Remarkable Stories of ‘Black Lives in the Duke Archives’
Annual event pulls historic items that are part of American history and culture
The first day of the exhibit, focused on Africana collections, took place on March 26 in the Holsti-Anderson Assembly Room. The second day highlighting the African Diaspora, occurred in the .
Among the gems on display in the African Diaspora exhibit was “The First Amy Tells,” an unpublished autobiography of Amy Ashwood Garvey, the first wife of and co-founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association.
Garvey-related material had the distinction of being featured on both days of the exhibition. The Africana exhibit included a June 4, 1921, letter written to Garvey on the letterhead of the ill-fated steamship company “.” that warned the race leader “there are enemies in our camp.”
There were photos of South African protests at the height of the anti-Apartheid movement, along with maps of Africa from the late 1500s and mid-1600s, including a world atlas created and published in 1648 by the Dutch cartographer and publisher Willem Janszoon Blaeu and his son Joan Blaeu, “two of the finest map makers of the 17th century,” to Duke Libraries.
There was an Ethiopian Bible on display from the 19th century, written in the , considered to be among the oldest languages in the world.
“I speak ұ’e, but I can’t understand this because it’s a church language and they only teach it in the church,” said , who grew up in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia now working at Boston University Libraries, who was on campus for the Africana Librarians Council .
The Africana archive began with “Progress In Liberia,” a series of black and white photographs taken between late 1949 and early 1950 by , a young African American photographer who chronicled the progress by and for the Liberia Mining Company. The series is part of the Archive of Documentary Arts collection.
The exhibit pulled from an array of Rubenstein Library resources, including:
* Archive of Documentary Arts
* Economists’ Papers Archive
* John Hope Franklin Research Center
* John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History
* History of Medicine Collections
* Human Rights Archive
* Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture
Brandon Payne, a second-year graduate student at the Divinity School, came to the program after being alerted to it by a friend.
“He knew that I spent a lot of time in various parts of Africa,” Payne said. “Senegal, Niger, Somalia, Congo and Mozambique doing humanitarian relief work.”
The exhibit’s black and white photos of Black demonstrators protesting Apartheid in South Africa are provocative.
“These photos are from the South African documentary collective, , a collection of South African photographers documenting their own experiences of themselves and their people during Apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s,” said Ama Kyereme, an artist and graduate student in experimental and documentary arts, who worked as an intern for the event.
Kyereme said the photos arrived at Duke during a period when images of anti-Apartheid protests in South Africa were at risk of being erased or destroyed because of censorship.
The archive also displayed a provisional ballot from the 1994 general election in South Africa, the first in the nation’s history where people of all races could cast ballots. The election brought Nelson Mandela to the presidency just four years after he was released from the notorious Victor Verster Prison.
A colorful poster of the Women’s Health Project in Johannesburg, South Africa, chronicled the country’s struggle with the AIDS epidemic during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The African Diaspora exhibit celebrated the Black church in America; one feature included church fans used by congregation members at Durham’s old St. Joseph’s African Methodist Episcopal Church during the 1940s. The fans shared space with a 1903 copy of “The Negro Church,” by the civil rights titan W.E.B. DuBois.
Another intriguing item was a poster published by the (AME), founded in 1816 by Richard Allen, that pictured the church’s bishops between 1816 and 1912. Two of the bishops, and , are honored today by the two historically Black colleges and universities named after them.
The performing arts section of the exhibit included a 1928 edition of “The Official Theatrical World of Colored Artists,” which included a “theatrical history” written by .
Materials from the library’s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) archive chronicled elements of the civil rights movement, including the 1964 Mississippi Project, known as , where three workers, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, were kidnapped and murdered.
That year, 20-year-old of Tarrytown, N.Y., a SNCC staff member, applied to participate in Freedom Summer. Richardson had been arrested eight times while participating in civil rights protests in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Her are housed in the Franklin Research Center.
When asked to list the name, addresses and phone numbers of people to contact for bail if she was arrested, Richardson wrote, “HA!”
The exhibit also highlighted the remarkable role women have played in America’s history. It included a 1931 edition of the book, “Women Builders,” by Sadie Iola Daniel, which the lives of seven women, including , and .
The exhibit featured a larger than coffee table-size book featuring Margaret Walker Alexander’s near-immortal poem, “.” The book is illustrated with colorful lithographs by . Also on exhibit: a rare, 1952 volume of poetry, “,” by Lucy Smith, whose closing lines of the poem “Affirmation” sums up the entire Black Lives in Archive experience.
For all that I have done
All that I have endured
All that I am
That is America too