Presenting Democratic Histories in Absentia: National Conference of African American Librarians

Dear Colleagues,

I regret that I was unable to join you in Atlanta last weekend for the National Conference of African American Librarians conference. As soon as I found out about the acceptance of our session proposal, my dear friend, Jinwen, informed me of her wedding date...August 11, 2017... in San Diego! As a bridesmaid, a big fan of Southern California, and a hardcore wedding enthusiast - I had to bow out of our presentation, Democratic Histories: Strategies for Engaging African American Communities in the Archival Process.

5 bridesmaids and the flower girl standing near the alter at the #totalifontastic wedding of Jinwen Li and Chris Fong, photo taken by Tracy Lin in San Diego, California

Although there is no substitute for sharing ideas alongside my co-presenters and answering questions in real time - I thought this blog post would be a good way to demonstrate my commitment to this work and keep the conversation going.   

Why this session?

When I saw the conference theme in the call for proposals -- Beyond Library Walls: Innovative Ways to Engage our Community, it was easy to make the connection to my work in the Southern Historical Collection as well as stories from colleagues doing library outreach work across the country. Recently, I attended the 2017 Movers and Shakers reception during the ALA Annual Meeting in Chicago and every award recipient had an element of engaging communities in meaningful ways. I met a school librarian from Massachusetts who found ways to bring parents to the library to engage in student learning outcomes and a youth public librarian in Illinois who designed programs about gardening and sustainability for immigrant communities. When I had a chance to meet my future co-presenters (Shanee, Holly, and Skyla) in a 2015 California Rare Book School course, I could see that they were interested in the same ethos of bringing established archival practices, collections, and institutions to new audiences.  

I called the session Democratic Histories, in the hope that it would invoke at least two concepts in the imaginations of our audience. The first being the total representation of all the people implied in the definition of democracy - we are striving to build archives that are more  representative of the people in our communities regardless of age, sex, gender, class, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, etc. The second is the idea of building citizenship through the participation in a democracy or an archive. Showing people how to use archives, how to contribute to archives, or maintain personal or family collections are forms of validating their experiences and giving them incentives and tools to question the status quo and effect change in their communities. If you are one of those people who hears the word democracy and laughs at the irony because you can’t see past the seemingly insurmountable inequality and corruption in this American democracy then you could probably provide an appropriate dose of cynicism to the discussion which can keep the scale of these outreach strategies in perspective.

The last reason that I was drawn to this topic at this conference is the opportunity to share an important moment of personal and professional reflection. Throughout library school and into the last five years of my career, many facets of archives work have called out to me. I love the way that archivists jump into collections, applying order, giving access, and churning through backlogs. I love to hear how we invent, adapt, and use systems and software programs to do this work more ethically, efficiently and across all formats. At the same time, situating archival materials in new contexts and adding to existing local, national, or international historiographies is fascinating. There is no better way to understand the past than to see people, places, and events through the lens of a stranger from history.

In the past three years at the Southern Historical Collection, I’ve grappled with the slippery notion of bringing material from marginalized African American communities or donors into an institutional archive. It’s easy for us as professionals to understand why this is important -- moral imperative, more complete histories for researchers, fulfilling missions of diversity, intellectual curiosity, etc; but why would communities look to institutions to preserve their stories when they have been doing it for themselves since the beginning of their existence? The examples that follow will try to answer this question -- but to me the question is really about outreach and ultimately requires a conceptual deconstruction and reconstruction of the formal archive. The opportunity to think critically and communicate clearly about what we do, why we do it, and who we do it for -- is a sweet spot for me. Hopefully the live session will include anecdotes from community members, archives professionals, and the general public that will keep your mind from going blank or dropping into “archives-speak” when you are inevitably asked why an investment in this type of outreach is worthwhile.    

What did I hope to share?

While my colleagues are well suited to discuss their engagement efforts with black churches, black college students, and black communities in urban environments - I was poised to discuss my work with black municipalities in rural environments. An extraordinary confluence of UNC professors, humanities scholars, and engaged mayors from these towns brought the Historically Black Towns and Settlements Alliance (HBTSA) to my attention in 2014. HBTSA was originally composed of five towns, Eatonville, FL, Mound Bayou, MS, Hobson City, AL, Tuskegee, AL, and Grambling, LA -- they have since grown to include more towns in more states.

It was clear from the beginning these towns did not represent traditional collection donors - they wanted to hear more about how the archives could serve their interests. Their primary one being support for using their impressive histories to promote cultural tourism in the towns. Representatives shared stories about how they could not register as historic landmarks because the necessary proof was last seen in someone’s shed - necessitating the need for a centralized archive. They wanted to have the genealogies of their founders properly documented and preserved. They wanted to honor the folks who had lived and died in their communities by cleaning up local cemeteries and clearly documenting the occupants.

