Good afternoon. And thank you for joining us today for the spring monthly Scholar in the Library series. This webinar is being recorded. I'm Jesse Erickson, Coordinator of Special Collections and Digital Humanities with the Special Collections and Museums at the Library, Museums and Press, Assistant professor with the Department of English and Associate Director of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center. I'm really pleased to introduce Alison Parker, who is the Chair of the University of Delaware Department of History and the Richards Professor of American History. She's also the chair of the UD anti-racism initiative. Parker's research and teaching interests are in women's and gender history, African-American history, and legal history. Her book, Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell , was published in late 2020. The book is available electronically in DELCAT if anyone would like to read it. And I can tell you it's fantastic. Professor Parker will be speaking on sharing Mary Church Terrell's legacy from family heirloom, the National Mall, and the Oberlin College Archives. Mary Church Terrell was the 19th and 20th century civil rights and black feminist activist who serve as the first leader of the National Association of Colored Women and the NAACP. During this talk, Parker explores how she helped realize that Terrell's family wished to donate a key objects to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American culture and life. And our collection of Terrell's papers to the Oberlin College archives. We've asked professor Parker to save the last 10 to 15 minutes of her talk for question and answer session. And if you have any questions, please, if you would like Professor Parker to answer them, please use the Q&A option on the Zoom webinar to submit your questions. We're going to try to get it questions as we can depending on the time. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Allison Parker. I'm very, very happy to be here today and thank you so much to Vicky White and the UD Library, Museums and Press for inviting me to speak here today. Typically, like most historians, I spend time in the reading rooms that archives and looking at the displays in museums. But as I was research and writing my biography of Mary Church Terrell, I had a chance to get some different perspectives. And this came as I came toward what I thought was the end of my research into the life of Mary Church Terrell, The black feminist and civil rights activist who was born enslaved in Memphis, Tennessee and died in 950 for just after the Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Brown versus Board of Education. In today's talk, I'm going to shift gears a few times in order to share different aspects of my research experience as a biographer, for a meeting with family members and experiencing the physical spaces of one's historical subjects. To working with family members to find ways to preserve and share family artifacts and papers. With public history museums and research archives. Throughout the talk, I will also pause at various moments to share how I interpreted and made sense of these new documents to inform my understanding of how towels personal and activist lives informed each other. First of all, as we know, it's Black History Month. So some history on the event itself is in order. Mary Church Terrell instituted the first official public history of public version of what we now call Black History Month. Although it is worth noting that black history is American history and can't really be separated out. In a 197, Terrell used her position as the first black woman on Washington DC is Board of Education to persuade its members to institute a Frederick Douglass stay in the districts African-American schools to promote an appreciation of black history and women's rights. She named it after her friend and mentor, Frederick Douglass, who had died in 995. Terrell wanted black students to learn about and take pride in their history and had a vision that Douglass his life story, would be a way for teachers to educate their students about the liberatory movements, the abolition of slavery, and for women's rights. After all, Douglas was a self emancipated, formerly enslaved man who became an abolitionist and a public supporter of women's voting rights. Ever since he had attended and spoke at the Seneca Falls women's rights convention in 848. Mary Church Terrell saw herself as Douglas's protege and intellectual compatriot, carry his legacy into the next generations. Carol's father, Robert Church of Memphis, Tennessee, had played a key role in shaping his daughter as a civil rights activist and as a lifelong party of Lincoln Republican. In fact, he had facilitated her first meeting with Frederick Douglass back in 880. Robert churches, good friends, the black Republican Mississippi Senator Blanche K. Bruce and his wife Josephine Bruce invited a teenage Molly church then in her first year at Oberlin College to attend Republican James Garfield Presidential Inauguration with them. Of course, Frederick Douglass was at the inauguration and met the young Molly church at that time. And then again in 1887 when she moved to DC to teach Latin and Greek at the prestigious M Street public Colored High School, where she met the man who would become her future husband, that head of the Latin department. And