About
About the Archive
This archive is a curated collection of primary sources related to Black student movements at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU). The records are sourced exclusively from Black instituitons, including:
- Southern University and A&M College -- Baton Rouge
- The National Museum of African American History and Culture
- The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
- The University of the District of Columbia
Documentary Focus
We primarily relied upon text-based records to build this archive. We felt that the best way to represent Black student voices in our archives was to center their writings. These resources also can be useful to researchers who are looking for direct statements from historical actors. Additionally, the documents written about Black students provide insight into how Black student activists were received by administrators, other students, and people outside of their immediate campus community. We also included pictures from demonstrations and ephemera to add more visually interesting elements to the archive.
Consideration of archival concepts and practices
Some of the materials in this archive deal directly with police violence and killings. In representing such materials in digital spaces, it is important to consider how representations could lead to commodification or reinforce existing archival standards. In “Making a Killing: On Race, Ritual, and (Re)Membering in Digital Culture,” Tonia Sutherland details this conflict: “...while communities of color have long engaged in ritual practices of (re)membering and bearing witness to violent acts as modes of resistance and mourning; in digital spaces these practices have been appropriated to reinforce systems of white supremacist power and racial inequality, re-inscribing the strucutral and systemic racism.” By documenting student demonstrations against police violence, we hoped to depict a more comprehensive image of Black resistance.
Criteria for record selection
" As a writer committed to telling stories, I have endeavored to represent the lives of the nameless and the forgotten, to reckon with loss, and to respect the limits of what cannot be known.”
-- Saidiya Hartman, Venus in Two Acts
Our hopes were to represent the "nameless and forgotten." We set out to center the voices of people whose narratives have been excluded from traditional, white historical narratives. As a result, we only sought out resources from Black institutions.
Black scholars have often encountered resistance from white institutions when consulting archives. In her article “Archiving While Black,” Ashley Farmer describes an example of this, going on to explain the consequences of erasure and exclusion from physical spaces and historical memory: “Ultimately, what scholars like Franklin are suggesting is that Black exclusion from archival spaces is more than simply a debate about physical academic space. It’s about building a more capacious foundation on which our shared histories are constructed.”
We hope to encourage a more comprehensive and equitable construction of history through selection records from people often left out of historical narratives.
Target user groups
Our target user group for the archive is Black students who are interested in archival materials related to Black student movements, whether it is for personal use or research purposes. In considering who would consult the sources and for what purposes, we selected more text-based sources, which we find to be richer in information than images. We considered that students may find it easier to use text-based sources for research papers and similar assignments and our selection of materials reflects a focus on these sources.
Our secondary user group is anyone, student or non-student, who is interested in Black student movements. We hoped to make the web pages appear less text-heavy to consider people who would want to quickly browse and not necessarily research for an assignment.
Perspectives
The perspectives in this archive are exclusively those of Black students and administrators at HBCUs. We felt that the perspectives that are most important are the ones from the only people impacted by anti-Blackness: Black people.
Keeping with our commitment to respectfully depict the organizations and people represented in the sources we curated, we decided to omit resources that included anti-Black language or sentiments, even if they were from collections from Black organizations.