JULY 2016
Amistad is committed to collecting, preserving, and providing open access to original materials that 
reference the social and cultural importance of America's ethnic and racial history,
the African Diaspora, human relations, and civil rights.
Visitors survey the posters at Amistad's booth.
Amistad  at the Essence Festival Community Zone
Visitors learn about the Center

Thousands of people come to New Orleans every Fourth of July weekend for the Essence Festival. ARC was right in the mix as a participating organization in the festival's Community Zone. Crowds experienced an amazing poster display of our civil rights, liberation movements, visual art, music, and literary collections. Many thanks to staff members Phillip Cunningham and Lee Facincani, and intern Christian Williams, for working so hard to create a dynamic presentation for festival attendees.

Did you know?  
ARC was one of the first cultural organizations to participate in the Essence Festival in 1994.  That year, ARC featured an exhibition from our fine art collection, Jacob Lawrence's Toussaint L'Ouverture Series.

Christian Williams inventories a new book donation.
Student Assistants Aid Center
Internships and experience

It has been another busy summer at the Center, but we have been fortunate to benefit from a lot of extra hands! Student interns and assistants have greatly aided Amistad in a variety of ways. From organizing archival collections to assisting with outreach and promotion, our young workers have been a tremendous help.

Students from McDonogh City Park Academy learn about the Amistad Research Center.
Summer Tours
Student visitors near and far

Summer is always a busy time for tour groups at Amistad. On June 28th, the Amistad hosted visitors from the United Kingdom. The Milton Abbey School visited the Center to learn about the Amistad court case, to view art from our collection and to observe our current exhibition. The junior high school students were very inquisitive and energetic. The group was involved in a local excursion of cultural institutions about slavery, and Amistad was one of their stops on the tour.
 
On May 18th, the Center also hosted two classes of 5th graders from McDonogh City Park Academy in New Orleans. The students were able to learn about the Center's collections and view archival materials related to African American civic and business leaders in New Orleans. They also viewed film from a 1950s Mardi Gras ball located in our audiovisual collection. It is always a pleasure to host students from international schools, as well as the city's local community.
Ruby Bridges and her fellow students at William Frantz Elementary School.
Film Grant Preserves History
Center receives third NFPF grant

Amistad is excited to announce the award of a 2016 Basic Preservation Grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation. The award will preserve an 8mm home movie depicting Ruby Bridges. The film was taken at William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans after Bridges integrated it as its first African American student in 1960. The grant will fund the creation of a new preservation master of the film, as well as a much needed access copy, which will be made available to researchers for viewing.


Harlequin figure by Richard Bruce Nugent.
Amistad Awarded IMLS Grants
Focus on community archives and digitization

The Amistad Research Center is pleased to announce the receipt of two grants from The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The first is for a project that will seek to expand the diversity of the nation's digital memory. For this collaborative project, Amistad was awarded a National Leadership Grant for Libraries to host a series of meetings that will focus on integrating community archives into the National Digital Platform. The second grant will assist the Center in digitizing the remainder of its fine arts collection in order to increase access, including a large collection of works by Richard Bruce Nugent recently acquired by the Center.

Read more about these grant projects here and here.

CORE workers making signs, circa 1960s
Image from the Ronnie Moore papers.
Center Unveils New Digital Collections and Exhibition
Sponsored by Patrick F. Taylor Foundation

The Center recently unveiled four new digital collections in the Tulane University Digital Library/Louisiana Digital Library. These collections include two oral history collections conducted by New Orleans writer Tom Dent, photographs from the Ronnie Moore Papers, and documents related to the 1841 U.S. Supreme Court case Amistad v. United States. The collections are listed on Amistad's Digital Projects page. 

For more detailed information on each digital collection, view our blog.

The Center is also proud to announce its fourth contribution to the Google Cultural Institute (GCI). "The Things We Do For Ourselves: African American Civic Leadership in New Orleans" is a new online exhibition that highlights the evolution of African American-owned and run businesses, organizations, and institutions in New Orleans.

The exhibition and others can be viewed on Amistad's Exhibitions page.

Development of these collections and exhibition was part of a K-12 education outreach project sponsored by the Patrick F. Taylor Foundation. The Center thanks the Taylor Foundation for helping make these online resources available.

The Laundress by Henry O. Tanner
The Laundress by Henry O. Tanner. Oil on Canvas, 1885.

Amistad Research Center Joins Artstor
Digital library of art works

This year, ARC joined Artstor to provide public access to over 300 digital images of its fine art collection. Users can research 20th century masters from ARC's Aaron Douglas Collection, including works by Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Hale Woodruff, and Aaron Douglas.
 
Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Artstor is a non-profit organization that digitizes and provides high-quality digitized images from cultural organizations, museums, and academic institutions. Its digital image library contains over 2 million images in the humanities and social sciences. Users can view, present, and manage images for educational and research projects.

For more information on ARC at Artstor, go to the Artstor announcement.

