The oral component of Pasadena’s 710 freeway historical project is transitioning from its outreach phase to a new stage after months of work by project leaders.
“Our ultimate plan is to have an actual documentary, a film where we brought in a filmmaker,” CEO of Allegra Consulting Inc. Suzanne Madison said in a recent interview. “But we’re creating footage as we go. We have different events. We’re doing outreach. So we’re capturing footage and we’ll have to figure out in a very artful way, how to blend the old with the new.”
To reach a wider and diverse audience, Allegra, together with the city, launched a survey in April, seeking feedback, photos and stories of those displaced by the defunct freeway extension nearly six decades ago. The online survey, available in English, Spanish and Japanese, opened for submissions on April 29, and will close this Sunday, June 30.
Once the outreach portion ends, project leaders will bring in a historian to study all the information gathered during the outreach “to make sure that we’re engaged with the right people who were displaced,” Madison said. After narrowing down the responses, the team will conduct interviews with selected individuals for the documentary.
One of the first families interviewed by Allegra was that of Barbara Richardson King. Their conversation took place on Friday, May 31, at King’s cozy residence in Pasadena. Surrounded by her daughters, cousins and niece, King recounted the struggle their ancestors overcame to bring them to where they are today.
The family are descendants of the Grants, five brothers originally from Parkersburg, West Virginia, who journeyed to California starting in the late 1890s in search of new beginnings.
One of the brothers, Earl Grant, became a prominent African-American figure in the city and founded Family Savings and Loan Association, one of the largest Black-owned savings and loans firms in the nation at the time, with locations in Pasadena and Los…
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