commercial publisher in the Tapestry Press, and they clung to this position even as I tried to school them.  Though a publisher in its own right, we hired Tapestry to provide us with some publishing services. They copy-edited and designed the journal, then sub-contracted the printing and fulfillment.  For this they were paid a fee, and could not claim the copyright, could not claim the revenue, and did not promote the journal or become liable for the veracity of the content.  They were a vendor; we were the publisher.  We were liable for what we put before the world.  We were our own Big Poppa.

As a result, our brand was out front, and our vendors stood in the background, for the most part.  JStor itself is so big that even though they were never our publisher, we were and are on their platform and so they branded along with us, though they are technically.   How much of this education in publishing sunk is unknown. These folks were trying hard not to hear me.  Some knowledge, however, did slip in.  Most grasped that a publisher is not a print, lol.   Well, they increasingly understood things, at least in theory, even as they kept saying to folks that we had had a white publisher in Tapestry.

What they did not really did not understand is what it means to put your journal under the management of a publisher.  They kept harping on still owning the old intellectual property and the journal itself.  Yet ownership and control are two different things!  And as publishing scholars, many of the board members should have known that.  We own copyrights and yet don’t control them–that is an academic reality.  I kept trying to tell them that the Chicago contract would be akin to owning a farm and continuing to do the labor but putting yourself under the management and control of a white company.  The publisher is The Man.  They call the shots.  You become “one of their” journals.  They control you, past and present.

To see the difference between being the publisher and the content provider is best seen on what is happening in JSTOR Archive.  We still self-publish the Black History Bulletin, so I looks as we would want it.  We don’t publish the Journal of African American History and we don’t control the copyright of the previous journals, so it appears as the University of Chicago–the Journal’s Big Poppa–would have it.

ASALH as Publisher

 

Chicago as Publisher of Journal of Negro History

Well, Here is how the article from the Journal of Negro History now appear under the University of Chicago’s control of ASALH’s intellectual property from the days of yore.  Oh the ASALH branding is gone, disappeared. If you did not know, you would not know, that the Journal of Negro History was published by the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History.  It says, published by The University of Chicago Press.  Why? Because the regime gave them the control over the copyright and they decided how to brand it and they now “publish it.”  Mighty white of them, at it?  Now, actually, mighty dumb of black folks.

 

Half Assimilated or Given a Modest Bit of Branding?

When you are the shot caller, or the publisher, you decide how things appear, how they are branded unless a contract clause prevents you.  It is mighty nice of them to decide that the Journal African American History articles, those from 2002 forward will remain on JSTOR’s platform and still carry the ASALH brand.  Or perhaps the assimilation process for ASALH’s JAAH is simply not complete.  Feels good to be half-assimilated, rather than wholly gone, huh?

Now, I note that something else is different with the newer, JAAH articles on JSTOR’s platform.  It appears that you can no longer see the full text on JSTOR for articles published after 2009.  You can only download the pdf.  Why that is unknown to me.  Was this done by Chicago as the new publisher of old things?  I’m clueless, and I imagine so are the powers that be at ASALH.  Publishers are shot callers, not the folks who are content providers.

Not Everyone Is Down with Being Assimilated

If you are even just a pluralist or multiculturalist who believes in some modicum of self-determination, none of this sits right with you.  It looks like ASALH begged to be assimilated by the mighty Borg, AKA, the University of Chicago Press.  Here’s my facebook thread about it from October 11, 2017.

Well, Now that You Have a White Boss the Remedy Should Be Familiar

For ASALH people who do not like this state of affairs, all you can do in the short-run is scream bloody murder and complain about white supremacy.  Mind you, the regime asked for this.  For less money than we were making, they wanted to get close to Chicago and let them publish us.  They said it was all profits and that Chicago just adored our journal.  We were free, self-standing for a century, but some black folks wanted back on the plantation.  Self-Determination did not feel right!  So now black folks can complain to white folks about how they are being done wrong, smh. Don’t blame white people; we have only ourselves to blame.  We asked to be incorporated, then signed on the dotted line.

