Amistad is committed to collecting, preserving, and providing open access to original materials that reference the social and cultural importance of America's ethnic and racial history, the African Diaspora, human relations, and civil rights.
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Support Amistad on GiveNOLA Day
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Dear Friend of Amistad,
GiveNOLA Day 2020 starts tonight at midnight
and we need your help to get the word out.
For 24 hours on Tuesday, June 2, this online day of giving is hosted by the Greater New Orleans Foundation to inspire people to give generously to nonprofits.
Well,...why wait until tomorrow
?
Right now, you can schedule your donation up until 11:59 tonight by clicking on the GIVE button below and pledging your support. You can also participate throughout the day tomorrow…in the morning, during the day, or in the evening!
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Your gifts will help Amistad increase visibility and awareness of public access to our
Digital Collections
; enhance our new digital & print education program
Amistad on the Go!
; and produce public programs like
Conversations in Color
, which feature engaging and thoughtful speakers in dialogue. Thank you!!
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Financial Donation to Center Honors a Lifetime of Activism
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Support for the Amistad Research Center comes from a diverse community of donors; from individuals and families to organizations, foundations and businesses. The Center is honored to acknowledge a financial contribution of $2500.00 from Burns & McDonnell, an employee-owned firm of 7,600 engineers, construction professionals, architects, planners, technologists, and scientists based in Kansas City, Missouri. This contribution was made in the name of Sybil Morial, who serves on Amistad’s board of directors and was honored in early March by Burns & McDonnell for her lifetime of community activism.
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Center Acquires Two Major Private Libraries
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The Amistad Research Center is pleased to announce the acquisition of two large book collections that will greatly expand and strengthen its library holdings in African American and LGBTQ literature. New Orleans poet, editor and educator Kalamu ya Salaam has donated the NOMMO Literary Society Library, while Amistad staff member Lisa C. Moore has donated her extensive collection on LGBTQ literature. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, staff were working to inventory both donations and hope to continue that work as soon as possible.
A New Orleans native, Salaam has been a leading poet, playwright, arts administrator and educator since the late 1960s. Salaam was a member of the Free Southern Theater and was a founder of BLACKARTSOUTH during the Black Arts Movement.
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Amistad’s Collections Depend on Your Support
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Amistad’s mission to collect, preserve, and provide access to historical documents is made possible by generous donations from individuals, families, and organizations.
Do you have materials to donate? Please visit our collection development policy available
here
to learn more about how you may donate or contact us at 504.862.3222 or
info@amistadresearchcenter.org
.
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Center Launches Documenting COVID-19 Project
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In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Amistad Research Center is launching the Documenting COVID-19 Project to chronicle aspects of the pandemic’s effects around the world. We invite the community to help by participating in this project. A project description follows.
Our Purpose – What We Are Collecting
The Documenting COVID-19 Project is a digital archive that will preserve and provide freely available access to community-generated original content created in the wake of the 2020 global coronavirus outbreak.
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The goal of this initiative is to document diverse perspectives of these events as experienced by citizens around the world, and to create a resource for educators, researchers, students and the public.
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Amistad Awarded NEH Grant to Organize Collections on Black Agriculture, Cooperatives, and Land Owners
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The Amistad Research Center is pleased to announce that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded funding assistance of $302,217 to complete archival processing and preservation for the records of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund (FSC/LAF) and the Emergency Land Fund (ELF). This three-year project follows a previous foundational grant from NEH to survey and plan for future access to these records. The FSC/LAF records comprise 481 linear feet; the ELF records comprise 134 linear feet. The FSC/LAF and ELF collections represent some of the largest sets of organizational records documenting the southern cooperative movement, Black land ownership and agricultural heritage held by an institution in the United States.
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Preparing to plant soybeans at the FSC training center farm in Epes, Alabama, June 1974. Photograph by Pat Goudvis. Used with permission.
The accessibility of the FSC/LAF and ELF collections will allow for the hidden history of the African American cooperative tradition to be explored further in the American historical narrative.
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Grant to Increase Access to Opera/Classical Holdings
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Thanks to a grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Amistad is completing the archival processing of eight collections related to African American classical and operatic performers and composers.
