Ardra Whitney: Week 3 @ The HistoryMakers

A sneak peek of my PowerPoint presentation for the host institution conference call with Avery Research Center on Monday, June 25^th

For the past couple of weeks, I have been corresponding with Georgette Mayo, Processing Archivist at Avery Research Center, about the structure, format and content of the conference call presentation we will be giving on Monday, June 25th. This Friday, June 22^nd, Ms. Mayo and I were able to touch base by phone to discuss: processing priorities for the archival collections I have been assigned; specific public/outreach programs I will be participating in or helping to plan; and the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT analyses) of Avery Research Center Archives, as well as its ongoing and planned public/outreach programs, and social media projects.

I completed two EAD/EAC-CPF finding aids for interviews with MediaMaker, Michele Norris and CivicMaker, Alvin Little. I was able to finish the EAD/EAC-CPF finding aid for Michele Norris with no problems, but the EAD finding aid I created for Alvin Little would not display the individual tape abstracts for the finding aids’ “Detailed Description of the Collection” section. However, once Daniel Johnson, Digital Archivist at The HistoryMakers, resolved the source of the issue, I was able to get my first two finding aids done this week. In addition, I have also completed two interview evaluations for EducationMaker, Crain Woods and CivicMaker, Frank Lumpkin. Lumpkin has the most unique interview that I have evaluated so far. Born on October of 1916; he was the third of ten children. Lumpkin began working with his family as a sharecropper in Florida’s orange groves when he was six years of age. While climbing trees with his friends as a teenager, he lost two fingers when he touched a live power line. As a young man, he learned to box and boxed well enough to fight professionally. “Lumpkin is known for winning a 17-year fight against a steel mill, but he also participated in numerous other struggles for social justice.” 

On Monday, June 18^th, fellows met with The HistoryMakers staff to discuss the Special Collections Processing Project. Then fellows split into groups of two and began processing fundraising, event and production documents from the interview programs, “An Evening with Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee” and “An Evening with Dionne Warwick”. On the following day, fellows attended Dr. Cecilia Salvatore’s archives seminar on arrangement and description. We reviewed how to assign relevant LCSHs using the twenty percent rule, which states: if a subject is covered in twenty percent or more of the text, then you can assign a subject heading for that subject. Fellows also completed a fun exercise which required us to take a virtual field trip of three websites: WorldCat, Amazon.com, and any library catalog system. The purpose of the exercise was to learn about the different practices used in describing information objects and to identify how categories of information are used in different contexts to describe information objects for various purposes.

At this week’s African American history lecture with Dr. Christopher Reed, fellows discussed readings from chapters seven through nine of Hine, Darlene Clark, et. al., The African American Odyssey (Comb. Vol.), on free African American communities in the United States, the Northern urban experience for free blacks, slave resistance and rebellion, the 19^th century anti-slavery movement, and the Underground Railroad. Much of the information from the readings and lecture was familiar to me from my work as project archivist at the Weeksville Heritage Center (WHC) in Brooklyn, New York. Weeksville is a historic settlement of national significance and one of the few remaining historical sites of pre-Civil War African-American communities. In 1838--just 11 years after the abolition of slavery in New York State--James Weeks, an African-American, purchased a plot of land from Henry C. Thompson, another free African-American, in the Ninth Ward of central Brooklyn. An article in the New York Age, recalling the period said that James Weeks, a stevedore and a respected member of the community, "owned a handsome dwelling at Schenectady and Atlantic Avenues." Weeksville, named after James Weeks, was home to ministers, teachers and other professionals, including the first female African-American physician in New York state, Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Steward, and the first African-American police officer in New York City, Wiley Overton. Weeksville had its own churches, a school, an orphanage, a cemetery, an old age home, an African-American benevolent society and one of the first African-American newspapers, the Freedman's Torchlight. During the violent New York Draft Riots of 1863, the community served as a refuge for many African-Americans who fled from Manhattan (Wikipedia, 2010).

Reference:  Wikipedia. "Weeksville Heritage Center." Last modified September 10, 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weeksville_Heritage_Center.

Ardra Whitney
IMLS Fellow
Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture