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History from the Community Up
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History from the Community Up

Since the 1990s, I have witnessed many talented historians, including some truly gifted ones, go without any real opportunity to practice their chosen profession. I have watched a rare few claw their way into the ranks of the tenured after being adjuncts for years. Most of us become academics because we want to think, write, and teach. Because I have always guarded myself against undo influences on my thinking–always skeptical or willing to be unconvinced–I have ever believed that the profession might have little for me. Yet I have been fortunate to ply my trade, but I was always willing to be a historian outside the academy. This is why I have always believed in ASALH and came to respect Carter G. Woodson–who did precisely the thing I thought I might have to do. He only lasted a year at Howard University and was saved for two years by his friend John Davis at West Virginia Institute. Before and after these experiences, he existed as a historian trained on his own dime and surviving outside of the academy.

The historical profession’s associations cannot imagine themselves serving anything but the academy, and then only from the top down. K-12 teachers, junior college professors, and independent scholars all feel less than welcome at gatherings, and publishing in one of the leading journals is but a dream. I spent a lot of time over thirteen years intentionally trying to be more democratic and inclusive than Woodson. Yet try as some of us did, the tendency of ASALH and all organizations occupied by academics is towards professional separation, hierarchy, and perceived prestige. Every time ASALH has tilted too far towards academics, its well-being has suffered. What is true for ASALH, I fear is true now for the entire academy.

Historians need to rethink their relationship to the university, the public, and one another. Attached to the academy, with its high cost structure, historians-in-training are running up enormous debt. Everyone who thinks about it for a moment knows that graduate programs could operate on weekends only. Societies unattached to the academy are able to publish journals at a fraction of the cost because they are free from course releases, graduate student stipends, and the ever-escalating demands of university libraries who increasingly don’t subscribe to journals anyway. Associations with their own peer-review programs could put a seal of approval on scholarship that gets preserved in their databases and then published anywhere the author, the rightful copyright holder, desires. Through local branches, historians who are from the community can promote history. Not just local history, but whatever history is being produced by the historians.

Implicit in all of this is that many of the historians, if not most, will be considered amateurs. Yet many would be history professionals outside of the academy. They will be teachers, museum workers, church historians, journalists, and former community leaders. I am convinced that America has been and remains a history wasteland precisely because we leave it to professionals rather than growing history from the community up.

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…”

 

 

 

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Why The Executive Council Cannot Admit It Was Wrong and Apologize for Disenfranchising the Members

 

Our century of self-publishing our journal is over.  The board has voted to allow the University of Chicago to become the publisher of our Journal.  It has been a year since President Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and Vice President Greer Stanford Randal stood before the 101st Business Session and claimed the membership lacked the authority to make the decision about the future of self-publishing the Journal of African American History.  By now President Higginbotham has every reason to know that she had no authority to shut down discussion and deny a vote on a motion for ASALH to continue self-publishing the Journal of African American History.  Despite what is known the people who disenfranchised the members like we were black and they were white and it was 1899 cannot come clean.  They must continue to lie.

The By-Laws clearly states that the function of the Executive Council is the enact the policies set by the Business Session.  The members are the bosses of the Executive Council, including the President.

This matter was brought to the attention of the Executive Council before it took a vote in February to make the University of Chicago the publisher of the Journal of African American History.  The board should have tabled the matter until after the Business Session could make its will known in Cincinnati.  Moreover, the Board, on reviewing the Constitution and By-Laws, should have sent a formal apology to the membership and stated only that it would defer to the will of the people on the matter.  Instead, the Board pretended the Constitution and By-Laws had not been violated.

Now that the Executive Council has voted 13 to 11 to go to Chicago, an apology to the membership would be an admission that the board has violated the constitution and by-laws by signing the contract with the University of Chicago.  Indeed, the contract itself stipulates it is only valid if the Executive Council has the authority.

 

 

Thus, when ASALH meets, the Officers of the Executive Council will have to go Trump and lie until the cows come home about the rights of ASALH’s members and the Board’s right to shut down the motion on the floor from the last Business Session.  And the paid parliamentarian will have to follow suit.

