Seed Grant Summer 2026 Report

Harry Foster

Background

The Badman Digital Archive catalogs Black badman figures, real and fictional, as they appear across a city’s cultural production, and maps the connections among them. The Detroit module launched publicly at detroit.badmandigitalarchive.com during my 2025–26 Cultural Heritage Informatics Graduate Fellowship, now the Computational Cultural Heritage Graduate Fellowship. At the start of summer 2026 it held 16 figures across four modalities, 91 sources, and 13 typed connections. Each figure has an entry with sourced claims, a position on a Leaflet map of Detroit, and a node in a D3 network graph. The data lives in a single JSON file served through GitHub Pages.

The archive exists to test a claim from my dissertation. The badman figure takes several forms, which I call modalities. The usual account treats them as phases that replace one another. I argue they coexist, with older forms persisting alongside newer ones in the same city and sometimes the same text. Close reading can show this in a handful of works. The archive is built to show it as a structure.

Project Description

The 2026 DH@MSU Seed Grant awarded $500 toward the in-state archival research travel portion of my proposal. The site was the Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs at Wayne State University in Detroit. I had two goals for this summer:

• Gather primary source material from the Reuther that documents connections among figures already in the archive, so that the connection layer can grow on archival evidence.
• Identify figures not yet in the archive who appear in those collections.

The project’s larger goals are unchanged.

• Catalog the badman figures of a city, real and fictional, with every claim sourced.
• Map the connections among figures across modalities as both a network and a geography.
• Test whether badman modalities coexist within a single city’s cultural production.
• Publish the data in a form other researchers can download, filter, and verify.

The method follows the one established during the fellowship year. Each source is logged with a stable identifier and a citation. Each claim in a figure’s entry points to the source that supports it. Each connection between two figures is typed and carries the source that documents it. New material from the Reuther entered the archive through this process rather than as free text.

Outcomes

Both goals were met. Over 2 research trips between July and August 2026, I worked in the Reuther’s League of Revolutionary Black Workers materials. One box holds material from the 1970 film Finally Got the News. It includes the Black Star Productions invitation letter, the fundraising flyer for the film in progress, the Wayne State Cinema Guild flyer for the world premiere on Sunday, June 14, 1970 at Upper DeRoy Auditorium, and two 1980 clippings from In These Times on WNET’s rejection of the film for its Independent Focus series. The other holds the League’s print organs from 1969 to 1971. It includes the November 1969 Inner-City Voice, two issues of Spear, the Spear Special on the killing of Cynthia Johnson, the Inner City Voice relaunch letter, and leaflets from the League’s Detroit General Hospital campaign and its James Johnson defense campaign.

Connections. The film folder ties the League’s central staff to Black Star Productions and the three filmmakers, Stewart Bird, Peter Gessner, and Rene Lichtman, and ties the finished film to the Wayne State Cinema Guild and, ten years on, to the public television fight in New York, where Vicki Gholson of the Black Producers’ Association defended it. The newspaper folder documents the League’s network in its own print. The November 1969 Voice carries the third part of Robert F. Williams’s “The Potential of a Minority Revolution,” John Williams’s “The Labor Question,” Red’s page, a page on Martin Sostre, the Central Staff’s open letter to Walter Reuther, and the call to confront the UAW leadership at Cobo Hall on November 9. Its back pages name the League’s plant affiliates, DRUM, ELRUM, JARUM, and MACRUM, and two League addresses recur across the folders, 5705 Woodward on the Black Star letter and the Spear Special, and 179 Cortland in Highland Park on the Voice order form and the James Johnson flyer. The James Johnson material connects the League, the International Black Appeal, Chrysler’s Eldon Avenue plant, the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice, and Solidarity House in one campaign across April and May 1971. The Spear Special on Cynthia Johnson names Frank Ditto’s Community Patrol Corps on the east side as the model the League wanted citywide.

New figures. The material surfaced candidates not previously in the archive. James Johnson is the clearest. On July 15, 1970 he shot two foremen and a job setter at Chrysler’s Eldon Avenue Gear and Axle plant, and the League took up his defense. The ballad “James Johnson Needed a Thompson” and the “Hail Brother James Johnson” flyer treat him as a figure rather than a defendant. Robert F. Williams, whose serial ran in the Voice, Red, the Voice’s cartoon persona, and Frank Ditto of the Community Patrol Corps also appear.

Future Directions

The Detroit module continues under my 2026–27 Computational Cultural Heritage Senior Fellowship. The first task of the year is a cross-city data schema, settled before the archive grows past Detroit. Two questions drive it. Where a figure’s canonical record lives when that figure appears in more than one city, and where connections between cities live. Both have to be answered before the second city module exists, not after.

Beyond Detroit the archive has a national scope. My production density analysis identifies 451 named figures across eleven cities. The national root site and a reusable city-module template will be built on GitLab.com under the project’s own account, with Detroit as the prototype each new city copies. The root site will carry inter-city connections and analysis, and it will offer dataset downloads so other researchers can use and check the data behind any claim the archive makes. Filtered export is the near-term goal. Once the archive holds enough entries, cluster analysis across modalities follows, which will require a scoring instrument with documented reliability.