Week 2 (June 11-15, 2012) @ the HistoryMakers: Amanda J. Carter

This week at The HistoryMakers was just as busy as last week, but I am adjusting to the schedule and was even able to improve my pace completing evaluations.  I do not like to be bored when I am at work, so this environment is ideal because there is always work to be done, a lecture to attend, a field trip to take, or a new process to learn.   This time we toured the Carter G. Woodson Regional Library as well as the usual African American history lecture and archival training.  

On Monday, I began preparing my participation plan by speaking with Dr. Smith from Franklin Library at Fisk University.  We discussed updates with Fisk University, including the Lyrasis’ HBCU Photographic Preservation Project with which Fisk has become involved in the last year.  We also discussed the Julius Rosenwald collection because I will be processing a portion of it.  Dr. Smith  suggested Meharry Medical College’s archives or Tennessee State University as nearby African American collections that relate to Fisk University.  While TSU is my alma mater and I have a general idea of some of its collections, I may go with Meharry since it was the first African American medical school in the South and I may have no other opportunity to find out what interesting information is held there.  I will be calling Dr. Smith again next week to get more specific information on the collection(s) I will process and to discuss my nine-month schedule and how social media may be able to help promote the archives.  

Tuesday we Fellows had the opportunity to tour the Carter G. Woodson Regional Library led by archivist Beverly Cook.  She was a fabulous tour guide and not only showed us around the library and website, but also gave us a behind-the-scenes tour of the processing and preservation rooms and the temperature-controlled archive.  What fascinated me the most was their deacidifying chamber:

I had never seen one before so I was enthralled.  I have an interest in preservation so I am always curious as to how each special collections handles their own.  I also really appreciate the library’s “Find It” site search that has indexed finding aids as well as books from the Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC).  Many libraries struggle with how to provide accessibility to the finding aids.  Considering the complications of creating MARC21 records for each collection, it is not yet common to find many finding aids in the OPAC.  It appears that the Chicago Public Library has resolved the issue by adding them to the site search even though their finding aids are not in the OPAC.  Well done!

Dr. Reed returned for our African American history lecture on Wednesday.  Having studied nineteenth century history as an undergraduate, I was familiar with much of the information.  However, I am always learning something new and this time it was the fact that there were a small percentage of free African Americans in the Deep South in the early nineteenth century.  I knew about creoles in Louisiana and had heard stories of a man or a family in Natchez, Mississippi, close to where I was raised (and close to Louisiana).  Yet I was glad to find that there was some, albeit small, extension of that freedom outside of that area.  I guess I assumed that the extreme violence during the Civil Rights Era in the Deep South had a much longer history which might have prohibited the freedoms of African Americans in the nineteenth century as much as it had in the twentieth.  I can only imagine how bold and fearless those free families were to have remained in what I can only imagine were at least moderately hostile conditions.

The Fellows met Dr. Cecilia Salvatore on Thursday for our archival lecture on subject headings.  She was very helpful and told us that she would have office hours every weekday at The HistoryMakers.  I find her office hours very helpful because I know how busy Julieanna Richardson and Dan Johnson are so I try not to bombard them with question throughout the day.  It will be great having one more resource that can help and support our learning process.  

Our special collections training was postponed on Friday so we learned how to create finding aids and EAC-CPF records from FileMaker using our evaluations.  I was able to finish three evaluations last week: Norma White, Kenneth Crooks, and Louis Dinwiddie.  I look forward to creating the finding aids once the edits have been approved.  While the first week and a half of this evaluation process was really slow for me as I learned the procedures as accurately as possible, I was able to pick up the pace by the end of this last week.  I am confident that my pace will continue to increase although I hope that it does not prohibit me from continuing to learn about the fascinating lives of these history-makers. Until next week...

Amanda J. Carter
2012-2013 The HistoryMakers IMLS Fellow
Franklin Library, Fisk University

Week 2 @ The HistoryMakers: Chaitra Powell

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the critically acclaimed Chicago Blues Festival, with a new friend, for the sake of anonymity, let us call her Roxanne. The festival was pretty amazing, it brought back memories of my mother and her sisters staying up late, drinking and dancing to Peggy Scott Adams, Johnnie Taylor and Clarence Carter records. To watch the musicians, with the Chicago skyline as a backdrop, and all of the delicious smells from the food vendors, made for a rather splendid Saturday afternoon. 

Roxanne, and I spent a lot of time talking about our observations of black folks in the city and sharing our ideas about how to make it a better place. The topics ranged from improving media images of black women to validating the experiences of people from black neighborhoods. Roxanne was explaining her view that all of the answers lie in Africa and if African Americans acknowledge their connection to this culture, and hold white Americans responsible, we can begin to heal from the trauma was chattel slavery. Roxanne had plenty of examples and tangential ideas to illustrate her point, and while I could not subscribe to her ideology, I could not stop thinking about it or talking to my friends and family about it. 

When I listened to Dr. Reed’s lecture this week about “African Americans in the New Nation” and he posed the question, at what point does an African become an African American. Last week, our lecture was about the incredible civilizations that thrived in Africa for thousands of years and then moved on to how the increased exposure to other nations led to the exploitation and eventual enslavement of the African people. Even after the Middle Passage, the slaves were still African; they spoke different languages, had their own cultural rituals and probably did not understand the full gravity of what was happening to them. By the time these slaves had children, and their children had children, African traditions are passed down but are not as prevalent as the assimilating behaviors that were necessary for survival throughout the 17^th through 20^th century. 

 This spoke directly to Roxanne’s hypothesis and my burgeoning, yet contradictory framework that African Americans are something else, not quite American and not quite African. While the circumstances that brought black people to this country were atrocious, it created a situation where the white American is inextricably tied biologically, psychologically and socially to the black American.

As of today, I have listened, in depth, to the interviews of five amazing HistoryMakers, six if you count watching “An Evening with Diahann Carroll” on DVD. Every single one of them, regardless of where they grew up experienced racism in some form. Keeping in mind that there is great wisdom to be gained by people who have been on this Earth for so long, none of them harbored hatred or bitterness towards all white people. Sometimes history and our own short sightedness can make us believe in stereotypes and perpetuate an “us” vs. “them” mentality, the richness of these interviews proves that simply was not the case, it was more complex. 

For example, Lillie Mae Wesley, a CivicMaker from Texarkana (TX), reveals that her paternal grandfather was a white man that she used to call Papa George. Papa George looked out for her and her siblings and was good to her father, as far she knew. In her interview, she said that there were white folks that were hateful but others were kind and would help you out if they could. Walter Gordon, a LawMaker from Los Angeles (CA) said that he was told to have an eye for kindness and an eye for prejudice when he was dealing with white people, and he should behave according to what he “saw”, he claims it made him a better person, more able to thrive in diverse environments. Diahann Carroll had two public relationships with white men, David Frost and Monte Kay, and her career exemplifies the need to communicate and express ourselves outside of ill-conceived racial labels.

 My conclusion is that getting at the truth of American history takes an open mind and a lot of hard work, not unlike the HistoryMakers fellowship. I’m still working on my understanding of how or why we are all connected but talking and reading about it is definitely making me think about ideas that I have not considered before. I suppose anything worthwhile begins with a thought…..

This week at TheHistoryMakers we spent most of the time working on finding aids. My interviews were John Hope Bryant, an entrepreneur from Los Angeles, Lillie Mae Wesley, a community activist from Texarkana, TX, and Walter L. Gordon, a lawyer from Los Angeles. We also traveled to the Carter G. Woodson Library to visit with the archivist at the Vivian G. Harsh Collection, Beverly Cook. Dr. Reed’s history lecture was about the American Revolution and the emergence of the Cotton Kingdom. We were introduced to Dr. Cecelia Salvatore from Dominican University and she discussed Library of Congress Subject Headings with us.      

Week 1 @ The HistoryMakers: Chaitra Powell

I could not be more excited to start my fellowship at The HistoryMakers this summer, where I can truly say, where much is given, much is expected. Let’s go over the terms of this agreement, I work ten hour days, submit enormous amounts of paperwork, process three program collections, and produce thirty, fifteen page (highly descriptive) finding aids. In exchange, I receive lectures from Archives and History professors, visit Chicago archival repositories, a trip to the SAA national conference, all the while building a professional network, and a practically guaranteed opportunity for permanent employment at the conclusion of the program. Since African American History is of special interest to me, and working in Archives is a professional passion for me, (so much, that I have been doing it for free, for the past two years) this sounds like the deal of a lifetime. I intend to take full advantage of it.

This week, I had the incredible opportunity to learn about Encoding Archival Context-Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families from Dr. Katherine Wisser (Simmons College). Dr. Wisser was the Chair for the SAA sponsored committee who developed this encoding standard. The basic premise is finding a way to standardize, contextualize and ultimately link together, the primary subjects of our collections. The Historymakers is one of the first repositories to utilize these conventions and our data will be used as EAC-CPF is continuously improved and distributed.

Dr. Wisser’s last slide which used North Carolina politician, Terry Sanford as an example, showed how an EAC-CPF record could connect Sanford’s materials across four different repositories. Researchers would benefit enormously from an implementation of this standard. Dr. Wisser spent two days lecturing and while we learned a lot about archival encoding standards, we also had an opportunity to get to know her personally and hear about her professional journey in archives. Her words of advice were very encouraging and reinforced that we had everything we needed to achieve similar levels of success, namely a passion for what we are doing.  

This week at the The HistoryMakers, I met everyone on the staff and was introduced to office protocols. I also began the arduous task of producing finding aids for the oral history interviews. Our first example was for Sylvia Waters (dancer) and I went on to the first individual on my list, Hon. William “Bill” Shaw, an Illinois Senator and the mayor of Dolton, IL. Dr. Reed lectured on Africa, The Middle Passage and Blacks in Colonial America.

Amanda Carter: Week 1 of Training

Hello! I am Amanda J. Carter, Franklin Library, Fisk University’s fellow for the 2012-2013 Increasing African American Diversity in Archives: The HistoryMakers Fellowship, Mentoring, Training and Placement Institute. While I am excited to work with Franklin Library in September, these first few months of posts will concentrate on the three-month intensive immersion training we fellows will have here in Chicago at The HistoryMakers.


Talk about “intensive immersion”! This week was filled to the brim with new training, procedures, and knowledge. Every day consisted of instruction or training that either expanded on my knowledge or presented a new aspect of my responsibilities in the program. While my body may have been exhausted at the end of each day’s experience, my mind was always exhilarated to learn something new.

On Sunday, we met at The HistoryMaker’s office and had lunch and a tour. The founder of The HistoryMakers, Julieanna Richardson not only met me at the door, but sat down and spoke to me for a few minutes about how I was settling in to Chicago. I greatly appreciate the time she took out of her busy schedule to speak to me individually as it helped me to reduce my overall anxiety of moving to a new city and beginning a new career. That half-day was great preparation for what was to come.

The next morning we were given the usual office rules and procedures as well as the training for the interview evaluations. Even though we had some of the afternoon and the next day to work on our first project, I felt like I was limping through the group evaluation assignment. After a few more meetings, clarifications, critiques, and much support and guidance from the archivist Dan Johnson, I was finally ready to begin my own assigned evaluation by Wednesday. However, we first had to meet for our African American history lecture with Dr. Christopher Reed where we reviewed our textbook chapters on African history, the Middle Passage, and African Americans in colonial America. We also discussed some Chicago history. I appreciated Dr. Reed’s acknowledgment of different types of documents (e.g. diaries, photographs, letters), especially in relation to archival preservation, as that is not always mentioned within discussions of history.

By Wednesday afternoon, I was feeling a little more confident about my interview evaluation assignment, but I was only about halfway finished by evening. The next two days were filled with a workshop by Dr. Katherine Wisser discussing EAD and EAC-CPF. While I have worked with EAD in the past, I have never before understood it as I do now. Furthermore, I have never had much interaction with EAC-CPF, so those two days were very enlightening. It was also great to get out on Thursday evening and have dinner with the office staff. Everyone is so busy trying to accomplish mammoth tasks during that day, it is nice to be able to socialize and become better acquainted over delicious Thai cuisine.

So far, the first week went really well. Everyone at the office is kind and helpful and all of the fellows are willing to share experiences and help each other to achieve our summertime goal of thirty interview evaluations and finding aids and processing of a few special collections physical record sets. I consider myself extremely fortunate that I have this opportunity to expand access to African American archives and I look forward to not only what I can learn, but how I can contribute to the phenomenal organization that has given me this opportunity, The HistoryMakers.

Amanda J. Carter
2012-2013 The HistoryMakers IMLS Fellow
Franklin Library, Fisk University

Skyla Hearn: Week 1

Hi There!

