About Chesapeake Heartland
Our Story↓
The project’s name derives from the Chesapeake region’s identity as the heartland of African American history and culture since the arrival of the first Africans at Jamestown in 1619. Kent County, Maryland, is in many ways a microcosm of that history, with its own rich and diverse African American heritage dating back nearly four centuries.
The mission of Chesapeake Heartland is to preserve, digitize, interpret, and make accessible materials related to African American history and culture in Kent County, Maryland and beyond. In collaboration with the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington College’s Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, and a diverse array of local organizations, Chesapeake Heartland seeks to build a model of grassroots preservation, curation, and interpretation for communities across the region.
Together, Kent County residents, Washington College students, Chesapeake Heartland staff, and our sub-grant partners—Sumner Hall, Kent County Public Library, and, Kent Cultural Alliance— explore, collect, record, and interpret our community’s own African American stories, and provide open-access to the Chesapeake Heartland Digital Archive.
In the three years prior to our official launch in 2020, we asked hundreds of community members how to make this project meaningful, and they have consistently said the project should:
Create platforms for community interpretation;
Support and strengthen local schools, nonprofits, and Black-led businesses and organizations;
Foster cross-generational and interracial conversation;
Engage, employ, and train local teenagers;
Document life’s more joyous experiences along with injustice and activism
Identify how racism has worked in the past, while actively undoing racism in the present.
Now in our fourth year, read below to learn more about how we continue to fulfill community-identified goals through events, projects, partnerships, and cross-organizational collaborations.
Our Approach↓
Chesapeake Heartland is a grassroots project that relies on community curation. Through conversations with a diverse group of stakeholders, we identified members of the Kent County African American community who are chroniclers and sharers of local history. As community curators, these individuals set and chart the course for sharing and preserving their own heritage, working alongside the Starr Center and other collaborating organizations to tell stories about the Chesapeake region’s rich history. Our many community partners on Maryland’s Eastern Shore include Kent County’s arts council, public library, school system, and Black-led non-profits, including Sumner Hall and Minary’s Dream Alliance.
By facilitating shared authority and resources, Chesapeake Heartland empowers local communities to shape the stories that connect their past, present, and future.
Read more about our staff and partners.
Our Impact↓
Over the past three years of active preservation and collaboration, the Chesapeake Heartland project has digitized and fully catalogued more than 3,500 historical items in our digital archive, engaged more than 10,000 audience participants through events and presentations, and employed nearly 150 individuals through staff positions, fellowships, and student internships.
Among many exciting past achievements, we’ve:
Built an open-source digital archive, with items ranging from eighteenth-century family papers documenting free African Americans, to 1962 home- movie footage of civil rights protests, to pre-integration high school yearbooks.
Constructed a mobile museum to meet the community on its own ground.
Launched the Hip Hop Time Capsule, employing over 22 paid high school interns to produce album-covers, beats, and lyrics that sample from the archive.
Collaborated with over 30 organizational partners on interpretations of archival materials, including walking tours, heritage signs, festivals, art exhibitions, musicals, poetry readings, field trips, databases, and documentaries.
Garnered coverage from local, regional, and national news outlets. Read these stories below.
On the Horizon↓
Moving forward, the project seeks to create digitization partnerships across the Eastern Shore, initiate “digital repatriation” with three archives in the region, craft learning materials to guide users through the archive, and develop software for audio metadata collection.
Chesapeake Heartland has energized the practice of historic research, preservation, and interpretation across a broad and diverse public, and we look forward to sharing our project’s platforms and practices with neighbors around the Chesapeake Bay.
Our Sub-grant Partners
About Sumner Hall↓
Sumner Hall was built in 1908 by 28 Kent County African American veterans of the Civil War, and is the home of the Charles Sumner Post #25 (est. 1882). As one of the nation’s two last surviving African American Civil War veterans’ posts, Sumner Hall is a historic and cultural venue of significance, both locally and nationally.
Sumner Hall, as a unique place of remembrance in Kent County, is dedicated to promoting an understanding of the African American experience and honoring the contributions of African American veterans who contributed to the pursuit of liberty for all and advocating for social justice.
