Danielle S. Willkens, assistant professor at Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Architecture, was a Mellon History Teaching Fellow in fall 2021. Her research report, “From Plantation to Protest: Visualizing Cultural Landscapes of Conflict in the American South,” discusses the use of digital documentation projects to interpret and preserve geospatial histories with case studies including the Selma to Montgomery marches of 1965 and civil rights sites in Atlanta.
Q&A with Danielle S. Willkens
What have been your projects on sites related to Bloody Sunday?
I've been part of a larger research team working in Selma to document and preserve sites related to Bloody Sunday through drone photogrammetry, 3D scanning, and other so-called reality-capture technologies. Reality capture is especially useful at sites that are structurally compromised¾it’s not contact invasive, so you can take very accurate surveys without physically touching anything. And we can return for sequential surveys, which shows us a quantifiable rate of change at the site that is useful to underscore the immediacy of a threat to a site.
The Edmund Pettus Bridge, which has experienced some deterioration over the years, is an icon of the civil rights movement and a National Historic Landmark, but the preservation and interpretation of the site today is complicated by the bridge’s location on Route 80, a highway still in use. So, the conflict site to the south is not actually very safe or peaceful for fully comprehending, or reflecting on, the place’s history—imagine Gettysburg or Normandy with cars going by at fifty miles an hour. We’re figuring out how the data we’ve captured can be used to safely enhance public interpretation and make it accessible for visitors who can’t travel to the site.
Part of our goal was also to digitally document these areas and recognize signs of change and decay at these sites. We have an amazing photographic and video record of the conflict and subsequent march, and we can use certain landmarks, like sewer grates, as control points to understand what still exists in the space and what has been lost.
What other sites are you working on?
With historic sites, it’s hard to understand the idea of movement and time, but of course the march had a trajectory before and after reaching the bridge that isn’t captured in that historic landmark designation. These places aren’t static, so we’re exploring the 4D aspect of documentation that includes time, drawing a lot of methodology from conflict archaeology rather than traditional historic preservation approaches.
There are many other sites in Selma tied to the struggle for voting and civil rights that we are starting to document. I have done some digital documentation at Brown’s Chapel, for example, where the event on March 7, 1965, later known as the Bloody Sunday march, started with a service. They’re doing a huge preservation and restoration project and unfortunately, keep finding more termite damage. We’ve also been documenting the homes of specific marchers and advocates like Amelia Boynton, who had a house in Selma.
Elsewhere in Dallas County and farther south in Lowndes County, where the march eventually headed into Montgomery between March 21 and 25, 1965, there are four campsites where marchers stayed. Three of them were private farms and the final one was the city of St. Jude, right outside of Montgomery. David Hall’s farm was the first campsite, which now looks like just a small residence. We’re working with members of the family to figure out documentation methods; it’s like the hunt for where George Washington slept, but instead we’re asking about the marchers and exploring how to share and enliven their stories. We also eventually want to do some documentation in Marion, Alabama, because the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson really jumpstarted the march movement in Selma.
As a Mellon History Teaching Fellow, you have been rethinking the pedagogy of urban landscapes. What is the class you are teaching, and how has it been reshaped?
I’ve been working on the “Race, Space, and Architecture in the United States” seminar I teach at Georgia Tech. Our immediate classroom is the city of Atlanta, which is known as the cradle of the civil rights movement, but also has deep ties to the Civil War, slavery, and Indigenous displacement; Georgia Tech was built on the site of a Muscogee (Creek) tract. Through the Atlanta Preservation Center, we identified sites and community partners where the work the students do¾drawings, archival research, even reality capture¾would be useful. I’ve been rethinking how we use these tools to tell stories of celebration, joy, and resiliency, so that it’s not a class centered on oppression and white supremacy. This semester, we’re excited that work continues in different forms on several sites recent students investigated, some supported by grants kickstarted by student analysis and 3D scan datasets that would have been cost prohibitive for the community or site owners to commission.
May Wang is postgraduate writing and reporting fellow. Photo by Emily Orr, humanities fellow.