Queens United

Building a Descendant Community Network

Abstract

In the midst of aggressive measures to erase Black history and culture through distorted legislation and manufactured popular opinion, there has been a steady increase in the number of institutions working together to acknowledge their historic complicity in U.S. chattel slavery and to atone for the legacies of systemic racism in slavery’s wake. This article is authored collaboratively by two heritage workers who, as descendants from the same enslaved family, seek to leverage their institutional affiliations in order to combat Black cultural erasure by launching a cultural heritage program that centers the goals of the descendant network with which they collaborate.

Genealogist Kevin Porter has been researching Queen family history for nearly two decades. More recently, Porter has engaged with the Sacred Heart Catholic Church (Bowie, Maryland) as it confronts its slave-holding, slave-trading past, which includes Porter’s Queen ancestors. This site was once White Marsh Plantation -- one of five Jesuit-owned plantations in the state. Porter founded his own nonprofit, which he named the White Marsh Heritage Society as a public assertion of the rights of the descendants of the enslaved to claim to that site’s history. Porter has been working with other descendant organizations on envisioning a descendant-led site to be “a place of learning, education and reflection."

Born and raised in the neighborhood founded by Porter’s same ancestors -- Queenstown in Severn, MD -- Joni Floyd has been working in the cultural heritage field for nearly the same amount of time, although she and Porter never met until 2019. In her current role as Curator of Maryland and Historical Collections at the University of Maryland, Floyd specializes in community-based archival interventions (CBAI). This approach has the potential to ground the vision generated by Porter and the other descendant groups connected to White Marsh. This article serves as a blueprint for applying the CBAI approach to the descendant network. It will also offer strategies and insights gained from establishing trust and building capacity in the planning of a heritage project.