Reclaiming the Rights of ASALH Members
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Reclaiming the Rights of ASALH Members

Dear Members of ASALH,

In violation of our Constitution and By-Laws and Roberts Rules of Order, the ASALH Executive Council signed the contract with the University of Chicago to end our century of self-publishing.  At the Business Session at the 101 Annual Meeting, a motion was on the floor, properly seconded and under debate, to continue self-publishing and to quit all negotiations.  We have that power through our by-laws, and if the president did not know it then, she had more than six months to read our fundamental laws and bring the issue back to the body.  The Chicago contract has already proven a bad deal.  Because Chicago, our new publisher, collects subscriptions and controls the funds, we had to go and solicit an advance from the press to stay afloat or eat up our meager reserves.  Moreover, we will make $35,000 a year less than what we currently make on the Journal of African American History.   Finally, the University of Chicago informed the board what we have said all along–the $100,000 is revenue not profit.  We were indeed lied to by the leadership, especially Gilbert A. Smith, our Treasurer, who as a CPA is trained to know that revenues are not profits.

Come to the Business Meeting today at 4:00 p.m. at the Netherland Hilton Hotel.  We meet, appropriately so, in the Hall of Mirrors, and there will be smoke.  I am proposing the following motion to that we can govern the board as we should.  If I am not recognized, and you agree with the following motion, please feel free to take the floor and make it.  Speak in the language of Roberts Rules by saying, “I move…”

 

 

 

The Permanent Damage Being Done by the University of Chicago Deal
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The Permanent Damage Being Done by the University of Chicago Deal

Someone asked me what is the permanent financial damage to the Journal of African American History by taking it to Chicago? It is a good question, and the answer is sobering.

1. After five-years, it is likely that the revenue from the journal will be below the $100,000 promised in the initial contract. Chicago has no magic business plan. They are trying to snatch part of JSTOR’s $80,000,000 archive business. With 70 journals versus JSTOR’s 2000, they are nobody. They are trying to increase the revenue from archive sales precisely because they know the new journals business is shrinking and less money will come from new sales. They are trying to force institutions that want a journal to buy both the archive and the new journal. That strategy won’t work for most journals, including ours. Libraries will opt for the old journals that are in JSTOR, Ebsco Host, Centage, and Proquest. If I am right about this massive failure, Chicago will offer much less than $100,000 a year after five years. In fact, they might just ask us to pay them to host our journal. Yeah. They are making a business bet that might be ended by their university. Happens all the time.

2. If ASALH got out of the contract today, we would likely suffer huge short-term damage and some permanent damage. Chicago is trying to sell subscriptions now for 2018 and the geniuses did not realize what this meant. Chicago probably won’t do half as well as we would have done.  Many librarians may take this opportunity to drop our journal as they always need to make cuts. (This may explain why Chicago never tried to ascertain how many customers we had!) Transitions like these always lead to customer losses. There is no way of knowing this in the short run.

The point being made here is that in stealing the decision from the membership and going rogue damage has been done by the Executive Council. We are effectively not the publishers of the journal and would have to rebuild our business already. Most people don’t understand that you cannot shut down an operation and start it back up without there being financial consequences.

If the decision were mine and mine alone, I would lay off any and all staff whose work has been eliminated by the move to Chicago. Financially, it is a no brainer. Boards and organizations, unfortunately, do not work this way. People are carried, and so as ASALH seeks a new basis for funding its journal, it will have to carry the past into the future.

The people who made this decision have cost us $35k a year for five years and untold lost future revenues beyond that. Remember the entire ASALH reserve is $150K or so, which is less than the losses from the deal. They rented out the farm to rich people running an experiment. When it’s over, the field may be less rather than more fertile.

