Recently 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.
This is a long-term commitment. As our first step, we have launched public initiatives, including Context for Today. Next we are also looking internally to examine how the Historical Society, founded in 1894, has contributed over time to these injustices. Specifically we are addressing how to change the ways in which we collect, describe, and provide access to the materials we hold in trust for the public.
Prioritizing Collections Description
With a renewed sense of urgency, we are prioritizing description of unprocessed collections (not yet available to researchers) relating to Black Washington. In the process we will identify gaps in our collection where people of color are concerned.
Let’s start by taking a look at the heart of the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. Unlike federal or municipal repositories—the legal homes for permanent records created by governments—the Historical Society focuses on the personal papers, business records, ephemera, photographs, maps, published works and other materials reflecting local life in the nation’s capital. The Historical Society has collected, described, and provided access to these local records since 1894 in order to help people understand our collective past.
Historical Society staff, interns, and volunteers, will take on this action following guidance from (with gratitude for) the work of such groups as the Blackivists and the Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia’s Anti-Racist Description Working Group.
Why is this gap analysis and commitment to describing what we already have so important?
Unprocessed collections are invisible to the public. While we made great strides in management of our collections over the past two years in preparation for the move back to the renovated Carnegie Library, the Historical Society, like any repository, continues to have collections not yet prepared for researchers to access. Past processing priorities have in part reflected researcher demand—but if a researcher doesn’t know that a collection exists, how can they request that it be processed?
In 2015-2017 the Historical Society participated in the grant-funded, multi-partner DC Africana Archives Project. The project allowed us to focus on materials relating to Black individuals and organizations and uncover important voices. For example, before the DCAAP project, the contents of the Madeline Lindsey Green papers (MS 0810) were largely unknown even to staff, let alone the public. Almost immediately after announcing that the collection was available for researchers, the Historical Society’s Kiplinger Research Library received and facilitated multiple patron requests for this trove of genealogical research material reflecting multiple local African American families from the 1600s to the late 1990s.
Every proposed donation to the collection is evaluated by a series of questions, including, what are the circumstances surrounding the creation and maintenance of the materials? Are we the right organization to take them in? And, does the material deepen an existing relationship with, and understanding of, a community, or add new voices or perspectives?
That last question doesn’t have a wrong answer per se, but we can’t even begin to answer it without a full accounting of whose stories we already are responsible for, and identifying the voices and experiences that are not represented in our holdings.
By committing to analyzing the collections we have onsite, we’ll bring more hidden stories into the light.