Helton, Laura E.
Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History
Columbia (New York)
2024
OUR SYNOPSIS: Laura E. Helton illuminates how Black people shaped historical understandings of the United States by building archives and foregrounding Black stories in the first half of the twentieth century. By focusing on six individual collectors, she highlights “the intellectual stakes and gendered politics of acquisition, arrangement, and classification—the labors that made Black archives possible.” (29) She frames this work as in open defiance of societal attempts to silence Black histories, a struggle for preservation “by and for Black communities.” (32) Focusing on Black community branch libraries, HBCUs, and Black home libraries, she shows how collectors carved out space and built organizing infrastructure for Black memory. This “intellectual work of Black collectors was both tactile and social. They assembled files and scrapbooks, but they also assembled people, turning their collections into gathering spaces for the study of Black ideas.” (37) Storytelling was and remains a collective endeavor. Helton identifies “a core set of three principles in Black archiving,” that are to value “records of Black knowledge,” “to order—and when necessary, disorder—Black knowledge,” and “to take risks, at once physical and intellectual, to provide access to Black ideas.” (55-56)
BIG QUESTIONS:
How did Black history collectors envision their preservation projects and goals?
What led Black history collectors to ascribe value to pieces of history?
FEATURE QUOTES:
“These are Black archives—not simply archives of blackness—and they emerged in a specific constellation of early twentieth-century spaces: branch libraries in African American neighborhoods; special collections on historically Black college or university (HBCU) campuses; and the homes of Black bibliophiles. In these spaces, collecting was intimately bound up with the possibilities of Black being—a relationship that none of the other types of archives had principally in mind.” (32-33)
“From Schomburg’s famous library in New York to the smallest assemblage in the Jim Crow South, each of their collections was imagined and inhabited by readers, fought for and protected by communities, and embedded in social movements.” (38)
PRIMARY SOURCES:
“Scrapbook page about the Wiley College Debate Team,” artifact (Marshall, TX, 1929-1930), collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington, D.C.), public domain,. https://www.si.edu/object/scrapbook-page-about-wiley-college-debate-team:nmaahc_2015.43.5.
BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS:
N/A