Looky Here It's My Field Practicum Blog

Today I mostly helped out a photographer that was there to take pictures of the Freeman collection. He was hired by Justice Freeman's son to take pictures of the items we pulled for the exhibit, in case he wanted to do a book or some such. But also, there was some agreement that the photos would be shared with the school archive, which is nice, because if they ever want to do a digital archive of any of that stuff they'll have some high quality photos. Though it is occurring to me now that actually, the photographer took photos of stuff that was relevent to Freeman but from another collection entirely, and down the line that could be a copyright issue. But those items are really just the stuff about Freeman participating in the Brown vs Board of Ed reenactment that happened on campus to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the court decision. That's probably mostly of interest to the university more than anybody else so it's probably not something that would come up. But...

Today was a weird one. Like last week, in my journey looking for that piece of paper that Bennett wrote working titles for Forced Into Glory , I kept getting derailed by trying to make sense of what was in each folder, because somehow now I'm both looking for that piece of paper and doing a more specific itemization of what I'm encountering in the folders. It's difficult to know what a lot of the manuscripts were because they were in bits and pieces. Bennett would use a lot of material for multiple projects, reworking speeches into magazine articles and then into books. And of course, he kept each draft of everything he wrote along with all the notes. Very few things are labelled, and a pile of papers in any given folder will start at some random page, end at another page, then next to it in the same folder there will be another pack of papers organized the same way. I was having to do a lot of scanning texts with my phone and then converting it to readable text, then copy/...

Today I continued going through the Lerone Bennett Jr. boxes, mostly with the idea that I might be able to find the note that Kheir said he saw that had the working (or maybe alternate?) titles for Bennett's  Forced Into Glory . I didn't find that, but in the boxes I was spending energy on (specifically ones with personal notes and manuscripts that I thought maybe I might have luck with), I did find a whole lot of manuscripts. But the manuscripts weren't labelled, so I had to do some detective work to figure out what they were. And because I know that many of Bennett's books started out as articles for Ebony , it was hard to know if those were magazine articles or book drafts. And it doesn't help that Bennett also recycled concepts sometimes. Thankfully I had copies of 2 of his most known books in front of me, so I could cross-reference them. But that was only helpful up to a point; later editions of those books were updated so the wording for certain sections was d...

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...