Undergrad Research: A Conversation with AMS Senior Max Mills

As part of UT's Undergraduate Research Week, our department will be hosting its 5th Annual Undergraduate Honors Thesis Symposium, to be held on Friday, April 22, 4-6pm, in Burdine 436a. Today, we feature a conversation with one of our undergraduate senior thesis writers: Max Mills. Here, he describes some fascinating findings from his research, as well as some of his favorite moments that emerged from majoring in American Studies. Enjoy! Why did you major in American Studies?Coming into UT, I had no idea that the American Studies Department existed. I actually only signed up for Intro to American Studies for my second semester because it fulfilled a flag requirement. The class was taught by Dr. Engelhardt, and it was essentially a course investigating the evolution of gender in America. I was hooked after the first day, but it was the lecture on the importance of Tupperware in American culture that made me realize that I needed to be an American Studies major. The courses that I took later down the road confirmed that I made a great choice. I liked what I was able to learn from an American Studies education, and the interdisciplinary nature of the field really appealed to what I wanted to get out of my time at UT. I mean, who else can say that they learned about the importance of Marxism in American film, the impact animals had as agents of American Empire, or the connection between video games and the military à la the “military-entertainment complex” during their college career?Do you have any favorite memories from your time in American Studies?There are too many!! But one that comes to mind is from an assignment in Dr. Davis’ Animals and American Culture 370. We had to bring a cultural artifact that related to factory/ industrialized farming, and so I decided to bring an empty carton of eggs. Her class was the last one I had on those days, and so I carried this carton of eggs everywhere I went with me. I mean, everywhere. And for some reason, everybody reacted to me as if I had a scarlet “A” embroided on my chest. I kept getting asked questions like “What’s the deal with the carton of eggs?” It was a cool way of being able to engage with my colleagues about factory farming and once again reinforces how awesome the American Studies Department is.What is your thesis about, and why did you decide to write a senior honors thesis?My thesis is an investigation of the integration process of Waxahachie Independent School District, a process that took about eighteen years after Brown v. Board was decided. While many schools in the South did delay school integration for many years, there are several reasons why I decided to write about this topic in Waxahachie. For one, it’s a history that is incredibly personal to me. Not only is it about the community that I grew up in and care for, but there is also a deep family history that runs through this narrative. My grandfather was the assistant superintendent that was hired to help implement the full desegregation of the school district in 1970. There is also, probably not surprisingly, a lack of community history regarding this process. Even though the memories of integration are held within many community members, I felt that a comprehensive history needed to be preserved for future generations.What kinds of sources do you draw upon in your research?Most of my sources were primary documents: school board minutes, newspapers, and yearbooks. I also interviewed a few community members that were former students of the all black schools in Waxahachie, as well as the two superintendents that helped integrate the district in 1970. When I was doing archival research in the school administration building in Waxahachie, I actually got to dig through the physical board minutes and correspondence with the office of Housing, Education, and Welfare. Getting that close to history was amazing.Has your thesis research yielded any surprising findings?I knew that white supremacy was manifest in my town, but it was the extent of white supremacy that really took me aback. Reading things like “First KKK wedding in Texas occurs in Waxahachie,” and seeing a high school yearbook cover of a black field worker kneeling before a white overseer made me realize what kind of history I was going to expose and write about. At first I was worried about upsetting people in my community. But that’s Waxahachie history, and avoiding it or choosing to ignore it is counterproductive to progress, and is even dangerous. I hope that this thesis can spur some much needed conversations about race and place.How has American Studies prepared you for your post-UT life? Majoring in American Studies has been the most transformative experience I’ve had at UT. Aside from a collection of facts that makes me awesome at dinner parties and trivia nights, the critical reasoning skills I have picked up from the American Studies department will come in handy in whatever I decided to do with my life. Majoring in American Studies has changed the way I perceive the world I live in and how I interact with that world. It has led me to question and contemplate profound moral issues, such as “What is the America we want to live in?” and “What is the responsibility of our America?” These are questions every American should be asking and pondering if we are to make our time on this tiny planet more bearable. The University's motto is “What Starts Here Changes the World.” Majoring in American Studies has made that more possible for me.

