Reconstruction Vol. 16, No. 1
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Reconstructing History: African American Alumnae at the University of Denver / Katherine M. Crowe, and Nicole M. Joseph
"If you want the history of a white man, you go to the library. If you want the history of black women, you go to the attics, the closets, and the basements" - Alta Jett, local project coordinator of the "Black Women in the Middle West Project," Richmond, Indiana [1]
<1> Researchers with questions about underrepresented or marginalized communities - those where inequity in terms of race, class, gender, or some combination of the three, is present - often find the historical records in archives and special collections lacking sources. This issue is multifactorial: first, archivists are rarely members of the underrepresented communities they seek to document. As a result, any attempt on the part of the archivist to acquire records for the archives may be met with a lack of trust on the part of the identified community. Second, the records of underrepresented communities are often ephemeral or hidden, in whole or in part due to the community's lack of trust that the truth of that community's history or narrative will be empathized with or understood. Third, many communities either lack the resources to document themselves or use non-text based methods (oral history, storytelling, performance, visual arts, etc.) to do so. Fourth, the records that do arrive in the archives often document individuals and organizations with resources (i.e. cultural capital and money). In addition to this, records received often document only the more positive aspects of these powerful individuals and organizations.
<2> The documentation of underrepresented communities in cultural heritage institutions is critical to their overarching missions - a record of the human experience, as it pertains to the institution's specific collecting mission, that is as complete as is possible. If researchers are to be able to answer larger questions about how human beings construct meaning and identity, it is critical that archivists, researchers, and community members come together to address these shared challenges to build truly inclusive collections.
<3> The "Reconstructing History: African American Alumnae at the University of Denver" project, which seeks to document the history of African-American women at this institution, has struggled with all of these issues, as well as some that have been unique to the project, the institution, and the participants. The authors offer some suggestions and a way forward for other projects seeking to take on this important task in a way that honors the trust that participants in projects like this must place in the institutions and interviewees that work with them.
Archival Gaps, Silences, Power, and Privilege
<4> The question of how best to address silence, gaps, and the marginalization of underrepresented groups is one that has been addressed by philosophers, historians, humanities researchers, and archivists, all using different language but most with two similar themes running throughout: first, that libraries and archives are places that hold the records (and therefore the history and the narratives) of those with power and privilege. Second, that what constitutes the "archive" and how it is constructed, deconstructed, and interrogated by those within and without is a complex problem which archivists have only recently begun to grapple with. Philosophers' takes on the "archive" are somewhat harder to parse as they do not refer to "archives" in the literal sense, as 'places that accumulate historical papers and records and make them available to researchers,' but instead as "systems of statements" to be discovered through "archaeology," as Foucault put it in his seminal work The Archaeology of Knowledge [2] . Jacques Derrida, in his meditation on Freud's "archive," (Mal d 'archive, translated into English as "Archive Fever") goes so far as to call the archive a place of violence - simultaneously revolutionary and traditional [3]. Verne Harris, the archivist for the papers of Nelson Mandela, expands on this to explain Derrida's understanding of the "archive" as a place, simultaneously, for memory and for forgetting, and as a place of mourning and trauma, where memories can be "put away" and "forgotten." [4] To illustrate this idea, Harris quotes a portion of a speech Derrida gave to an audience in 1998 at a seminar that dealt with South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission: "So, suppose that one day South Africa would have accomplished a perfect, full archive of its whole history-not simply apartheid, but what came before apartheid, and before before, and so on and so forth, and a full history-suppose that such a thing might be possible-of course it is impossible-let us suppose it's possible-everyone in this country, who is interested in this country, would be eager to put this in such a safe that everyone could just forget it..."[5] In this way, Derrida references the idea he discussed in "Archive Fever," the idea that the archive is simultaneously a place of creation (memory-making) and destruction (the forgetting of those memories, which we have kept safe in the archive). Foucault and Derrida's philosophical understandings of the concept of "the archive" inform many of the theoretical underpinnings of the approaches archivists and other cultural heritage professionals take in building inclusive and compositionally diverse archives.
