Mary Rizzo
Mary Rizzo, Assistant Professor of History and Associate Director of Public and Digital Humanities Initiatives at Rutgers University-Newark, has won a $50,000 Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship to produce a traveling exhibit about Black cultural activism in Baltimore co-created with local middle- and high- school students and grounded in the evolution of
Chicory, an African American literary magazine published from the 1960s through the 1980s.
The story of
Chicory rediscovered by Rizzo after falling into relative obscurity and now fully digitized in collaboration with Pratt Library overturns the usual narrative of Baltimore’s Black history, which sees the riot in 1968 as the starting point of an inexorable decline leading to increased poverty, drug use, and violence, culminating in the 2015 uprising. Looking at Baltimore through the lens of