Posts Tagged ‘Black History’
“If We Don’t Preserve It,
There’s No Other Resource”
The Rochester Museum & Science Center Ensures Local Black History Will Always Have a Voice Where to start? With the late Howard W. Coles, a Rochester, New York journalist, author, publisher, broadcaster, civil rights champion, real estate agent, insurance salesman, court attendant, public housing advocate and loving father? With his only daughter, Joan Coles Howard, who has furthered Coles’ legacy of community activism and ensured that his efforts have been protected, preserved and digitized to tell the story of six…
Archiving Washington: The People’s Archive Creates Accessible D.C. History
Timing is a funny thing. After learning about the journey of The People’s Archive (originally known as the Special Collections department of the DC Public Library) and their mission to create more efficient digitization, timing seems to look less funny and more like fate (or really good planning). Over the past few years, the DC Public Library’s archive staff has laid significant groundwork for advancing their digitization and customer service. Essential elements of this plan came together just in time…
Archiving “The Greatest”: Digitizing Rare History for the Muhammad Ali Center
In a time when the civil rights movement was at its peak and racial divides spread deep and wide, one African American teen and eleven established white businessmen joined together for the sake of success, boxing and the future of “The Greatest,” Muhammad Ali. In today’s blog, we’re combining history and present day to show how knowledgeable teams (in this case, the Louisville Sponsoring Group and The Crowley Company) can provide already successful entities (Muhammad Ali and the Muhammad Ali…
Digitizing The Reporter: Archives of Akron’s Only African American Newspaper Online
Each February, Crowley highlights a digitization project that has bearing on Black History Month. Today we feature the newspaper digitization of The Reporter, which has been documenting the African American community in Akron, Ohio since 1969. Past posts discuss an 1841 edition of the Morning Star, a Freewill Baptist publication that advocated for abolition, the digitized records of The Central Lunatic Asylum for Colored Insane and the research of tax assessment and slave records of Cecil County, Maryland. Each project, including…
176 Year Old Newspaper Fights Slavery; Echos Today’s News
Last August we received a plea via email: “We want a scan of four pages of a fragile 1841 newspaper that is approximately 16 7/8″ x 22 3/4″. I suspect this is too small a job for your company, but I thought I’d try. We are a small museum with a pitifully small budget.” How could we resist? What Jane Rissler, director of the Jefferson County (W Va.) Museum and author of the email, didn’t know is that we keep…
Cecil County Records Aid Research on Black History
February is the month dedicated to honoring the contributions of African Americans to U.S. history, chosen in part to coincide with the birthdays of Frederick Douglass, an escaped Maryland slave and national leader of the abolitionist movement, and Abraham Lincoln, the nation’s 16th President, under whose term slavery was formally abolished. On the heels of a preservation project on which Crowley Imaging and the Historical Society of Cecil County (Md.) (HSCC) collaborated, we spoke to historian and HSCC board member, Mike…
Saving Black History: Digitizing Records of The Central Lunatic Asylum for Colored Insane
The name alone is enough to conjure images from television’s “American Horror” yet this is no scriptwriter’s drama. Instead, the records of The Central Lunatic Asylum For Colored Insane tell the stories of tens of thousands of real African American psychiatric patients dating back more than 100 years. Except for the intervention of Dr. King Davis, director and professor of the University of Texas at Austin (UT) Institute for Urban Policy Research & Analysis, these stories may well have…