<5> Terry Cook, an archivist who has written about how "we are what we keep," [6] and other issues of power, memory, identity, and representation in archives, as well as their inherent subjectivity and culturally constructed nature, has called for "co-appraisal" of archives, as a way of ensuring that they are truly inclusive. [7] He has urged archivists to work jointly with community members to "co-create" an archives that is representative, to the extent that it is possible, of the whole of whatever history it has as its mission to document. [8]
<6> To illustrate this issue, Cook includes a portion of the speech "Whose Memory? Whose Justice? A Meditation on How and When and If to Reconcile," given at the eighth annual Nelson Mandela Lecture by the Chilean-American author, writer, and human rights activist Ariel Dorfman:
"Communities give themselves the chronicles they need in order to understand the world, just as individuals create for themselves the stories they need in order to survive with a sense of self. . . .A nation that does not take into account the multitude of suppressed memories of the majority of its people will always be weak, basing its survival on the exclusion of dissent and otherness. Those whose lives are not valued, not given narrative dignity, cannot really be part of the solution of the abiding problems of our times." [9]
<7> This is the salient point - if the voices of all members of a given community are not kept, valued, and, as a shared exercise between community and archivists, made accessible to the wider world, then the story of the community as a whole is incomplete, and the ties that bind the community together are weakened.
<8> In Cook's article "The Archive(s) is a Foreign Country," he has also discussed the necessity for historians and other scholars who work with archives to recognize and acknowledge that, like history, archives are not created in a vacuum. [10] Cook points out that historians, though many of them have written extensively over the last fifteen years about how libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions are actively "engaged in constructing cultural memory," few have dealt with the constructed and mediated nature of the archives. [11] Even in the context of discussing their work with archival materials, Cook believes that, in order to maintain the fiction of an unproblematic archive, historians seem to need to believe that archives are "pure [and] virginal...ready for the historian to discover and exploit," [12] and that the archivist is "an invisible caretaker, a docile handmaiden, the harem-keeper of the documentary virgins." [13] As Cook and others have noted, nothing could be farther from the truth. Archives are intensely mediated and political, from what is accepted, what is retained by the archives, and how what is retained is presented to researchers. The historian Howard Zinn, in a speech to the Society of American Archivists in 1970, urged "those connected with the dissemination of knowledge in society" (archivists, teachers, historians, etc.) to stop maintaining their respective fictions of neutrality.[14] He asked that archivists acknowledge the inherently subjective nature of the profession, and admit that they have a chance to impact society either by "serv[ing] the status quo" and "social control" by documenting those with wealth and status, or by using their position to document "the poor, the obscure, the radicals, [and] the outcasts."[15] He notes that, in a series of thirty-three letterpress publications of the papers of noteworthy Americans, there is one black person on the list - Booker T. Washington.[16] Zinn's assertion that "the existence, preservation, and availability of archives, documents, records in our society are very much determined by the distribution of wealth and power" and that, therefore, "government, business, and the military are dominant" to the exclusion of the histories and narratives of "ordinary people" in many archives aligns with much of Cook's writing from the archivist's perspective. [17]
<9> Many of Zinn's contemporaries in the 1960s and 70s in the "new social history" - archivists and historians - began to focus on labor rights, women's, and African-American history and began to turn their attention toward forms of documentation that would allow them to capture exactly these kinds of narratives. Oral history - something that had been discredited as too "subjective" in the nineteenth and early-to-mid-twentieth century positivist schools of historical thought - re-emerged as a legitimate documentary method. Dale C. Meyer, in his 1985 article on how archivists could support the new social history, notes that "oral histories can be an excellent source of group and community history." [18] In addition, he notes that social historians are interested in large amounts of data, which might impact the usual archival practice of retaining only a small sampling of information from records like case files or other large bodies of records that contain valuable sociological information. [19] Terry Cook cites Joy Parr, a Canadian gender historian, as an example of a scholar who has urged other historians to question archivists' practices, and read archives "against the grain."[20] Cook implored social historians and other scholars to not only directly engage with archivists about their processes for acquiring, describing and providing access to the records in their custody, but to recognize the inherent subjectivity and culturally constructed nature of the archives. [21] In addition, it seems that despite an increased focus in the "new social history" on marginalized groups, Darlene Clark Hine, a noted scholar of African-American history, has said: "The new social history told us to write history from the bottom up, but not many of the new social historians realized how far down the bottom went. As far as I'm concerned, we really investigate the bottom in this country when we explore the complex and exciting history of African-American women." [22]
<10> Hine is one of several social historians who have embarked on projects with archivists and archives to gather and write the narrative history of marginalized groups - in her case, at the urging of a group of determined African-American women. The "Black Women in the Middle West" project, which Hine led for a number of years, is a prime example of a social history project with true community roots. Hine, who was at the beginning of the project a professor of African-American History at Purdue, recalled in an interview about the project with the New York Times in 1987 that it began when two women showed up in her living room with a car full of the papers, documents, and other records of black families and organizations in Indiana and informed her, in no uncertain terms, that she was to write a book on the history of African-Americans in Indiana. [23] Dr. Hine recalled that one of the women told her that she had her position as a professor at Purdue because they "were out protesting years ago to make opportunities available to [her]," and that she "owed them this book." [24] Once Hine completed her manuscript on black history in Indiana, When the Truth is Told: Black Women's Community and Culture in Indiana, 1875-1950, the papers and records were returned to the families and organizations. Concerned that records like these might not be preserved over the long term or ever made available to other scholars, Hine wrote a National Endowment for the Humanities grant proposal to fund a project to document the history of black women in the Middle West, which received $150,000. She and a project coordinator held two-week training sessions for "search teams" to seek out and gather the records, noting that "word of mouth" was the best and most successful method for gathering materials. [25] Dr. Hine noted that the project volunteers, many of whom had no academic background, "believed...fervently in the power of history…that you could really change your present circumstances if only your history was told...and finally be accorded recognition and dignity," and that as a historian, it "knocked [her] on [her] heels, what history can really teach." [26]
