Transcript of the video interview with Professor Paul Mullins for The Hoosier Story with Anne Shaw.

See full video: https://purl.dlib.indiana.edu/iudl/media/j72p199d3f

Hello. Today we're speaking with dr. paul Mullins, a historic archaeologists at IUPUI, who studies the relationship between racism and material culture. Hey Paul, how are you doing today? Very good. Thank you. Can you tell me a little bit about your research? My research in Indianapolis focuses primarily on the predominantly African-American community. Once live where the IUPUI campuses and along Indiana Avenue. And I'm interested in the establishment of that community, the diversity of folks that lived in the near west side. And I'm especially interested in their displacement after World War II by highway construction, state expansion, and of course, the construction of the university itself. And for those who may not know, you mentioned the building up the interstates through downtown Indianapolis. I understand that's called redlining. Can you speak a little bit about that? Well, what happened? Red lining is a 1930s phenomenon By, done by the Homeowner's Loan Corporation. In the 1930s, all major American cities were divided up by what the federal government referred to as risk for loan default. And if you were a community that had a single African American than you were, you were you were class so low that you could not get a federal loan. So that's what we referred to in on those maps. Those neighborhoods were red, hence redlining. Those neighborhoods were predominantly African-American. And that's true certainly in Indianapolis, we have a map done in 1937. So when the highways are built, one of the things that highway planners looked for was property that was the most inexpensive. So the most cost-efficient in that ended up being, of course, those neighborhoods that in the 1830s had been classed as high risk, risk for rents. So that's one of the reasons the interstate and downtown Indianapolis is a sort of weird meandering snake as it comes down out of the northwest side. And it went through primarily African-American neighborhoods, certainly on the northwest side. Although it goes through neighborhoods like Fountain Square, of course, which have a very wide representation of all sorts of Hoosiers. Okay. I would like to ask you about how you can use archeology to study the intersection of racism and material culture. Well, I think one of the things I define archaeology relatively broadly as all materiality. It doesn't really have to be something at the trial tip under the ground, although that's certainly part of what I do. But when I would like students and faculty and visitors, WPI, when they come to the campus, they don't see any historical structures anymore because that neighborhood was erased between about the mid 1950s into very early 1980s. So there's nothing left. So they don't see a heritage, so they don't believe it's a historical neighborhood, but there are plenty of descendant community folks who feels stakeholder status in that neighborhood and feel a connection to the place, even though it may not look like a historical place. So I'm interested in kind of defining materiality broadly and reminding people that it may be a parking lot today, but it was once a club or a house, or a church or school for a century or more in many cases. Can you give me some examples of artifacts that you might find or remains? Buildings? Well, there are big artifacts in there, a little artifacts. The ladder are those little artifacts recovered through archaeological excavation or anything people would have thrown away. And we've done excavations on the IUPUI campus. And we have a very wide variety of everyday material culture that may include things like food remains, bottled goods, ceramics, all the things we would expect to find on a historic archaeological site. The big artifacts are things like parking lots, empty spaces, all of those absences, the landscape itself and how it was created by IU. Now UP why afterwards, those are artifacts as well that were created for very different ideological. Now I think a lot of people don't really associate archaeology with an urban landscape. And it has been my experience that people think if there's a parking lot that's been paved or new construction that's there, that there's nothing left, but there are remnants under there that you just can't see. And actually, construction of parking lots from a purely archaeological preservation perspective really preserve some stratigraphic remains incredibly well when parking lots were built at IUPUI, for instance. And this is true along the Avenue as well. Generally, they just push buildings over. They they salvage some material, they took some stuff to the dump, but generally they just put stuff into seller holds and then build it over with gravel and asphalt. So it's very well preserved like a cap over in a time capsule. It's a Pompei, just a little different kind of fill. It's not volcanic field. It's who's your bill? Exactly. So when these communities were pushed out for construction of new buildings and campus and red lining. Where did they go? In Indianapolis, most folks stay in town because they're connected to family. They have friends, they have schools, they have church congregations that they don't want to leave. Some people do leave Central Indiana. They may go to a place like Chicago. They may go North, they may settle into the countryside. But most folks go to the west and northwest sides of campus than any other direction. Some folks go to haul Ville, for instance. Some folks go to the northwest side. As those neighborhoods gradually began to integrate after about 1960 or thereabouts. Okay. Can we talk a little bit about how important Indiana Avenue was to this community? Will Indiana Avenue is the heart of the segregated black community in Indianapolis. There are African-Americans live all over the city. It's worth keeping that in mind. But they're generally after 1,900 in relatively segregated pockets and a handful of places in most African Americans who live in really on the near west side. And the center of that neighborhood really was Indiana Avenue. This is where we would have found every possible consumer product. We would have found leisure venues like theaters and clubs. There are churches sprinkled along, kinda offered, just offer the avenue and the residential neighborhoods around there. Virtually all of that is gone today. I mean, the walker theater has been preserved. Ransom Place is a tiny little fragment of what that neighborhood look like. They're tiny little pieces of it. If they had street as well that are still preserved. But there's very little of it for us to see. And I think that's what one of the things archaeology can do is we can begin to build a consciousness that there was a heritage to this place. In ideally, we can intervene with developers and began to do development up and down the avenue in the future that will integrate an understanding of this as a Black place and black heritage would be part of development. Instead of simply putting cookie cutter apartment buildings up and down the avenue. The community is working with. Who are they working with? We've worked with since I arrived here in 1999, I've always had an oral history project. It was part of the program. This is the distinctive part about doing archaeology of the very recent past is I also have an ethnographic oral historical component. I can talk to people who lived in these neighborhoods. So we've always done oral historical interviews. Some of those elders have passed since the program began, but there still are people around to talk to. So we have a lot to work with. We have a lot of oral history in which people have talked about these are the things that are important in their experience. These are the places they went. This is a church that shape their life. This is what school meant, this is what the importance of was a Christmas attics for instance. We have a lot to work with to kinda build a thoughtful development on the part of the city and private developers. So archaeology focuses on material culture, but also there are other ways to do research associated with that. Yes. So for instance, I've worked with the community since I arrived here in Indianapolis in 1999. A voiced an oral history with elders. I've always worked with descending community. I've always worked with elders who actually worked for the state and for the university as well. So I have a variety of historical perspectives on the development of the Near West side. And we have an enormously rich primary documentary base that increasingly is being digitized. So we have lots and lots of primary materials to work with and more of it is floating to the surface all the time. We have quite a lot of material to work with. This is not, this is a little different than the kind of stereotype of prehistoric archaeology where we have some oral memory, we have some oral heritage, tribal heritage, but we have no primary documents per se men in historic archaeology, we have a lot of that. I love that many people and communities, it seems like they come together to sort of preserve that history and make sure that it is known and people do remember it and they can tell people about it. Yeah, and I think we want to I think what the archaeology project does is we channel that a little bit. There is, there are lots of people for whom this heritage is very consequential. They pass it down generation to generation within families. But it often doesn't get communicated outside of small communities or outside of the family itself. And I think we give a little bit of a platform to tell those stories to broader publics and might otherwise not here. I think that is so important. We have the possibility for louder voices are more opportunities that we give those opportunities to those communities so they can speak to that. I love that chair, that the best part of my job is working with descendent community and elders. This is the coolest part and this is why I always did historic archaeology. I like the ethnographic dimension. I like dealing with people who are committed to the heritage. I like the idea that we could shake things like development and we can shape the way we tell these historical, these stories in the future. We'll call Thank you so much for speaking with us today and sharing your research for the history of Indianapolis. Care much for having me.