How ASALH Treasures Ended Up in the Dumpster and Now Ebay
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How ASALH Treasures Ended Up in the Dumpster and Now Ebay

Once upon a time in the 1990s, ASALH was in a financial crisis, running deficits with seemingly no way out.  It had a real estate portfolio that included a building on Fourteenth Street in Washington, DC.  One of the leaders of the board decided that the national headquarters, already worth a million dollars in the nation’s gentrifying capital, embodied an all-in-one solution, a permanent fix.  ASALH would sell the building, move the headquarters into a smaller and cheaper rental space in Silver Spring, Maryland, and run the organization in part off the return on the invested money.  For some reason, it was believed that the principle would yield $70,000, or 7%.  The plan was bullish, and ASALH would be lean and mean and stable.  A simple, easy-to-grasp solution.

Part of what sold the argument was the condition of the building and the neighborhood.  While the city had begun to gentrify, Fourteenth Street had the look and feel of being crime ridden.  And the building had seen better days.  Its huge basement that housed much material tended to flood, and why not be some where smaller, higher, and drier.

While the plan was simple, executing it had to be hard for many involved.  Fourteenth Street was the project of Charles Wesley, one of the great institution builders in African American History.  It was part of his late 1960s renaissance of the Association, when Woodson’s co-worker returned to Washington and became the executive director.  Wesley raised money to buy the building but the lion’s share came from the Ford Foundation.  History can be kind. Wesley passed away well before the sell became part of the board conversation.  History is also rife with bitter irony, and this move must have been hard for Samuel DuBois Cook.  An institutionalist in his own right, Cook was the Ford program director that Wesley worked with to get the funds for the property.  Now, less an a generation later, he was president of ASALH when the board sold the building.  The effort to convince him must have been great, or at least painful.  And the influence on the Ford may have been even greater.

Unlike the founder, who would through himself into every project performing mental and physical work, most of those who have served on the board have done their work from a distance, and have seldom volunteered their professional skills and even less often their brawn.  They have tended to be policy makers, or day-to-day bosses of the staff.  Being disproportionately people of thought and direction rather than action, lacking much practical experience, the board overlooked the details and expenses of making a move.   No one in the brain trust of the board, not even the leaders on the project, had made the calculation of what would become of the things in the headquarters. The things included more than eighty years of the records of the ASALH and the Associated Publishers.  And it included priceless artifacts and documents from both.  While Woodson had given many papers collections to the Library of Congress, there were still small collections in our possession.  There were Woodson’s papers, too.  Indeed, I found what became known as Carter G. Woodson’s Appeal among those papers.  And then there were the artifacts from the Associated Publishers, Woodson’s personal business, and it included photographs, original manuscripts, printer’s plates and engravings, and more I’ll never know.  The engraving plates included images of Nannie Burroughs, Henry Highland Garnett, and Henry McNeal Turner.

The process of leaving Fourteenth Street came without planning, less a move than a scramble.  No money was made available for professional movers.  Over the years, I have not identified a single board member who rolled up their sleeves to help.  Most lived out of town, some were too old, and others too grand.  Most were professors, after all.  Graduate students and local friends of ASALH pitched in to help the staff move from the city.  Worse still, no decision and provisions had been made to deal with the records and artifacts and trash of over eighty years.  Decision were made pell mell:   Volunteers moved stuff to several different self-storage facilities in Washington, DC.  Frantically and unwittingly, they placed thousands, yes thousands, of boxes of worthless materials in permanent storage facilities where it cost $5 to look into them and twice that to remove or destroy.  Bowie State University gave permission for ASALH to move material to their library temporarily, and that stretched over a decade.  It was a vast mountain of stuff–much of it unboxed–that covered more than six-hundred square feet and stood over six-feet tall, as high as middle-aged men could stack it.  Years later when I first saw it, I almost cried as I looked at rare black history photographs and Woodson correspondence crunched up by moldy, water-logged books and thousands of copies of the same flyers.   Over the years, ASALH’s board had included a number of leading archivists, and but none had taken the time to separate the wheat from the tons of chaff.  The total volume of the materials in the headquarters  was massive, and anyone who had been to the headquarters should have known it.   Years later, the material removed from one storage unit alone weighed over 55,000 tons, and I know because I signed to take it out and sort through it with graduate students such as Kamal McClarin and Anton House.  (Moreover, it cost ASALH over $25,000 a year to store what was mostly trash and excess publishing inventory, and it took nearly seven years to convince the board to allow me to stops the bleeding and clean up our mess.)