A strength of Amistad’s music-related holdings, these collections will join the personal papers of performers William Warfield, Carol Brice, Anne Wiggins Brown, and others in documenting African American contributions to the field of classical and operatic music. The eight collections being organized under the Delmas grant include: the papers of
Thomas Carey
, baritone and professor of music at the University of Oklahoma;
Jessie Covington Dent
, graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and concert pianist;
Dr. Eva Jessye
, the first Black woman to receive international distinction as a professional choral conductor and who orchestrated the first all‐African American film musical, Hallelujah, in 1929;
Loretta Cessor Manggrum
, a pianist who broke the color barrier at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music in 1951; and modern classical composer
Howard Swanson
, who won the New York Critics Circle Citation in 1952. Additionally, the project will open the papers of
Larry Goodkind
, who was a talent agent for William Warfield and Leontyne Price. Lastly, the project will organize and open the records of the
Chicago Music Association
, a branch of the National Association of Negro Musicians, and the
Erwin A. Salk Collection on Paul Robeson
. New online finding aids for these collections will be available this summer, when Amistad unveils a new online database for its archival collections.
This project is supported by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation’s Research Libraries Program, which aims to “improve the ability of research libraries to serve the needs of scholarship in the humanities and the performing arts, and to help make their resources more widely accessible to scholars and the general public.”
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Center Progressing on Papers of Marguerite D. Cartwright
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During the early months of 2020 and with support from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), Amistad’s staff continued to make progress on organizing the extensive collection of personal papers of journalist, actress, researcher and educator Marguerite D. Cartwright. Staff have highlighted a number of interesting aspects of the papers in a series of blog posts written prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Cartwright series has emphasized the internationalist aspects of Cartwright’s career and interests.
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In March, Curator of Moving Images and Recorded Sound
Brenda Flora
served on the review panel for Cycle 7 of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR)'s Recordings at Risk at program. Amistad has been a past award recipient of the program, which supports the preservation of audio and audiovisual content of high scholarly value. For the first time in the the program's history, the panel met remotely via video conference rather than convening in Washington D.C. amid COVID-19 isolation measures.
Brenda's joint presentation with Leslie Bourgeois, Archivist at Louisiana Public Broadcasting, was accepted by the Society of Southwest Archivists (SSA). The panel,
Preserving America’s Languages: Practical Advice for Managing Audiovisual Grant Projects
, would have been presented this May at the SSA annual conference in Denton, Texas. The conference has been canceled, but you can still learn more about Amistad's project preserving recordings from the Lorenzo Dow Turner papers in Episode 2 of CLIR's
Material Memory
podcast.
Deputy Director
Christopher Harter
contributed an article on the Amistad Research Center for the Winter 2019 issue of
Signals
, the quarterly magazine of Antenna, a New Orleans arts and literature non-profit. He also discussed Amistad's exhibition on narratives and images of American immigration as part of the live-action version of the magazine on December 10, 2019. Christopher was also a panelist for the "Dialogue on Dent" forum on February 6, 2020, sponsored by One Book One New Orleans, during which he discussed the importance of the personal papers of New Orleans writer Tom Dent, which are housed at Amistad.
Amistad archivists,
Jasmaine Talley
,
Laura Thomson
, and
Phillip Cunningham
’s proposal presentation to the Society of Southwest Archivists (SSA) Annual Meeting was also accepted. The presentation was entitled
Marguerite Cartwright: African American Internationalism in the Archives
. The presentation team is working to create a digital version of the talk to be made available on Amistad’s website.
The Amistad Research Center is pleased to announce that
Hsiu-Ann Tom
has joined its staff as the Center’s new Digital Archivist. This first two years of this position, the first of its kind for Amistad, is funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Hsiu-Ann focuses on Amistad’s digital and born digital collections. She received her Masters in Library and Information Science with a concentration in Archives Management from Simmons University in Boston in 2019. She is a graduate of Columbia University (BA, Sociology) and Harvard University (MA, Religion and Politics), and is a member of the Academy of Certified Archivists. Prior to working in the archival field, Hsiu-Ann served in the United States Army intelligence field as a cryptolinguistic analyst, attending the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. Before coming to Amistad, Hsiu-Ann worked on the archives staff of Boston University's Howard Gotlieb's Archival Research Center working with the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts Collection. She has held archival internships including working at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum and the Massachusetts National Guard Military Records Branch.
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Find. Follow. LIke. Let's Be
Friends
!
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