Residents and survivors of a West Philadelphia bombing that killed 11 people, including five children, in 1985 gathered near Cobbs Creek Parkway and Osage Avenue Saturday afternoon to commemorate the solemn occasion.
The bombing by Pennsylvania State Police against members of the MOVE activist group destroyed 61 homes at the time, and continues to define a marginalized section of the city.
Those who gathered for the unveiling of a temporary marker called for greater social justice and a demand...
If you happen to be attending SAA and would be interested in summarizing a session, please drop me an email at hilary.h.barlow@gmail.com. The HRA blog has two conference posts so far, one about a session on Indigenous records and one about a disability rights collection. Your post can be a simple summary of the issues discussed, or you can get a little opinionated and say what you thought was most productive about the session or not as productive.
I would love to see one or more of these...
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 July newsletter, please send you submission July 26, 2017.
If you weren't at SAA you might have missed the presentation about the Helen Keller Archive digitization project and the important project to make it more accessible. Check out this post with session highlights at the American Foundation for the Blind blog.
Look out for more SAA content coming up on the Human Rights Archives Section blog!
In the wake of the US presidential inauguration, millions of people took to the streets for the Women’s March on Washington, DC, and in other cities around the world on January 21, 2017. The Newcomb Archives and Vorhoff Library Special Collections, part of Newcomb College Institute (NCI) of Tulane University in New Orleans, joined archivists across the country to preserve the legacy of those marches.
As other New Orleans repositories were also collecting ephemera from the local and DC...
This symposium featured authors from the Pushing the Margins: Women of Color and Intersectionality in LIS book to discuss thematic issues that pertain to intersectionality, feminist theory, race and ethnicity, and libraries. Participants broke out into smaller groups to have critical discussions based on the themes presented.
Listen to the keynote by Fobazi M. Ettarh here.
On July 13, 2017, Liu Xiaobo, China’s only Nobel Peace Prize winner and its most famous political prisoner died from complications due to liver cancer. He was detained in December 2008 for his participation with “Charter 08”, a manifesto that called for political reform and an end to one-party rule. In June 2017, eight years after his imprisonment, he was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. The government of China rejected his request for permission to receive medical attention abroad, for...
The 2017 campaign began on February 21 with the third annual One Book, Many Communities Lecture in London, England. Featured speakers included Professor Gilbert Achcar of the University of London’s Centre for Palestine Studies and Khaled Ziada, head of the Palestine Film Foundation.In spring 2017, groups throughout North America, the Middle East and Europe hosted discussion events in libraries, coffee shops, theaters and homes about Ghassan Kanafani’s novella “Returning to Haifa.” Most of the...
Founded in 2003, StoryCorps has grown from operating a single StoryBooth recording studio in New York to managing outposts in Chicago, San Francisco, and Atlanta, with a mobile booth and digital app to collect stories from individuals around the country. The nonprofit was inspired in large part by the work of Studs Terkel, who documented histories of common Americans and advocated for labor unions from the 1960s through the ’90s.
And yet, when a group of employees told management of their...
The Schomburg Center’s “Black Power” exhibition traces ten years of the Black Panther movement, looking at the topics, issues, misunderstandings, and people that shaped a global movement.Curated by Dr. Sylviane A. Diouf, this exhibition invites guests to take a closer look at the movement that guided the black consciousness between 1966 and 1976. “Black Power” is part of the Schomburg Center’s “Black Power 50” - a yearlong review and introspective look into the Black Power Movement’s 50th...
Last year, the National Archives (NARA) acquired a large number of historically valuable National Security Agency records. But they remain inaccessible to researchers, at least for the time being.
David Langbart of NARA described the situation at a closed meeting of the State Department Historical Advisory Committee late last year. According to recently published minutes of that meeting:
“The [NSA] records consist of approximately 19,000 folders without any real arrangement. These records...
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 August newsletter, please send you submission by August 24, 2017.
Per the Human Rights Archives Section Rules: “The section shall be led by two co-chairs, one web liaison/newsletter editor, and at most four steering committee members. A co-chair shall be elected annually for a staggered two-year term. The web liaison/newsletter editor shall be elected for a two-year term. The steering committee members shall be elected annually for a one-year term. All officers and steering committee members may serve for an unlimited number of consecutive terms.”
