We continue to examine how the Historical Society, founded in 1894, has contributed over time to injustices that African Americans and people of color face every day. We have found that we need to change how we collect, describe, and provide access to the materials we hold in trust for the public.
Action: With a renewed sense of urgency, we collaborate with other institutions and communities that collect local DC history to ensure that collecting includes a variety of voices and records. In collecting historic material and contemporary documentation, we seek to deepen existing relationships, and forge new ones, with local Black communities and other communities of color to ensure their records are maintained for posterity.
How to ensure inclusive collecting, describing, and providing access is clearly top of mind as local communities grapple with both Covid-19 and the legacy of systemic racism that has been met with the sustained Black Lives Matter movement.
With every potential donation of historical material (the Historical Society does not purchase collections), we ask a series of questions to guide our decisions. In previous posts we’ve mentioned some of them, such as What are the circumstances surrounding the creation and maintenance of the materials? Are we the right organization to take charge? Who are the other players?
Collecting during a historic moment raises questions that—while still applicable to records created in times past—take on particular weight.
- Does the collection of the material at the current moment provide catharsis, hope and solidarity, or does it add new pain?
- If we don’t solicit the material, are we clear on why we are not actively calling for it? If we don’t collect it, will the story or a community or voices be lost?
If we decide to not collect, or to do so selectively, then: Will the story’s absence be a gap in our collection that will be seen as an indictment of the value of the story—that our institution felt the story wasn’t worth collecting? Or will that gap be identified as purposeful, a decision made to avoid additional harm to those for whom the current events are not new experiences but simply the freshest wound in a long line of repeated traumas?
Collecting the present moment is a new challenge for the Historical Society, as it is for many institutions. It’s a shift in the type and volume of materials collected and resources needed to maintain them. Our current collections are largely paper- or film based, while most records created today are born digital. We also tend to receive materials decades after their creation. So it’s also a shift to ask for people to contribute in the moment highly personal material similar to what we have always collected—such as diaries—without the distance afforded by the passage of time. And most critically, the current topics are clearly of such monumental importance—a virus that has killed so many so quickly, the largest social justice movement in our nation’s history, the systemic racism that correlates the two—as well as inherently traumatic.
How do we fulfill our mission to make sure the future has materials to learn, study and share the events of today while safeguarding every community’s right to tell its own story?
Here’s where we strengthen existing relationships with organizations that create and collect records.
We will be looking to the organizations that exist today and whose records we hold to document their actions and their constituents’ experiences during this time. When those additional organizational records are eventually transferred to us, we commit to describing them promptly. (We recently blogged about some important considerations about describing unprocessed records and the language we use in description).
Here’s where we add our voice to support for accessible government archives. The current movement is bringing political and legal change with unprecedented speed. DC government records, as we’ve mentioned, are maintained by city agencies such as the Office of Public Records, in records centers. Permanent records are housed in the DC Archives. Government officials and repositories are always called to document with transparency and archive the government’s decision-making records, but never more so than during pivotal times such as these.
Here’s where we encourage individuals to continue to document their lives and the District in ways that provide personal enrichment, and to only share that documentation with a wider audience when and if it feels right.
For the moment, that means that those called to share their first-person narratives about their lived experiences in 2020, including the local Black Lives Matter protests and movement, are encouraged to contribute to our In Real Time initiative story bank.
But as organizations such as Blackivists and Documenting the Now explain, there are critical safety and privacy issues that take priority over capturing the moment for posterity when it comes to contemporaneous protest, memorial, and vigil documentation. Therefore for stories that address Black Lives Matter protests, for example, we ask that contributors focus on written submissions. If visual documentation is submitted, no people other than the contributor and their family should be identifiable in any photographs.
And here’s where we acknowledge that while we want to have the widest range of voices contribute to In Real Time so that future researchers have access to myriad unvarnished primary sources, even our sincere efforts will be insufficient. There will be archival silences. But our description of the collection that results from this outreach will describe how diverse contributions were sought, and where our outreach fell short; silences will be acknowledged rather than hidden.
That said, a single organization won’t, can’t, and shouldn’t collect everything. That is not new. The scope of collecting always reflects an institution’s resources, mission, capacity, and ethics. It means that while we documented the history-making Black Lives Matter protest memorial fence at Lafayette Square and identified the DC-specific material contributed by protestors, we are not currently collecting this physical material. Instead we support the archiving efforts of the Smithsonian, lead by the National Museum of African American History and Culture. It means that we support, rather than compete with, the call for social media content and website curation under the DC Public Library’s Special Collections Archive This Moment DC initiative.
While there can be an institutional impulse to want to be the center, the place, that collects it all, it’s an impulse worth fighting. After all, as always, an integral part of our research services is helping to connect researchers with individuals, organizations, and other repositories that maintain records outside of our holdings.
Responding to the current moment is an evolving process. We are sharing, learning, and listening along the way (and look forward to constructive feedback to help us do so; please reach out via collections@dchistory.org). We encourage individuals to document their own lives, whether or not they choose to contribute to collecting efforts such as the In Real Time storybank, photo documentation, or time capsule, now or in the future. We continue to share resources that can help inform a wider audience about models for community archiving efforts, as well as the particular nuances of documenting the Black Lives Matter movement and protests and more generally, those local communities who may have been excluded from or othered by traditional repositories in the past.
Our path forward, helping ensure that a multitude of local voices are heard for posterity, will unfold as we do.
The Historical Society of Washington, D.C. declared that it stands in solidarity with those demanding political change and meaningful reform to address the institutional racism and pervasive injustices that African Americans especially face every day.