Archivist as Detective

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 different and so on. However, the fact that a number of the manuscripts said "Chapter 1" at the top and had sentences that were very close to the first chapter of Forced Into Glory was a dead giveaway! Maybe as I get into the boxes more I'll get later chapters, but there was a lot of redrafts that said Chapter 1 at the top, as if he was really stuck there. As a perfectionist, I implicitly understand this. But he was a prolific writer, publisher and scholar, so somehow he got past Chapter 1.

To make things more confusing, there are manuscripts with a typed treatment Bennett wrote that says the following manuscript was for a book tentatively called The Making of Afro-America: from arrival to present. But cross-referencing his itemized chapter headings, I'm 90% sure that manuscript is what actually turned into his book The Shaping of Black America. Of note on that treatment are the words, “I would like to finish this in six or seven months.” That man was a writing machine! OK, he was clearly able to overcome attachment to Chapter 1.

A few other interesting finds in general today too! 

First, apparently Bennett wrote a musical about Harold Washington?!?! It was called "Harold's Journey." A musical about a Chicago mayor! I could not love this more. I am a fool and neglected to take a picture of this find, but I did cross-reference it with an article about how it got performed at Orchestra Hall in 1989 to learn that it was actually a thing. It wasn't a musical in the way we think of musicals with people acting and singing a plot line and so on. It was more like there was dialogue performed that were mostly taken from speeches of Harold Washington, interspersed with well known symphonic pieces and spirituals.

Secondly, and this was the thing I liked the most, is a 1972 speech Bennett wrote for John Johnson of Johnson Publishing (at least, I'm pretty sure that's what that was, based on some internet sleuthing), with a lot of really good activist calls to action. One of the things he kept mentioning was that it was the "Time of the Whale" which is one of those things he uses in multiple books etc, usually as sort of a metaphor for struggle. 

What convinced me that it was a speech (besides the internet sleuthing) was the fact that it was written in all uppercase, the way you would type someting you had to read in front of people TO MAKE IT REALLY HELPFUL AND OBVIOUS.

After doing all this sleuthing for things I made some notes in a document that Kheir and I will share about what exactly the manuscripts are in those boxes. And I used a lot of post-its. Hopefully whoever comes after me (since I probably won't finish this before the semester ends) can use that information to make a more elaborate finding aid that is beyond just "Boxes 22-24 Manuscripts." I'm laying down some groundwork for the next person.

Also today I cross-referenced Bennett and Chicago State University in CPL's Chicago Defender archive. I found 3 connections! Bennett participated in a tennis match with other well known figures like the Staples Singers on the CSU campus that was a fundraiser for NAMW (National Association of Media Women, Inc.) in 1976. Also, in 1987 Bennett received the President's Leadership Award from CSU at a dinner at Palmer House, and in 2000 Bennett spoke at CSU's 10th Annual Gwendolyn Brooks Writers' Conference on Black literature.

The last thing I did today was meet with Kheir and another staff member about doing a zine workshop during Library Week for CSU staff, students and community. So that's on the calendar in April. It will be fun. I always like doing those workshops.

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Today's standards fulfilled as per the Society of American Archivists Curriculum:

Society of American Archivists Curriculum: A. CORE ARCHIVAL KNOWLEDGE, 1. Knowledge of Archival Material and Functions, b) Appraisal for Selection and Acquisition, g. Management and Administration (p. 5)

A. CORE ARCHIVAL KNOWLEDGE, 2. Knowledge of the Profession, c) Professional Ethics and Values (p. 7)

A. CORE ARCHIVAL KNOWLEDGE, 3. Contextual knowledge, a) Social and Cultural Context, d) Underserved & Underrepresented Communities (pp. 7-8)