Looky Here It's My Field Practicum Blog

Today Kheir and I had a chance to talk about the Freeman event last week, and we felt like it was well attended which was nice. I think he appeared on Fox News talking about the collection and the event (though I haven't had a chance to go watch it just yet). Also today we talked about what my next project would be. We decided I would spend some time with the African-American scholar Lerone Bennett Jr. (1928-2018) collection in the CSU archive. Like many scholars, his entire archive isn't collected in one place. CSU has, among other things, a lot of personal papers, notes from his book Forced Into Glory , but not manuscripts from  Before the Mayflower (also known as the one book I have read by him), etc. About half of the 20-some boxes CSU has of his work has been itemized in a finding aid (done by previous CSU practicum students), but there are more boxes that need some attention and might be a project I could take on. Or another project for me might be fleshing out the findi...

Tonight was the Justice Freeman event at the CSU archive that we had been working on, and I would say it was a success. There were probably about 50 people there, and a lot of them were justices or people from the university. And Fox News was there too. Did I mention they had a jazz band and refreshments? I was not expecting that! During the day I did some last minute tag changes, added some signs around the archive that Kheir was hoping to get done and did some last minute cleaning. I think we did Charles Freeman, um, justice! Ha! Does everybody make that joke when you're a judge? The event started around 5, and after a cocktail hour there were some speeches. Then everybody came into the exhibit, and it was great to see how into it people were. It made me glad we had picked the objects we did to highlight.   Current Chief Justice of the Illinois  Supreme Court P. Scott Neville Jr. (left) talks with Kevin Freeman (right) at the event We really got to see the impact it mad...

Last night I worked from home on the labels for the Justice Freeman exhibit, laying them out with InDesign, and I printed them out to bring with me, also emailing them to Kheir and told him he had the files just in case I got abducted by aliens on my way to campus. I came in today even though it is Tuesday and I usually go in on Thursdays. We decided for this week and next week for me to come on Tuesdays instead. "I see you did not get abducted by aliens," Kheir said to me when I arrived. I cut the printouts into their respective sizes and put them in the cases to see how they look. We still went over some changes together and emailed files back and forth as we sat in Kheir's office, noticing things to change. I also decided that one thing I had not made a label for that could have used one for. We need a label to accompany the Justice Freeman on the Brown v. Board of Ed reenactment that happened on campus in 2004. So I made a label for that event to accompany the relevan...

Kheir greeted me today with a nice surprise -- 9 or so boxes of material pertaining to the Brown v. Board of Ed 50th Anniversary Commission files, all of which are housed at CSU! I didn't even know there was an entire collection that was specifically about the anniversary (the anniversary being in 2004, when CSU held the reenactment with Charles Freeman playing the role of the judge in the case). So I spent a large part of the day scouring those files to find anything with his name on it to prove a CSU connection, which would be a great addition to the Justice Freeman exhibit. Boy am I glad Kheir had previously told me to scour T he Chicago Defender back issue archive a few weeks back (accessed through CPL) to see if there was anything written about Freeman and CSU. And to think that CSU had the whole collection about that anniversary commission (and that there even was a commission)! In those files I found a physical copy of that Defender article that featured a picture of Just...

Today I spent time finessing the displays in all the glass display cases for the Freeman exhibit and then writing text for labels that will go in a few of them. The display cases in the front will hold some of the "big ticket" items related to Freeman's relationship with Harold Washington. Most notably, the framed picture of Freeman and Washington at the swearing in of the Harold as mayor and relevant paperwork/correspondence. For the display case further into the archive that has early to mid-career Freeman ephemera, I wrote text that gives an overview in terms of timeline and accomplishments at different points in Freeman's life, but I also wrote text for labels for items that if you were looking at a thing and didn't know what it was, the label would tell you. Obviously not everything in the case requires labelling -- if you look at a newspaper and read the headline it's pretty obvious what it is and what you should be getting out of it. The next display ca...

I started today with the idea that I was going to configure what was going to go in the small glass cases up front, which I had spent a few minutes figuring out which set of keys Kheir gave me would successfully unlock. These are different glass cases than the bigger ones I spent the last couple weeks on. These are  elsewhere in the archive that once we unlocked them we talked about what to do with the unrelated material that was already in them. Using them for the exhibit means that things that I thought I wouldn't be able to fit into the Freeman exhibit can now possibly make an appearance. And that also means that I can spread out certain periods or even give one case an entire highlight of one period. For example, one case can be all the material from the Harold Washington overlap with Freeman (former legal partners, Freeman swore HW in to office both terms, etc.), or maybe one can be about the link between Freeman and CSU (more on that below). But then my day got away from me, ...