This was not the worse of Executive Council’s failure to plan the move.  Tragically, without rhyme or reason, the materials that could not be moved to storage units, permanent storage, or Bowie State room, had a much worse fate. With a need to turn over the keys and limited resources, decisions had to be made.  Locals would later recall that dumpsters appeared in the street outside of the headquarters, and material tossed into them.  Over the years, I have talked to integrationists, black nationalists, socialists, and those who simply love black people who spoke of the tragedy that unfolded and wondered how it could happen to an institution that allegedly believed in history.  How could they let it happen to Woodson’s legacy?

For days, cars pulled up, and conscious black people of all walks of life went dumpster diving.  This included professors who were members of ASALH, people who could have helped in the move.  From learned people you would here about manuscripts, Woodson documents, and rare books and photographs and other material.  All this sound apocryphal until you meet people who confess the treasurers in their possession and how they got them.

Collectors collect until they need money or die.  And now ebay is how many things change hands.  Yesterday, I received a notice on Facebook from a friend that some Associated Publishers engravings were for sale.  There it was, our history, on ebay.  I bought the engraving plate of Henry Highland Garnet, and alerted other friends.  This sell off of thrown-away ASALH assets is evidence of how a board can botch a decision by not doing due diligence.

The money from the sale of Fourteen Street did not get used as planned.  When outstanding debts were paid off, there was only $800,000 or so I’ve been told.  And then the Ford withdrew its support, something probably not understood by those making the decision.  Why would Ford continue to support an association that had squandered an asset appreciating rapidly in gentrifying Washington, DC, especially when they had underwritten it?  When I joined the board, ASALH was bleeding $120,00 to $150,000 of that money each year.  The simple solution proved to be a failure, a massive failure.  It cost on average $25,000 a year for a decade to store the material, and nearly $20,000 to remove it from permanent storage to decide what to keep and what to destroy.

The single, brilliant solution to ASALH’s problems proved to be an embarrassing, expensive, and tragic blunder, but one of the prime movers on this solution probably little understands what was lost and the total cost.  He has not lived in the city where people still talk about it.  No one has ever forced him to confront the cost of his plan.  Yet this person is a big booster of allowing  the University of Chicago to become the publishers of the Journal of African American History. This one has not learned of Gilbert Smith’s Big Lie on the University of Chicago Press proposal to become the publisher of the Journal of African American History.  He has not been disabused of the notion that Chicago will provide us a profit of $100,000 a year to buy and do for ASALH, or that our journal now profits us nothing.  Even though he erred, he is honorable and takes people at their word.

 

 

 

Once You Get Out of a Business, It’s Hard and Expensive to Get Back In
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Once You Get Out of a Business, It’s Hard and Expensive to Get Back In

In this debate over whether we should continue independently publishing the Journal of African American History, one of the arguments made is that if the University of Chicago deal fails to work out, we can always return to self-publishing. Says Professor Sharon Harley in a statement to about the Chicago Proposal in a letter to the membership last fall after the Annual Meeting in Richmond:

 

Really? Someone just said, get out of a business and try to restart one in five years. Clearly these folks do not know the business, and will know even less about it in five years.

This glib argument arises from those who have never been part of making, marketing, and selling of the sausage. They don’t get what they are saying. Let’s flesh it out a little to see if it helps: If we close our store and let someone else manufacture and sell our products in their store, we always have the option of leaving them later and reopening our own manufacturing, marketing, and selling arrangements. That is more than a notion. That means you have to relearn your business, put up new start-up costs to manufacture, market, and sell your own journals. You would have to find new business partners who come in at the right prices. You might even have to find new sites to review your products to get you back out there in the marketing world and become apparent to potential customers again, click here for examples. Anyone who has started and run a business should know this is more than a notion, but let’s discuss it. Perhaps this will make your eyes glaze over and make you realizing that going to the University of Chicago for a few thousand dollars could be the biggest mistake of all.

Few of the people on ASALH’s board even had the vocabulary to discuss our publishing business. Sharon Harley, the chair of the committee, keeps referring to one of our vendors as our publisher. She did it as late as the Richmond meeting. If you don’t know what a publisher is now, how do you return to “publishing.” If you have never produced revenue-expense reports on the journal how would you know the true costs involved? The folks selling out said we do not have the capacity to fulfill our journal orders from headquarters. Our journals are not fulfilled from headquarters. They know nothing about a publishing work flow and how they are inter-related. They do not understand what all was involved in an editorial office, and connecting it to vendors, so how would they know how to set one up from scratch? They did not understand a word I was saying when I talked about digital platforms, publishing services, archives versus new scholarship, metadata, and the like. Five or six years from now, who would know all this and much more if the journal is published by a university press?

