Partnerships

This community-based documentary recounts Fairfax County activists' formation of what would be the NAACP's first rural branch. The Colored Citizens Protective League came together in 1915 to resist a proposal to zone Black residents out of Falls Church.

Our collaborations with community groups and lay historians, local elders and the keepers of church and club archives widen the available archive for fully researching Northern Virginia's past. CML's approach, which augments such sources with digital methods as well as more conventional scholarly digging, provides a model for deeper study of supposedly "lost" pasts almost anywhere in the United States.

Our work demonstrates that stories become "lost" not through a paucity of resources that document the Black community,  but rather, a choice not to recognize them.

—CML Director George Oberle

Community collaborations helps elevate identities, lore and events that may be known locally but largely unrecognized in public and academic accounts. In one such example, by partnering with the Black History Committee of a historic Northern Virginia library in 2024, two CML graduate students recovered the contributions of Black rural expertise and "placemaking in shaping Loudoun County "horse country." Consulting secondary works and primary sources from established archives, they were able to place local artifacts and oral recollections in historical context for the first time. These community ties even helped them name people in Smithsonian collection photographs whose archival data rendered Black subjects anonymous. 

Read on for examples of CML collaboration and results.