With great care and appreciation for myself and others, I submit this reflection. As the summer of 2023 comes to an end, I am reflecting on my most memorable moments. The presentation that I gave at the 2023 Docomomo US National Symposium in New Haven, CT, was one of them. It was an opportunity for me, a Black woman, to practice racial equity in the sense of asking for what I need: reciprocity.

The goal of (un)Redact the Facts is to read and hear historical narratives that tell fuller stories of accountability about our lived experiences of slavery, lynching, redlining, etc. These fuller stories reframe the narrative to one of horrible, unexplained conditions happening to us instead of horrible conditions being a natural occurrence of which we deserved due to a fictional, inherent inferiority. How we tell the story about the past is integral to this – less passive voice that omits who did what to whom and more active voice.

In this period of my career in 2015 and beyond, I observed first hand how we, architects, historians, and historic preservationists can craft a narrative in support of or against the landmark nomination of a building or site with the data we observe about it.

Is it the ethical duty of architects, historians, historic preservationists, journalists, communications teams, teachers to (un)redact the facts of historical narratives to tell a fuller history…