What decent digital platform would we had to re-establish ourselves as a publisher–not simply the owner–of the journal? By moving our journal to a university press that has its own platform, we would first and foremost have to take the JAAH out of JSTOR’s Current Scholarship Program. To do this, we would have to violate the terms of our contract. This means that we would be leaving on less than the best terms. Mind you, I keep hearing we are not talking to JSTOR, Chicago is. This is a mindless. We have a twenty-year relationship with JSTOR, and we are not talking to them to see what they could do to keep us on board. We are leaving that to the University of Chicago, which means we are not doing our due diligence as frequently claimed. And worse still we are not acting the way good business partners should. Leaving on these terms, we might not be able to easily return at the end of any University of Chicago contract. Even if so, perhaps we will find ourselves in less favorable terms on any return. Maybe we will not be allowed back into the most important collection they have-if you understand what that means financially. If you are in the wrong collections, your sales will suffer greatly, by tens of thousands. Maybe we will have to market our journal ourselves as others are now doing on the platform. This would be an expense that we could not afford.

Besides JSTOR, there is only one other digital platform in the non-profit world for scholarly journals worth talking about, and that is Project Muse. We wanted to go to Project Muse, but they have a waiting list and an application process. What this means is that we could apply to become part of Muse and never get in after several years of trying. We could literally die waiting to get on Project Muse’s platform after leaving Chicago because that deal did not work out.

We would be forced to go to a small commercial platform such as Allen Street. Small commercial platforms do not enjoy the status that librarians look to. And consequently, they carry journals that are not well known and respected. Librarians do not automatically look to them for titles, and they do not bundle titles. No, indeed, we would have to market our journals to libraries, which would cost us marketing money. We would not have the revenue to hire a marketing person to promote the journal to libraries. Today, every librarian knows JSTOR and they market our journal. We have had experience with this problem before. The folks involved here do not know that in 2009, before JSTOR’s current scholarship program we went with a platform provider known as Metapress. Our digital sales went nowhere because they did not market our journals, and we had no budget to do so. Metapress failed, but fortunately we had already left them for JSTOR’s New Scholarship Program.

We would also have to restart the print side of our business if we left Chicago. While print is declining as a product bought by librarians, the reality is that the print customers are the most reliable from year-to-year. Moreover, we will for long and perhaps always have members who prefer print versions of the journal. Given this, someone on ASALH’s board will have to be knowledgeable about how publishing services work in the print world. In going to Chicago, we would end our relationship with the company presently providing most of those services, but who would keep abreast to changes in print? We produce the JAAH the way we do now to accommodate our editor who is nearing the end of his career and is not versed in new technologies. Who on the board would be there with the knowledge to establish a modern, stream-lined print program? The people on the publishing committee now do not understand the current arrangements and how they could be improved to save thousands in production costs. If they did, they would see that the entire monetary advantage of going to Chicago would disappear. When would this new knowledge appear?

Finally, does anyone on the board currently know who to publish a new title via the ASALH Press? That should tell you something about getting out of a business and thinking you can just step back into it. Be wary of people who speak easily about hard things they have never done. A business is an idea grounded in the nitty gritty.

Sharon Harley, Where Is the Money? Doesn’t Selling Out Pay?
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Sharon Harley, Where Is the Money? Doesn’t Selling Out Pay?

wheres-the-moneyThe fallout from the 101st Business Session has forced the regime to engage the membership and the Executive Council.  They had been loath to do so.  Yet, if members of the board had been indifferent, the people did not take kindly to being disenfranchised in the middle of our discussion of a motion to cease and desist in negotiating with any publisher.  The members had doubts about the nature of the current leadership, and the leadership proved them right.  The president and the vice president of membership got haughty and told us we were powerless. Turning the constitution and by-laws on their heads, they asserted us that the Executive Council, not the Business Session of the membership, was the legislative branch of our association, and that they could make decisions as they see fit. That was that, and we were, for the moment, disenfranchised!

