In a 1995 interview with Linton Weeks of the Washington Post, the Howard University librarian, collector and self-described “bibliomaniac” Dorothy Porter reflected on the focus of her 43-year career: “The only rewarding thing for me is to bring to light information that no one knows. What’s the point of rehashing the same old thing?”
For Porter, this mission involved not only collecting and preserving a wide range of materials related to the global black experience, but also addressing how...
We are delighted to announce that the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s late photo archivist, Lucia Raadschelders, is to be honoured posthumously by the Presidency for her role in South Africa’s freedom struggle.
Raadschelders passed away on 19 November 2018 after a long battle with cancer. The Presidency will honour her with the Order of the Companions of OR Tambo in Silver.
Elinor Sisulu, who nominated Dutch national Raadschelders, said that she had “devoted most of her life to the struggle for...
Documenting the Now is accepting applications from US-based social justice activist organizations that would like to benefit from a free community-based digital archives workshop in their city or town in 2020. The workshops will focus on helping activists to develop the skills and to use available tools to collect, preserve, and share their web, social media and other types of digital content in their own digital archive.
Our hope is that activist communities, in creating their own archives...
After years of failed attempts, the front-facing staff at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum have finally announced their decision to unionize. In a vote held Monday, April 15, the workers voted in favor of joining Local 2110 UAW (United Auto Workers) by a 96% margin.The new union members include employees in the education, retail, and visitor services departments. The workers report low wages, scarce benefits, and unstable working conditions. These inadequate conditions, the organizers say,...
Who has the right to own photos of slaves? We speak with Tamara Lanier, the great-great-great-granddaughter of Papa Renty, the enslaved man whose image was captured in a 19th century photograph currently owned by Harvard University. She is suing the school, accusing it of unfairly profiting from the images. We also speak with her attorney, Benjamin Crump.
Watch the interview here.
In the early 1920s, the director of the Bristol Museum in Britain received a package containing two human skulls. The donation came from Alfred Hutchins. He had left England seeking brighter horizons and by the late 1800s was living in Southern California. There he became an amateur archaeologist, excavating Native American graves on the Channel Islands. He offered the museum this collection, apparently in honor of his son, who perished during the First World War.Last week in a ceremony,...
On International Roma Day, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum welcomes efforts in Congress and in US embassies around the world to recognize the genocide against Europe’s Roma at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators, to honor the Romani community and culture, and express concern about continuing violence directed against Romani populations.
In light of the history of the persecution of Roma, which culminated during the Holocaust when at least 250,000 Roma were targeted and...
Something important to you missing from this newsletter? Send a submission my way and let me know what you would like to see.Please submit newsletter items about archives and human rights (writ broadly) to hilary.h.barlow@gmail.com. These can be recent publications, upcoming events or exhibitions, opportunities and scholarships, or something else entirely as long as it connects to archives and human rights. For the May newsletter, please send you submission by May 24, 2019.
In the latest on our blog, Eira Tansey relates how historians put today's politics in historical context. Eira, Digital Archivist/Records Manager at the University of Cincinnati Libraries, reflected on her experience as an archivist attending the Organization of American Historians Conference. Her piece touches on issues of racial justice, labor and surveillance. Read the post here.
If you'd be interested in writing for the Human Rights Archives Section blog, email hilary.h.barlow@gmail.com...
At last month’s “Vision & Justice” convening hosted by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, luminaries from Harvard and beyond came together to consider the most pressing problems at the juncture of justice, arts, and race. In particular, the conference description characterized the “foundational right of representation in a democracy” as “the right to be recognized justly.”So it was peculiar that neither the event nor the subsequent publicationreferenced the ongoing struggle of...
Esther F. arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1944 — a period when the camp’s crematoriums were operating at full capacity. Esther, a physician, was held for five days before being transported to Guben, a labor camp in Germany where she was assigned to care for Jewish factory workers.
At Guben, a sub-camp of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp in eastern Germany (present-day Poland), a female Nazi officer instructed Esther to produce a list of medical supplies she needed. Mentally and...
The National Security Archive, along with 15 other media organizations, filed a “friend of the court” brief on April 29 in the lawsuit Barr v. Redacted challenging the FBI’s authority to issue national security letters (NSLs) without any judicial oversight and under indefinite gag orders. The letters demand business records from a wide array of organizations for national security investigations, and their accompanying gag orders prohibit the recipient from speaking with anyone about the NSL,...
In August 2017 an exhibit titled A Campus Divided: Progressives, Anti-Communists, Racism, and Antisemitism at the University of Minnesota, 1930-1942 opened in Elmer L. Andersen Library, the home of Archives and Special Collections at the University of Minnesota. The exhibit was a culmination of years of original research pulling from archival materials to tell the story of racism and surveillance of students on campus during the interwar years.