<11> The beginnings of the "Black Women in the Middle West" project are significant for two reasons: first, black women sought out a historian who was also a black woman to write their history and, second, their instinct was to return the papers to their owners at the completion of the project rather than direct them to an archival repository. This project raises a number of issues that archivists and other scholars who attempt to document communities that they are not a part of should strongly consider at the outset of any attempt to create a more "inclusive" or "diverse" archives. What role(s) should archivists and scholars play in soliciting the documentary records of communities when they are not members of the communities they seek to document? What if the community does not seek them out? What if, in addition to not seeking them out, the community does not trust the institution that is doing the "ask" for individual and community records? These are not small questions, and they have real-world impacts. Just as representation of marginalized groups in history is an issue, compositional diversity in the professional staff of cultural heritage institutions is, as of the last major survey of the archival profession in 2004, also an issue. Of the 5,133 archivists who responded to the survey, 4,504 identified as "White/Caucasian" - almost 88% of the total, and only 2.8% identified as African-American. [27]
<12> Dr. Hine's response to a question about why she sometimes uses the term "womanism" and sometimes "feminism" in her writing about African-American women, addresses this issue in these words: "Feminism focuses more on the gender questions and perhaps pays too little attention to the racism that black women encounter. Feminism also can sometimes obscure the racism that some white women direct against black women." [28] This statement, if unpacked, provides a fantastic example of two related theories and concepts critical to the success of any project that seeks to research or document African-American women's history: critical race theory (CRT) and intersectionality. At the time of the interview with Hine, critical race theory and related ideas had been in the academic discourse since the mid-1970s and would no doubt have been familiar to Dr. Hine as a professor of African-American History.[29] Anthony Dunbar, in his article "Introducing Critical Race Theory to Archival Discourse," pulls out three aspects of CRT with significance to archives: "counterstories […] microaggressions […] and social justice." [30] Hine's statement is an illustrative example of a second concept, now known as "intersectionality," (a term coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989) which, at the time of Hine's interview, was beginning to bubble up into women and gender studies as a way to discuss, pull apart, and examine complex issues of intersecting power, privilege, exclusion, and subordination related to race, class, and gender. In the specific case of African-American women's history, Hine's statement encapsulates a multitude of issues related to these concepts that are specific to the issue at hand. [31] First, early feminism (and, it could be argued, feminism today) focused almost exclusively on the problems of white middle- and upper-class women. Second, that in excluding women of color and working-class women from the feminist movement and the narrative of women's history, the written history of women has often ignored not only these categories of women, but, even when including these women, ignored the intersecting issues of race and class and how they have affected African-American women's history. Third, without a medium, like storytelling or oral history, that allows for the very counterstories that CRT calls for, these erasures and microaggressions - white women not acknowledging the racism that impacts their day to day interactions with black women - remain unacknowledged, and the histories and personal narratives of African-American women remain incomplete - hearkening back to the call for social justice and "violence" inherent in Derrida's conception of the "archive." [32]
<13> Several archivists and historians have written about the importance of respecting decisions by individuals to be silent about their experiences, and silence as an equally valid form of expression when faced with an "ask" - especially an "ask" from someone who is not a member of their community - to share their archives and, by extension, their story. As the archivist Ronald Carter notes, "invoking silence can be a strategy used by the marginalized against the powerful." [33] Despite this, Carter notes that "if archives are not created and kept, stories can, are, and will be forgotten. And with no archives there is little chance that the marginalized groups can seek redress for the wrongdoings inflicted on them." [34] In considering what constitutes an archival silence, Carter references Derrida, Foucault, and Susan Sontag, in reminding us that concepts are often defined in reference to their opposite, in a binary; in order for there to be silence, there must be speech, in order for there to be memory, there must be forgetting - in order for us to define what is absent in an archive, we must know and be clear about what is present. [35] In addition, as St. Augustine of Hippo put it, if a memory was completely forgotten, how would we know that it had been there to begin with, and want to know more about it? [36] Carter outlines several strategies to "listen for silences" in the archives - first, to look for omissions (i.e. did a man documented in the archives have a wife or daughter - what about his mother? If so, might these women be found in a census record or other public document?). Second, in the case of governmental or organizational records, the archivist and researcher should look for the interactions between the citizen or client and the state or organization. [37] Indeed, in many cases, the "only records of the extant historical information on persecuted minorities, the lower classes, the poor, and the humble is found in the records created by the state and their apparatus in the active marginalization and suppression of these groups and individuals." [38] Carter exhorts archivists to attempt to redress "unnatural silences" (those where the marginalized group has been forcefully silenced by those in power), but to leave "natural silences" (those where the marginalized group has chosen to remain silent) well enough alone. [39]
<14> This contextual framework forms the basis for many of the decisions that we've made as we considered how best to approach our specific problem of reconstructing the history of African-American alumnae at the University of Denver.