Photo of cemetery, featuring an angel figure, flowers and the headstone Bernice Flowers; born: March 20, 1935, died September 31, 1973 in Grambling, Louisiana (2014), taken by Biff Hollingsworth

Photo of archival materials from the home of former Hobson City, Alabama mayor, Mrs. Willie Maude Snow - brought in to city hall to show the extent of dispersed collections (2014), taken by Chaitra Powell

Photo of an unprocessed archival collection in the Tuskegee History Museum in Tuskegee, Alabama (2014), taken by Chaitra Powell

Photo of an Eatonville baseball or cricket team, n.d. shared by Maye St. Julian in her home in Eatonville, Florida (2014), taken by Bryan Giemza

Photo of Chaitra addressing the audience about the Southern Historical Collection’s commitment to the Historic Black Towns and Settlements Alliance (HBTSA) during the conference in Chapel Hill (2015), taken by Jay Mangum

Lastly, they wanted opportunities to share stories in order to engage and inspire the community’s younger generation in the histories of their towns. In order to gain as much context as possible - we made visits to the towns, established working relationships with town stakeholders, conducted archival content surveys, supervised field scholars, participated in weekly HBTSA conference calls, and helped to orchestrate an HBTSA conference in Chapel Hill in the spring of 2015. All of this preparation culminated in three exciting pilot initiatives in Mound Bayou, Mississippi in the Fall of 2015.

1. Document Rescue: The Administration Building of the Knights and Daughters of Tabor of organization held important documents in less than ideal environmental conditions. The building had been ravaged by storms and neglect, leaving it water damaged, dirty, and full of pests. The rooms within the building contained publications, insurance forms, photographs, and ceremonial artifacts that told the story of a Southern based, black fraternal organization. The Southern Historical Collection offered to rent a storage unit in nearby Cleveland, MS for three years and temporarily store the materials until an adequate permanent solution could be found. We worked with the community to move the materials into storage in October 2015.

Photo of a van filled with moving boxes during the document rescue event at the Knights and Daughters of Tabor Administration Building in Mound Bayou, Mississippi (2015), taken by Chaitra Powell

     

2. Virtual Community Genealogy: In recent years, Mound Bayou has been the site of several field experiences for Duke and UNC graduate and undergraduate students. In the summer of 2015, students worked to compile biographical information on the town’s founders and early residents, up until the middle of the 20th century. They conducted interviews, visited local archives, perused obituaries in home collections in order to build a spreadsheet. In the fall semester, we were able to work with computer science students to turn this spreadsheet into an interactive and searchable website documenting the people, places, and organizations of early Mound Bayou.

Screenshot of the cover page for the Mound Bayou Virtual Community Genealogy (2015), taken by Chaitra Powell

3. High School Student Outreach: One of our community liaisons, a former librarian, and I connected with the principal of John F. Kennedy High School, and organized an after school event in the library to discuss local history. Six students participated in several activities, one included creating an account for the Virtual Community Genealogy website, and entering biographical content found in primary source material borrowed from community members.        

Photo of Chaitra with the JFK High School students during the after school local history program in Mound Bayou, Mississippi (2015), taken by Ms. Edna Smith

And in conclusion..

After we finished all of these exciting outreach initiatives we took a serious victory lap! I cited these examples in presentations, conversations, interviews, and short videos for our fundraising campaigns and felt pretty good about the ability of an institution to participate in altruistic and meaningful collaboration with a marginalized community. Our team was feeling so good about it that we crafted a successful grant application to the Mellon Foundation to elaborate on this model of developing community partnerships. HBTSA, along with three other pilot communities are the site of development for a wide variety of tools and strategies to nurture the relationship between the community and the archive.

From this short synopsis, it is clear that sustainability, replicability, costs, personnel, scale, parity across communities, institutional priorities, and many other considerations are necessary to develop a toolkit that has the potential to work with other communities and institutions around the world. So, we are currently using Mellon funding to hire a team of archivists, documentarians, and communication specialists that will unpack what we’ve done thus far, develop techniques to do it better, and determine if our work is having the positive impact that we have been shooting for since the beginning - informed communities who feel empowered to challenge the status quo.

There will be updates on our Community Driven Archives work via my personal social media and all of the public faces of Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library Special Collections, as well as UNC Libraries. I welcome your feedback and thank you for taking the time to read this extra long blog post.

Sincerely,

Chaitra Powell

African American Collections & Outreach Archivist         

Southern Historical Collection

Wilson Library Special Collections

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries