Highlights Archives
New Black History Manuscripts Acquired
Wisconsin Historical Society archivists are busy this winter processing two important African-American history collections acquired late last year. The oldest one consists of two boxes of previously unknown correspondence with American Federation of Labor President Samuel Gompers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Staff in the Tamiment Library at New York University came across these and, knowing that the Historical Society possesses the nation's richest archives about Gompers and the AFL, graciously arranged for the donation.
The letters document organized labor's efforts to grapple with the place of former African-American slaves in the U.S. workforce. A number of letters to Gompers discuss whether black workers should be allowed to join the same unions as white workers, especially in the South. For example, a union official in New Orleans wrote Gompers about attempts by the Knights of Labor to use white-only unions as a way to woo members away from the AFL. John M. Callaghan's 1892 letter from New Orleans acknowledges the importance of forming integrated unions: "Enclosed please find application of Journeymen Horse Shoers for certificate of affiliation. The Union is composed of white and black men. I am sure that in the course of a few months they will have by far the greater number of the men employed at that calling within the ranks of the Union." The new Gompers letters are quite fragile and require expert conservation before they can be made freely available to researchers later this year.
The second collection is the FBI's file on Martin Luther King Jr., totaling about 17,000 pages, obtained by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nick Kotz under the Freedom of Information Act. Kotz acquired the archive while researching his book Judgment Days, about Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the civil rights movement, and donated it to the Society with other valuable research materials. As is common with FOIA-obtained documents, many pages are significantly redacted (blacked-out), however the size and depth of the collection make it extraordinarily valuable to scholars despite this censorship.
A different copy of the FBI files on Martin Luther King was issued on 25 reels of microfilm in the 1980s by University Publications of America. The Society's set of the records in the Kotz Collection will allow scholars to compare the two versions for omitted or overlooked documents. Library-Archives staff are investigating the possibility of mounting the entire archive on its Web site, since the FBI has published only 221 of the 17,000 documents on the Web. Processing the papers and researching potential privacy and copyright constraints for a Web edition will require several months.
The Society has long been a leader in collecting, preserving and sharing African-American history. Its Library-Archives division holds nearly 400 collections of unpublished documents and nearly 10,000 publications on black history. The only comprehensive guide to the black press was compiled at the Society by James Danky, on the strength of the Society's century-old African-American newspapers and periodicals collection. Fifty primary sources about black history in Wisconsin have been mounted online at Turning Points in Wisconsin History as well as a short survey for Wisconsin students and lesson plans for teachers. Over the years, the Society has also published dozens of articles and books on Wisconsin's African-American heritage, most recently a biography of Caroline Quarlls for young readers and an article on J. Anthony Josey, "the first mayor of Black Milwaukee."
:: Posted February 8, 2008
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