UNC's Mapping Black Towns Symposium: An Archival Take

You ever get so fired up (in a good way) after a session that you sit down quietly while your kids are sleeping and write a blog post about it? That is what happened to me after reflecting on the Mapping Black Town Symposium hosted by the Institute of African American Research at UNC-Chapel Hill this morning. All of the presenters:

Dr. Cynthia Copeland (Public History, NYU), Dr. Edward Gonzalez-Tennant (Anthropology), Dr. Cheryl LaRoche (UMD-College Park), Dr. Danielle Purifoy (Geography, UNC), Dr. Andrea Roberts (Urban Planning,Texas A&M), Dr. Melissa Stuckey (History, Elizabeth City State University) and Dr. Karla Slocum (Anthropology, UNC)

discussed their unique projects and approaches to mapping black towns, but I was most engaged when they each responded to my question about how archives help or hinder their work. These are brilliant and experienced academics who have spent many hours in institutional archives and built many of their research findings on content found (or not found) in these archives. I paraphrased and redacted the speaker’s names, but here are some of their comments:

Help:

I love looking at the historical marker application files -- they detail how people are making cases for markers, plus they can provide clues about who has the community memory and where to find them.

National Park Services have databases and records that have been incredibly helpful.

There are archivists that embrace me when I arrive, even if it is months in between my visits

Hinder:

1. Archives need to address what is not processed, what are they hiding from us?
2. I don’t always feel welcome in archives - you have to put all your stuff away, they are watching you, and think you don’t know what you are doing with the material, there are sheriff’s deputies at the entrance to the archive.
3. I don’t trust the archive, I know they have ignored or destroyed records related to my community of interest, they need to repair trust with their users
4. There are not enough resources/training to help young scholars learn how to read historical documents for marginalized stories.
5. They don’t believe that I can find what I’m looking for - so I lie. I tell them I want the slave owners papers when I am most interested in the slave content.
6. Important truths about the enslaved are hidden in the manuscripts of the slave owner.
7. “If I’m looking for a needle in the haystack - bring me the haystack” It took time for archivists to see how serious I was about my search and they began to respect me more.
8. I’ve found that some repositories are not interested in digitizing their content because they don’t want controversial content out on the web - they want to control how people access and use their material.
9. I don’t like the way that archives undermine/disparage a community's desire/capacity to protect, interpret, or take care of their own history. From an unnamed archivist/historian: “the community think’s John Hope Franklin’s house was over here, but they don’t know what they are talking about, it’s right here”
10. I work with a local community activist who is in talks with a repository. He is having a hard time negotiating liberal access standards for his materials, The activist, “am I going to have to teach these folks how to archive?”
11. I’m paranoid about the archives, they are witnesses to some of the greatest crimes against humanity and they exonerate the criminals by obstructing access to material.
12. I want HBCU’s to be more engaged and supported in the preservation of African American stories, they have been so immersed in survival, the archives are not prioritized.
13. The reasons that communities keep archives is usually different from why institutions keep archives.
14. I built my own archive when I couldn’t find what I needed in institutional archives
15. Maybe us being here together today talking about Black geographies and agency will lead to the establishment of digital archive full of our sources…

I think that archivists are well served in considering how we are perceived by outsiders and not in a condescending one-sided, contrived, Alice Dreger fashion, but in an open forum with space for many voices to be heard. It shed light on a few things for me. For example, I always considered the “backlog” as a purely administrative problem -- too many collections not enough time and staff. To hear that it is perceived as selective processing designed to suppress certain stories sounds antithetical to values espoused by most archivists I know, or does it? Of all the strategies that I’ve heard for addressing the backlog - starting with collections about the marginalized have never been mentioned. Institutions, like UNC, who are working to expose unprocessed collections and eliminate backlogs are probably on the best track for addressing these issues.

I’m also pleased to be a part of work happening at Wilson Library that is resonating with the scholars I spent time with today - namely the Untangling the Roots: Surfacing the Lived Experience of Enslaved People in the Archives, and the Mellon funded, Community Driven Archives grant. Untangling the Roots acknowledges hindrances #4,#5, #6, and #11 by targeting researchers who are encountering the records of the enslaved in manuscript collections for the first time and showing them how to navigate those materials. The Community Driven Archives grant addresses #2, #3, #9, #10, #13, and #14 by expanding the notion of what an archive can be and whose authority determines which records have enduring value. Although there is so much work to do, it feels good to engage in critical dialogue around these issues and discover new allies and colleagues in the process.