A month later, without conceding they were wrong and the people are the power, the regime now finds it necessary to acknowledge the rank and file and appear to seek our consent.  To be sure, they mean to press ahead.  Laying the ground work to do so, Sharon Harley has sent out a constant contact to the membership stating their case.  To be sure it is not the same case with the same promises made before the Business Session.  Despite being an outstanding historian, Harley has authored a document full of misleading and erroneous information.  She has silently altered promises and data about the deal they are attempting to negotiate with the University of Chicago Press.  It appears that the regime thinks this public relations campaign will placate the membership and allow them to continue the process of selling out of the century of self-publishing the Journal of African American History.  The Big Lie is about a penny-ante status move.

After telling us that Chicago had promised ASALH $100,000 plus in “profits” and that everyone would get a hard copy of the Journal of African American History, the regime has deflated the Big Lie after it became laid bare by V.P. Franklin’s slip.  If you do not recall, the editor of the JAAH sent out an email telling everyone that the editorial office’s expenses would be paid for by ASALH out of the “income” from Chicago.  So the promised $100,000 of profits were not that.  Moreover, when many of us made a big thing out of how much the 2,000 hard copies would cost–the balance of the promised profits–the regime knew it had a problem.  Well, they probably also knew it because “our attorney” from Blank Rome was in the Business Session, and I’m sure that as an officer of the court our attorney informed them that truthful financial disclosures must be made to decision makers to comply with the conditions of the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002.  Moreover, it was not very becoming for our Treasurer, Gilbert Smith, to be one of those touting a “net” or “profit” of $100,000, knowing editorial expenses must be charged against it.

In this new document from Sharon Harley, numbers take a vacation.  Indeed, from that letter alone, we have no idea now what the bottom line will be on the sellout.   Profit, what profit? Who said anything about bottom lines?  We are left only with the false statement that the journal makes $240 a year and left to assume that Chicago will net us more than that.  The document no longer makes the claim that Chicago will provide members free print copies.  It now says that about half the members will receive free copies–but it does not say who will pay for it.  In general, Chicago does not pay for the copies received by the members of scholarly associations.  The individual members do for a fee of $20.  Now, it likely means that ASALH will pay for it out of its “income” from Chicago.  It so, this number is roughly $20,000.  Would Chicago swallow the cost?  Harley does not say who pays and how much.  What is the bottom line on this proposed sell out?  Numbers and transparency, where art thou?

Of the $100,000 in the original promise, the costs of the editorial office (approximately $55,000 to $60,000 with increasing staff costs) and the $20,000 for print copies the net revenue would be roughly $20K to $25K. Mind you, if they get around the constitution and by-laws and sign a deal, they would have not delivered free journals promised those in attendance.  Making good on that pledge would have meant $5,000 in profit.

Ladies and gentleman despite what our CPA-holding treasurer reported, the Journal of African American History profits us $25,000 or more a year.  Yes, this is why the come up with the following formulation:  “ASALH Treasurer Gilbert Smith…noted in October 2016 that between 2011 and 2014 ASALH publications had net losses. In 2015 the Journal of African American History had a net income of $240, which is slightly better than break even.”  Why did not our CPA Treasurer report what the JAAH’s revenues were for those four years?  Why are they folded into a number about all publications?  That’s because the revenue over expenses were on between $35,000 and $45,000.  What happened in 2015–an accounting change recommended by the auditors to place the revenue for a given volume in the same fiscal year rather than when we receive it.  Effectively money received in 2015 went to the financials for 2014, reducing the profit to $240.  Thus, in 2016 we can expect the revenue of $25,000 or more.

Now, mind you, our JAAH revenue will decline as the journal business across America is declining.  Yet this kind of poor reporting to members after literally lying to members about $100,000 is shameful on the part of the leadership.  This is no way to get your way.  This is misleadership.  If I am in error, then the leadership should provide the JAAH revenue-versus-expense reports for the years 2011-2016, since the funds for volume 100 (2015) are all in. Let us argue about real reports, not phantom claims from people who a month ago tried to pass off revenue as profits.

After a century of self-publishing, the new leadership has suggested first that we had not been our own publishers.  Secondly, they argued the Journal of African American History made no money, and Chicago promised us profits of $100,000, which we could use to pay for the other things in the life of the Association.  Now we know there is no Chicago advantage, not a tangible one.  If it is not about money, could these folks be in pursuit of status?  Do other people have colder ice?

