The Making of African American Archives, 1910-1950

FAIN: FT-265433-19

Laura E. Helton
University of Delaware (Newark, DE 19711-3651)

Writing two chapters of a history of African-American archives in the early 20th century.

"Black Archival Publics" charts the making of early-twentieth-century African American archives in order to understand the relationship between historical recuperation, forms of racial imagination, and black social movements. It traces a generation of black bibliophiles, librarians, and scrapbook makers in New York, Chicago, Raleigh, Detroit, and Washington, DC, who created repositories of African diasporic material between 1910 and 1950. At a moment when most scholarly and popular accounts rendered blackness as unlettered and absent from history, these collectors assembled books and manuscripts, organized “Negro collections” in local and university libraries, and made such collections active sites of black public life. In so doing, they did more than simply bequeath to the future a storehouse of research materials. They also activated the urgent declaration of Afro-Puerto Rican bibliophile Arturo Schomburg that “the American Negro must remake his past in order to make the future.”

Associated Products

Access Restrictions and Secret Libraries: Virginia Lee and the Policing of Black Books (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: Access Restrictions and Secret Libraries: Virginia Lee and the Policing of Black Books
Author: Laura E. Helton
Abstract: In the early twentieth century, African American women librarians in Raleigh, Atlanta, Greensboro, and other southern cities created a remarkable set of small archives that documented Black life. In Roanoke, Virginia, for example, Virginia Lee was a dedicated collector of books, ephemera, and clippings, building a “Negro Collection” inside the segregated Gainsboro Branch Library that today remains the largest accumulation of Africana in southwest Virginia. But like her counterparts elsewhere in the Jim Crow South, Lee operated against forbidding material and political conditions. At times she had to operate secretly, at one point even protecting the collection from a threat of destruction by white city leaders. This talk uncovers the clandestine collecting practices of Virginia Lee to show how branch libraries put record-keeping at the center of Black public life, often under threat of erasure. It argues that any theory of the Black archive must encompass not only the iconic collections in New York, Washington, or New Haven, but also the small collections, like Lee’s, that prioritized local access to Black texts. The “lady librarians” at the center of this project were good at keeping secrets, underscoring the risks—and the radicality—of Black archive-building during and after the nadir.
Date Range: 09/28/2020
Location: Workshop in the History of Material Texts, University of Pennsylvania
Primary URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0ppuTTlIzI
Primary URL Description: Recording of Fall 2020 Workshop in the History of Material Texts, Laura E. Helton, "Access Restrictions and Secret Libraries: Virginia Lee and the Policing of Black Books"

Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History (Book)
Title: Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History
Author: Laura E. Helton
Abstract: During the first half of the twentieth century, a group of collectors and creators dedicated themselves to documenting the history of African American life. At a time when dominant institutions cast doubt on the value or even the idea of Black history, these bibliophiles, scrapbookers, and librarians created an enduring set of African diasporic archives. In building these institutions and amassing abundant archival material, they also reshaped Black public culture, animating inquiry into the nature and meaning of Black history. Scattered and Fugitive Things tells the stories of these Black collectors, traveling from the parlors of the urban north to HBCU reading rooms and branch libraries in the Jim Crow south. Laura E. Helton chronicles the work of six key figures: bibliophile Arturo Schomburg, scrapbook maker Alexander Gumby, librarians Virginia Lee and Vivian Harsh, curator Dorothy Porter, and historian L. D. Reddick. Drawing on overlooked sources such as book lists and card catalogs, she reveals the risks collectors took to create Black archives. This book also explores the social life of collecting, highlighting the communities that used these collections from the South Side of Chicago to Roanoke, Virginia. In each case, Helton argues, archiving was alive in the present, a site of intellectual experiment, creative abundance, and political possibility. Offering new ways to understand Black intellectual and literary history, Scattered and Fugitive Things reveals Black collecting as a radical critical tradition that reimagines past, present, and future.
Year: 2024
Primary URL: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/scattered-and-fugitive-things/9780231212755
Primary URL Description: Columbia University Press publication information
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780231212755
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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