A recent grant of more than $100,000 will allow Emory’s Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library (MARBL) to arrange and document nine collections of papers concerning 20th century African-American women writers, musicians and artists, according to a Sept. 13 University press release.
The National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) grant will fund a professional archivist who will spend two years working on the collection, according to the press release.
The press release states that the collections of photographs, writings, compositions, letters and audiovisual material have been largely inaccessible to the public but have the potential to benefit scholars from a wide range of interdisciplinary fields.
The collections include the papers of novelist, playwright and activist Pearl Cleage; scholar and filmmaker Delilah Jackson; educator, artist and author Samella Lewis; newspaper publisher and activist Almena Lomax; author and playwright May Miller; composer and educator Undine Smith Moore; musician and author Geneva Southall; artist, writer and editor Mildred Thompson; and poet and novelist Sarah Wright, according to the press release. Each collection will reveal personal and professional relationships that helped shape each woman’s life and work.
Both scholars and the Emory community heavily use similar papers at MARBL, including those of Alice Walker and Lucille Clifton.
Sarah Quigley, manuscript archivist at the MARBL library and author of the grant application, said that the process of receiving the grant for this project took approximately a year. The process is similar to the methods many libraries use to expand their work beyond the ability of the full-time staff.
“MARBL has been acquiring African-American literary collections for years,” Quigley said. “Each collection was acquired either directly from the creator [of the collection] herself, or from her family.”
According to Quigley, scholars will have easier access to the new items, and professors can now use the documents in class assignments. The collections are important to researchers because each woman, through their chosen media, opened new paths.
Sabrina Paxton, College freshman and History major, said that when this collection becomes openly accessible, it will present a new perspective on the time period, which she said she hopes will be utilized in her history classes.
Carol Anderson, associate professor of African American Studies, said in the press release that the value of the grant is “Mastercard-priceless” and the newly accessible information will be a “quantum leap” in knowledge from the time period.
Francille Rusan Wilson, associate professor of an American Studies and Ethnicity and History at the University of Southern California who wrote a letter of recommendation for the grant, said in the University press release, “The available archives for black women’s studies remain spare and scattered, reflecting their ‘triple oppressions’ of race, gender and class, forcing scholars to continue to develop innovative techniques for finding black women in the archives.”
– By Alyssa Posklensky
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