What makes a “historical source” a “good source?”
Pat Duggins
News Director at Alabama Public Radio, the first radio newsroom to win RFK Human Rights' "Seigenthaler Prize for Courage in Journalism." Award-winning journalist, published author, and former NASA correspondent at NPR.
Alabama Public Radio hangs it’s hat on big journalistic investigations. We call them “deep dives.” Over the years, we’ve addressed rural health, prison reform, civil rights, the Gulf oil spill, and Alabama’s water crisis. This had led to the lion’s share of APR’s one hundred and sixty awards for excellence in journalism, since I became news director. Many of these projects involve our student interns from the University of Alabama who are now working "in the industry." That tally includes APR being named the first (and at this writing, “the only”) radio newsroom to win the “John Seigenthaler Prize for Courage in Journalism” from the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Foundation. We were kindly selected over The New York Times, The Washington Post, PBS Frontline, and ABC-TV for that honor.
Our latest effort investigates the preservation of slave cemeteries in Alabama https://www.apr.org/2022-10-13/no-stone-unturned-part-2-the-champ-and-the-slaveholder. These burials sites are being lost to neglect or paved over for parking lots. We started at the Old Prewitt Slave Cemetery near Tuscaloosa. Alabama Public Radio arranged for an expert with ground penetrating radar to do the first ever scan of the burial ground. He found forty unmarked graves within a half hour. The two acre site was set aside by plantation owner John Welch Prewitt, and we wanted to paint a picture of him and how white Alabamians felt about slavery at the time of the Civil War.
That’s what prompted this article.
Prewitt wasn’t much of a letter writer. So, the notion of doing a “Ken Burns,” with somebody reading what he wrote, was out. There were published accounts of a story about Prewitt’s second wife and how she treated her family’s slaves. It was an essay from the 1930’s written by a white woman who told a tale of how “Miss Betsy” was kind to her kidnapped Africans, and how loyal they were to the Prewitts. We interviewed a historian on how southern whites would often write revisionist material like that to send the message that slavery wasn’t as bad as everybody thought it was. Our interviewee felt that the descendants of enslaved people would tell a very different story.
The question for me, was whether or not to use the original essay in APR’s slave cemetery preservation series.
Here’s the wrinkle.
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The Alabama State Archives couldn’t find a copy of the document, and neither could historians at the University of Alabama nor in Prewitt’s hometown of Northport. So, that left the possibility of crediting the writer of the modern articles featuring the essay, or not. That raised the interesting question of… if somebody “finds” something at a governmental archive that hasn’t been cataloged, is that a “discovery” to which the discoverer deserved credit, or even ownership? I didn’t have to argue about that…The Atlantic magazine already did ten years ago.
Here are links to two articles, both from 2012. Both centered on the discovery of writings by the first military surgeon to arrive at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. following Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. The author of the first story contended that if something is found in public archive, it isn’t a “discovery” by anyone. The second article is from the “discoverer” of that Lincoln document, who felt otherwise.
So, rather than get into the fight over the issue, I chose “plan B.” ?
I conducted my own search of the Alabama Archives and found a typewritten account of the same tale. It was from an obscure file labeled “negroe folklore,” and it was in the form of a ghost story about plantation owner John Welch Prewitt’s second wife, Betsy. White farmers, back in the day, swore that her ghost could be seen, basket on arm, tending to the needs of sick slaves. It had the same apologist tone of the 1930’s essay, and there were no questions as to its source. It was also cool to have a ghost story in our coverage. Case closed.