Evan Towle: First, can you speak a little about your history with the Archives at Tuskegee?
Dana Chandler: I’d first visited in 1972—my parents brought us down here to see George Washington Carver’s laboratory, and I fell in love with the place then. I did not ever expect to work here. The opportunity kind of fell into my lap, and I have been able to, I think, develop the Archives into a viable place for researchers to come from the US and all around the world to work on the materials to fill in some blanks that have been evident for a long time about the history of the Civil Rights Movement and the history of Tuskegee as a whole, as well as the work of African Americans, how successful they really were during the time of Jim Crow Laws and laws of segregation.
When you think about Tuskegee, you think about George Washington Carver, Booker T. Washington. You think about the Tuskegee Airmen, and maybe something called the Syphilis Study, which did not happen here on the campus. But it is much more than those things. The first Extension Agent to the US Federal Government came from Tuskegee—not just the first black agent, but the first Extension Agent came from Tuskegee University—the first African American Hospital in Alabama; the first school to offer a four-year degree in nursing in Alabama; the first African American woman to win a gold medal at the Olympics, Alice Coachman Davis, went to Tuskegee. And believe me, I could go on and on ad nauseam about the stuff that’s here.
We have 600 historically significant collections. And that includes over 1/4 million photographs. We just received a collection two weeks ago from a man in Florida, Donald Polk, that I probably would call the highlight of my career. There are photographs that have never been seen of Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver. The three photographs that are in the article from the news of Jackie Robinson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Muhammad Ali, those were just released for the first time. We have over 750 reel-to-reel tapes, 1,000 cassette tapes, 1,200-1,400 VHS tapes, Beta tapes. Listen, we have things I have not even begun to look into because we have a small staff and very little funding. What funding I get, I get from grants. This one, the CIC/Shared Shelf [now JSTOR Forum] grant , was a non-funded grant. You guys provided the space. We had to have funding to work on those tapes.