Title page of George Moore's History of Slavery, 1866

The Chicago Friends of the Amistad Research Center (CFARC) is an organization that is among Amistad's greatest assets. Mrs. Willie Lee Hart has been a member of CFARC since it was founded in 1979 and president since 1985. The group was organized to support Amistad financially, encourage donations of archival materials to the Center, and sponsor community programs emphasizing African American history and the preservation of historically significant materials.

Mrs. Hart's personal loyalty and dedication to the Center are also well documented and matched by caring and generous philanthropy. She recently presented Amistad with a very special donation, which was the culmination of a project that lasted over two years. According to Amistad's director of Library and Reference Services, Mrs. Hart's gift includes approximately 300 works published from 1853 (H.C. Carey's The Slave Trade, Domestic and Foreign) to a 2010 pamphlet on the Amistad Incident (Joseph Yanelli's Cinque the Slave Trader: Some New Evidence on an Old Controversy).

The collection is particularly strong in African American literature and history with notable first and early editions of works by James Baldwin, Arna Bontemps, Maya Angelou, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carter G. Woodson, and W.E.B. Du Bois. Mrs. Hart's library also expands Amistad's strong holdings of works on African American art with works by or about Allan Crite, Jeff Donaldson, James A. Porter, Jacob Lawrence, John Biggers, and James VanDerZee. Notable titles within this oustanding collection include: an 1866 edition of George H. Moore's Notes on the History of Slavery in Massachusetts; Daniel A. Payne's History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, published by the Publishing House of the A.M.E. Sunday-School Union in 1891; and a copy of Mary Church Terrell's A Colored Woman in a White World, signed by the author.

Mrs. Hart stated that her decision to begin donating her personal library to Amistad was based not only on her support of the Center in general, but the fact that the collection will be cataloged and made accessible to anyone with an interest in reading about African American history, culture, literature, and life. Amistad's staff has pledged to do just that. The donation is currently being inventoried and will be fully cataloged in the near future.

Amistad's quarterly exhibitions are an important aspect of the Center's outreach programs, and provide a glimpse into the many unique and historical documents, photographs, books, and other materials held at the Center. The following exhibitions will be featured through 2011, and next year's exhibitions are currently being planned and designed.

Operation Crossroads Africa: "Progenitor of the Peace Corps"

July 12 - September 29, 2011

Operation Crossroads Africa (OCA) was established in 1958 by Dr. James H. Robinson as a cross-cultural program in which young people from North America and Africa would work together at the grassroots level on a variety of projects in host countries across Africa. Called the "progenitor of the Peace Corps" by President John F. Kennedy, OCA has sent over 11,000 young Americans to more than 40 African countries since its inception. This exhibition features correspondence, photographs, reports, and other materials from the extensive archives of OCA, as well as the personal papers of Dr. Robinson, both of which are housed at the Amistad Research Center.

The Revolution Will Not Be...: Print Culture and the Civil Rights Movement

October 3 - December 22, 2011

The Civil Rights Movement coincided with rapid changes in a variety of news and communications media. The expansion of television and documentary filmmaking brought images of the struggles of African Americans and those who supported civil rights into the homes of the American populace. However, control of the tone and content of electronic media was not always in the hands of those who were being documented. It was the democratization of various printed media that allowed civil rights leaders, workers, and organizations to circulate their combined, and sometimes contradictory, voices. This exhibition will highlight the newspapers, posters, broadsides, pamphlets and other printed ephemera produced by student groups, leading civil rights organizations, and individuals, which documented a revolutionary era.

Jimmy Daniels (right) with film director Kenneth  MacPherson and actress Blanche Dunn, likely at the Bon Soir supper club in New York City.

From Harlem and Greenwich Village to Monte Carlo and Paris, nightclub host and cabaret singer Jimmy Daniels made a career of entertaining and performing in some of chicest nightspots on both sides of the Atlantic. His career is documented in over 260 photographs that form the Rex Madsen and Jimmy Daniels Photograph Collection, which is housed at the Amistad Research Center. The finding aid was recently added to the Center's online database and provides an item level description for each item in the collection. Read more about Daniels' life and career and view some of the photographs in a recent article on the Amistad Research Center blog.

