Archiving Black History

Dr. Ben supposedly gave his 30,000 volume library to the Nation of Islam. He said there were no Black institutions that deserved his books. Harlem's Shumberg Library is owned by the City of New York. The HBCU institutions are white controlled, he felt. For sure, no black institutions were seriously interested in my archives, so they were acquired by the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.

What is of greater importance to me are the archives of common people. At the transition of our elders, most of their archives find their way into the trash bin while relatives take the gold, silver, diamonds and any cash found. But the real gold are the letters, notebooks, photos, diaries and other items our elders acquired during their sojourn on earth. 

I am trying to organize an Archive Project to educate our community on the importance of archives. In Oakland the West Oakland Renaissance Committee/Elders Council has been made aware of the importance of saving the history of not only intellectuals and social activists but the common people as well. Everyone has a story, a history, every family and we must stop throwing our family history into the trash!

While in Houston, TX on my book tour, I addressed the Elders Council Institute of Wisdom. They immediately recognized the urgent need to secure the archives of members.

Below Rudy Lewis comments on his experience as an archiver.

--Marvin X

My Archival Experience

Or the State of HBCU Archives

By Rudolph Lewis

Note: Charles E. Siler, an artist and a museum curator, suggested that maybe we should create a forum for the discussion of the State of HBCU Archives. We came to this necessity partially as a result of two recent articles. One, an article on Alice Walker  in which it was reported that Alice Walker to Place her Archive at Emory University and two Fisk U struggles to sell art. Miriam DeCosta-Willis raised the question whether Walker had considered Spelman, an HBCU institution from which Walker had graduated. My immediate response was Walker probably thought that Emory had greater resources and thus Emory could make her papers quickly available to the public and probably in more creative formats than Spelman was able to do. There was a round of other responses. Then on the heel of that story came the crisis at Fisk in which administrators were trying to sell off their art collection in order to pay bills. That set off another round of exchanges about the State of HBCU archives. Some of these exchanges you will find below.

So I've decided to kick off this forum with a rendition of my experience with HBCU archives and other archival experience. After that I will post some of the exchanges and other items pertinent to the conversation. We hope that there are others who will respond with their own presentation or comments on the problems and solutions of the crises now existing for HBCU archives. We welcome of course comparative studies.

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I spent one year working in an archive, The George Meany Memorial Archives, as a fellow during my last year in library school. So I've processed only two collections: the papers of the Department of Organization of the AFL-CIO and that of Vanni Montana, a member of the largest Garment Workers local (NY) in the nation, during the period of the 1930s to the 1950s.

I am intellectually curious about an odd number of things, even boorish union men and political ideologues. Montana was Italian, and early on a socialist in Sicily. Of course, his politics changed gradually as he became more and more an American. He wrote a political biography (unpublished), which I read and found interesting; a copy of one of the manuscripts being discarded was given to me by the former GMM director, Stuart Kaufman, I have been carrying it around for a decade. I have meant to read it a again and post excerpts online to kindle an interest in its publication.

There was of course very little of a personal nature in Montana's papers, mostly politics and organizational conflicts and an indication of his progression toward the conservatism of Nixon's Republican Party. What there was that was personal was contained in the manuscript of his political biography. It represented a curious history of Italian immigrants and their involvement in political and union movements back home and in America. Some of the correspondence was in Italian, so in some cases I had to use a dictionary.

The emphasis at George Meany however was on preservation and not promoting and programming and making connections with other such papers in the Archives and making those evident in finding aids or online. All that requires time and energy and money. Of course, some of this could be done by students given fellowships. But the old paradigm of preservation is first and last, primarily. The fellows I encountered had little interest in politics or union history. I think I was the only one of the fellows that year who had a union background. But few of us, in the late 90s, were up sufficiently on the web and the new digital technology, which has advanced in leaps and bounds in the last decade.