also a formerly enslaved man who became a Harvard University graduate, Robert H. Terrell, in the early 1890s. Once she returned from a 2.5 years study abroad in Europe, where she became fully fluent in German, French, and Italian. Molly church moved permanently to DC and married Robert Terrell. From that plane on, she often collaborated on civil rights projects with Frederick Douglass, who was by then a leading Republican elder statesman, having recently retired as US Ambassador to Haiti in 891, Molly church and Robert Terrell had married and a lavish wedding at her father's home in Memphis, Tennessee with Thomas Moss, an old childhood friend in attendance. A year later, when Molly was far along in her first pregnancy and early and eagerly expecting her first child. She got word of a tragedy that ended some lives and change the trajectory of others. Three black grocers in Memphis, tennessee had been brutally murdered by whites who resented their economic success and competition with white grocery store across the street. One of these men was Thomas Moss, the close friend of both Mary Church Terrell and of Ida B. Wells. Each woman was moved to greater activism by this tragic lynching. But for Terrell, her activism was temporarily delayed by a late term miscarriage. This tragedy made her wonder about the role of trauma and racism in black women's disproportionately high reproductive losses. To move beyond sorrow and loss, Terrell needed a sense of purpose. Frederick Douglass and parallel collaborated to bring Ida B. Wells to the nation's capital to give her one of her very first anti lynching platforms to speak. In October of 190 to Terrell was honored to introduce Ida B. Wells, whom she had previously known. Memphis. Soon after Terrell informed her husband that she had been elected secretary of a committee to arrange for a repetition of Miss Wells is lecture. Mr. Douglas encourages me. So anti lynching activism and collaboration with civil rights and women's rights activists like Douglas and Wells helped Terrell work for her civil rights goals and provided a focus for her energy and sorrow. When Ida B. Wells returned to Washington in 193 to discuss her pamphlets, southern Horrors, Lynch Law in all its phases. Terrell again introduced her. We admire Miss Wells for her undaunted courage and for her recital of the wrongs heaped upon her oppressed people in the South. So well on her way to being a public speaker in her own right, Terrell argued, when men whose only crime is the color of their skin are denied, even the farce of a trial are forcibly torn from jails of the largest and wealthiest cities of the South and family murdered. It is time for a persistent and system systematic agitation on the subject of Southern mob rule. Surely no one can charge us with exaggerating our woes and magnifying the acting indignities heaped upon us. The murder of colored men is of almost daily occurrence in the South. And then, to press their point, Douglas and Terrell visited the White House together, personally, imploring Benjamin Harrison, the president, to take a strong public stance against lynching. Terrell and Douglas also visited the Chicago World's Fair together, where there was much controversy over the segregation and representation of African Americans. And both attended the National Women's Council convention on February 28th. Now 890 five. Terrell recalled. Mr. Douglas died suddenly one evening at his home after a business meeting of the National Council at which I was present and saw him. He invited me to lunch, but I declined for and thus missed the last opportunity of having the chance to listen to his dear voice. She declined because she was feeling ill and was in the midst of yet another difficult, ultimately failed pregnancy. Terrell always regretted having missed a final time alone with Douglas on the day he died, and she was committed to keeping his legacy alive. Terrell always, thus, the symbolism and synergies of last week's Douglas Day celebrations with honored them both together. We're really fitting commemoration to them both. As you may know, the Frederick Douglass Day celebrations featured a national transcribe, a fan of Mary Church Terrell papers at the Library of Congress. Many thousands of people participated in, in the act of reading and trying to understand her handwriting so that they could help to create easy to read transcriptions of her documents. I can only say, but I wish for papers had been digitized and are transcribed when I started this project over a decade ago. Since Mary Church Terrell believed that black women and men should be honored and respected in American history. She was also determined to preserve her own papers in order to create a usable legacy, a genealogy of black women's activism for future generations. During her over 60 years of living in Washington DC, she spent a great deal of time at the Library of Congress researching topics for articles. She was writing for newspapers and magazines on subjects such as lynching and the convict lease labor system in the South. She felt that she had a personal connection to the library, to the nation's magnificent public library, and decided that her papers belonged there. Terrell understood the value of her own life story as part of American history. And she specifically wanted major public repositories of national papers, like the Library of