The Strange Career of Jim Crow Archives: Race, Space, and History in the Mid-Twentieth-Century American South (original) (raw)
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Harold T. Pinkett and the Lonely Crusade of African American Archivists in the Twentieth Century
The American Archivist, 2017
As suggested by its Statement of Core Values (2011), Statement on Diversity (2013), and Strategic Plan (2014–2018), the Society of American Archivists has recently increased its efforts regarding diversity and inclusion. This article focuses on Harold T. Pinkett (1914–2001), the first African American archivist employed by the National Archives as well as the first African American to be named an SAA Fellow, to edit The American Archivist, and to serve on SAA Council. Pinkett’s life speaks to current diversity and inclusivity conversations in two ways. First, it illuminates the history of racial and ethnic diversity and inclusivity in the archival profession, particularly at the National Archives and in the Society of American Archivists. Archivists such as Harold Pinkett began to fight for diversity and inclusivity in the profession’s early years. Second, Pinkett’s story shows the long-standing investment of African American archivists in increasing racial and ethnic diversity and inclusivity in collections and documentation. Pinkett proselytized for the maximum use of records in the writing of history, especially in documenting the history of underrepresented people, and his own writings reflected this belief
Archivists who work on African American collections are increasingly more aware that traditional sites of African American agency and autonomy are becoming more unstable. The need to capture the perspectives and histories of these institutions is urgent. The challenges become more acute when communities recognize the need to preserve their legacies but do not have the resources or support to make it happen. African American material culture and history remains at risk of co-optation from large institutions and individuals seeking to monetize and profit from collecting Black collections. Endemic in that process is the risk of these institutions controlling the narrative and inadvertently or deliberately erasing the narratives of these diverse communities from that community's perspective. Cultural memory workers focused on African American collections face numerous challenges: the risk of losing the materials or communities themselves; partnering with organizations and administrations with differing, and perhaps conflicting agendas; working on projects with limited or term funding; and the emotional labor of being a person of color in a predominantly white field trying to support communities that can often reflect their own experiences. How can libraries, museums, and archives bring these communities into the world of archives and empower them to protect and share their stories? How can archivists, particularly those of color, find support within their institutions and the archival profession, to accomplish this work of preserving African American cultural heritage? How can archives support genuinely collaborative projects with diverse Black communities without co-opting their stories and collections? The authors will address these questions in this article, discussing their experiences working with a variety of institutions-predominantly white universities, Black colleges, churches, neighborhoods and families. The authors also include their reflections from their National Conference of African American Librarians panel presentation in August 2017 on these related topics.
Oral History, Civil Rights and the Archival Role
2004
The years 2003 to 2006 will witness the anniversaries of many of the events that represent the Modern Civil Rights Movement. With the 50 th anniversary celebration of the historic Brown v Board decision, the court order to desegregate the Boston Public schools in 1974 and the ensuing convulsions it caused. Couple with this the city of Birmingham, Alabama having experienced its most violent period of civil right activities during the 1950s and 60s, which many of those organizations and institutions in Birmingham will be commemorating from 2004 to 2006. The March on Washington and the 100th anniversary of the publication of W.E.B. DuBois's Souls of Black Folks behind us, this is an appropriate subject for our series. This issue of Africa Rising will chronicle how those professionals called archivist, charged with collecting, preserving, and making these important resources available to the public, view their role in this endeavor. This issue will show how oral histories have become a central component in the ongoing struggle to document, revise, and append the stories of the Modern Civil Rights Movement.
Library Trends, 2016
Despite calls for diversity and minority participation in library and information science (LIS) and archival science, these professions have seen little change in this respect over the past two decades. This paper attempts to connect the archived, enslaved black woman of the French Antilles to the contemporary black woman in the United States. The paucity of archival materials on the first group is reflective of the low incidence of the second group in today's archives profession. That is, the way in which black women of the Americas have been historically misrepresented or not represented at all can be connected to recruitment and retention problems in the archival profession. If black women are not recognized as worthwhile subjects in the archives, and presently not valued as knowers, how can they be accepted as library and archive professionals? If the archives are where origin stories are excavated, black women-through the profession of archival science-have a role to play in the administration and management of archival materials concerning the historical enslavement of black women. The paper will specifically discuss concepts from archival appraisal theory and highlight the ways in which power influences the collection of archival materials. Also, educational and training solutions that include black feminist thought, critical race theory, and cognitive justice are discussed. "What can a niggerwoman do but endure? What can me do but tell the story? Who is there when we recall great womens?"-Marlon James, The Book of Night Women According to the American Library Association's (ALA) 2007 Diversity Counts report and the HistoryMakers' (2013) "Education: Assessment of Need"
Pinkett's Charges - Recruiting, Retaining, and Mentoring Archivists of Color
The American Archivist, 2017
This article focuses on ethnic and racial diversity in the archival profession. It draws upon the experiences, reflections, and recommendations of twenty-one Harold T. Pinkett Minority Student Award recipients to suggest ways in which the archival profession, especially the Society of American Archivists, can improve its recruitment, retention, and mentoring of archivists of color. The study’s participants discussed their undergraduate experiences, information and library science (ILS) education, entering the archives field, mentoring relationships, working with ethnically and racially diverse materials and people, the Society of American Archivists, and lessons learned and advice to young archivists. They stressed the importance of networking, professional development, professional organizations, and openness to experimentation. Last, the article suggests five areas for future research.
