The Strange Career of Jim Crow Archives: Race, Space, and Archives in the Mid-20th Century American South

Alex H. Poole Agency, Power, and Space “Archives have the power to privilege and to marginalize. They can be a tool of hegemony; they can be a tool of resistance.” -Joan Schwartz and Terry Cook (2002) “We must be insistently aware of how space can be made to hide consequences from us, how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality of social life, how human geographies become filled with politics and ideology.” -Edward Soja (1989)

Outreach and Access “Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.” -Jacques Derrida (1996)

Accountability, Social Responsibility, and Diversity “[T]he archivist, in subtle ways, tends to perpetuate the political and economic status quo simply by going about his ordinary business.” -Howard Zinn (1977)

Writing History “[I]t is impossible to write history on the basis of documentary evidence that has been destroyed or that was never collected.” -Pat Galloway (2006)

Civilities and Civil Rights: North Carolina “combined a reputation for enlightenment and a social reality that was reactionary”(Chafe, 1980)

1) Minutes of Board of Trustees, Executive Committee, 12 May 1952

2) Letter from Gordon Gray to W. Kerr Scott, 27 May 1952

3) Letter from Edwin Pate to Gray, 29 May 1952

4) Letter from Arch T. Allen to Billie Curtis, 27 May 1952

5) The Final Wording: for the Record

John Hope Franklin

Helen G. Edmonds

“The Dilemma of the American Negro Scholar”(1962)

Mirror to America (2005)

Letter from Edmonds to Robert B. House, 15 May 1951

Letter from Georgia Faison to Edmonds, 22 May 1951

Memorandum from Olan V. Cook to House, 19 April 1951

UNC-CH Chancellor Robert B. House

University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Librarian Charles E. Rush

Memorandum from UNCG Librarian Charles M. Adams to Chancellor Edward K. Graham, 14 June 1951

Luther Porter Jackson, “Opportunities of Negro College Professors for Research in the South” (1944)

North Carolina State University Librarian Harlan C. Brown

UNC (System) President Gordon F. Gray

UNCG Chancellor Edward Kidder Graham

Wilson Library (UNC-CH) Addition of 1952

Hill Library (NCSU)

Jackson Library (UNCG)

Lawrence D. Reddick

“Research Barriers in the South”(1937)