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As part of an effort to research and record local history, ����AV graduate and undergraduate students, along with faculty, have begun documenting Black students who attended Mason and the Black communities that once existed in Fairfax County.

This fall, the website went live with initial research exploring the early years of George Mason College and its transition to a university in 1972. The project, conducted under the auspices of the , is an ongoing interdisciplinary collaborative effort to highlight voices that history has suppressed.

“This project reflects what we believe, the importance of researching and understanding the past, the importance of showing just how messy history is,” said history librarian , director of the Center for Mason Legacies, assistant term professor and Mason alum. “What we’ve learned is that Mason, while one of the most diverse destinations of higher learning in the U.S., has a haunting past.”

Oberle, , associate professor in the , and associate director of the and senior director of fellowships in the , are the founders and primary supervisors of the Black Lives Next Door Project.����

The website has a section titled , which includes individual stories of Black students in the early days of Mason and the struggles they faced. One biography describes Irma R. Willson’s battle in the 1960s for enrollment in the college and then to change the campus environment. Another section delves into at Mason. In addition, the website has a section describing the neighborhood, a Black community that used to exist near Mason.

“I hope that the legacy of this project is that we recognize what happened in our history and highlight problems from Mason’s past and the community’s past that maybe people don’t want to recognize but should for the sake of recognizing and honoring the erased Black history of Fairfax,” said Veronica Mata, a senior majoring in who participated in the research.

The project was inspired by a New York Times opinion piece “Black Lives Next Door” by legal scholar Richard Rothstein, who called for more studies of “comprehensive racial inequity” at the local level, said Berger.��

“Now that Mason is turning 50, it’s a good opportunity to look backwards like this and embrace the past, both the good and the bad, as part of the discussion of what Mason will like going forward,” said Berger.

Over the summer, six undergraduate students, two doctoral candidates and faculty members examined the early years of George Mason College, the institutional predecessor to Mason. The group, which received funding through the (OSCAR), attended a two-week research seminar and then probed into primary source material to answer questions about how segregation affected the college and its community and what happened to the Black communities that were once part of the Northern Virginia landscape. Speakers, including Marcia Chatelain, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Georgetown University historian, helped hone the students’ research skills and inspire them in their work. Rothstein also spoke to the students in the fall after the site was published.

, a doctoral candidate in and a digital humanities graduate research assistant, was one of two graduate students working over the summer to help guide the undergraduate students in their research. She found particularly interesting how few Black students attended Mason as recently as the early 1970s and how far they had to commute to attend.

“Black students were dispersed throughout the region at that time,” Dobberteen said. “It was still a very white college at that time.”

senior Kyler B. Buckner’s research led him to former Mason professor Robert Houston, considered a “revolutionary” by Mason College administration in the late 1960s for protesting the Vietnam War and running teach-ins on societal racism.

“It was the 1960s and Virginia, so I expected to learn there was racism,” said Buckner, a major. “What was unexpected was finding that there were people trying to do something about it, resisting.”

Berger hopes that the work Mason is doing inspires other colleges and universities to similarly research the hidden lives and suppressed voices within their own communities. As part of that effort, Berger and others have started a social media campaign: #blacklivesnextdoor.

Meanwhile, said Berger, research at Mason is ongoing, and they are always seeking sources of funding.

“I’m so proud of these students and what they’ve accomplished with their high-quality work,” Berger said. “It’s rewarding to watch students get so excited about learning and conducting research of consequence.”

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