(More on Harley’s Letter Later)

 

 

 

Self-Publishing the Journal of African American History and On Going Revolution in Journal Publishing
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Self-Publishing the Journal of African American History and On Going Revolution in Journal Publishing

The nearly universal assault on university library budgets has led librarians to want free scholarly journals, and every year an astonishing number of for-pay journals are cut by libraries, especially in the humanities. Nothing and no one will stop this decline, just as few associations publish their journals for free.  Associations need this revenue stream to pay for operations and so they no longer talk much about open access.  While journals are no longer a cash cow, but the meager revenue is sorely needed.   JSTOR’s New Scholarship Program and Project Muse allowed associations to remain their own publishers, but increasingly associations, looking to do better, are running to university presses and giving up their tradition of self-publishing.  Founded to self-publish for a people, not a professional association, this move is much more perilous because it involves more than money.

JSTOR and Project Muse were funded by foundations to keep the revenue flowing, but increasingly they are not successful as their business plans are being challenged by others seeking a way through the crisis.  Muse boasts that its business is declining at only 5% a year, which means they should be glad they are not a publicly traded corporation because that statement would result in instant death.  And JSTOR, which only recently got into the new scholarship business, is not doing well in that area.  Last year, JSTOR lost two of its biggest customers, The University of California Press and the University of Chicago Press.   They represented about half of their New Scholarship business.  This means that JSTOR’s new scholarship program is wounded, and they are now fighting for market share with two large former allies.  Don’t be surprised—this is a revolution.

This also means is that the journal battle field of different business models has expanded.  It’s about the back files baby!  What is clear now is that both Chicago and California believe that JSTOR’s business models for new scholarship and old scholarship were not working out for them. The JSTOR Archive had thousands of titles that shared revenue from bulk sales, and the New Scholarship model allowed libraries to buy individual titles. We at ASALH with one title could feel the problem–too little revenue from the back files and promised rise in sales from the New Scholarship Program. What is clear, both Chicago and California are saying, if we can’t find new customers in the world (their rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding) we want more money for our back files. Bye-bye JSTOR Archive. Both are trying to make subscribers to their journals pay much more than they were paying via JSTOR Archive. Chicago is charging as much for back files as current titles. And California is breaking back files into two categories recent and deep back files. They are aggressive on back files. The future of a journal, they are saying, is really its past.

Now this move to make libraries pay for old articles is not without its problems. The world has been saying the opposite since the creation of JSTOR and the rise of other “aggregators” such as Pro-quest and Ebsco-Host. Most Deep archives are available in Proquest and Ebsco-Host and will always be there because that’s how those contracts were written in the 1990s and 2000s. ASALH’s JAAH and Black History Bulletin are in those databases. They are also in JSTOR and the contract we signed years ago means they will stay in their–unless we go with Chicago and they liberate them. (Me wonders what all we are not being told in this Chicago deal because their business model is based on back files.) This wide availability of back files means that many libraries are not going to pay for them as they already have them. In fact, what the librarians tell you when they cut your journal title is that we will have to make it with the back files only. They point to ProQuest, Ebsco-Host, and JSTOR Archive and say, they are only three years behind. And they have studies that show that the most important articles do not get used until that point in time anyway!!

Now, I have not said very much about the Journal of African American in all of this because we are just one journal caught in a digital revolution.  Associations with individual journals that are taking on publishers, most notably Oxford and Duke, are not making much money.  The American Historical Review and the Journal of American History report minor returns in the $20,000 to $40,000 range.  There is no land of milk and honey.  I rather doubt that either the Chicago or California approach will benefit JAAH, but they would upset our existing relationships with JSTOR and I am convinced it will not stop the revenue slide.

Think of this digital revolution as a movie in which the question is whether the Negro will get shot and die first. I take a bit of pride in saying that over the last decade I made sure that we did not get capped in the first or second scene. And I am saying that we do not have to get capped at all if take the position that we will self-publish our journal for our own sake and will get into no unnecessary entanglements. As long as we are our own publisher, we are mobile and agile. Moreover, we are intellectually independent–and that is what we at ASALH were founded to be. We live to be wholly free with no risk of being muzzled.

Rogue(s) Corrupt ASALH Election to Advance Sellout of Tradition
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Rogue(s) Corrupt ASALH Election to Advance Sellout of Tradition

rogue-election-file-showing-both-corporate-executive-seats-different-years

 

In standing up for the Woodson tradition of self-publishing, I became a persona non grata in the eyes of the new leadership of ASALH, which is increasing taking the shape of a regime.  One of the defining characteristics of a regime is the nearly universal tendency to perpetuate itself and protect its rule by eliminating the opposition, which it considers to be inherently illegitimate.

To prevent me from running for the board as a corporate member, the majority of the Executive Council voted to exclude me from the ballot for the class of 2019.   But when the opposition told them that I could indeed run a write in campaign and win, the regime ignored the concern–did not seek a change of policy–but went to work.  Without a vote of the Council, the regime created an electronic ballot that, breaking with tradition, excluded write-in candidates for the corporate seats.

We warn our children to watch what they do on the internet because an indiscretion can ruin a reputation.  But the technologically less savvy can give that advice,  but they really don’t know how deep things can get, not really.  Those who tampered with tradition for undemocratic purposes have left themselves exposed.  Here’s last year’s ballot, and here is this year’s ballot as they sit out in the open internet, going nowhere and leaving a trail of authoritarian behavior.  This goes against the traditions of the association, which has always allowed write-in candidates in elections.

As a result of the unauthorized ballot, which excluded the write in for the corporate seat only, Gladys Mack sits there alone as the candidate, no opposition–not even a potential one as a write in.  Effectively the regime is appointing her to a three-year term: She is not being elected.  (No choice, no real election.)  This is unprecedented in ASALHland for that last who knows how many elections.  But as you can see from last year’s ballot, this is not how we hold elections.

Now, keeping me off the board even if it means violating ASALH’s election practices is a must because I oppose, strenuously oppose, ending our century of tradition of self-publishing ASALH’s Journal of African American History.  What folks think of my methods matters not in this–it does not justify the means used to oppose me.   They had the power to deny me a place on the ballot, but they did not have the authority, without going to the general membership, to change the election practices.  People who agree with me were denied a choice. I received 54 write in votes for the non-business seat, and because of a paper ballot was sent out to someone who requested one, I had one vote for the corporate seat.   I am suggesting to the board that both candidates–the advantaged candidate and me–both be appointed as there are two seats available in each class.  This is a wise way to solve the problem of corruption.

Democracy in a membership organization is vital for its survival.  If members feel that people who have dedicated themselves have no voice, then they cease to belong.  ASALH must clean up its house.  The persons responsible should resign.

Click for pdf versions of the ballots:  2015 and 2016

What about Power to the People?
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What about Power to the People?

In this effort to save Woodson’s journal from the fate of losing its independence, I have been on an effort to get back on the governing board of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH).  I would like to give you definitive news on my candidacy for the ASALH’s board but it all depends of the board means by democracy.

Despite being the immediate past president, I was denied a place on the ballot as a corporate member without explanation and certainly there were no irregularities with my service as any audit will show.  I’m decided a good government type.  This is oppositional politics at its worse, but I’ve been around and have thick skin.

In my write-in campaign, I asked my supporters to write me in for a general seat because the electronic ballot omitted a space for a write in for that position. Now we have always had write-in candidates for all positions, but somehow this year, the year I applied to be a corporate member, no go. Now in ASALH corporate includes almost anything, including leadership in not-for-profit, so I should have been gold as a candidate, write in or otherwise. (I spent 13 years participating governing and heading a not-for-profit–the organization in question!) Turns out, someone must have written me in for a corporate seat on a requested paper ballot–bless them. So I was a write in for two seats, corporate and regular.

I did not win the regular seat, but got much love from supporters. It mattered from what I can tell. Many supported me and others, so it mattered. And my hat goes off to the winners.

Now there was only one person running for a corporate seat though each ASALH class has two corporate seats available. So my one write-in corporate vote should make me the winner! I told the nomination committee co-chair, Barbara Spencer Dunn, that I consider myself the winner of that second seat. But what is democratic and fair no longer prevails in ASALHland. As I argued, if there is only one candidate in an “election” for a seat there is no election without the possibility of a write-in candidate. The person running for that seat, a woman named Gladys Mack, is virtually an antidemocratic appointment, breaking tradition in ASALH elections. I have never met her, and I’m told she is wholly new to ASALH, so I have no opinion of her, but I do have an opinion of a lack of democracy. I suggested that the right thing to do is to honor democratic results. If Gladys Mack defeated me as the write-in candidate for the first of two seats, we are both legitimate winners–me for the second seat. This is what wisdom would dictate.

So if democracy has a place in ASALH, I won. If not, the board just threw the will of the people aside and appointed someone rather that elected them. These folks, I hope, will not become a veritable regime. I guess they are deadset on not getting right with Woodson. But we will prevail. There are sturdy people joining the board.

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