History professor, Dr. Mark Schultz, has a specialized focus on African-American and southern history.
Schultz grew up in Georgia and has been working on research on “the day-to-day experience of rural, black and white people, in Jim Crow Georgia” for 25 years.
Through this, he’s written a book about the “separate but equal” era in the south titled, “The Rural Face of White Supremacy: Beyond Jim Crow.”
Little did Schultz know that his academic research on the complex, yet rich, history of the south would land him a guest spot on NBC’s genealogy documentary show, Who Do You Think You Are?
The new series is an adaptation of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) show of the same name. In each episode, different celebrities are featured in hopes of trying to learn more about their ancestry, ultimately filling in their family tree.
The celebrity goes on a journey throughout the nation, meeting with local historians, archivists and genealogists to help the celebrity in trying to trace their family’s name throughout the past.
In its first season so far, actresses Sarah Jessica Parker, Lisa Kudrow and football player, Emmitt Smith, have been featured amongst others.
Though genealogy isn’t necessarily Schultz’s niche, he calls it a methodology and a tool as a means to get a broader scope of the past.
“I found out early on that I had to do a lot of oral interviews; a lot of tape recording. Sometimes that involves trying to do a lot of research on specific families to get a sense of what their story is,” said Schultz. “But, it’s not simply to understand their stories [but] to get this bigger story.”
It was his work on African-American history and the research he’s done at the Georgia State Archives in Morrow, GA, that caught the ears of producers at NBC.
Schultz’s colleagues at the state archives suggested him as a person NBC would want to feature as a historian on the show.
“[NBC] had a set of celebrities that they were going to do research on and one of them had ancestors from middle Georgia,” said Schultz.
Little did he know until the day he was going to film his segment that famed director, Spike Lee, would be the celebrity he’d help try to get a better sense of his ancestry.
One of the show’s primary sponsors is Ancestry.com, and through the site’s help, and the census records and census manuscripts that Schultz analyzed, he was able to help Lee interpret what those documents could mean.
“They gave me those documents, and it showed names and where they lived and whether they could read [which] tells us something about their education level, and members of family he didn’t know about,” said Schultz.
He explained that such work to obtain records and documents used to be extensive, but with a site like Ancestry.com, it’s gotten easier.
Schultz explained that the interviews he has conducted with African-Americans in the south, and getting to know what day-to-day life was like, helped him interpret the census documents and records.
“I know about what life was like for ordinary, black people coming up in Georgia in the Jim Crow era,” he said. “When I looked through the documents I could read that to get a sense of where they stood in society and then [I] start making guesses based on what people have told me.”
In essence, Schultz explained that showing the documents to Lee was more like a “discussion based class,” rather than him sharing the facts explicitly.
“I’d show him the documents, and my job was to get him to interpret them himself, and as he’d ask questions I’d give suggestions,” said Schultz. “It was like a teaching situation, and so it was more conversational than simply lecture.”
It is evident how invested Schultz is on his research of African-American history in the Jim Crow era through the 25 years of work he has devoted to it. But he explains that the curiosity behind the research simply came from his experience growing up in the region.
“I came into the world during the Civil Rights movement. By the time I knew anything, that Jim Crow world was in the rearview mirror and books didn’t talk about it a whole lot,” he said. “I was just so curious [about] what were my friends’ parents’ experiences like.”
Schultz essentially wanted to understand how they came to be, “a really warm, really loving, forgiving” people, despite the thick racial tension during that time.
“That’s what really got my curiosity up, to try to understand their story. How they passed through this still being human,” said Schultz. “The story’s not in books, I really don’t think, and so it became something I had to research.”
Overall, Schultz explains the importance for people to truly know their roots, in that it gives an individual a better understanding of “family dynamics and people’s limitations as well as their strengths.”
And in terms of people looking to find out more about their rich ancestry on their own, Schultz explained that the best place to start is at home.
“I tell everybody who I talk to about history to get the oldest people in your family on tape, like your grandparents, as soon as you can. There’s whole traditions that disappear with them that you just can’t get back again,” he said. “There’s little bits and pieces that we can glean from our past in physical record, but there’s nothing as rich as the oral stories.”
Make sure to catch Schultz in an upcoming episode of Who Do You Think You Are, airing Friday nights at 7 p.m. on NBC.
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