Raising Her Voice: Collecting, Digitizing, and Teaching with Diverse Archival Collections

Abstract

The presenters will discuss the collections of two African American women: Dr. Carolyn Jefferson Jenkins and Jennie Elder Suel, and how we plan to use their collections to promote equity, diversity and inclusion in our archives, and in the classroom. Dr. Jefferson Jenkins is an educator and voting rights activist. Her collection is currently the subject of a digitization project. Jennie Elder Suel donated freedom papers, as well as other historical materials documenting black life in the early 19th and 20th century. Suel’s collection showcases what Dr. Sutton has termed descendant archival practices—a method that reveals new ways of writing histories of 19th-century Black women in the rural Midwest and acknowledges the preservation and memory work of Black women elders as an alternative to mainstream archives.Moderated by Jessica Gavilan.