Congress to include the papers of African Americans. Thus, she initiated negotiations with the Library of Congress to take many of her and her husband's papers. After her death, her family are also arranged for more of the tails papers to go to Howard University, where she and her husband had both taught classes. Judge Robert Terrell had an appointment in hard Howard University's law school. And these papers are housed in them. Orleans gets been Gartner Research Center at Howard. I was inspired to write a biography of Terrell when I was writing a different book on 19th century black and white women's political thought and included a chapter on her. I expected to find several biographies, but I found that there were none that were written for adults. There are several for children and young adults. I was surprised that no one had written about her, especially sense her large repository of papers made it quite possible to delve into her life. Although I'll admit by the end I decided maybe there were so many papers that people will daunted by the experience. So turning to the official topic of my talk, the public sharing of tails, artifacts, and capers. In 2015, I gave a paper on Terrell at the Association for the Study of African-American history and left knife, or a solid, not coincidentally a solid. It's an organization founded by Carter G. Woodson, who also created ***** History Week in the middle 1920s. And because she knew everyone and live so long, Terrell work with Carter G. Woodson, helping him organize his back black history conferences. In any event, I was on a panel with Professor Steven Mendelson from Mississippi State University who was researching her husband, Robert Terrell, as the first Municipal Court judge in Washington DC, who was African-American. After we presented our papers, a member of the audience asked a question about the nature of the tail couples intimate relationship stated that I was committed to exploring their private intimate lives in order to tell a deeper history. Black women's interior lives and intimate relationships are now fortunately receiving more sustained attention from historians. But in the past, that wasn't the case. Steven Middleton replied that several years earlier he had visited with Mary Church Terrell relatives to see if they had any materials on Robert Terrell that had not yet been donated to the Library of Congress are Howard University. They told him that they did not except for some racy love letters that they had kept out of her public archival collections for over 60 years. At the time, professor Middleton did not pursue this since he was more interested in Judge Charles public career as a lawyer, I responded that I would like to see their love letters, not for the sake of gossip, but for to be able to understand a prominent black women like Mary Church Terrell and her husband, as fully human with passions and joys and desires, uncovering her interior life could help us better comprehend her as a daughter, wife, partner, mother and lover, who was simultaneously and not separately. Also a prominent suffragists and civil rights activist. Even Middleton generously offered to call her family to propose that we visit together. Terrorist family members Raymond and Jean Langston kindly agreed to let us come to view their entire privately held collection for the first time at their home. Tells former summer cottage in Highland beach, Maryland. Raymond Langston is Terrell step grandson, the step son of her daughter Phyllis. For decades, Raymond and Jean Langston and now they're adult daughter, Monique, have been the devoted caretakers of Carroll's legacy and of her former home and papers. The langston couple now live year round in what used to be Terrell summer house on the Chesapeake Bay near Annapolis, Maryland. And if you can see, there's a star on the map that says highland beach south of Annapolis. And that is where this community was founded. She actually died there. Terrell did it right before her 91st birthday and 950 for, but the community was founded in 1893 by Frederick Douglass son Charles, after he was denied entrance to a white beach resort nearby. Douglas, the Douglas family purchased beach front property from a formerly enslaved man. And the beaches at the lower end of the picture. But basically, his former enslaver had given this formerly enslaved man a strip of bad, Sandy, marshy land at the edge of the Chesapeake Bay that he didn't think was worth anything because it couldn't be productively farmed. But that was not taking into consideration the notion of beachfront property. So this man sold it to Charles Douglas, who built it into a resort community for the blacks from Washington DC and Baltimore. And if you look on the map at the street names, you'll see pinch back Lynch, Bruce, Langston, women. They're all names of prominent black families at the time. And so Charles wanted to build a house for his elderly father, Frederick Douglass, so that he could summer there. And Mary Church Terrell, but the piece of land right next door. So this is what it looks like today with the Terrell house on the left and the Douglass house on the right. After meeting with the Langston at towels home with many of its original furnishings and decorations. They took us next door to see the Frederick Douglass house, which the town of Highland beach now runs as a by appointment only