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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Thank You for Your Support during GiveNOLA Day!
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On behalf of the board of directors and staff of the Amistad Research Center, thank you to everyone who supported the Center during this year’s GiveNOLA Day campaign. Amistad’s participation in GiveNOLA Day helped the Center raise over $20,000 that will not only assist us in fulfilling our mission, but will also allow Amistad to take advantage of future opportunities.
This year was incredibly noteworthy as donations launched the Amistad Arts Guild and also aided the cooperative effort to honor and support the conservation of a national treasure: The Toussaint L’Ouverture Series by Jacob Lawrence. This series could not be timelier as it showcases the power of resistance and strength through the story of the Haitian Revolution.
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Jacob Lawrence. Toussaint L’Ouverture Series, No. 16. Toussaint captured Dondon…, 1938
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Special thanks to L. Kasimu Harris whose article on Nola.com spotlighted the series’ historical importance.
Thank you for helping us continue our work to preserve Black stories and art. As we build, preserve and work toward greater accessibility for our historical collections, donations from friends and supporters greatly aid in these endeavors. Your support on GiveNOLA Day helped make that possible.
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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Amistad’s mission to collect, preserve, and provide access to historical documents is made possible by generous donations from individuals, families, and organizations. Please consider becoming a recurring donor through our Network for Good page.
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Do You Have Materials to Donate?
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Interested in donating personal papers, organizational records, works of art, books, or other materials to Amistad? Please visit our collection development policy available here to learn more about how you may donate, or contact us at 504.862.3222 (ext. 3) or info@amistadresearchcenter.org.
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It is with great sadness that we share the passing of historian and author Dr. Sylvia Frey. She was the first woman to join the history department at Tulane University and was a former board member of the Amistad Research Center. During her tenure at Tulane University Dr. Frey specialized in colonial and revolutionary America, U.S. political traditions and institutions, and women and religion. An ardent supporter of civil and women’s rights, much of her work was rooted in race and gender. She was the founder of the Deep South Regional Humanities Center and co-founded Nola4Women.
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Amistad Assists Community Effort to Honor Veteran
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As a member of the New Orleans community, the Amistad Research Center seeks to support community-led causes from time to time. The Center was proud to assist in efforts this past Memorial Day to honor Lance Corporal Isiah Baker III, who was killed in action while serving in Vietnam in 1966. Amistad’s Executive Director, Kara. T. Olidge, asked the Center to become involved after seeing a local news broadcast about efforts to raise funds for headstones for Baker and his foster mother, Elizabeth Brown. Both are buried in Mt. Olivet Cemetery in New Orleans, but until recently, their burial plot lacked headstones.
Amistad would like to thank the family of Isiah Baker, Doug Thomas, and Thanh Truong of WWL-TV for allowing us to be a part of those efforts.
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Summer Interns/Assistants Help Center Meet Its Mission
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ARC welcomes new and familiar faces to our staff this summer as part of internship and summer employment opportunities. Sisters Aria and Raven Johnson have returned for their 7th and 4th summers respectively to assist with various projects at the Center. Aria is a 3rd year nursing major at Southern University and is assisting fine art registrar Turry Flucker by entering documentation on ARC’s fine art collection into a collections database. Raven, a sophomore at the University of New Orleans, is helping to organize the Alexis De Veaux papers and inventory photographs from ARC’s own archives.
We are also pleased to welcome Drayona Denson and Julia Tannenbaum, who were both selected to take part in the Robert F. Smith Internship Program administered by the National Museum of African American History & Culture. Dray and Julia are working remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but will be working with various staff to explore digitization and preservation of materials that reflect African American history. Dray recently graduated from Pomona College with a degree in Africana Studies with a concentration in literature. Her interests revolve around gender in the Black Church, as well as Black culinary histories in the American South and the greater United States. Julia is a recent graduate from the UCLA library and information science program, whose inspiration to become an archivist came from her desire to aid efforts to include silenced voices in the larger historical narrative. Her interests include community-based archives, social movement history, and gender and sexuality studies.
Read more about our wonderful interns/assistants this summer via ARC’s blog. For now, we say Welcome!
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Amistad Collaborates to Celebrate Juneteenth
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In honor of Juneteenth, the Amistad Research Center had the great pleasure of partnering with 9 other Black museums and historical societies for the Blkfreedom documentary film “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” This collaborative project celebrated the shared mission to preserve and uplift Black history in a way that virtually connected communities across the United States. For our part in the program, Amistad honored the historical moments that exemplified Black fortitude, highlighting examples such as the Amistad Revolt and Homer Plessy’s work as an activist against segregation.
View the documentary here…
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Documenting Africatown, USA
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This year the staff at the Amistad collaborated with the community of Africatown to help develop a church archive. Africatown, located near Mobile, Alabama, was founded in 1866 by the survivors of the last documented slave ship, the Clotilda. To help honor the history and legacy of the enslaved Africans who built the historic town, Amistad staff provided archival training and helped conduct oral histories of the descendants which will be preserved in their upcoming archive.