Sumner Hall is pleased to be one of the partners of the Chesapeake Heartland: African American Humanities Project. The African American Veterans of Kent County research project is an exciting one that engages the community and honors the African American veterans of Kent County by memorializing their stories. This project will research and document the genealogy of Kent County African American Veterans; beginning with the Revolutionary War and continuing to the present-day conflicts. The project findings will be made available to the public via the Chesapeake Heartland online database, public and virtual exhibits, educational materials, and other creative approaches for engaging the public.
About KCA↓
The Kent Cultural Alliance (KCA) is proud to be a partner with Chesapeake Heartland. As Kent County’s oldest and longest serving nonprofit arts organization, founded in 1975, we have supported arts and culture workers in all disciplines as they strive to connect communities through traditional, historical, and new art forms.
Kent County has been recognized by the Maryland State Arts Council as one of the state’s most significant arts communities. The KCA “seeks to invest in, infuse, and inspire artists and arts organizations throughout Kent County in an effort to expand access to the arts for all residents and visitors.” Since its founding, KCA has been a leader in efforts to support local African American visual and performing artists and collect local black history.
As a Chesapeake Heartland partner, we will bring to the light artistic interpretations of stories not widely known of our African American families, friends, and neighbors, through words, music, and art. These interpretations will serve as tools for building a stronger community connection.
John Schratwieser,
Director
About KCPL↓
Kent County Public Library (KCPL) is dedicated to being a cornerstone of the Kent County community as a location where children and adults can experience life-long learning, personal enrichment, and connection with one another. Through joining Chesapeake Heartland: An African American Humanities Project, KCPL is building on this dedication. The process of collecting, curating, and making information and stories available is a core function of a public library. The ability to participate in preserving the vibrant history of the African American community and making it easily accessible to the entire community is an incredible and unique opportunity for a small public library.
Being a Chesapeake Heartland partner is an honor and a joy for KCPL as an institution and for the staff members who are supporting the process, including:
- Executive Director, Jacqueline Adams
- Circulation Manager, Michael Sampson
- Public Service Librarian, Annie Woodall
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Chesapeake Heartland?↓
Chesapeake Heartland is an African American humanities project dedicated to preserving, digitizing, interpreting, and making accessible materials related to African American history and culture in Kent County, Maryland and beyond. In collaboration with the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington College’s Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, and a diverse array of local organizations, Chesapeake Heartland seeks to build a model of grassroots preservation, curation, and interpretation for communities across the region.
What does the Chesapeake Heartland logo symbolize?↓
Designing the Chesapeake Heartland logo was a process of deeply understanding the area I am from. Kent County is full of rich history, but growing up here, that history is described through family stories. Unfortunately, due to this fact, the significance of these stories can often be overlooked. So, I had to separate myself and look at the African American history in Kent County from a different perspective. This led to the question, “what has always been important for families in this area”? The answer is land and the water. Since we are a rural community, a lot of families make a living from those two resources. This is what led me to use the colors blue (water) and tan/gold (land).
The Sankofa bird was the icing on the cake, because it represents looking back and remembering the past, while still moving forward. In the Chesapeake Heartland logo, the surrounding design elements around the Sankofa bird represent intertwining waves. The idea behind the complete design is a path woven into the Chesapeake. We are looking back while moving forward.
-Gordon Wallace
What are we building toward in the coming year?↓
- Expanding digitization beyond Kent County by awarding two small subgrants to nonprofits in adjoining counties;
- Working with three regional archives to initiate the “digital repatriation” of items in their collections that chronicle this community’s history but have remained largely inaccessible;
- Convening an Advisory Committee — including local tradition-bearers, community leaders, scholars, public humanities professionals, and technical experts — to craft inviting pathways through our digital archive;
- Developing software and workflow for the archive’s audio metadata collection tool.
Why the name “Chesapeake Heartland?"↓
The Chesapeake Bay region might be called the heartland of the African American experience, and Kent County, Maryland is a microcosm of this important history.
What are Chesapeake Heartland’s Community-Identified Goals?↓
In the three years prior to our official launch in 2020, we asked hundreds of community members how to make this project meaningful, and they have consistently said the project should::
- Create platforms for community interpretation;
- Strengthen local schools and nonprofits;
- Foster cross-generational and interracial conversation;
- Engage, employ, and train local teenagers;
- Document life’s more joyous experiences along with injustice and activism.