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Articles

Visions for a Community-Driven Archive

Now that we’ve concluded the work on our grant, we are identifying ways that our short-term efforts can have a longer-term impact on the University Libraries at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Published June 30, 2021
Categorized as Articles, Project Reflections, Reflection

Reflecting on our Community-Driven Archives Project, 2017-2021

Chaitra Powell, Charlissa Rice, Sonoe Nakasone, and Alex Paz Cody gather around a table to create information packets for incoming Archival Seedlings

After four years, our Community-Driven Archives team has concluded its work on this Andrew W. Mellon grant-funded initiative. As we come to the end of our journey together, we took the time to reflect on and to be honest about the strengths of this work and the challenges and weaknesses of our project.

Published May 3, 2021
Categorized as Articles, Blog, Project Reflections, Reflection

Eatonville, Florida: A Vital History

The back of a broad-shouldered person wearing a brimmed hat walking on a street lined with palm trees and street lamps, with a park bench on one side

Against all expectation, with the suburbs of Orlando at its doorstep and the interstate visible from the town center, Eatonville has survived the fragmentation common to many small southern towns. If Eatonville retains a small-town atmosphere, it is also mindful of deep history.

Published April 9, 2021
Categorized as Blog, Collaborations, Reflection Tagged Historic Black Towns and Settlements Alliance (HBTSA), Local history, Partners, Reflection

Stories from Swift Memorial Institute: A Late-HBCU in Appalachia

Stella Gudger, Found of Swift Museum, Rogersville, TN, 2013

In 2012 and 2013, Archival Seedling William Isom, II helped conduct oral history interviews with a number of community members associated with Swift Memorial Institute, a late Historically Black College in Rogersville, Tennessee.

Published March 26, 2021
Categorized as Blog, Reflection Tagged Archival Seedlings, Eastern Kentucky African American Migration Project (EKAAAMP), Local history, Partners, Reflection

The Negro Motorist Green Book and Community Memory Keepers

Derrick Green stands proudly in front of the brick building and front window that are home to his barbershop.

Archival Seedling Lisa R. Withers’s project reframes the Green Book travel guide as a publication highlighting social networks, community hubs, and prominent changemakers in African American communities across North Carolina.

Published March 25, 2021
Categorized as Blog, Collaborations Tagged Archival Seedlings, Local history, Partners, Reflection

Partnering with The San Antonio African American Community Archives and Museum

Two African American men and a white woman stand beneath tree branches and blue sky at Griffin Cemetery. One of the men, on the left is holding a microphone.

What is Chapel Hill doing in San Antonio? The SHC’s role at SAAACAM is to share and develop resources and tools that help SAAACAM succeed in its goal of becoming a self-sustaining, self-directed, empowered archive and museum.

Published March 25, 2021
Categorized as Blog, Collaborations Tagged Oral History, Partners, Reflection, San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum (SAAACAM)

All Hands on Deck at Hobson City’s Museum: Interview with Pauline Cunningham

Mayor Alberta McCrory wants to share the remarkable history of Hobson City and other historic Black towns in Alabama at the Hobson City Museum. Through a partnership with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries’ Community Driven Archives (CDA) project, Hobson City Museum hosted a workshop in March 2020 that focused on caring for museum collections.

Published March 23, 2021
Categorized as Blog, Collaborations Tagged Historic Black Towns and Settlements Alliance (HBTSA), Methods, Partners, Reflection

Budget as Morality in Community-Driven Archives

Our grant project points to the need for critical reflection about institutional resources, and our experiences spur us to devise ways to more directly resource our partners, design grant projects with a bigger focus on equity, and collaborate with our community partners in the development of frameworks to help us measure progress in these areas.

Published March 18, 2021
Categorized as Articles, Blog, Reflection

Dyann Robinson and the Tuskegee Repertory Theater, 1991

Program for Tuskegee Repertory Theatre's presentation of “Booker T.’s Towns by Dyann Robinson," featuring a central image of Booker T. Washington surrounded by the crests of five historically Black Southern towns: Tuskegee, AL, Hobson City, AL, Mound Bayou, Mississippi, Grambling, LA, and Eatonville, FL

Dyann Robinson is the heart and soul of the Tuskegee, Alabama theater scene. She founded the Tuskegee Repertory Theater in 1991.