For Juneteenth, to commemorate the emancipation of the enslaved in America, Amistad highlighted this ongoing project in our latest Conversations in Color event. This virtual presentation showcased the work conducted by musician and community activist Hannibal Lokumbe and the Pastor of Union Missionary Baptist Church of Africatown, Rev. Derek Tucker. They discussed their concerted commitment to the cultural restoration of this significant American place of memory. In addition, Amistad shared the oral history of Africatown descendent Lorna Woods.
View the conversation here…
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This program was in partnership with the New Orleans Museum of Art.
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Grant to Increase Access to Amistad Fine Art Collection
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Amistad is proud to be one of 24 recipients of funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ Museum Grants for African American History and Culture. The Center will build capacity to enhance stewardship of its fine art collection with the hiring a part-time visual arts curator to create onsite and digital exhibitions and interpretative programming, retaining a part-time registrar to implement policies and collections management, and purchasing a web kiosk and hosting services for collections management. The project will enable Amistad to increase access to its fine art collection to researchers, cultural heritage institutions seeking loans for exhibitions, and educators.
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"This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services [MH-249621-OMS-21]. The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation's libraries and museums. We advance, support, and empower America’s museums, libraries, and related organizations through grantmaking, research, and policy development. Our vision is a nation where museums and libraries work together to transform the lives of individuals and communities. To learn more, visit www.imls.gov and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.”
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The Marguerite Cartwright papers: Open for Research
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The papers of Dr. Marguerite Cartwright are now open and available to researchers. This collection was processed with funding assistance from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC).
Dr. Cartwright's papers chronicle her life as an entertainer, university lecturer and United Nations correspondent for the Pittsburgh Courier. Through her correspondence, one can see the connections she made with Harlem Renaissance-era poets and with leaders of newly independent nations such as Nigeria and Ghana. Her ability to weave her international travels and personal experiences into her lectures is reflected in the coursework she assigned her students; many examples of this coursework are included within her papers.
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Dr. Marguerite Cartwright and her husband Leonard Carl Cartwright boarding a Pan Am flight.
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“I revel in the beauty of your voice”: The Career of Opera Soprano Annabelle Bernard
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Annabelle Bernard (1935-2005), see right, was a New Orleans-born opera singer who spent four decades with the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Her papers at the Amistad Research Center, currently being processed, are evidence of a musical life well-lived.
Bernard’s love of music began at an early age; she began performing publicly at New Orleans’ Fisk Elementary School and at the Fourth Baptist Church. While attending McDonogh No. 35, the city’s first high school for American Americans, she began receiving vocal training from Edwin Hogan (the uncle of well-known composer Moses Hogan). Hogan, a graduate of Xavier University, encouraged Bernard to audition before Sister Mary Elise Sisson, chair of Xavier’s music department. Bernard secured a scholarship to study music education with a concentration in voice under Sr. Elise from 1952 to 1956.
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Phillip Cunningham, Head of Research Services, participated on a virtual panel, "Advocating for Civil Rights in Eisenhower's White House," hosted by the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library & Museum on May 27th. Along with Dr. John H. Morrow, Jr. (University of Georgia) and Dr. Michael Birkner (Gettysburg College), the program discussed the life, legacy, and writings of E. Frederic Morrow, the first African-American to serve as a member of the White House executive staff. The Amistad Research Center holds a collection of Frederic Morrow's personal papers.
Laura J. Thomson, Director of the Archives Division, become Amistad’s representative on the United Church of Christ’s (UCC) Historical Council. The Council, established in 1975, advocates on behalf of the archives and libraries that care for various aspects of United Church of Christ history and heritage. The Council seeks to promote the history and traditions of the United Church of Christ, as well as encourage preservation for archival collections related to the denomination. As the repository for the records of the American Missionary Association (AMA) and the United Church Board for Homeland Ministries (UCBHM), as well as the home of the personal papers of many UCC affiliated clergy and churches, ARC has had a representative on the UCC Historical Council for many years. Ms. Thomson has been involved extensively in the preservation and organization of many of ARC’s UCC related collections and is happy to serve as ARC’s representative on the Council.
Courtney Tutt, Project Archivist, attended the Agricultural History Society's annual meeting this month and co-presented in a session, "African American Tactics for Rural Survival," to discuss the histories of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund (FSC/LAF) and the Emergency Land Fund (ELF) and their fight against black land loss. The paper she presented is titled, The Myth of "Forty Acres and a Mule": African American Land Ownership in the South and the Work of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives and the Emergency Land Fund.
Laura J. Thomson, Phillip Cunningham, and Jasmaine Talley, Curator of Manuscripts, presented “Marguerite Cartwright and African-American Internationalism,” at the Society of Southwest Archivists 2021 Annual Meeting on May 17th. The panel examined African-Americans and internationalism with a specific focus on the papers of United Nations correspondent Marguerite Cartwright (1910-1986). The Amistad Research Center received funding assistance to process the papers of Cartwright, a UN Correspondent for the Pittsburgh Courier. Through her rich collection of writings, photographs, and collected materials, the Cartwright papers provide valuable documentation of the Civil Rights Movement, African Americans working within the UN, and post-war anti-colonialism. Additionally, Cartwright’s travels provide a wealth of materials for archival public outreach and education--two areas of SSA member interest. By providing access to these papers, ARC bolsters its collections involving African Americans and internationalism, which is an underrepresented area of study.
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