The Amistad Research Center welcomes IMLS Fellow, Felicia Render, to the Center on September 6. She will intern with the ARC staff for the next nine months and work in the areas of collection development, reference services, processing, and preservation. Felicia is from Atlanta and a graduate of the University of North Texas Library and Information Science program. She specialized in digital content management of collections.

Amistad was selected as a host site for the History Makers of Chicago Fellowship, Mentoring, Training and Placement Institute, which was funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Studies (IMLS). The program is designed to address the lack of ethnic diversity in the archival profession and to provide professional training for African American and other archivists interested in working with African American collections.

Felicia has spent the last three months in Chicago participating in History Makers' summer immersion program, where she received initial archival training and worked extensively with oral history collections. ARC's staff is excited to introduce its newest intern to Amistad's collections and provide her with in-depth training that will assist her as a professional archivist.

Amistad's Christopher Harter assists students from Bonnabel Magnet Academy.

Past issues of e-Amistad Reports contain several articles highlighting educational outreach programs, including local, regional, and national groups from high schools and universities. When Penny Prado, teacher at Bonnabel Magnet Academy in Kenner, Louisiana, inquired about our participation in an educational project introducing her junior students to archival research and the Amistad Research Center, we were pleased but thought "been there, done that."

These kinds of projects are an important part of connecting with new constituents and providing additional means for understanding and appreciation of the archives and archival functions. So when we met with the Bonnabel students, this group was immediately impressive and unique among school visitors.

Ms. Prado arranged the student visit to the Center well in advance, which facilitated avoidance of conflicts with researcher visits. Upon first arrival, it was apparent that this group was excellently prepared to maximize their Amistad exposure. They had already learned much of the Center's history dating back to the Amistad Incident. Several class members were familiar with our website and were able to raise questions about specific topics. Upon learning that Amistad is the definitive repository for Countee Cullen's papers and the special Cullen Online Project, student poet Dakarai Moton revealed special interest in Cullen and was awed while working with original copies of Cullen correspondence.

The following acknowledgements directed to staff after the visit provide insight into how mutually beneficial the partnership was between the Bonnabel students and Amistad staff.

Brandi Sellers wrote: ...Thank you for allowing my class to experience what your fantastic facility has to offer... When seeing classmates able to actually read historical documents and view photographs, I felt pride. Pride not held for only being African American, but pride that my classmates showed interest and had a rewarding experience.

Soundscriber audio discs from the Preston and Bonita Valien Papers.

As part of the ongoing Audiovisual Assessment project, funded by the National Historic Publication and Records Commission (NHPRC), Amistad has taken a closer look at its audio, video, and film recordings. Though often part of a larger manuscript collection, audiovisual materials have additional storage and preservation concerns. Playback capability is one of the most serious concerns for formats that are no longer used regularly. The Center can carefully house, catalog, and care for AV materials, but if we do not have access to the machines necessary to play them back, the content will be inaccessible to researchers.

We are presently examining the AV materials of the Preston and Bonita Valien Papers. Preston Valien served as chair of the Department of Sociology at Fisk University, succeeding President Charles S. Johnson. He also taught at Columbia University and Brooklyn College, and served as Cultural Attaché for the American Embassy in Nigeria from 1960-62 and as director of the academic programs branch of the U.S. Office of Education from 1967-73. Both Preston Valien and his wife, Bonita, also a prominent sociologist, were the authors of numerous publications and frequent contributors to scholarly journals, encyclopedias, and other reference works.

In addition to manuscript and photographic materials, the collection has a large number of Soundscriber audio discs containing the Valiens' correspondence dictation from the 1950s. Although similar to the typical phonograph records that remain in home music collections, these discs can be more difficult to care for and listen to. They are an unusual format to come across because as dictations, the recordings were never intended to be saved. A recording was made and given to a typist, who converted its contents to typewritten letters. The original disc was rarely kept, and the quality of the discs reflects this; they are fragile and were not designed to hold up over time. Fortunately for future generations of researchers, the Valiens preserved their recordings in good order.