Three Dudes by Ben Jones. Silkscreen, 1974. Used with permission of the artist.
Exhibition Opens on Black Arts Movement
On display through December 16

As part of the commemoration of its 50th anniversary, the Amistad Research Center is celebrating another anniversary, that of the development of the Black Arts Movement (BAM). The Center's manuscript, library, and art collections are especially rich in BAM-related materials, which make for an engaging exhibition. Materials will be on display through December 16th.



Black Arts Movement Conference
Co-sponsored by Amistad Research Center

Amistad is the proud co-sponsor of the Black Arts Movement-Southern Style Conference that will be held September 9-11, 2016, on the campus of Dillard University. Conference papers will present new research on the movement, and speakers will include Mona Lisa Saloy, Kalamu ya Salaam, Jerry W. Ward Jr., Mwende Katwiwa, and Haki R. Madhubuti. More information and attendance registration can be found on the conference website.



Blog Series Highlights Center Collections
50 Years | 50 Collections

The Amistad Research Center is currently seven months into our 50th anniversary blog series and it has been a success! The Center has received so much feedback and engagement regarding our blog posts. We hope to continue gaining interest from our readers and from our fellow researchers. A new post is published on the Center's blog every Monday. The subjects that have been covered so far deal with Native American newspapers, Jewish scholars at HBCUs, the New Orleans Chinese community, LGBTQ collections, African American history, and many other engaging themes. 

Amistad's blog is located here.
The Chicago Friends of the Amistad Research Center
37 years of support

The Chicago Friends of the Amistad Research Center was founded by educator Irma Kingsley Johnson, Rev. Dr. Kenneth B. Smith, and Mr. Warren Marr in June 1979.  For 37 years, the Chicago Chapter has raised awareness about ARC's collections, worked to identify and collect archival materials for the Center, and created community programs to increase membership and fundraising for the Center.

Each year in the month of June, the Chicago Friends host a community awards program in honor of Mrs. Johnson and her support of the Amistad Research Center. This year, honorees included Mr. Mitchel Smith, Branch Manager of the Whitney Young Library, Rev. Dr. Terrell N. Miff, Pastor and community youth leader, Mrs. Sirota B. Vincente, educator, and Mr. William A. Johnson, music director and educator. They also honored five high school students - Brittany Johnson, Devin O'Bannon, Mina Campbell, Kamari Baker, and Rashad Neal - for their outstanding academic achievements and community service.

We want to thank Mrs. Willie Lee Hart, President of the Chicago Friends of the Amistad Research Center, and the members of the Friends for their continued dedication in supporting our mission.
New Additions to Staff

Jasmaine Talley, Archivist
Nice to meet you everyone! My name is Jasmaine Talley and I'm excited to begin working at the Amistad Research Center. I was born and raised in Georgia and I received my BA in History from Georgia State University in Atlanta, where I specialized in 20th century U.S. History. I chose to become an archivist because I knew it was the perfect use of my history degree. After that decision, I spent more than a year at the Auburn Avenue Research Library helping to process collections and developing my interest preserving and making accessible materials created by minority populations wherever they may be. I was accepted into the MLIS Program at LSU and moved to Baton Rouge in 2014. I definitely got a well-rounded education--digital curation, traditional preservation, and records management. For two years, I worked as a graduate assistant in the Paul M. Hebert Law Center where I created software informational tutorials for faculty and other patrons. During my final semester, I did a directed independent study on the use of archives as instruments of social justice. After studying the social movements of the 1960s, it's so interesting to see current social movements play out through social media. It's absolutely amazing and I want to be a part of preserving it for future generations.

On a personal note, I recently got married in May and I'm loving it! I love my video games (especially Pokemon games), writing fantasy, and football. I'm greatly looking forward to exploring New Orleans and being a part of the community.

Phillip Cunningham, Library Reference Assistant/Cataloger
Hi, I'm Phillip Cunningham and I have been at the Amistad Research Center since October 2015. I am very excited to join the staff at the Amistad as their Library Reference Assistant and Cataloger.

I earned by BA in History in 2011 from Kansas State University with a primary interest in local African-American History. Last year, I earned my Masters in Library and Information Science from Pratt Institute in New York City. While studying in New York, I had the delightful pleasure of interning in the Jean Blackwell Hutson Research & Reference Division of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture as a BNY-Mellon Library Pre-professional as well as at the Gilder-Lehrman Collection, housed at the New-York Historical Society.

So far I have thoroughly enjoyed working with patrons, learning the collections, and playing a part in all of the exciting programs and events we are coordinating for the Amistad 50th Anniversary. I am very fortunate to be part of such a wonderful team here at the Amistad Research Center!

Other Staff News...

Christopher Harter, Director of Library and Reference Services, presented a paper at the annual conference of the Rare Book and Manuscript Section of the American Library Association in June. His paper traced the history of the "Archives of Negro History," a 1960s community archiving effort in New Orleans.
 
Laura J. Thomson, Director of Processing, attended the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) convening of grantees in the Museum Grants for African American History and Culture Program in May. Amistad received funding support from IMLS in 2014 for a two-year project to process fifteen archival collections highlighting the accomplishments of African Americans in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) professions. The convening was an opportunity for Amistad to connect to over 40 museum professionals from African American museums and Historically Black Colleges and Universities.