The Macon Housing Authority says they may have found a time capsule buried in the ground. The CEO of the authority, June Parker, says they discovered a box that looks like a safe underground by a flag pole outside of the Technical Service Building. Parker says the box could be empty, but she says it also could be some kind of time capsule. The Macon Housing Authority will open the box Monday at 4 p.m. to reveal what is inside.1
In the summer of 2017, a mysterious safe with time capsule-like contents was discovered beneath the grounds of a public housing site owned by the Macon Housing Authority, Tindall Heights, that was being redeveloped in Macon, Georgia. Several others have been unearthed at the sites or future sites of public housing projects. A time capsule dating back to 1925 was found in 2011 at the site of a future affordable housing project in Cumberland, Maryland. Another, dating back to 1937, was unearthed during the demolition of the Brand-Whitlock public housing complex in Toledo, Ohio in 2013. Another, from 1941, was discovered as the “blighted” Charter Oak Terrace public housing site came tumbling down in Hartford, Connecticut in 1997. A capsule from 1909 was found at the Garfield Park Lofts in Grand Rapids Michigan, the former site of Burton Heights Methodist Church, which is managed today by Michigan State Housing Development Authority.
Time capsules date back to the beginning of humanity’s marking of time, and typically represent different traditions and understandings of time and temporality. However, modern time capsules as we know them are often thought of as a Western linear temporal ritual. Creating and burying time capsules is highly popular and well-documented in America: it is often done at baby showers, buried at building dedications, weddings, buried at school events, or even used for personal reasons.
Objects placed inside time capsules are usually mundane. Their contents are not useful per se, and are usually not particularly unique. Time capsules in Western traditions operate from past to future on the timeline of progress: something is buried in the present for the future to learn about their past. According to William E. Jarvis, time capsules in the American tradition must also be built in a certain way that allows them to survive the test of time, “notify future recipients of its existence at a precise location,” and perhaps most importantly, “select and preserve contents.”
A scan of traditional time capsules contents and time capsule histories provides little evidence that traditional American time capsules are created for Black future generations. The histories found inside of these time capsules rarely account for the presence of Black people, while Black future generations are diligently erased from the envisioned futures of traditional time capsule buriers.
The pattern of unearthed time capsules at sites of affordable housing is therefore critical. Their contents offer alternative, lost, and otherwise obscured histories. Marginalized Black and Brown communities are often disproportionately impacted not just by material and spatial inequalities, but also temporal inequalities, or what sociologist Jeremy Rifkin calls “time ghettos.” Time capsules buried within or underneath housing projects tend not to have a specified “opening” date attached to them, which makes them fall, by some accounts, outside of their traditional definition. But uprooted in the midst of redevelopment, these time capsules work to reverse the exclusion of Black people as actors in the events that fall upon the timeline of Western progress.