Grad Research: Histories and Highways in Washington, DC

Once the holiday festivities, post-Christmas sale shopping, family fun and new year's shenanigans quieted down, I snuck off to the MLK library down in Gallery Place in Washington, DC, to spend a few days digging around in their voluminous community archives collection.  It was awesome.  I'm working on a piece on DC's anti-freeway movement, and hoo boy does the DC Public Library have a lot of great stuff!  Not only do they have an incredible collection of photographs, DC City Council records, and DC-area newspapers large and small - they also have 42.5 linear feet worth of clippings, flyers, hearing transcripts, correspondence, maps, picket signs and all manner of other goodies donated by the Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis (ECTC), an interracial anti-freeway group that leveraged the social upheavals of the 1960s to fight freeways in DC and to rewrite eminent domain legislation in the process.  Needless to say, I was psyched.The ECTC formed in the mid-1960s, when DC and Maryland attempted to build the ten-lane North Central Freeway right through the heart of DC's Northeast quadrant.  The Freeway was purportedly part of a much larger interstate project.  Back in the mid-1950s, fueled by some alchemical combination of increased economic prosperity, a WWII-era "mega-project" mindset, and various automobile-oriented advocacy groups, Eisenhower's "highwaymen" had begun to draw up and build what we know today as the National Interstate System - that vast network of highways that connects the nation and allows high-speed traffic to flow seamlessly from one city to the next nation-wide.  By the early 1960s, many of the rural stretches had been completed, and some cities - like Austin - even featured highways cutting right through the center of town.Not so in DC.  By 1964, I-95, the major highway that runs the length of the East Coast, approached DC from both Virginia and Maryland, but on both sides it stopped abruptly ten miles outside of town at the newly completed Capital Beltway.  Drivers wanting to enter the city itself had to leave the highway and navigate its surface streets, which, as DC's burgeoning population began to spill out into the Maryland and Virginia suburbs and long-distance road travel to and from the city became more common, was causing more than a little congestion.  And nothing makes a highway engineer more frustrated than congestion.  So the District Highway Department began to plan a network of intra-city freeways.  And, when the wealthy, white, well-connected residents of DC's Northwest quadrant flat-out rejected any proposals to put freeways in their neck of the woods, highway planners slyly relocated freeway plans to Northeast, where the population was poorer, more diverse, less-connected to the usual channels, and thus supposedly less able to resist the overtures of the highwaymen.  In late 1964, expecting an open-and-shut case, the Maryland and DC highway departments drew up plans for a ten-lane North Central Freeway through Northeast and hid a small announcement about a public hearing in the back pages of the Washington Post.Thank god for all those crazy old people with nothing to do but sit around and read back pages of the Washington Post!  That first public hearing drew more than 700 furious residents, nearly all of whom were vehemently opposed to the freeway - or any freeway, for that matter.  As it turned out, it also kicked off a ten year long struggle to keep the freeway out and bring rapid transit in instead.This is where the ECTC comes in.  Building on pre-existing neighborhood organizations and leveraging national movements like black power and environmentalism, they mobilized DC residents to protest the freeway, to fight the highwaymen, to testify before congress and to harass the crap out of DC's Mayor and City Council.  They also had some pretty amazing graphic designers on their side.  Check this out:Pigs eating at a trough of highway-related exploitation!  Downtown Progress was a business organization that supported building freeways in DC in hopes of bringing suburban dollars back to the city's central business district:Those same exploiters doing a number on "This Land is Your Land!"  This one vents their frustration at the collusion between big business and politics and the expense of the lives of the people in the path of the highway.  And yes, they had lyrics for the entire song.And this on is one of the ECTC's more famous posters, at least locally, featuring their slogan:What's particularly interesting about this last one is that the ECTC quickly grasped the racial implications of moving a freeway from Northwest to Northeast and made race a central part of its campaign against the freeway from the get-go, but it wasn't until the 1968 riots that the Federal government was willing to admit that a) the ECTC was right and b) in the late 1960s, DC's integrated neighborhoods had at least as much political clout as its white ones because they had the weight of the entire Civil Rights movement behind them.  Really, a genius move on the part of the ECTC.And, together with all of their other mobilization and communication tactics, an effective one: the North Central Freeway was never built, the Metro's Red Line runs along the CSX tracks near where the freeway would have been, and the Federal government has long since stopped trying to build highways anywhere near our fine nation's capital - or in any other major city, for that matter.These days, it's better to put those highway funds to good use in building a bicycle network, anyway.