Co-Chairs...
We were lucky enough to have not one, but two writers contribute SAA 2017 coverage to the HRA Section blog. Both posts covered sessions in the Liberated Archives Forum. Jeremy Brett covered the #ArchivesForBlackLives session, which featured the Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia Movement.
Jennifer Eltringham covered the Dismantling Barriers and Indigenous Sovereignty session. While conversations in this session were to be anonymous, Jennifer deftly summarized the discussion while...
Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently asked the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA), which instructs federal agencies on how to maintain records, to approve its timetable for retaining or destroying records related to its detention operations. This may seem like a run-of-the-mill government request for record-keeping efficiency. It isn’t. An entire paper trail for a system rife with human rights and constitutional abuses is at stake.
ICE has asked for permission to begin...
Writer/activist/educator/poet Walidah Imarisha delivered the opening keynote address at The Liberated Archive: A Forum for Envisioning and Implementing a Community-Based Approach to Archives at ARCHIVES 2017 in Portland, OR. Imarisha discussed the role of a community archives in telling community stories—and making sure that all stories are told.
Listen to her keynote in its entirety here, and read a full transcript here.
In the Holocaust era, countless ordinary people acted in ways that aided the persecution and murder of Jews and other targeted groups within Nazi Germany and across Europe. The Museum’s current special exhibition, Some Were Neighbors: Collaboration & Complicity in the Holocaust, examines one vexing question: what prompted average people to commit extraordinary crimes in support of the Nazi cause? The seminal research of Dr. Christopher Browning, the author of Ordinary Men, and Dr. Wendy...
The Archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva has created the new blog CROSS-files! This blog aims at promoting the contents of the rich audiovisual archives, library collections, general archives and what the ICRC calls the “Agency Archives”. This great collection of books, sound recordings, films, videos and photos illustrate and document the activities of the ICRC from the end of the 19th century up to the present day.
These archives and library have been...
A new Freedom Trail marker honors those who helped break down the doors of segregation in Jackson.
Nine African-American students from Tougaloo College held a "read-in" at the old Jackson Municipal Library on March 27, 1961.
When the all-white library staff told them to leave, they stayed, and when the police did the same, they didn't move.
Read more here, and read a June 2017 American Libraries story about the Tougaloo 9 and library desegregation here.
The archive of lesbian musician Gretchen Phillips, co-founder of the trailblazing band Two Nice Girls, sheds light on what it was like to be gay in the 1980s – before the internet helped create communities and at a time when gay lives were rarely visible.Now part of Cornell University Library’s Human Sexuality Collection, the video recordings of Phillips’ shows, reviews and news articles, fan mail and more that Phillips collected over three decades will be available to researchers interested in...
A researcher of visual history, Sela uncovers records of Palestinian existence and culture hidden in Israeli archives.Rona Sela, a researcher of visual history and a lecturer at Tel Aviv University, first began studying the history and culture of Zionist and Israeli photography more than 20 years ago.
Read more here.
Who is this Guide for?
You are a human rights activist, a small or grassroots human rights organization, or media collective;
You are creating or collecting digital video to document human rights abuses or issues, and;
You want to make sure that the video documentation you have created or collected can be used for advocacy, as evidence , for education or historical memory – not just now but into the future….
But you are not sure where to begin, or you are stuck on a particular problem.
If...
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 September newsletter, please send you submission by September 22, 2017.
Syria's civil war has been one of the modern world's most brutal conflicts and one of its most heavily filmed. Hundreds of thousands of amateur videos uploaded to YouTube document every heartbeat of the war over the past seven years, from momentous events like cities under bombardment to intimate scenes like a father cradling his dead children.Syrian activists fear all that history could be erased as YouTube moves to rein in violent content. In the past few months, the online video giant has...
When the latest barrage of bad news out of Washington batters your hope for the future, it’s time to plan a trip to Interference Archive in Brooklyn.This place is the Smithsonian of dissent, the Louvre of political organizing—a vast treasure of pamphlets, posters, banners, flyers, photos, buttons, film clips, newspapers, t-shirts, ‘zines, audio recordings and other artifacts from movements that changed the world.You’ll find troves of boxes, files, stacks and shelves shining light on anti-...