museum. They invited us to read towels paper in the Douglass house. For the next week. When we went out onto the porch, we read the plaque that said that the elderly Frederick Douglass had designed his house with the second story balcony and a wide front porch on the first story with a rocking chair for him to sit in, saying, I will sit here as a free man in a home that I own, looking out across the Chesapeake Bay to the eastern shore where I was enslaved as a child. It was truly profound to inhabit that space. And what I wanna do now is just pause to show you some of the slides that give you a sense of what highland beach and other black beach resorts look like and meant to those who could find joy and recreation there during the time of Jim Crow. So this is a picture of Stephen Middleton on the porch. And then this is the view from Carol's house out at the bay, looking out onto the eastern shore of Maryland. And this is just another view of that. But then here you'll see an 890 a tax bill for Mary Church Terrell for Highland beach. And the plot next to her was purchased by Paul Lawrence Dunbar. So you can see that this was really the place where the black elite from the DC area decided that they would congregate. And this is an early picture. And the far that helps on the right with the pointed thing is Frederick Douglass his house. And this is a post photo. It's not, I don't think actually the beach, but it's a picture of Mary Church Terrell with her daughter Phyllis. And so you can see that the recreation and swimming and being out in nature is really important. This is a picture from the beach with her daughter Phyllis, as an older girl. And then here you see the charter which Mary Church Terrell organized to incorporate highland beach as the very first all-black town in Maryland. And she went through the whole process to do it and got it incorporated in 1922. They've managed to keep it almost entirely black today, partially by selling houses through a private listserv instead of by putting them on the market. These are just some scenes, probably mostly from the twenties of the recreation and activities that people were able to do when they were there. There were tennis courts and of course people swam in the water and just generally had a good time. And then this is actually Phyllis Langston, Terrell Langston, her husband. So the langston family and payments father crabbing at the area. And this is a picture of Mary Church Terrell in the early fifties presenting an award to Fannie Douglass. They had a pavilion where they would meet and it's no longer there, but that was the kind of social and event space. There were lots of other of these kinds of communities, some that were more public and open to a broader vacationing population, including sparrows beach in Annapolis, which were again, these kind of segregated beach spaces that allowed African Americans to have some of the pleasures that were denied to them in the other spaces that were entirely white. And finally, the picture from 950 5, which says Post Office on it because she her family and the Douglas family traded off having the post office in their homes next door to each other. But at the time, apparently the Post Office was there. So in any event, that's just a display of what it was like at Highland beach when that's where we did our research. When we were visiting the langston. The Langston also mentioned that they had a storage unit with more of Mary Church and Robert, Carol's belongings. And we realized that the tendrils material culture artifacts could also tell an important story. So we were thrilled when the langston graciously showed us the artifacts. These included Mary Church Terrell, silver tea set, formal gloves, hats for pieces, and her enslaved great grandmothers. Coral neck list, as well as Robert Terrell ink stand and gavel from when he served as a municipal court judge. These artifacts clearly had historical value and deserved to be preserved and displayed in a museum such as the, as yet an open National Museum of African-American History and Culture. The length since confided that they had already contacted the Smithsonian to gift some of these artifacts, but we're mistakenly told by a receptionist that they cannot donate to the museum without first providing an inventory of the collection. However, it was clear that the new museum would surely want some of the artifacts from such a prominent African-American family. So I offered to contact someone at the museum to arrange for a site visit to view and inventory the Terrell artifacts for possible donation and display, and they gladly consented. I called my friend and colleague, Professor Carol Lasser of Oberlin College, who told me that a former Oberlin grad, Nancy burka, worked as a curator of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture. She responded immediately and enthusiastically, bringing a tour, a team of curatorial assistance with her to meet with the langston her team inventory the artifacts and the storage unit, including the one on the screen, and facilitated the langston gift of several pieces to the museum. When the museum opened, the langston were invited to one of the special opening celebrations and a hired a limousine and came and style. Several of the items are now part of the Smithsonian Institute and a few are part of their newer digital collection for public review. And so these slides come from the digital collection. The first is a bell that she got when she was visiting and living in Switzerland when she finished Oberlin and was studying languages. So that's one of the things that they own. They also own this pair of her Parisian opera glasses that she had. And the small gold pencil with the pencil case. That she carried. In addition, they had things like her National Association of Colored Women pin with the motto that she created, lifting as we climb. And they have a little almost like a little pocket calendar that she would carry with her or keep on a desk, and a medallion. That was a service award given to Terrell as the honorary president for life. The first the first past president of the National Association of Colored Women, which was a tribute to her service. And then this is an interesting one that the museum quite light. And that is that there are pictures of Terrell in the chair that is at the house. And so they are particularly interested in finding things where the objects are with the subject. And so that's one that they were happy to see. And here's the engraved gavel from a strange angle, but in order to show you that it sends his name Robert H. Terrell on it. And that is the basic version of what was in the artifacts. So now I'll shift over to the families privately held papers and talk about how they, I hope, helped me write a better biography of Mary Church Terrell. The left letters between Molly church and Robert H. Terrell and her diaries and the families collection greatly enrich our understanding of this remarkable woman, her courtship and marriage. These documents were especially important for enhancing my understanding of the deep and loving relationship between Mary and Robert Terrell telling the story of her intimate life, I give careful attention to Cheryl's a close relationship with her husband who nurtured her and facilitated her public activism. Her diaries allow us to see in the correspondence, allowed us to see her courtship and her marriage and really help kind of change the story around that, because some authors had mischaracterized the Terrell marriage as strained. But the couples love letters, which went on for years, helped me tell a much different story. In spite of many tests to their relationship, the couples Enduring Love inspect sexual passion, sustain them personally and in their public careers. And Robert Carol's role as her and her partner and husband is crucial to understanding her successful public work because he consistently encouraged his wife's activism throughout her life. The families papers also reveal more about the serious health problems that Terrell struggled with throughout her life. And especially tragically in the 190s, as she tried to bear a healthy living child. Her story revealed the cost to Black women of trying to get good healthcare in segregated hospitals. Over seven years, Terrell experienced a late term miscarriage or stillbirth, and the death of a newborn infant two days after his birth, who did not receive proper medical care. Terrell knew firsthand the better pain of the many black American women of all classes who suffered from disproportionately high rates of miscarriage and infant mortality. This deeper perspective allowed me to put in context her activism when she was elected president of the National Association of Colored Women. And if you turn to this picture just briefly, on the far left is Mary Church Terrell with the feather and the fruit on her hat. And then carrying a baby is Alice. Ruth more, who becomes Alice Dunbar Nelson. And then that baby is Charles Burnett, who belongs to Ida B. Wells Barnett, who is sitting below the baby. So there are a lot of amazing women in this photo, but just to give you that sense of it, although she has sometimes been characterized as an elitist club women, Terrell was in fact, personally committed, absolutely determined even to help wage earning black women and their babies survive and prosper. Her private experiences shaped and motivated her public advocacy of racial and gender justice as she prioritized the creation infant day nurseries and kindergartens. She also called for black women to be professionally trained as doctors and nurses. Believing intuitively what study showed today that black hair healthcare providers are more invested in the health and well-being of their patients and help them thrive. Charles personal papers deepen and enrich our understanding of her experiences as a black woman. Unceasing militant presents a sustained analysis of the connections between terrorist long public career as a civil rights activist and her private experiencers. Exploring her family history, intimate relationships, his finances, and other personal concerns deepens our understanding of her as an individual and amplifies her ideas, her anti-racism, her feminism and her militancy. Insisting upon African-American women's full humanity and equality tendrils feminism and suffered activism were Based on her understanding that gender and race are inseparable factors and black women's lives and oppression. She repeated, she repeatedly expressed in her diary that she wished that she could use her own life and experiences to teach others, especially white Americans, about the challenges faced by black women at the time. Overall, the papers in the langston private collection