Project Beginnings
<15> Our project began in the fall of 2013 when Dr. Nicole Joseph, Assistant Professor of Curriculum and Instruction in the Morgridge College of Education, contacted Kate Crowe, Curator of Special Collections and Archives, to request help in putting together an event for the 150th anniversary of the University of Denver (DU) that would honor the experiences and history of DU's African-American alumnae. Dr. Joseph envisioned the event as a way to connect her student group of current African-American women graduate students, "The Sistah Network," to their historical predecessors. Nicole and Kate quickly realized that there was very little information in the University Archives on African-American alumnae, either in the form of personal papers or other documentation of their experiences either while they attended the University of Denver or after graduation. In the short term, Nicole and Kate were able to put together a brief slideshow of African-American women alumnae for the event, but the two of them began a conversation about how, moving forward, they might address the gaps and silences of these women's experiences in the historical record.
<16> The first few attempts to come up with a cohesive plan were somewhat problematic. The two women connected with both the Office of the Registrar and the Alumni Relations Office and were told that the University had not collected (or at least not retained) race/ethnicity data on students until the last few decades. Second, the Alumni Relations Office had a list of individuals who had self-identified as African-American women during one or another attempts by the office at communication with these alumnae, but the list was relatively short (just under 1,500 women total), and of these women, only a few hundred had graduated prior to 1980. We quickly concluded that the Alumni Office's results were a good start, but were skewed toward actively engaged, living alumni. Our second path to identify women involved one of the few sources in the archives that did document the lives of African-American women, to some extent: the yearbook. Nicole recruited several volunteers from the Sistah Network and related affinity groups for faculty and staff of color on campus to scan the yearbooks for women with "African-American features" in hopes of identifying some of the women who had attended DU in the early 20th century. However, we realized quickly that we could not rely on images alone, as "African-American features" were not sufficient to identify all the women who might have self-identified as African-American during this period of time. A prime example of this is the University of Denver's first self-identified African-American graduate, Emma Azalia Hackley (AB, 1900). Though Hackley's photograph does not appear in the 1900 yearbook, photographs of her taken later in life, after she had gone on to become a celebrated performer and voice teacher, show a woman who would not necessarily be recognized, based solely on physical characteristics in reproductions of photographs, as African-American. In fact, the only reason that Hackley has been recognized as the first black woman graduate of the University is due to her outstanding contributions to society, her activism on behalf of the African-American community, and the fact that she moved through society and spoke about herself in such a way as to suggest that this was how she identified. She married a prominent Denver African-American attorney and editor of the Denver African-American newspaper The Denver Statesman, and was the founder and executive director of the Denver chapter of the national organization the Colored Women's League.[40] [41] After her marriage ended in 1905, she went on to be a voice teacher to students such as Marian Anderson, wrote several books, including The colored girl beautiful in 1916, [42] and there are two published biographies available that detail her life.[43] [44]. Most of the women who had attended DU in the early to mid-20th century that we sought to document did not have anywhere near this level of biographical information available. In addition, because we had so little information to go on to begin with - and much of it was visual information - we had the very real potential of missing individuals who, like Hackley, might not appear to be African-American based solely on an examination of small, relatively low-quality reproductions of photographs in a yearbook. We also realized the opposite was possible - that we might mis-identify individuals who self-identified as white or who were light-complexioned enough to "pass" as white and chose to do so.
<17> Our next step was to cross-reference the limited information we'd compiled based on our imperfect initial assessment of the yearbook against available census data. At this point we arrived at another issue. As legal scholar Christine Hickman points out in her article "The Devil and the One-Drop Rule," race as a legal definition in the United States has a lengthy and complicated history. [45] The period of time we were most interested in - the decennial census for the years 1890-1940 - included the use of 3 racial categories - "White," "Black," and "Mulatto" (in use from 1850-1920)[46], and the period of time where the "one-drop rule" became codified into the census and elsewhere in state law (1920-1967) [47]. The "one-drop rule" is a colloquialism for the U.S. application of the term "hypodescent," [48] meaning that any multiracial individual is assigned the race that has the lower social status - in this case, where anyone with "one drop of Negro blood" was considered to be black in the eyes of law and society. [49] Additionally, unlike the most recent iteration of the census, the assignment of racial categories was assigned by the enumerator rather than self-assigned - so, for the period prior to 1920, the enumerators were required to be, in Hickman's words, "clairvoyant gene counters." [50] Hickman even includes an example of this in a footnote: "In reviewing the 19th century census records for my own family, I noted that a "W" had been crossed out and replaced with an "M," suggesting that my great, great grandparent may have gently corrected the mistaken impression of the [enumerator]." [51]
<18> Three of the women (Grace Mabel Andrews, AB 1908; Annie Marie Cox, AB 1910; and Robertann Barbee, AB 1911) we were able to identify as pre-1920 African-American alumnae of the University, are good examples of the problems inherent in utilizing census data and other easily accessible public records for biographical research on African-Americans in general and African-American women in particular. Grace Mabel Andrews is listed as "Black" in the 1900 [52] census and "Mulatto" in the 1910 census[53]. Annie Marie Cox is listed as "Black" in 1910[54] and "Mulatto" in 1920 [55]. Robertann Barbee is listed in the census as "Black" in 1900, when she was 10 and living in Central City with her widowed mother and seven siblings, and then as "Mulatto" in 1920, when she was living in Missouri as a teacher. Of these women, only Annie Cox appears to have attended the University of Denver under her married name; she is listed as married to a "Thomas Cox" [56] in both the 1910 and 1920 census. The other two women appear elsewhere in public records - Andrews appears in a 1917 city directory with her occupation listed as "col'd tchr" [57] and Barbee in the 1920 census as "single" and with an occupation of "teacher" [58] in Missouri - but after 1920, none of the women appears in public records under these names. Without additional information and considerable in-person archival research outside the University of Denver, it's hard to know if these women passed away prior to the next census, if their names were so mangled by the enumerator or the transcriber that they were not searchable after these dates, or if they married, divorced, or disappeared from the historical record for some other reason.
<19> Though three of the four early African-American alumnae of the University of Denver have only census data and other public records available for their biographies, what little information is available does begin to paint a picture of what student life was like for African-American women at the University of Denver at the turn of the century. None of the women - Emma Azalia Hackley (AB 1900), Grace Mabel Andrews (AB 1909), Annie Marie Cox (AB 1910), and Robertann Barbee (AB 1911) appear to be well off - and at least one, Barbee, came from what were likely dire circumstances. Barbee is listed in the 1900[59] census as living in Central City, Colorado with her widowed mother and seven siblings at the age of 10, appearing next in the 1920 census as a teacher living in a boarding house in St. Louis, Missouri [60]. Three of the four women - Hackley, Andrews, and Barbee - appear to have become teachers, based on Hackley's biography as well as census and city directory records. The degree from the University of Denver was also apparently not a guarantee of immediate employment - in the case of Grace Mabel Andrews, she appears in the 1910 Denver city directory one year after having received her degree from the University of Denver with the occupation of "Maid - Golden Eagle," [61]likely a reference to the Golden Eagle Dry Goods store, a department store at Sixteenth and Lawrence in downtown Denver at the time. She did find employment as a teacher later, as an entry 1917 Denver city directory lists her as "col'd tchr." Of the four women who graduated from DU pre-1920, only one, Robertann Barbee, was born in Colorado, the other three were born in the Midwest or the South; Emma Azalia Hackley was born in Tennessee [62], Grace Mabel Andrews was born in Missouri[63], and Annie Cox was born in Kentucky[64], which explains the "I'll go home to Dear Old Dixie" [65] quote next to her senior photograph in the DU yearbook.
<20> As tantalizing as these beginnings of these biographies and what they tell us about these women are, they highlight the very real issues inherent in attempting to reconstruct the history of individuals who were part of communities that were marginalized in their lifetimes and thereafter - especially if the attempts at reconstruction are done in such a way as to either further obscure the already-faint voices of these women in the historical record. In addition, we began to think about how we could create a sustainable, long-term plan to document the histories of not only the women who were no longer living, but especially those who were still with us, and who wanted to tell us, and the world, their stories.
The Living History of African-American Women at the University of Denver
<21> The experiences that Darlene Clark Hine had during the beginning of the "Black Women in the Middle West" project mirror those that Nicole Joseph had when she and I decided to partner to document the living histories, through oral history, and collect the personal papers of African-American alumnae at the University of Denver. When Nicole mentioned the project to the women she already knew through her work as faculty advisor for the Sistah Network and professor at the University of Denver, and at several venues where she was already scheduled to speak about her work on issues of representation of African-Americans in STEM education, she was inundated with information about African-American alumnae - both from the women themselves and from their relatives. This only increased when we filmed a news segment with TaRhonda Thomas, one of the morning news anchors at Channel 9News in Denver, for Black History Month about Emma Azalia Hackley and, secondarily, about our project to document the history of early African-American female students at DU.
<22> At the same time, we began to brainstorm about how to fund our project, both in the short- and long-term. We sought and received letters of support from our respective deans for the project, and applied for University of Denver grant funding from the Interdisciplinary Research Incubator for the Study of Inequality (IRISE) to fund the recording of oral history interviews with eight of the women who had self-identified as interested participants. Despite overwhelmingly positive feedback from the director of IRISE, our project was not funded, though we were encouraged to apply for funding again the following year. Despite a lack of funding, we were able to work with the University Media Services staff to get an in-kind donation of staff time to film and transcribe two of the eight oral history interviews with two of the women who had volunteered their stories to the project in the beginning: Beverly Leali (class of 1962)[66] and Monyett Ellington (class of 1969). [67]
<23> Much as the four early African-American graduates' biographies shed light on what student life for African-American women was like in the early twentieth century, Ms. Ellington and Ms. Leali's stories illuminate a bit of what life was like for African-American alumnae in mid-twentieth century Denver. Ms. Ellington was born in Kansas City, Missouri - as she notes, in a segregated hospital - and her family moved to Denver at the age of three after her parents separated. She attended desegregated schools in Denver, and graduated from East High School prior to coming to the University of Denver, where she was one of about 25 African-American students out of a student body of more than 3,000. When asked about encouragement and preparation for college, she noted that rather than encouragement for college preparatory courses, her counselor, who was white, informed her that she should be taking courses to prepare her to enter the workforce after high school graduation. When asked why she continued on a college track regardless of this advice, Ms. Ellington credited the support of her family and her community, especially that of a group of like-minded young adults in her church, Scott Methodist, at 22nd and Ogden in the Five Points neighborhood. When asked if she participated in any student activities, she remarked that she worked part time to put herself through school - she lived at home, several of her friends who were also students pooled gas money and rides, and if she wasn't at school, she was working or at church. She married a career military man and spent a great deal of time traveling, but when they returned to Denver, she completed her bachelor's degree in psychology and sociology in 1969 and worked for the Colorado Department of Public Health for more than 30 years, focusing on projects related to maternal health.
<24> Ms. Leali was born in Louisiana and grew up in Dallas, Texas, where she had a "wonderful childhood" [68] with a very close family with several aunts who were college graduates. She attended segregated schools, and credited her family's expectation that she attend college, as well as her close relationship with her high school teachers and counselors for her drive to attend and excel in higher education. According to her, they "over-prepared [her]...because being black they knew it was going to be a struggle...you could be successful if [you] just maintained the attitude of being the best."[69] She recalled going to a career day in high school and meeting a black medical technologist and thinking that this was what she wanted to do. She also mentioned that she had initially wanted to be a pediatrician, but made the choice to become a medical technologist after realizing that she would likely get married and have children soon after graduation. She felt - rightly, it turned out - that she would have a better chance of being able to continue to work after having children. When asked about coming to campus to start her life as a student, she recounted driving with her family and that her parents, coming from Dallas, which was still segregated and not knowing Denver and not being able to afford to stay at the hotel on campus, spent the night in the car, which she remembered as "kind of devastating." [70] Her dorm experience was equally problematic at first; in an effort to keep all of the African-American students together, they put her with two senior African-American girls who tormented her - after requesting to be placed elsewhere, she roomed with two other girls, one African-American and one white - and "still has a lasting friendship with both...our children call us aunt and uncle even though we're not related." [71] She remembered that when she graduated, they had all the students line up by major, and she was "the only one...so everyone wanted to know what her major was." [72]
<25> Both Ms. Ellington and Ms. Leali recalled that there was one spot on campus, the corner of what was then the student union, where all of the African-American students would gather to play cards, share food when one or the other of them was low on money, and "talk smack." [73] Ms. Leali recalled that the white students would gather around, fascinated by the African-American students' games of cards and dominoes. Ms. Ellington recalled that it was a "safe space,"[74] and both new African-American students and even alumni who were visiting joined the corner at times. Both women also maintained strong connections to their churches - a significant fact because, as President Barack Obama noted in his eulogy for the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney: "The church is and always has been the center of African-American life…[it is where] children are loved and fed and kept out of harm's way, and told that they are beautiful and smart, and taught that they matter." [75] Ms. Leali joined New Hope Baptist Church when she arrived, after Bruce Randolph Jr. (the son of Denver barbecue restaurateur and philanthropist "Daddy Bruce" Randolph) reached out to the Black Student Alliance and offered to provide transportation to New Hope Baptist Church in Five Points, where she and some other students are still members of the congregation. Though they did not discuss it during their interviews, both women also indicated after the interviews had ended that they maintained strong connections to the University of Denver. Ms. Ellington indicated that she had participated in the Ammi Hyde interview - a process where each applicant for the University of Denver is personally interviewed by a volunteer - and mentioned that a large part of her motivation for doing so was to show African-American students that there was someone in the alumni community who looked like them, and make them feel welcome. Ms. Leali met Nicole at the Diversity Summit in 2014 - both of them remain deeply connected to the University and obviously continue to value the education that they received during their time at DU.
<26> These two women are the first of more than twenty women who graduated from the University of Denver between the early 1960s and late 1970s who have already volunteered to tell their stories. As with the "Black Women in the Middle West" project, we believe that, once the project is funded and gets rolling, word of mouth will be the best way to sustain it - both in terms of interview subjects and papers, as well as future funding.
Future Directions
<27> The University of Denver is in the midst of a strategic planning process to re-imagine and transform the university in the face of many changes in the higher education landscape. This project, and related projects, is well-placed to support many of the overarching goals that have come out of the first phase of the planning process, which focuses on identifying "transformative directions" that the University should take. As the Chancellor (and the whole of the University) wrestles with the question 'What should the University of Denver look like in the 21st century?' an answer that includes an acknowledgement of and respect for the contributions and history of the University's students and alumni - not just those who have been or are potential major monetary donors - is critical.
<28> The University of Denver has several avenues for future project growth that we intend to explore. First, the Center for Community Engagement and Service Learning (CCESL) provides "public good" funding of up to $10,000 for faculty that create projects which involve University of Denver students in community-engaged scholarship. Nicole and I believe that, in addition to our desire to interview and collect the personal papers of the women who've volunteered to participate in this project, that it would be valuable to have current University of Denver students, especially African-American female students, interview these women. This would not only add to the information available about these women, as the interviews would be made available to researchers, but create connections across the generations between current students and alumnae, and possibly even women in a shared field or discipline, which could potentially add a mentoring component. Second, the Director of the Interdisciplinary Research Incubator for the Study of Inequality (IRISE) has encouraged us to apply for funding for the project in the next funding cycle. Third, we see several possibilities for grant funding from foundations (the Ford Foundation) and federal funding sources like the National Endowment for the Humanities (which also funded the "Black Women in the Middle West Project" in Illinois and Indiana), especially if we expand the scope of our project, and our partnerships with other institutions like the Blair-Caldwell branch of the Denver Public Library, which focuses on the documentation of African-Americans in Denver and Colorado, to the wider Rocky Mountain region.
Conclusion
<29> The "Reconstructing History" project to identify, honor, and document the experiences of the early African-American female students of the University of Denver is just one component in what should be a holistic approach that the University takes to honor and reconnect with all of the students - women and men - who have taken the risk of attending a predominantly white institution like DU. As this project shows, the documentation of underrepresented communities in cultural heritage institutions, especially those that are part of predominantly white institutions, run by white archivists, is only possible through partnerships with engaged and invested community members who choose to tell their stories and are empowered to do so in a way that is authentic and honest to their personal narratives.
Notes
[1] Paul E. Bushnell. The Black Women in the Middle West Project: a comprehensive resource guide, Illinois and Indiana. Vol. 81 (Illinois State Historical Society 1988),152.
[2] Michel Foucault. Archaeology of knowledge. (London: Routledge, 2002),145.
[3] Jacques Derrida. Archive fever: a Freudian impression. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,1996),12.