The board members who supported this have to be sent packing. And those of us who believe in self-publishing have five years to lay the ground work for a new financial basis for the Journal of African American History. We have been seriously wounded in the digital revolution–shot by Du Boisians in the House of Woodson.

JAAH on the Brink of Whitrification
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JAAH on the Brink of Whitrification

 

It bothers VP Franklin and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham none that to sell out a century of self-publishing they have had to disenfranchise the membership and make less money. Why let an organization of black folks get in their way? A graduate of the University of Chicago, Franklin with whom I labored for thirteen years gets to be the editor for a whole year at a journal published by his alma mater. For Evelyn, whose ASALH accomplishment before becoming ASALH president was to write a fund-raising letter, this is the crowning achievement of her presidency and her time on the board.

Now both still try to pretend that the white folks who used to work for us, Tapestry Press, was our publisher. This is largely because they do not really know what a publisher is. Believe me, documents will bear this out. They cannot distinguish a vendor from a shot caller. Yet publishers get a cut and are liable for what is printed, thus they are the decision makers. Ask a lawyer filing a libel suit and they’ll tell you who is the publisher. And Chicago has a clause in the contract saying that the next editor has to be agreeable to them. Now, Tapestry had no contract and printed whatever we told them. We could have told them to print that the white man is the devil, and they would have done it. That is what printers do. Say something Chicago doesn’t like, and you’ll meet your boss, baby–even if you own the journal.

The membership does not have to take being disenfranchised and having its authority usurped lying down. Before we were disenfranchised we were told everyone would get a print copy of the journal. That is not true. We were told that the $100,000 would be all profit–the only money they’ll make will come from cheating people out of the promised journals. Indeed, we will make about $35,000 less than before. And our new issues will not be in JSTOR. Worse still, worse of all, we will no longer be the oldest scholarly journal published by a black organization in the world. Nope. We gave that up for the look of being a University of Chicago Journal. Wow, how black is that?

By the way, until now, the board has not voted to give VP Franklin the $5,000 raise he has been looking for. If so, ASALH will make about $40,000 less than it has been making. In ASALH world, where deficit are frequent, this is more money than you know.

Would They Have Disenfranchised an Organization of White Folks? What Will We Do?
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Would They Have Disenfranchised an Organization of White Folks? What Will We Do?

Violating our mission

When the Executive Council of ASALH voted in February of 2017 to end our century-long tradition of self-publishing our Journal of African American History, it violated not only a tradition established by our founder, but also our belief in democracy.  Carter G. Woodson believed that historical truth, published and promoted by black folks, would promote an expansion of democracy in America. His fight and our fight has always been to use history to make the United States and the world respect the rights of black people.  Thus it is doubly tragic that the decision was made by violating the voting rights of the members of ASALH.  At the 101st Annual Business Session of ASALH in Richmond, the president denied the constitutional right of the members to decide the question. When a member raised the question of whether the Business Session had the power to make the decision, the president ran through the open door and never looked back.

Violating our fundamental laws

The constitution and by-laws state clearly that the members are the bosses of the Executive Council, which is bound to execute the policies we set.

Rather than take a moment and consult the constitution and by-laws, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, the president,  high-handedly told us that she not only had the power but that she was the authority to which we had to appeal!  And if this action was born of ignorance of our laws, and that is always possible, she and rest of the Executive Council knew when they voted to go to Chicago several months later–because the opposition on the board and this site made it clear.  Democracy matters not to the majority of the board–and to three former presidents who either serve on the board and voted for the measure and weighed in to sell out tradition and democracy.

I will continue to point out the folly of this move to the University of Chicago (it will financially weaken us and reduce our staff), but what saddens me more is the evidence of mis-education involved in this move. Would the Executive Council have disenfranchised an organization of white people?  Would an organization of white people have allowed such a thing?  We were founded to combat mis-education, but we will have lost the war within our own ranks if we do not hold the Executive Council responsible when we meet at the 102nd Business Session of ASALH that will be held in Cincinnati.