I Cannot Believe Some of What Im Reading about Black Papers Collections and Archives As my facebook friends know, Im for individuals exercising free choice in making deposits. But some people commenting on this matter are becoming decidedly insulting about black institutions, going beyond arguments about resources and getting into the triffling Negro sphere of analysis. I have horror stories about archives run by both blacks and whites. People have been sharing their Negro institution stories, so let me share some white institution stories and a possible vision of back to the future. When writing my dissertation, I virtually begged Duke university to allow me to have access to the Behind the Veil interviews paid for by the the federal government. No body would answer a letter, and when I went in person the archivist played dumb. A couple of years later when I was teaching at Columbia, I sat on a NEH panel in which the folks at Duke claimed the documents had been available to researchers and now they wanted funds to write the definitive history of segregation. Besides the lie, the original funding proposal had stated that Duke had no interest in writing a definitive study. It appears that some folks at Duke thought black peoples history belonged to the white scholars teaching there and the black folks who were selected by them to be on the faculty. I have talked to white scholars who have done research on black topics at white universities and have gotten material when black scholars were not shown the said collections. Many researchers hear stories of unprocessed collections being shown certain people who are virtually never black, except at black institutions. But here is what I really want to tell you folks who believe that all is well at white institutions and that there is no real decision to be made about where to deposit papers. History is long, and the institutions who had no use for you a generation ago may have no use for you a generation from now. Worse still, perhaps those with access to Toni Morrisons well-preserved and organized papers in 2214 may use them for purposes she and we cannot imagine. Perhaps they will write about when Princeton was overrun with third rate artists and scholars during that late twentieth century when America experimented with racial equality before learning definitively that both the first and the second Reconstructions were both grand mistakes. Dont ever be so sure about which road is better for Black folks. There is no easy road for us.
Posted on: Wed, 22 Oct 2014 20:01:36 +0000
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