“People cry more than you would think in the archives. Emotions can run very high when an individual is confronting information that impacts their lives.
“Once a colleague of Dr. King, well into his 80s, burst into tears
looking at essays he’d written that were with Dr. King when he died. Recently, a
high school junior cried over the hand-written manuscript of ‘The Color Purple.’
.
“Archives are about humanity as much as scholarship.”
.
— Courtney Chartier, head of Research Services for the Manuscript,
Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University, quoted in the Southern Register (summer 2014)