[4] Verne Harris. "'Something is happening here and you don't know what it is': Jacques Derrida Unplugged." Journal of the Society of Archivists 26.1 (2005),137.
[5] Ibid., 137.
[6] Terry Cook. "We are what we keep; we keep what we are': archival appraisal past, present and future." Journal of the Society of Archivists 32.2 (2011), 173.
[7] Ibid., 182.
[10] Terry Cook. "The Archive (s) is a Foreign Country: Historians, Archivists, and the Changing Archival Landscape." The American Archivist 74.2 (2011), 611.
[11] Ibid., 611.
[14] Howard Zinn. "Secrecy, Archives, and the Public Interest." The Midwestern Archivist 2.2 (1977),17.
[15] Ibid: 23.
[18] Dale Mayer. "The new social history: implications for archivists." The American Archivist 48.4 (1985), 393.
[19] Ibid., 395.
[20] Cook, "What we keep," 613.
[22] Roger Adelson. "Interview with Darlene Clark Hine." Historian 57.2, (1995), 273.
[23] Andrew H. Malcolm. "Black women find history in the attic: a project unearths a lost chapter of Midwest society." The New York Times (1987), C10.
[24] Ibid.,C10.
[27] Victoria Walch and Elizabeth Yakel. "The archival census and education needs survey in the United States (A*CENSUS)." OCLC Systems & Services: International Digital Library Perspectives 22.1 (2006), 22.
[28] Adelson, "Interview with Hine," 272.
[29] Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. "Critical race theory: an annotated bibliography." Virginia Law Review (1993), 461.
[30] Anthony W. Dunbar, "Introducing critical race theory to archival discourse: getting the conversation started." Archival Science 6.1 (2006),114.
[31] Leslie McCall. "The complexity of intersectionality." Signs 30.3 (2005),1771.
[32] Derrida, Archive Fever,12.
[33] Rodney Carter. "Of things said and unsaid: power, archival silences, and power in silence." Archivaria 61 (2006), 217.
[34] Ibid., 222.
[40] Lisa Pertillar Brevard, A biography of E. Azalia Smith Hackley, 1867-1922, African -American singer and social activist (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001).
[41] M. Marguerite Davenport. Azalia: the Life of Madame E. Azalia Hackley. (Boston: Chapman & Grimes, 1947).
[42] Emma A. Hackley. The colored girl beautiful. (Memphis, Tenn.: Burton Pub. Co. 1916).
[43] Brevard, A biography of.
[45] Christine Hickman. "The devil and the one drop rule: racial categories, African Americans, and the U.S. census." Michigan Law Review 95.5 (1997),1997.
[46] Claudette Bennett, "Racial categories used in the decennial censuses, 1790 to the present." Government Information Quarterly 17.2: (2000),163.
[47] Hickman, "Racial categories," 1164.
[52] United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Twelfth census of the United States. (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1900). Ancestry.com. Accessed September 1, 2015.
[53] United States of America, Bureau of the Census Thirteenth census of the United States. (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1910). Ancestry.com. Accessed September 1, 2015.
[54] Ibid.
[55] United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Fourteenth census of the United States. (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1920). Ancestry.com. Accessed September 1, 2015.
[56] United States, Thirteenth census; United States, Fourteenth census.
[57] Ballenger & Richards, and Gazetteer Publishing and Printing Co.Ballenger & Richards Denver Directory, Vol. 45 (Denver, Colo.: Ballenger & Richards, 1917), 274.
[58] United States, Fourteenth census.
[59] United States, Twelfth census.
[60] United States. Fourteenth census.
[61] Ballenger & Richards. Ballenger & Richards Annual Denver City Directory. Vol. 38 (Denver, Colo: Ballenger & Richards, 1910), 33.
[62] United States, Twelfth Census.
[63] United States, Thirteenth Census.
[65] University of Denver. Kynewisbok. Vol. 13, (Denver, Colo.: University of Denver, 1911), 24.
[66] Beverly Leali. Transcript of interview by Nicole Joseph. (conducted Denver, Colo.: University of Denver, May 22, 2015).
[67] Monyett Ellington. Transcript of interview by Nicole Joseph. (conducted Denver, Colo.: University of Denver, May 22, 2015).
[68] Beverly Leali, Transcript of interview.
[73] Monyett Ellington, Transcript of interview.
[74] Beverly Leali, Transcript of interview.
[75] Barack H. Obama "Remarks by the President in Eulogy for the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney," (speech, Charleston, South Carolina: College of Charleston, June 26, 2015) https://www.whitehouse.gov accessed September 23, 2015.
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