I will attempt to fully convey my excitement as I share with you news and information about my latest endeavor as the 2012-2013 Carter G. Woodson Chicago Public Regional Library, Vivian Harsh Collection Fellow in Increasing African American Diversity in Archives: The HistoryMakers Fellowship, Mentoring, Training, and Placement Institute.

Although I began the fellowship exactly one week ago, my heart is still beating fast with anticipation and excitement--I will use the word ‘excitement’ a lot--as I learn more about The HistoryMaker’s collection of oral life histories, standards and practices and engage with staff.

Maybe it’s my upbringing, which included, many summers spent in the South but I place a strong value on community and neighborliness. I think some of the best relationships are formed when people are allowed to engage with one another openly and over food. We, the IMLS Fellows and some of The HistoryMakers’s staff, including Executive Director, Julieanna Richardson, met at The HistoryMakers’ office Sunday, June 3 to have lunch, discuss The HistoryMakers’ collection, policies and procedures and to tour the facility.

I was in heaven—digitization, acid free boxes and loads of African American history! From room to room, I gained a full understanding of how the “magic” is made that allows this repository to stand aside from the rest. Once shown to my desk, I was  met by the special collections of Eartha Kitt, Valerie Simpson and Dionne Warwick housed in acid free boxes, stacked neatly alongside binders of readings and my personal headphones.

The week was a combination of introductions, workshops, lectures and staff engagement. One of the most valuable sessions, facilitated by Katherine Wisser of Simmons College, was on EAD/EAC-CPF. For those of you not “initiated”, EAD/EAC-CPF are standards for encoding archival finding aids, which are maintained by the Library of Congress and the Society of American Archivists. This is technical area I have studied in the past but after this session I can finally say that I really understand it. 

By Friday, I had accumulated a wealth of knowledge to further prepare me to complete my upcoming assignments.  In addition, I began to build camaraderie with the members of my cohort and The HistoryMakers’ staff.  

Looking forward to sharing with you!

Skyla, The ARCHIVE-ist

Cynthia Lovett: Week 1 @ The HistoryMakers

This week has been packed with new information and new experiences, within a new and fabulous city—Chicago! Even though my head is still spinning, I believe things are slowly sinking in.    • On Sunday we had an orientation with introductions from the staff as well as a lovely lunch meeting: Very good collard greens, mashed potatoes and fish; lemon bars and something delectable with chocolate—which I kept my eye on but didn't touch. We received a thorough overview of the projects and expectations for the TheHistoryMakers Mentoring, Training, and Placement Institute.  
•  Monday and Tuesday were spent with more in-depth training and workshops with Program Managers, Jessica Levy and Y’hoshua Murray, and Digital Archivist, Dan Johnson. We went step by step through how The HistoryMakers processes video oral history interviews using evaluations and finding aids and also discussed our host institution participation plans. We began to process the video oral history of Alvin Ailey dancer, teacher, and Artistic Director, Sylvia Waters as a sample exercise. I was excited to learn about a restaurant/club in Paris called Buttercup's, (“Buttercup’s Chicken Shack,” run by Altevia "Buttercup" Edwards—associated with Jazz artist Bud Powell); a place many black servicemen as well as expatriate artists frequented in the 1960s. After working on our sample, The HistoryMakers Executive Director, Julieanna Richardson and Dan Johnson reviewed our test evaluations: Writing evaluations requires that we balance between narrative flow with an emphasis on factual elements of time, place, people, and institutions. We need to work quickly without sacrificing quality: We need to find the middle line.  
•  On Wednesday we got a chance to dive into African American history with Professor Emeritus of History at Roosevelt University and specialist in Chicago black history, Dr. Christopher Reed.  He discussed the symbiotic relationship between archivists and historians within the context of African American history.  He emphasized the importance of "interior history," or looking from the inside out, where African Americans are not the objects of history, but the subjects of history.

•  Thursday and Friday we had full-day workshops with Katherine M. Wisser, professor at Simmons College, and chair of the EAC Working Group. We were extremely fortunate to have someone who is in love with the subject matter---especially "the angled brackets: "  …<ead> ... <dao>. We learned to work with Oxygen and the structure of XML; we learned about the difference between describing intellectual structure verses the physical structure of files in boxes; we learned how EAC-CPF is similar to the LOC authority file in that it defines corporations, people, and families.  Unlike AACR2, EAC-CPF recognizes families as creators: And.. it is written in a powerful transformative language called XSLT which can spit out documents in numerous formats: pdf, xml, text, spreadsheets, and who knows what else?  
•  Thursday afternoon we also said our goodbyes to Jessica Levy with buttery red velvet cake.  Jessica will be moving on to pursue her PhD and we all wish her luck. Thanks so much Jessica for all of your assistance through the application process and for helping us get settled here in Chicago!  Later that evening we also had a staff dinner at Opart Thai Restaurant, here in the South Loop.  Along side flavorful dishes of coconut and basil we got the chance to get to know one another better.