included some of Mary Church Charles original diaries and letters and other papers, some from the 880 is and 90s or earlier. These are originals, but they also had other papers that are duplicate manuscripts of speeches, galley proofs of her autobiography, and advertising flyers for her public lectures. All were in need of care and preservation and would also be excellent resources for students and faculty researchers. Terrorist family agreed that it would be wonderful to identify another archive that could create a significant repository of papers. For of Mary Church Terrell. And they were especially interested in an archive that could restore and preserve them, but also make them widely accessible to students and scholars alike. What better place than towels Alma Mater, Oberlin College, where she earned a BA in 1884 and an MA in 1886. Tell was very proud to have graduated from Oberlin College and was thrilled when she was honored with an honorary degree in 1948. If you look at the picture, you'll see she's the only woman and certainly the only black person that year who was honored. But it was also very unusual in general for a black woman to get such an honor. So she was very happy with that. I knew that Oberlin had a well-respected archive that could handle a new donation and take good care of it. So when I returned from what turned out to be the first of several wonderful visits to the Langston in Highland beach. I contacted careless or on behalf of the lengths tends to extend an invitation to Oberlin College to house the papers. And she has facilitated a conference call. And with Oberlander, then President Marvin, Chris love and the Oberlin College archivists can grow see, as well as the chairs of the departments of history, African Studies, and Gender, Sexuality and feminist studies. And when we discussed overland acquisition of the collection, all were enthusiastic about moving forward. So I put them in contact with the family and then can grow see arrived to drag and drove to Highland beach to pick up the collection. In June of 2015, he returned to Oberlin with six boxes that contains letters, diaries, photographs, fires, awards and more. Oberlin College Archives has done a wonderful job of preserving her papers and organizing them for use by students and scholars alike. The Oberlin College Archives would can grow, see in the lead, preserve the papers with a special class that helps students learn how to do that. They set up displays in the library, created a plaque honoring Terrell to be put in the gender and sexuality in feminist studies offices. And even hosted a symposium on Terrell called complicated relationships. Mary Church, Terrell legacy for 21st century activists, where many scholars, including me and Steven Middleton spoke on taro. And the family attended and we're thrilled, especially to see the presentations by Oberlin College students about Mary Church Terrell that were directly derived from the new collections. So this is one of the displays of the papers and photos in the library that they put on. And this is just an example of her handwriting. This is not too bad. Have an example. Problematic though, if you have to read too much of it. And here's the plaque that was put up in the Women's Studies Office. And this is a photo of myself with Ken grossly on the far right in the middle are gene and Raymond Langston with their daughter Monique. And so that was quite a lovely event. Oberlin chose the theme, complicated relationships to acknowledge what Carol's documents reveal that the Oberlin College she had loved and thrived at in the late 19th century had changed by the second decade of the 20th century. A chapter from my biography entitled the invasion of Jim Crow, 1913 to 941 reveals Terrell accompanied her two daughters, Phyllis and married to Oberlin that academic year. But found the rachel environments so troubling and different from what she had experienced that she challenged it. She had accompanied her daughters to help ease their transition from the all-black world of their segregated DC public schools to this predominantly white college. She had hope that Marion Phyllis would be treated as equals. But instead, Terrell found that Jim Crow had invaded and institution founded by abolitionists that had admitted black and female students. Well before the Civil War, served as a stop on the Underground Railroad and resisted the Fugitive Slave Act. Unfortunately, the Terrell daughters belong to a rising generation of black students in the 1910s and 20s who encountered increasingly overt prejudice at predominantly white colleges, even Oberlin phalluses and Mary's experiences of racial prejudice where there were personal and private for them. But their mother moved quickly from the rain realm of personal outrage to political activism. Terrell expanded her advocacy of civil rights to include standing up for black students, equal access to all social and educational experiences at it, but predominantly white colleges. By the end of the fall semester, she felt compelled to alert the national headquarters of the NAACP, an organization that she had helped to found and was still active in, that. Jim Crow had even invested a college with a well-known abolitionist past. Revealing that administrators, professors, and the majority of the white college students alike had abandoned Oberlin historic legacy. Yet, when the college was celebrating its a 100 years in 1933, she was named as one of the 100 most important graduates of the college. Terrell still believe that Oberlin was capable of better things and kept pushing. She did not give up. Not only is Overland College Archives now the home to her papers, but the library itself there was renamed the Mary Church Terrell library. This took place in 19, sorry, 2018 as part of the inaugural festivities as Oberlin College conducted, the first black person and the second woman to hold the position of president of Oberlin, Carmen bar. The family attended these festivities as well and brought with them an additional final donation of papers for the archives. And this is a picture of them with up at the top in red is the new lettering for the Mary Church, Terrell main library. And the family and their collection of one more set of letters. And then in the middle of this picture is come Carmen unbarred the new president. And at the library, they also created a traveling exhibit with images from the collection which has been traveling the country ever sense is just a photo display that they had up next to one of their statutes where apparently there was a sneaker on the foot there. But basically, that's the story of the various ways in which this biography led me in a variety of different directions to share the story of Mary Church Terrell's unique and powerful voice with a new generation of activists and students, as well as with the general public. Thank you. Thank you. Alison for just a wonderful and informative talk. So I'm going to go ahead and check the Q&A. It looks like we have one question I'll open with that one. What are your thoughts about black families who have maintained their archives? for sometimes centuries, having had so much denied them and taken from them, are leery of trusting archives or institutions. Should archivists and other professionals revise their thinking to include working with family and community archives, help provide access rather than taking our archival collections from families? I think that's a good question. And one of the things that I did is I made sure that we gave copies of every single thing to the family, both in paper and in digital form and as CDs and on thumb drives. Every possible way to make sure that they had that material back in. It. It's it is a touchy issue and it did also inform where we took the collection. We were thinking hard about access and they had given one item, a material object to a collection that I'll not name. And when they came to look at it, they were actually refused access to it. That really upset them. They they weren't told they couldn't see the physical object that they had donated. And so this was a really problematic moment and we had to make sure that that would not be the case. So part of the discussion with Oberlin from the beginning was about how we could create something that felt inclusive and welcoming while still actually having the physical papers transferred. And the reason why I do think that that's important if it can be done in spite of understanding the reluctance on the part of families, is because it's so difficult to preserve the papers in proper condition. And allow them to, to really survive and stay around for future generations to read and view. One of the things that I encountered when I opened up these love letters from the 18 nineties, is that as you open them up, you could kind of see them starting to crumble. They needed to be taken and mounted on special paper. They needed to be in. There. There's ways that you can preserve them, keep them in rooms that are at a certain temperature. They're put in boxes that don't harm them with different kinds of sunlight and they can treat them so that you don't have problems with mold. So even though it seems like It's risky to turn over documents, it's probably riskier to leave them at home. And so that's really where I would come down on that at least, uh, but I think you have to do it really sensitively and working collectively with the family. The family was it part of this every step of the way. And they came to both of those key events and really enjoyed that. And also the opening ceremonies at the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture. So these are the kinds of things that I think needs to happen along with. It's not just like take the papers and run. Thank you. So the next question asks Were the Langstons descendants of John Mercer? She's asking were the Langstons descendants of John Mercer? They're related to them, yes. Yes, absolutely. And so that's what's nice about the street names, is that the Terrells, the Langstons, the , the Bruces' are all these prominent families and they're all interrelated. So, yeah. That's what I'm saying. Looks like we have another question. Is the NACW photograph from 1896 with Ida B. Wells Barnett and her baby in the Oberlin College Archives? Such a great photograph. Yeah. Thank you That is there. And one of the things I'm most proud of really in terms of the images that I put in the book, is that I put that in the book and I made it as a really huge effort with the help of a lot of archivist friends, including either Jones who was at Howard and now is at Morgan State. Then also Cecilia Robinson who's at Oberlin to help me identify as many of those women as I possibly could. And so the picture