I begrudgingly spent a good deal of time in a storefront museum in Ash Grove, Missouri, the Ozarks Afro-American Heritage Museum. In the classic tradition of African American community archives, this one was curated by a charismatic, self-educated man, dedicated to the memory of Black people in a region that would prefer to forget them. I rolled my eyes at historical anecdotes I thought were corny or in need of references. I sighed when he began his rehearsed introduction: I grew up in the house my great-great-grandparents built in 1873. I knew I wanted to study history in a real way, at a university with credentialed professors and rich with historical documentation.
Decades later, while participating in a virtual symposium from my apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I found myself representing archivists in a group of credentialed professors participating in a discussion on the archives. “The neighborhood is an archive, the woman was an archive, this land is an archive.” There was a general excitement around imagining objects, people, and places as archives without any clear definitions. In a fit of pique I finally asked, “If everything is an archive, what meaning does the word have? What is so great about being an archive? Why have we given the word such power?” What I felt, at least subconsciously, was annoyingly provoked, reflecting on the decades of labor my mentors, colleagues, and I have worked trying to unlock ignored Black history from institutional strongholds through whatever means institutional boundaries allow. I realized I resent the joy and expansiveness of the professorially vague the archives because they flit over the struggles for respect and visibility that punctuate my career. I see the archives dancing atop the waves while the burdens of archives pull me farther and farther down.
Academics continuously loosen the concept of the archives in vigorous debate and flowery speech, while hundreds of linear feet of Black history are stacked in secure shelving, unbeknownst and inaccessible to implicated communities. “Why do we even have this?” is a recurring question whispered across institutions as complex histories of provenance and acquisitions lead to single box collections with titles like “Miscellaneous Slavery Documents,” a collection of Freedman’s Bureau papers and Bills of Sale I recently encountered. In the face of this guilt-inducing backlog, special collections have turned towards digitization as a solution, prioritizing getting images of Black people online and hoping that will be enough. I’ve commiserated with colleagues about demands to streamline digitization with the feeling that getting things online will increase access- even without full description or detailed metadata, the things that guide digital discovery. Digital collection development has been presented as a liberatory access provider, with the idea that reparative access is primarily a workflow adjustment.