Cynthia Lovett
IMLS Fellow at The HistoryMakers

Ardra Whitney: Week 1 @ The HistoryMakers

Greetings from the Windy City!



For the next 3 months, I will be calling Chicago home as I participate in the 2012 IMLS Summer Immersion Program with The HistoryMakers. The week was filled with several meetings and presentations from HistoryMakers staff, including: Julieanna Richardson, Public Historian and Founder/Executive Director; Dan Johnson, Digital Archivist; Jessica Levy, former Research and Program Coordinator; Y’Houshua Murray, current Program Coordinator; Alison Bruzek, NSF Project Director; and Paul Mackey, Production Manager. Through these various meetings and presentations, fellows received an introduction to The HistoryMakers Digital Archive collection; discussed grant expectations; and learned about the organization’s office and archival procedures. We also got to do some really neat ice breakers to help us become more acquainted with one another.

On Wednesday, June 6^th, fellows had their first African American history lecture with Christopher R. Reed, Professor Emeritus with the Department of History and Philosophy at Roosevelt University. Reed began the lecture by sharing photos and stories about African Americans like journalist and newspaper editor, Ida B. Wells and her husband, newspaper owner, Ferdinand L. Barnett.  He also showed us 19^th century photographs of his great grandparents, who were former slaves. His great grandfather, he said, served in a colored infantry during the Civil War. My favorite part of the lecture was Reed’s discussion of the black presence at the World’s Fair of 1893-- because he mentioned the Fon people from the Dahomey Kingdom in West Africa. I find this group of African people to be particularly fascinating because the Dahomean state maintained an all-female military regiment for nearly 200 years. The women warriors were referred to as Mino, meaning "Our Mothers" in the Fon language.

“The simulated village of the Fon people from Dahomey was among the most widely publicized and frequently visited fair sites. Newspapers and magazines extensively covered the exhibit, photographers included it in souvenir booklets, and many observers flocked there each day. The interest in this exhibit, perhaps more than any other, revealed the disparity in perceptions of Africans by an international audience. Some people saw at the exhibit the rich culture of the Fon people, as well as a reminder of a distant African past that had shaped all humanity--as did Bishop Henry McNeal Turner of the African Methodist Episcopal church, commenting at the concurrent Conference on Africa held in Chicago, publicly expounded his belief that all humanity started black" (p. 184). Other fair goers saw in the Fon village a non-industrial, rural lifestyle that was anathema to their Victorian tastes. The scantily clad, bare breasted women and the robed men with their traditional musical instruments and other accouterments both fascinated and repelled many fair goers.”
 - Excerpt from Reed’s book "All the World Is Here!": The Black Presence at White City

On Thursday, June 7^th and Friday, June 8^th, fellows participated in a 2-day training session on Encoded Archival Description (EAD) and Encoded Archival Context—Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF)  led by Katherine Wisser, Assistant Professor and Co-Director of the Archives/History Dual Degree Program at Simmons College. In addition to her informative and well-presented workshop, Wisser provided great insights into professional networking in the field of archival encoding/description. Case in point, Wisser’s continued interest and participation in the development of EAC-CPF has made her Chair of the EAC Working Group and allowed her to collaborate with information professionals from all around the world.  

At the end of the Summer Immersion Program, I will be responsible for completing 30 interview evaluations and EAD/EAC-CPF finding aid assignments. This week, I completed my first interview evaluation assignment for head waiter, letter carrier, and humble activist, Alvin Little. In watching Little’s interview, I was almost moved to tears by the power and simplicity of his life experiences. He realized early on that nobody would give him anything and that if he wanted something he would have to work for it. In his interview, Little says that in order to be successful in life, one must qualify themselves to achieve their personal and professional goals. Congruently, I look forward to learning from and contributing to my fellowship experience--as much as possible--so that I can qualify myself to do outstanding work as an archivist.

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