in the book is small or regular sized, but the description of the picture takes up an entire page. Because what I decided to do was to identify every single woman I could and then say what she was known for at that point in her life in a 196. So not what she became famous for. But why was she part of this initial group that came together to put together the first black women's secular organization that was dedicated to civil rights, activism and change. And so you have that organization, NACW is a major organization and that photo is a wonderful, wonderful piece of the Oberlin archives. A lot of these things may also be in the Library of Congress and are at Howard because as I said, some of the items were reproductions or duplicate copies. And in fact, that's part of what's so nice about this collection, is that it gets students and faculty or any other person who wants to come to Oberlin a chance to, once again kind of physically touch and work with collections that may be digitized, but also there is some value in seeing the objects themselves. Yeah, I totally agree. And that that is an amazing photograph. There are no other questions in the Q&A box. We had one pop up and it's a comment So he says generally archivists discourage splitting up collections. Was there any thought to adding material to the LSE rather than Oberlin? Yes. And that was the family's choice not to not to do that. That comes down to some of those questions about family access that I was talking about before. And then also just the overall health of the libraries collections and whether they seem to be in good physical shape. Because some times you can have a really good amazing collection at a library. But there might be, might be some physical structural problems with library. And so those were some considerations that they were taking that they had some strong feelings about. And so I think once again, working with a family is an important way to think about this. So that's something that we did. But another thing that I, that I wanted to mention and I didn't really see a way I could stick it in there, except for that when I was talking about Alice Dunbar Nelson. And I know that Jesse is very interested in to her and has done a lot of research on her. But one of the interesting points of connection is that both Terrell and Nelson work done by nasa worked really hard on political campaigns and most of their lives where Republicans, although done by now, switch to the Democrats for a little while. But one of the things that happened to Terrell in 1920, when she became the first director of Colored Women's votes for the Republican National Committee. They are and see. When women got the right to vote, is that she took a train and went to Dover to give a speech to black Republicans. And when she got out of the train, she couldn't find the man who was supposed to pick her up. So she looked in the telephone directory, can find them there, and went up to the conductor and asked him if, if he might be able to help her at the desk with finding this black Republican. And he was so angry that a black woman who was talking about voting and he wanted to talk to black Republicans had come up to him that he had her arrested for disorderly conduct. And she she refused to. The day. After a couple of hours. There was a delay in getting the police out there. And so she ended up going to give her talk anyhow. And the detectives came to the back and listen to her speak, and then confronted her afterwards and decided that since she had spoken so well, they would not arrest her. But she talked about how this was this experience that made her wonder what was going on in Delaware and why she was treated so terribly there. But she also said she kind of wish she had really been arrested so that she could turn it into a way to talk about black women's rights, voting rights, and really to highlight the problems that black women in the South were facing. But here we were in a kind of border state where so much later there's still some of these issues. And a lot of the men who were associated with her, ministers and other people said, Oh, how could you even consider getting arrested? You notice how it's not respectable. And she just said, well, I wish I wish that we could wish I could've been because I could've made a point. So that's what she thought about that really dedicated. So with no other questions. I'd like to thank you, Professor Parker. Thank thank you to everyone who asked questions and who attended today. So please join us for the next Scholar in the Library being held on March 10th from 12 to 1, which will be held virtually. The speaker is Daniel Dixon, Associate Professor School of Marine Science and Policy, who will speak on reef real estate, how coral reef animals choose their homes. She will discuss research on what information tiny fish in corals take into account when choosing a coral reef. What makes a good reef? And what makes a bad reef? What do animals do when a habitat, when their habitat is, is under threat? So for more information on other events we have coming up, I encourage you to please visit the events calendar on our library website at library.udel.edu/events. Thank you, everybody. Have a wonderful day.
Scholar In The Library - February 17, 2021 - Alison Parker
From Kristopher Raser March 06, 2021
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