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Website creator Jack Del Nunzio discusses his work

Tell us a bit about your background.

I was born in New Orleans, LA in 1997, and soon after my family moved to Carroll County, about thirty minutes west of Baltimore, MD. I had a very privileged upbringing; and yet, I was acutely aware of--and frustrated by--the inequality and persistent racial injustice that plagued New Orleans and Baltimore. I attended public schools in the local Carroll County system, and went on to graduate from a small liberal arts college, McDaniel College (in nearby Westminster, MD), in 2016 with a BA in History & Economics. I am currently a graduate student at American University in Washington D.C., studying Public History.

How did you become interested in this subject? What brought you to this?

I attribute my passion for history to the places I call home: New Orleans and Baltimore, both home to robust black populations and troubling legacies of racism. Of course, public school curriculum in white, suburban Carroll County did its best to erase black voices and the black experience. From pre-K to high school, a largely normative, white-washed version of history was presented to me--I can remember asking questions to myself about why this was, about why we glossed over subjects like slavery, the failures of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, continued racism & inequality, etc. I was lucky enough to find McDaniel College, where throughout my undergraduate career I committed to a deep engagement with the history of racism & antiracism. When it came time to compose my capstone thesis, I had originally intended to write about public memory & memorialization, the Confederate Lost Cause, and the most recent iteration of the culture wars: the debate over what to do with confederate monuments. Instead, my professor and I stumbled upon an announcement for the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project's Inaugural Conference at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, and the rest is history: I wrote my thesis on lynchings in Maryland; discovered several new lynchings & errors in the historical record that the Maryland State Archives had overlooked; presented my piece at various conferences; and have remained engaged with the MD LMP by attending events and gatherings state-wide. Last year, I was contacted by a former professor at McDaniel College, who had helped establish the Carroll County Coalition of the MD LMP. Subsequently, it has been my privilege to work on the steering committee and serve as research lead. At American University, I have continued with lynching research while widening my methodology; instead of relying on newspapers and archived materials alone, I traveled to the Eastern Shore to conduct oral history interviews with descendants of George Armwood. Most recently, as part of a digital history methods course, I developed this digital resource to complement ongoing lynching research in Maryland.

Why did you create this site? What needs did you identify that this satisfies?

The site is grounded in the needs of the MD LMP, and ongoing research/reconciliation efforts therein. Thus, I developed the site due to a glaring lack of statewide cohesion when it comes to current research; in other words, there was no stable platform for researchers and the community to come together and archive/interpret/aggregate their findings. If we are to tell the full truth about lynchings in Maryland, and nationwide, current research must be made widely available and interpreted--with empathy and respect for the victims--by experts in the field. Just as important, research must conducted in collaboration with Maryland's black community & descendant community, as well as invested members of the public more broadly. This site is meant to do just that.

How will it work? What will be the mechanics, protocols for contributors?

The overarching goal of this platform is for it to be a collaborative, open-access, and accessible primary source archive. It is for anyone: seasoned researchers engaged in the field of lynching studies, members of the descendant community in Maryland, and the interested public in general. To these ends, the site serves (or will serve) a few purposes: it maps, documents, and interprets the lynching victims in Maryland that we currently know about; it is as an iterative platform whereby researchers and the community can reflect their latest findings; and it incentivizes collaboration between researchers and county communities through oral history projects, preservation of descendant community artifacts, etc.

With regard to curation and contributions to the site, I envision that each county research lead will be provided editing access. In addition, community ambassadors as well as leaders of the commission and the MD LMP will be able to make contributions. This will ensure that the site reflects the latest county-level and statewide research, while giving members of the community a voice in the process as well. 

Have you done other websites? How did you acquire the skills that allowed you to create this thing?

Throughout my undergraduate and graduate career, I have been privileged to work extensively in the field of digital history methods: blogging, digital archiving, website building, collections management, oral history audio editing, ArcGIS software, and the like. I also do editing and web design for The Docket, an abbreviated, online version of the journal Law & History Review. This is the first time, however, that I have developed a website and primary source archive from the ground up using ArcGIS; in this sense, I very much so think that this site can and should be iterative so as to best serve our goals going forward. Perhaps the site should be formatted differently, with a landing page for each county? Perhaps it would be best to migrate the site over to a platform such as Omeka, which is better designed to house primary source materials? I look forward to feedback!

How do you hope the site will be used? What do you hope it will achieve?

In addition to the goals above, I sincerely hope that this website creates a space in which researchers and the community can come together. Where they come together to tell the truth, to leverage this truth toward achieving reconciliation, and to practice antiracism unabashedly. Far too often, historians do their work without acknowledging that a shared authority exists between themselves and the community they claim to represent. There is much we do not know about lynchings in Maryland--many answers can be found by involving the community through oral history projects and the like.Moreover, I see this site as an educational tool for combating historical erasure. I hope that these kinds of resources can be incorporated more robustly into primary, secondary, and post-secondary curriculum statewide to complicate white-washed, normative historical narratives--to confront, rather than ignore, troubling parts of our past.