The small, flexible Soundscriber discs were recorded on a special dictation machine that was also designed to play the discs back. The discs are a fairly rare find, and the original recording and playback machine is almost nonexistent. The needle that originally inscribed the discs is not the same size as a standard phonograph needle. Playback with a standard needle would damage the disc, and the recordings would be lost forever.

When researching turntables to handle the breadth of Amistad's phonograph collection, we consulted with the Museum of the American Printing House for the Blind in Louisville, Kentucky, and the University of Texas Libraries at Austin. With their input, we have chosen a turntable model that is flexible enough to handle different sizes and shapes of discs, from commercially pressed records to dictated inscriptions.

The purpose of creating an online publication of all surviving Countee Cullen correspondence is to make Cullen's primary documents conveniently available to scholars, students, and the general public. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Dr. Clifton Johnson, Amistad's Founding Director, and the committed support of Harlem Renaissance scholar Dr. Thomas Wirth, the Countee Cullen Correspondence Online Project began in the summer of 2008.

In 2011, private funding made it possible to hire a full-time employee to transcribe some 3,500 original and copied letters. Since February, over 500 letters have been transcribed and annotated. They include Cullen correspondence to and from poet Langston Hughes; philosopher Alain Locke; Fisk University President Charles S. Johnson; and novelist Dorothy West. Each letter provides historical information that informs the reader about the remarkable cultural, intellectual, and political development known as the Harlem Renaissance. The papers reveal Cullen's wide acquaintances with intellectual contemporaries, as well as his extensive travels throughout the United States and Europe to lecture and write. In the coming months, the correspondence with Cullen's first wife Yolande Du Bois, his best friend Harold Jackman, and fellow writers Arna Bontemps, Claude McKay, and Eric Walrond will be transcribed.

The software chosen to prepare the letters for internet access is Oxygen Extensible Markup Language (XML) Editor. Using this software, each letter goes through an initial phase of being encoded, checked by editors for accuracy, annotated with notes and biographical information, and saved in a master file. This preparation can take a few days to several weeks depending on the length and amount of biographical research required. In future phases of the project, an editorial board will review the editors' work for style and content, and all saved files will be transmitted to an ePublishing platform. Once complete, the use of this program will provide a well-formed XML document that is usable as an online publication, and freely accessible to all.

With a final goal of completing the entire corpus by 2013, funding is an issue. It is the Center's every intention that, with long term financial support from committed sponsors, the Cullen Project will become a valued resource and a model for future online scholarly editions in the field of African American literature and history.

Engagement with professional organizations and with colleagues at peer institutions is a priority for Amistad's staff. With the American Library Association (ALA) annual conference in New Orleans this past June and the preconference of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) of ALA held in nearby Baton Rouge, staff were invited to participate in both to share recent news about the Center's activities and share their views on the state of the library and archival worlds.

Executive Director Lee Hampton delivered a plenary address at the RBMS preconference on "Cultural Stewardship: The Challenge of Acquisition, Preservation, and Access in a Time of Perpetual Crisis." Director of Library and Reference Services Christopher Harter spoke on the Center's efforts toward diversity of staff, researchers, and donors as part of a panel sponsored by the RBMS Diversity Committee. Reference Archivist Andrew Salinas spoke during a panel on alternative methods of fundraising for libraries, archives, and museums at the ALA conference, while Audiovisual Archivist Brenda Flora participated in a panel for the ALA Video Round Table. In July, Director of Processing Laura Thomson, who has coordinated the processing of the records of the United Church Board for Homeland Ministries, attended the General Synod of the United Church of Christ (UCC), where she met with archivists from other institutions with UCC and Congregationalist-related holdings. It has been a busy summer, indeed!

President Barack Obama recently announced his intent to nominate former New Orleanian Adrienne O'Neal as Ambassador to the Republic of Cape Verde, an island country off the coast of Western Africa.

Ms. O'Neal has previously served as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U. S. Embassy in Lisbon, Director of the Office of Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy for Europe and Eurasian Affairs, and Deputy Press Secretary to the Director of National Drug Control Policy at the White House.

After graduating from Abramson High School in New Orleans, Ms. O'Neal received a B.A. from Spelman College and M.M.L. from Middlebury College.