There were some letters of a personal nature from organizers in the Department of Organization papers, of old organizers being discarded like they were yesterday’s trash. Heartbreaking stories of the poverty of old CIO organizers who fought the hard fight and were abandoned because they couldn’t document their years to qualify for a pension or couldn’t qualify for the personnel cuts when the AFL and the CIO became one organization.

I made copies of some news clippings and letters and statements of union men, especially concerning organizing efforts in the South among agricultural workers and Negroes. I tried to get some black union people interested in the documents, for educating their organizers, giving them a sense of the early CIO organizers and the new AFL-CIO of the 1950s. None of the union people I knew was interested in possibly printing the documents as part of their organizers training program.

I eventually decided to digitize some of those documents and include them as part of ChickenBones: A Journal:  Blacks and Labor in Print. These documents  became part of the foundation of the site. The niece of one of the former union organizing directors thanked me for keeping alive the memory of her uncle, William Kircher. Often what to include or exclude in a person's papers also depend  on the person who is processing the papers—their background, their emphasis, their knowledge of what might be important to researchers, especially when writing bio-sketches and finding aids.

As a researcher in the mid-80s, I also became familiar with the papers of Marcus Bruce Christian while teaching at the University of New Orleans and wrote as a result a seminal essay on his poetry and how it represents aspects of his personal life. Not even Tom Dent who knew Christian personally and wrote a published paper on him made use of the diary and letters of Christian to explicate Christian's poetry. I also did a focused research in the unprocessed papers of Sterling Brown at Howard.  The archivist was kind in bringing those papers from the warehouse where they were stored. That came after a Marcus Christian research  was done at the National Archives and the Library of Congress, looking for letters and materials Christian had sent Sterling Brown, when Brown was the Negro Director of the Black section of the Federal Writers’ Project. Brown was collecting material from the black state projects for his proposed book, “The Portrait of the Negro as American.”

I expected the Federal Writers’ Project material would be at the National Archives— in that the productions of the Federal Writers Project were government documents. Some administrative papers were indeed at the National Archives. But a decision was made to transfer the bulk of the requested material from the states to the Library of Congress so that there would be a greater accessibility. So I went to the Library of Congress in search of the materials Christian had sent Brown. They were not in the Louisiana folders. In the late 30s and possibly the early 40s the Library of Congress had a lending policy. I assumed then that Brown had borrowed the materials and never returned them.

So I went in search of Brown’s papers, which I discovered were at  Moorland-Spingarn.  Among these unprocessed papers (of the mid-30s) I did not find what I was looking for but I found papers of a congressional controversy regarding an entry in the Washington, DC Guide Book, produced by the Federal Writers' Project. It included material on Blacks in Washington. There were charges from a Wisconsin congressmen of communists in the FWP trying to embarrass/slander the family of George Washington, the nation's hero and first President. Brown was thus viewed as an enemy of the State. These unprocessed papers I discovered constituted Brown's defense. I made copies and later pulled them together, digitized them and published them  as the Maria Syphax Case.

I have also had an opportunity to check out the collection at Morgan State University and Virginia Union. Neither had the expected archival controls for heat, humidity, or pests. I’ve heard stories that some of the papers given to Morgan were sitting in hallways. Morgan is building a new library but  they have not made provisions for a state of the arts archives. I have also heard horrid stories about the Bowie State University collections. The papers of Marcus Christian were at Dillard University. After his death, Christian’s nephew (I believe) turned them over to the University of New Orleans, which he thought had greater resources to deal with Christian's great volume of documents, some from the Dillard Federal Writers’ Project. From my research use of the UNO Archives they have done Christian and researchers a great service. But UNO has not gone that far beyond the preservation stage. Digitizing the Christian Collection more in depth would provide greater access to the general public and a greater appreciation of Marcus Christian, the poet and historian.

So the above is a short version of my limited experience which forms my attitude towards the importance and the possibilities of archives as educational institutions with an enlarged audience and clientele.—Rudy

posted 4 January 2008

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