Voices of the Russell School
A multifaceted project that brought together members of the local community with the Libraries, the College of Education, and DELTA to present the history and voices of the Historic Russell School, a Rosenwald School built in 1926 in Durham County, North Carolina.
Overview
The "Voices of the Russell School" community event was planned to share with the campus and local communities the story of Rosenwald Schools in the American South, with a focus on the Historic Russell Rosenwald School in nearby Durham County. Through the enormous efforts of the Historic Russell School preservation group, the school has been nearly fully restored, making it the most complete of the over 800 Rosenwald Schools built in North Carolina from the 1910s to the 1930s. Over 5,000 Rosenwald Schools were created across the United States during that time period through a collaboration between Julius Rosenwald, the then-CEO of Sears, Roebuck and Co., and Booker T. Washington.
The Rosenwald Schools were an effort to bring education to Black Americans during the Jim Crow era, and they had an enormous positive impact on the communities that helped build them. Using a matching grant system, the Rosenwald Fund supported at least one-fifth of the cost while the rest was raised by the local community. One official with the Fund noted that the project was “not merely a series of schoolhouses, but … a community enterprise in cooperation between citizens and officials, white and colored.”
The event kicked off with a panel discussion in the D. H. Hill Jr. Library's North Forum, near the Cyma Rubin Visualization Gallery, with community members and alumni associated with the Historic Russell School sharing memories of their school and the broader mission of remaining Rosenwald Schools to educate the public about the quest for educational equity in the United States. Members of the panel included Phyllis Mack Horton, Chair of the Historic Russell School; Dr. Valinda Littlefield, Associate Professor of History at the University of South Carolina; and her mother, Bessie Pearley, who attended the Russell School from first grade until its closing in 1945.
Following the panel discussion and questions from the audience, visitors were directed to rotate through three technology-enabled exhibits for more information on the Rosenwald Schools program in the American South and on the Historic Russell Rosenwald School specifically. Most users began their rotation in the Visualization Gallery, which featured immersive images from the Historic Russell School overlaid with interview footage captured from community members and alumni affiliated with the school. They next enjoyed a virtual tour of the Historic Russell School on virtual reality (VR) headsets, with embedded audio commentary from community members and alumni affiliated with the school. The final stop was the iPearl Innovation Studio, displaying information and historical photographs about the broader Rosenwald Schools program across North Carolina. (This part of the project remained available to view as an interactive exhibit in the Innovation Studio after the February event.) This approach meant that each exhibit did not need to tell the entire story of the Russell School; each piece was meant to be seen in combination with the others, creating a full picture.
The event hosts noted that the progression of most guests from micro-level details about a single school to macro-level details about the broader Rosenwald Schools program worked effectively to contextualize locally what they would discover about the broader movement on the next stop. Project team members from the College of Education, the Libraries, and DELTA each brought unique space insights, content knowledge, and/or technical expertise to the project that led to its overall success. With a large team comprised of faculty, students, and staff, the project was able to divide responsibility to efficiently develop individual exhibits, and no one person was responsible for conveying the entire story. The NC State chapter of the Fulbright Association provided food and drink for visitors on the day of the event. The College of Education donated its van, and one of the faculty members picked up some alumni and community members from the school in Durham to bring them to the event at the Hill Library. The College of Education also provided four undergraduate student ambassadors who directed visitors to the panel discussion initially and later assisted with technical exhibits (e.g., showing visitors how to use VR headsets and how to navigate content exhibits on interactive tables in the Innovation Studio).
How We Did It
In mid-2022, Drs. Kevin Oliver and Angela Wiseman conducted interviews with the Russell School alumni and board members, and also took advantage of a DELTA Virtual Tours grant to capture dozens of 3D scans throughout the interior and exterior of the school using a technology called Matterport. Matterport is a virtual tour platform that allows visitors to navigate through a 3D space, constructed using a combination of 360-degree images and LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) or laser scanning. The resulting digital twin can be further annotated with images, video, text and graphics to provide a rich learning experience. In 2023, Drs. Oliver and Wiseman approached Shaun Bennett at the Libraries about hosting an event to showcase these rich materials in the Hill Library's 360-degree Cyma Rubin Visualization Gallery. In initial discussions with library staff, it was suggested this exhibit might expand to include other library spaces such as the Innovation and VR Studios.
Doctoral student Franziska Bickel led the effort to create the first part of the exhibit in the Visualization Gallery, combining 360-degree photos with overlays of interviews with alumni from the Russell School. This created an immersive environment which brought viewers "into" the space, while combining it with commentary from people who actually attended the school.
Adam Rogers, Learning Innovation Librarian and manager of the iPearl Innovation Studio, was brought into the conversation and shared templates for creating table-top exhibits in that space. The College of Education group then created a plan for four exhibits that would introduce the broader Rosenwald Schools program, as well as zooming in to showcase the Historic Rosenwald Russell School in Durham County. Overall, four digital exhibits were created, drawing on historic photographs from the State Archives and on websites about area Rosenwald Schools developed by local public libraries. Four additional tabletop exhibits were planned that did not project onto the tabletops but were displayed on computer monitors (e.g., finite Omeka collections presenting further details about the Rosenwald Schools program and Julius T. Rosenwald's broader philanthropy for Black Americans). A final exhibit was planned that further repurposed 360-images captured from the source Matterport tour.
For the third piece of the exhibit, the VR headsets, the College of Education team selected images and audio clips from its interview footage, and Franziska Bickel and Michael Cuales edited a VR presentation that walked viewers through the Historic Russell School while hearing audio commentary from community members and school alumni using VR headsets. Rather than requiring viewers to navigate the space themselves using complicated controllers, the team decided to create the VR presentation as a timeline-based video with no controls required. Users could rotate their chair or head to see the full 360-degree view, but they did not have to move from waypoint to waypoint (i.e., no control of scene, some control of point of view).
The use of immersive display technology across three exhibit spaces (360-degree Visualization Gallery, Innovation Studio flat-top tables, and VR Studio) was facilitated and supported by Libraries staff. NC State students, faculty, and staff can request a consultation in these spaces with this form or by emailing library_hightechspaces@ncsu.edu.