Published March 15, 2021
Categorized as Blog, Collaborations, Reflection Tagged Historic Black Towns and Settlements Alliance (HBTSA), Local history, Reflection

Project Spotlight: Princeville

On September 21st a group of CDA team members and students from the Public History graduate program led by Dr. Charles Johnson at North Carolina Central University drove to Princeville NC to conduct oral histories. We partnered with lifelong citizens, town officials, and longtime residents of the Princeville community to collect stories and workshop the oral history backpacks.

Published March 12, 2021
Categorized as Blog, Collaborations, Reflection Tagged Historic Black Towns and Settlements Alliance (HBTSA), Oral History, Partners, Reflection

Working from behind the Scenes: The Appalachian Student Health Coalition Archive Project

a photograph from the 1960s of a young doctor (on the right) consulting with a nursing student (left background) and nun (left foreground) in a hospital

CDA team member Gillian McCuistion reflects about the relationship between UNC Libraries project archivists and the Appalachian Student Health Coalition: What is our institutional role so that community storytellers and their needs are centered?

Published March 12, 2021
Categorized as Blog, Project Reflections, Reflection, Resources Tagged Appalachian Student Health Coalition (ASHC), Archival Collections, Partners, Reflection

Community-based, in a Digital Space

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the change of medium from in-person to digital presented an unexpected opportunity to stretch our expectations of technology and start rethinking how we can use it to create embodied and relational experiences online.

Published March 12, 2021
Categorized as Blog, Project Reflections, Reflection Tagged Access, Archival Seedlings, Local history, Reflection

So What’s a CDAT Anyway? Meet the Community-Driven Archives Team at the Southern Historical Collection

Meet past team CDAT members: In October 2017, the Southern Historical Collection celebrated the complete staffing of our “Building A Model For All Users: Transforming Archive Collections Through Community-Driven Archives” Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant team.

Published March 12, 2021
Categorized as Blog, Project Reflections, Reflection Tagged Definitions, Methods, Partners

On the Road: The Community-Driven Archives team travels to Shaw, Mississippi, February 2019

Two African-American women-presenting people seated, talking with an audio recorder on a tripod between them.

CDA team members spent the last weekend of February traveling to Shaw, MS to conduct an Archivist in a Backpack Training and archival techniques workshop. They collaborated with a group working to preserve and share the history of the town of Shaw, specifically the civil rights case Hawkins vs. Town of Shaw.

Published March 12, 2021
Categorized as Blog, Collaborations, Reflection Tagged Archivist in a Backpack, Historic Black Towns and Settlements Alliance (HBTSA), Local history, Oral History, Reflection

Archival Seedlings: Resourcing Local Collaborators Across the American South

Archival Seedlings was a 15-month program supporting the development of small community archives projects led by individual history keepers across the South.

Published March 12, 2021
Categorized as Blog, Collaborations, Reflection Tagged Archival Seedlings, Definitions, Partners

Archival Seedlings: Putting Our Values into Practice, the 2020 Edition

Here are some ways our collaboration with Seedlings participants got creative in 2020 to resource local history initiatives with the support of our grant funds.

Published March 12, 2021
Categorized as Blog, Collaborations, Reflection Tagged Archival Seedlings, Local history, Partners

Getting to know Navassa, a historically Black community in Brunswick County, North Carolina

Photograph of the Navassa town sign. Three flags, the North Carolina flag, American flag, and a third flag, stand behind the town sign.

Navassa, NC is one of the towns in our Historic Black Towns and Settlements Alliance (HBTSA) grant partnership. University Libraries at UNC-Chapel Hill has several interesting collections that encompass the history of this small town.

Published March 10, 2021
Categorized as Blog, Collaborations, Reflection Tagged Historic Black Towns and Settlements Alliance (HBTSA), Local history, Partners

Fighting for clean land, energy, and industry since 1974, a story of the East Tennessee Research Corporation

Around 1973, the Appalachian Student Health Coalition (ASHC) recognized that groups working in the east Tennessee area needed additional legal services not initally provided by ASHC. Thus, in the ASHC’s spirit of “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comforted” the East Tennessee Research Corporation (ETRC) was born in 1974.

Published March 10, 2021
Categorized as Blog, Collaborations, Reflection Tagged Appalachian Student Health Coalition (ASHC), Partners, Reflection

Presenting “Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia”

The cover of the book "Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia" featuring a road in the mountains surrounded by trees

From 2017-19, the Community-Driven Archives (CDA) grant team and the Southern Historical Collection collaborated with Dr. Karida Brown while she was a Ph.D. candidate at Brown University, along with many Appalachian families on the Eastern Kentucky African American Migration Project (EKAAMP).

Published February 18, 2021
Categorized as Blog, Reflection, Resources, Storytelling Tagged Eastern Kentucky African American Migration Project (EKAAAMP), Partnerships, Reflection

Announcing the Launch of the Student Health Coalition Project Website

Majority white group of students, many smiling, with their fists raised in the air. An older person is in front of the group wearing a white lab coat on a motorcycle.

Introducing a pioneering online archive about student activism in the 1960s and 70s, a digital home for video clips, historic photos, and personal profiles from former activists in the rural South with a focus on health care.

Published February 16, 2021
Categorized as Blog, Collaborations, Reflection, Storytelling Tagged Appalachian Student Health Coalition (ASHC), Local history, Methods, Partners, Tools

What is a Community Archive?

Two triangles side by side, one inverted, demontrating the different audience focuses of the traditional and the community-driven archival models. Scholars are shown at the top of the pyramid in the traditional model, while community creators are shown at the top of the inverted triangle in the community-driven archival model.

Community archives and other community-centric history, heritage, and memory projects work to empower communities to tell, protect, and share their history on their terms.

Published February 12, 2021
Categorized as Archival Concepts, Blog, Reflection, Resources Tagged Archival Collections, Definitions, Local history, Partners

What’s with all the Backpacks?

A dozen backpack in variety of bright colors sit in the bed of tan pick up truck along side a large cardboard box.

One of the central initiatives for the CDA Team is a transportable archiving kit that demystifies the technical jargon and supplies resources for communities.

Published February 12, 2021
Categorized as Blog, Project Reflections, Reflection Tagged Archival Formats, Archivist in a Backpack, Reflection, Tools

Why are Oral Histories Important for Community-Driven Archives?

Bernetiae leans over a group of seated African American women to assist them during a training.

From the beginning, the Community-Driven Archives Team has prioritized oral history training and the collection of oral histories as a key part of our work.

Published January 28, 2021
Categorized as Archival Concepts, Blog, Reflection, Resources Tagged Appalachian Student Health Coalition (ASHC), Description, Local history, Partners

Credits

Community-Driven Archives

Project Duration 2017-2021

designed by
UNC Creative

web development by
Quran Karriem

This website is under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Creative Commons license
(CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Our Team

María R. Estorino, Principal Investigator
Chaitra Powell, Project Director
Biff Hollingsworth, Co-Investigator
Charlissa Rice, Business Services Coordinator
Sonoe Nakasone, Community Archivist
Kimber Heinz, Outreach Coordinator
Alex Paz Cody, Graduate Research Assistant
Gillian McCuistion, Graduate Research Assistant
Lidia Jo Morris, Graduate Research Assistant

Past Team Members

Bryan Giemza, Principal Investigator
Josephine McRobbie, Community Archivist
Bernetiae Reed, Project Documentarian and Oral Historian
Eldrin Deas, Graduate Research Assistant
Claire Du Laney, Graduate Research Assistant
Brenna Edwards, Graduate Research Assistant
Leah Epting, Graduate Research Assistant
Lucas Kelley, Graduate Research Assistant
Lindsay Terrell, Graduate Research Assistant
Merisa Tomczak, Graduate Research Assistant

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