Comics and Public History: The True Story of the 1934 Chatham Coloured All-Stars

Abstract:This essay examines how the Harding Project, a digital and oral history project at the University of Windsor, decided to use comics as one way to tell the story of the 1934 Chatham Coloured All-Stars. It is a story of collaboration and what can happen when conversation is allowed to develop organically as connections are created with the community. This essay details one such collaboration, between individual community members, community groups, and researchers from History, Leddy Library, and English at the University of Windsor, and the resulting cross-pollination of public history, digital librarianship, and comics studies. In telling this story, the essay examines the ways in which comics, in a variety of forms, can aid in the public dissemination of knowledge, act as an educational resource and site of multimodal literacy, and engage in the process of revising the historical narrative and intervening in practices of historiography and pedagogy surrounding race and sport in Canada.