Black Lives and Justice with the Archive: A Call to Action
Black Camera: An International Film Journal, 2018
This commentary calls for scholars, activist, archivists, and curators to work in alliance with social justice aims to collect documents of count-history to official reports of police violence. The modern archival craze can be traced back from the influences in nineteenth-century Victorian England. Cultural Heritage workers collected and archived the materials that serviced the empire. The new cultural heritage workers of the digital age exist formally in institutions but also informally in the streets, recording, archiving, and circulating with smartphones. Digital culture brings with it an abundance of public discourse but it quickly slips from the official record without a concerted effort to save, preserve, and collect vernacular history. The ephemeral character of this digital rhetoric requires that researchers must collect materials in real time, archiving history as it is happening.
Library Quarterly, 2018
This article uses the North Carolina Negro Library Association (1935-1955) and the Richard B. Harrison library (1935- ), as well as the life of its founder, Mollie Huston Lee (1907-1982), as a lens through which to examine the efforts of African American female librarians to battle information poverty during the long civil rights movement between the mid-1930s and the mid-1960s. College-educated and professionally-trained, Mollie Huston Lee and other North Carolina librarians committed to personal and community uplift. A crucial part of this uplift involved fighting the information poverty that pervaded African Americans’ lives, which they did on a local, state, and even national level through institutions such as the NCNLA and the Harrison library. In the context of the Jim Crow South, such parallel institutions were incubators of innovative resistance strategies to white racism and played pivotal roles in the long civil rights movement.
Maryland Institute Black Archives: A Post-Custodial Project
Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art , 2022
I contributed a piece of writing to the inaugural "Digital Dialogues" section of Panorama Journal, an engagement with Maryland Institute Black Archives (MIBA), a fascinating born-digital archival project initiated and passionately maintained by Deyane Moses. It's a great example of post-custodialism in practice, and it's inspiring to follow Deyane's pathway in bringing an idea to reality. What began as a photo documentary of Maryland Institute College of Art's Black community (students, faculty, and staff) by then-student Moses became an exhibition and then digital humanities project that has navigated a complex relationship with institutionality. It's a remarkable example of storytelling that excavates institutionalized racism while sharing silenced or manipulated histories, all while maintaining a commitment to collective care for Black Baltimoreans in the present.
The Consortium Institutional Archive: A Model for Preserving Memory at a Historically Black Seminary
The International Journal of Equity and Social Justice in Higher Education, 2022
Institutional archives remain largely a product of affluent, predominately white colleges and universities in the United States. Many schools with limited resources cannot support an archive. The historical structural inequities faced by many HBCUs only compound the difficulty of establishing and maintaining these repositories of institutional memory. The field of archival studies has largely told its history through the lens of white institutions; scholarship engaging historically black archives, especially at HBCUs, remains limited. This paper examines the history of the Interdenominational Theological Center (ITC) and its archives and the ways in which institutional history has been preserved by the ITC over time. The ITC is a federally recognized HBCU consortium of seminaries in Atlanta established in the late 1950s as way to make accredited graduate theological education available to clergy in predominately black Protestant denominations. Informed by research at ITC's archive, this paper considers the consortium model both as a means of attaining accreditation and a vehicle for facilitating the establishment of institutional archives. The ITC offers an example of collaborative archiving to preserve multiple voices and histories of historically underrepresented institutions and a model of institutional self-publication to preserve and share institutional memory.
Anti-Racist Archival Description
Archives and Manuscripts, 2024
For those whose stories are in the archives, accessing them can prompt many emotions and reactions. People accessing these records, and those processing and providing access to them, may be affected by their contents. There are many things we can do as archivists and archival institutions to make this process easier, more accessible, and safer for those who experience direct or intergenerational trauma. The profession has access to a growing selection of tools to guide our protocols and practices, such as the Tandanya Declaration, the ATSILIRN protocols and UNDRIP, as well as case studies for high-level institutional changes and cultural shifts, though this process is arguably only at the beginning of its collective journey. However, there are often immediate and practical ways in which we can implement anti-racist archival practice, including the way we describe archival materials. This paper will discuss practical ways in which archivists can actively undertake anti-racist description work, and why it is imperative that this work becomes a priority in our collection management work. It will draw on the comprehensive document Anti-Racist Description Resources, authored by the Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia's (A4BLiP) Anti-Racist Description Working Group, as well as other standards and sources.