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Back to the boxes!

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 finding aids for the Freeman material. Or for either/both collections doing a bit more on the conservation end, to make sure things are physically archived in a more protected way.

Today I spent some time familiarizing myself with some of the material in the Bennett collection, mostly as a recon mission beyond what I already knew about him (namely that that he had been the editor of Ebony magazine at Johnson Publishing in Chicago, also home JET magazine for which he had been city editor). Kheir had mentioned a few things I started to do a hunt for that he had sworn he had peripherally seen in the collection, such as a memo of working titles for Forced Into Glory and papers regarding his involvement with getting MLK day to be a federally recognized holiday. I got into a few boxes and found that there were a lot of things in his archive that at first glance seemed like they were relevant to his work but not specific to his involvement. But then after a while I figured it out: he was often solicited to either speak at things or to donate money to things, and he (or someone near him obviously) kept all of that. It was also clear that a lot of this material was because he was serving on a steering committee or advisory board for things. Sometimes I wouldn't figure out that that was what the connection was until I looked at the list in the back of a program guide or something and it would say all of the members on the committee or the board.

It was interesting to see all of the material from Coretta Scott King! As MLK's widow, she was very persistent in her service with the committee that got MLK Day to be a federally recognized holiday (first celebrated in 1986). And Bennett was in the perfect position, as a media figure, to follow the narrative over the years. I bet I could go look up old issues and see it covered over time. 

When Coretta Scott King faxes you, you never throw it away.





When I go in next week I'll go look at the personal notes (in later boxes with less finding aid documentation), and see if I can find any of those notes with working titles for his book.

Just as a sidenote, today I also stumbled in the collection a bunch of issues of the Chicago Urban League. I loved the design sensibility, and it was interesting over time how the newsletter evolved in format.





This early issue was great! It went from a pamphlet to a newsletter to a bigger format over the years but I love the early start.

--

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

B. COMPLEMENTARY KNOWLEDGE, B. Structure of the Learning Process (pp 8-9)





Comments

  1. GabrielMarch 19, 2026 at 6:13 AM

    Good work as usual and congrats on the event. It's great to see your efforts generate success while you maintain your enthusiasm.

    ReplyDelete

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