Documenting a Troubled Past
February is Black History Month, a celebration of African American heritage and achievement that has been observed nationwide since the mid-1970s. In its honor, we profile recent GSLIS alumna Holly Smith '08LS, who works with the African American archives at the Southern Historical Collection in Chapel Hill, N.C. While at Simmons, Smith received a scholarship from the Spectrum program, sponsored by the American Library Association to increase diversity in the library profession. We also highlight some of the African American-related holdings at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston. (See sidebars for more information about Spectrum and MHS.)
There is little evidence of Dolly other than a partial photo of her wearing a kerchief in her hair and staring directly into the camera, and this description: "She is thirty years of age, light Complexion — hesitates somewhat when spoken to, and is not a very healthy woman — but rather good looking, with a fine set of teeth." This is all we know of her; the rest of Dolly's life is lost. Dolly was an African American slave who worked in the home of plantation owner Louis Manigault in Augusta, Ga. In April 1863, halfway through the Civil War, she ran away, or perhaps was abducted. "It is thought she has been enticed off by some White Man, being herself a Stranger to this City," wrote Manigault in an ad he placed offering a $50 reward for her return. Manigault pasted the ad in his plantation journal, among pages of crop prices and slave inventories, and it is now with his family's papers in the Southern Historical Collection (SHC) in the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
"There are a lot of records related to enslavement from the slave holders' perspectives, because these are the kinds of records that have come in," says Holly Smith '08LS, the Overholser Archival Fellow for African American Studies at the SHC, which holds the world's largest collection of material about the American South. About 16 million items have been processed to some degree, and records related to black history are a prominent part of the collection. But many were created by white Southerners. "These documents are still important," says Smith. "They say something important about African American history."
During her two-year fellowship, one of Smith's jobs is to update an online guide of the hundreds of African American-related records in the SHC, which include the Manigault papers as well as those of several African American organizations and individuals. She and colleagues plan to incorporate Web 2.0 technologies like blogging and a wiki into the site, along with static information from finding aids. The goal is to make the collections more dynamic and easier to access. But they also hope the site will entice people to donate records so that the SHC can continue to document African American individuals, businesses, and families — and fill some of the holes in southern black history. "Historically, African Americans' stories have been underrepresented in the archival record, both intentionally and unintentionally. I want to help change that," says Smith.
Smith, who is originally from Hampton, Va., studied history and black studies at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg and completed a one-year master's degree program focusing on African American history at Yale before moving to Boston in 2003. She worked for the city's National Historic Park (part of the U.S. National Park Service) and for the Museum of African American History in Beacon Hill before taking a job that introduced her to library and archival science. Smith photographed and inventoried art by renowned black painter and illustrator Allan Rohan Crite, whose work is in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Smithsonian. While working on the project, she met Reginald Jackson, a Simmons professor and colleague of the artist. ont of the Wilson And through Jackson she met GSLIS Archives Professor Tywanna Whorley, who recruited Smith to the GSLIS program, something she hadn't originally considered.
"In my experience, not many young people of color think of this as a career," she says. "People hear 'library and information science' and think 'librarian,' which has a not-great connotation. It doesn't necessarily make you think of the skills you need today, like being tech savvy and progressive." While at Simmons, Smith worked with Whorley on a diversity initiative grant, brainstorming ways to recruit people of color to library school and, in the process, to clear up that misconception.
Next fall, the SHC will launch the updated Web guide alongside an exhibit of materials from the collection, and Smith is taking the lead as curator. "Pulling items is the fun part, that's what I love," she says. "But how to limit it to a few things?" One document that Smith says will almost certainly appear is an 1853 letter from an enslaved pregnant woman, Virginia Boyd, to her owner, Rice Ballard, begging him to intervene and prevent her sale.In the letter, which Boyd writes from a slave trader's yard in Texas, she condemns the man who impregnated her — possibly Ballard's business partner — for selling his own children and their mother. (Boyd and one of her children were sold a few months later.)
"It has been used in exhibits before, but this document is a powerful representation of the cruelty of enslavement, while at the same time showing the incredible strength and courage of Virginia Boyd to confront her oppressor," says Smith. "The fact that we have a written record of this exchange in the archives still amazes me."
Smith says she'd be happy to stay on at UNC after her fellowship ends next year. But her dream job, she says, would be as a curator of African American photography. She's interested in images taken by and featuring African Americans, both of which were relatively rare until well into the 20th century. "Photos are visually compelling. They tell the truth, but then they don't," she says. "Images can be posed, but what's actually going on?"
If only Dolly could have been free to explain.