Project Description
Documentary focus:
This archive primarily focuses on the photograph documents that are in the Atlanta University Archive. To keep the sanctity of the archive, we use pictures and documents from student newspapers called The Torch, The Maroon Tiger, and The Athenaeum throughout the project. Other documents, such as letters, are not used for this project because many are not available to the public and are spread out through different institutions. For example, James Nabrit has his papers at George Washington University, and they are not open to the public like the AUC Library Archive in Atlanta. This is why we draw on Amy Williams’ literature of community archives. Community archives are “a group of people with the same ethnicity, religion, gender, occupation, or defining characteristic” (Williams, 2015). Despite our little professional experience, we want to make historical materials accessible to Morehouse students. The evidential value from this digital repository makes it easier for students to view primary materials, inspiring students to use primary sources for more assignments.
Consideration of Archival Practices:
Depending on how archival material is arranged, various narratives can be enabled. As Yakel (2003) notes, “Archival representation processes are neither objective nor transparent” (p. 25). The type of narrative that will inevitably be told by archival arrangements and descriptions can either enable or disable harmful human rights abuses, couched in white supremacist and colonialist power structures. This is also reflected in Farmer: “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” (Farmer, “Archiving While Black”). Therefore, various lenses and ways to tackle archival description must be handled very carefully.
Jordan’s and my project focuses on a specific period of Morehouse College history when John Hope was president from 1906 to 1936. Hope was an outspoken civil rights activist and promoter of Black education who worked with figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois and within organizations such as the NAACP. This project’s primary focus is a key part of Black history of the early 20th century, overlapping with key movements such as the Harlem Renaissance. It is ethically important that a Black scholar leads the project and thus has control over the narrative and its presentation. This avoids a narrative that is white-dominated or white-controlled. It is also important that someone close to Morehouse College and intimately familiar with the materials being used for the website has control over the project. Jordan Ross, who proposed this project, is a Black scholar, a Morehouse alum, and closely acquainted with the material from Morehouse’s collections. We agreed that he would be handle the content to be used and have the final say in how the material is presented for Morehouse students. Nicolas Ciccone, as a white person, made Omeka resource templates, modified the Cozy theme to match with Morehouse’s maroon-and-white color schemes, and uploaded the material onto Omeka, all with Jordan Ross’s approval. Metadata provided by Ross have been crosswalked onto on Omeka-friendly schema derived from Dublin Core and Bibliographic Ontology.
Cultural knowledge goes beyond documents and extends into cultural memory and experience. For example, Indigenous knowledge includes “oral memory and associated traditions, oral memory which has been captured using various Western technologies, records created by Indigenous people and organisations using the structures and forms of Western knowledge and communication systems, and records created by non-Indigenous people and organisations about Indigenous people” (Iacovino, pp. 355-356). Just as with Indigenous knowledge, Black knowledge extends beyond archival records and into oral histories and other sources of information. It is important that the full scope of this knowledge is represented in archives. This website accomodates this by relying on physical documents, including works written by Morehouse faculty and students, as well as Morehouse tradition, to reflect Morehouse history and Black student life.
Finally, it is important to consider the legal aspects of our project. Though discussed in relation to public records, the Shepherd (2017) idea that transparency is “a prerequisite for, but not the same as, accountability” (p. 249) is helpful for our project, as we are trying to represent Morehouse College and its history as fairly as possible—therefore, we need to be transparent about our sources and intentions. As Hodson (2004) discusses, sensitive information can abound in celebrity/author correspondence and thus needs to be monitored very closely. However, the information and documents used for our project were freely provided by Morehouse and are not outside their authorization. This accords with the observation by Ketelaar (1995) that “personal information which is freely provided to an agency, acting as a ‘licenses factory’, by the subject him or herself in a regulated process requires less stringent protection than sensitive data which has been gathered through denunciation by, and used by, an intelligence agency without the subject having any recourse to a hearing or an airing of both sides” (p. 15). Our information was obtained through legal means. As we are curating this information for internet access, we also considered copyright issues and will not be using anything not owned by the repository. So, like the respondents of Dryden’s 2014 survey of archivists on handling copyrighted materials, we “avoid the risky materials” (p. 82) and there is no real risk factor in using these documents and information supplied by the college. According to the AUC Woodruff Library, whom Jordan has been in discussion with, our project follows established ethical and legal principles and we are authorized to use the items here.
Criteria for Record Selection:
Jordan selected material
1. That accurately reflected the story of John Hope, his presidency, and its impact on Morehouse;
2. That was created by and for past Morehouse students and faculty, thus preserving Morehouse tradition;
3. That we were authorized to use by the AUC Woodruff Library.
Though this material is spread out over different collections, as discussed above, the main source of this online archive is the Atlanta University Center Robert Woodruff Archive. The main collections consulted were the Atlanta University Photographs, the Morehouse College Collection, and the Maroon Tiger Collection.
Target user group:
The target user for this project is freshman students at Morehouse College. Our goal of students utilizing our archive is to get a deeper understanding of the John Hope presidency at Morehouse College. Many of the information on the history of Morehouse College is hard to get for students, alumni, and anyone interested in Morehouse College. Students may find the names of the people in the archive as familiar but would still need clarification. To address those needs, we made sure that the metadata is detailed and have citations that can help the user understand what or who they are looking at. Also, we will develop an access system that uses finding aids to help students navigate the site. There are other user groups that can utilize the online archive. People such as Faculty, alumni, and people with a general interest in the history of Morehouse College are other users that could benefit from this platform.
Perspectives:
The explicit perspectives expressed throughout the archive are a mix of student perspectives and scholars from secondary literature. Saidiya Hartman's critical fabulation method was used as a framework for this archive. Critical fabulation is a method of bringing the past's suppressed voices to the surface through hard research and scattered facts (Hartman, 2008). The archive for Hope’s era is either lost or spread out through multiple institutions. We try to use photographs and student newspaper documents to put together the scattered stories.
In some of the photographs, you can see the students’ humor by the nicknames they would give faculty, staff, and students. For example, Kemper Herrlad has his famous line, “Son, son, that’s exactly wrong,” listed below his name. Users can also download and view two student news publications from John Hope’s era. In those documents, you can view poems, stories, and debates from the students at that time. They even have a tribute to John Hope for a publication after his death. Many of the scholars we used for secondary literature are alumni (Edward Jones, Leroy Davis). Their information helps the user see the incredible mystique of the students and faculty during the John Hope presidency at Morehouse College.