The first school established in the U.S. South to educate formerly enslaved people. The beating heart of Gullah cultural traditions. A sacred gathering place for those seeking justice, civil rights, and Black uplift. Since 1862, Penn Center has been the convergence point for these and many other central threads of the American experience. And since 1962, the Southern Historical Collection has been honored to collaborate with Penn Center in preserving a rich archive of materials that document Penn’s storied past.
This year we are reflecting on this legacy of preservation, sixty years in the making, and preparing the way for decades of partnership to come! Here is an interactive timeline of the Penn Center-UNC Library partnership and some highlights of our most recent community-engaged activities:
Timeline:
Digitization and Access:
Since 2005, we have digitized around 10,000 documents, including: all early Penn correspondence, administrative records, dozens of manuscript volumes, and other papers.
- Digitized twenty five fragile 18th- and early 19th-century photograph albums (with more than 1600 pages containing thousands of individual photographs) and hundreds of individual unmounted photographs.
- Digitized more than 300 audiocassettes and 10 transcription discs, containing recordings of Gullah and African American musical traditions, oral history interviews, and recordings of meetings and events.
- This year we received an National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF) grant to digitize a set of at-risk films from the Penn collections.
Recent Community Outreach and Education:
- SHC staff have visited Penn Center several times in recent years to meet with the center’s staff about ways to make the collection more readily accessible to the research public and the local communities around Penn.
- This spring, SHC curators Chaitra Powell and Brianna McGruder developed and taught a UNC Maymester class on the history of Penn Center (AAAD 290 – “Memory Work at Penn Center“). The class included hands on research and engagement activities during a visit to Penn Center by enrolled UNC students.
- SHC archivist Brianna McGruder curated a digital exhibition, “Erasure and Resilience at Penn,” focused on surfacing the marginalized thoughts, narratives, and voices of local Black people who are documented within Penn’s archival collections.
- UNC Library staff developed a LibGuide to aid researchers in navigating the two main Penn archival collections and many related primary and secondary sources.
More Information and Links:
- “Penn Center Honors UNC for care of Penn School Papers,” by Jonathan Outlaw, May 7, 2012, UNC News Services.
- “Penn Center: A Place, An Archive, A Class,” by Brianna McGruder, 2023, Southern Historical Collection.