My involvement, as Archivist for the Upper...
The decades-long history of the two-spirit movement here in Manitoba and throughout North America is now being saved and preserved at the University of Winnipeg Archives. The collection — mostly donated by long-time Winnipeg two-spirit activist Albert McLeod — will be on display at the archive's launch Monday, kicking off the school's Pride Week celebrations. Believed to be the most comprehensive collection of two-spirit materials in Canada, Mcleod says the archives will be used by researchers...
The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center (NURFC) continues its Freedom 55 Programming Series this spring as part of its year-long commemoration of the 55th anniversary of Freedom Summer, an integral milestone in the nation’s civil rights history.“Being an institution focused on the continual struggle for human rights, it’s important that we further this discussion and honor all freedom fighters,” says Jacqueline Dace, NURFC deputy director. “Focusing on Freedom 55 not only allows us to...
If you are attending any of the above conferences in the coming month, the HRA Section Blog could use your help! It's not as hard as it sounds, and it's a great way to add a publication to your resume. The post can be a simple summary of the issues discussed at a certain session, or you can get a little opinionated and say what you thought was most productive about the session or not as productive. Here are two examples of sessions covered in the past year. If you're interested in covering a...
Something important to you missing from this newsletter? Send a submission my way and let me know what you would like to see.Please submit newsletter items about archives and human rights (writ broadly) to hilary.h.barlow@gmail.com. These can be recent publications, upcoming events or exhibitions, opportunities and scholarships, or something else entirely as long as it connects to archives and human rights. For the June newsletter, please send you submission by June 24, 2019.
Human Rights Archives Section 2019 ELECTION CANDIDATES
The 2019 election for the Human Rights Archives section of the Society of American Archivists has the following candidates running for these positions:
1 incoming co-chair position serving 2 years
4 steering committee member positions ech serving a 1 year term
Ballots will be managed by SAA and distributed in mid-June to all SAA registered members. Results will be announced in mid-July via SAA listservs, the HRA blog, and Twitter social...
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary. That position has repeatedly and unambiguously been made clear in the Museum’s official statement on the matter – a statement that is reiterated and reaffirmed now.
Read the rest of the statement here. Note: members of the American Jewish community and some Holocaust historians have expressed differing opinions from the...
In a statement handed out during the protest, the organizers explain that "The Central Intelligence Agency stands in direct opposition to our core values.... That is why today, we join those librarians who came before us as we stand up to oppose CIA recruitment at the ALA Annual Conference....The CIA has participated for decades in the violent overthrow of governments while propping up dictators all over the world."
Read more here. Common Dreams also published an article about this protest.
The National Security Archive joins our international and Guatemalan colleagues in calling for the protection of the Historical Archive of the National Police (AHPN) of Guatemala, which faces new threats to its independence and to public access to its holdings.
In a press conference on Monday, May 27, Interior Minister Enrique Degenhart signaled his intent to assert his agency’s control of the AHPN including the prospect of new restrictions on access to the archived police records and possible...
Set to open on the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, the exhibition examines the role of nightlife venues, parties, and other late-night establishments across the United States in serving as catalysts for LGBTQ protest and activism, while simultaneously facilitating the demand and need for liberated space.
Organized thematically into four sections--Police Raids and Resistance, Contemporary Activism, Los Angeles Nightlife, and Contemporary Art Meditations--the exhibition seeks to...
Time to Act: Rohingya Voices features images by internationally renowned photojournalist Kevin Frayer that compassionately portray the desperate and ongoing plight of a people struggling to survive violent persecution and dehumanization. Huge, projected black-and-white photographs are layered in the Museum’s Level 6 Expressions gallery, interspersed with animated design elements that suggest the displacement, movement and continual relocation of a stateless people.
“I had gone with the hope of...
Substantial concern is being raised about recent action by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) regarding the presentation of two sets of records on their website.
A collection of speeches and testimonies made by agency leaders was removed in 2017; the record of detainee deaths while in ICE custody remains on the website but is no longer updated. Both types of record are considered permanent by the National Archives and Records Administration and are part of records...
When officials in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, refused to make black history part of the mandatory school curriculum, Sadie Roberts-Joseph created a museum dedicated to African-American heritage, friends say.
Today, the Baton Rouge African-American Museum occupies a four-room building under Interstate 10. It was first named for educator Odell S. Williams, whose paintings of black inventors adorn the museum's walls. A bus outside tells the story of the Baton Rouge bus boycott during the Civil Rights...
