I’m spending today and tomorrow in the Archives at Tuskegee University; I’m working on a handful of projects about racist violence and Southern economic development, and a lot of the data and information I’m using is drawn from work done by scholars at Tuskegee. It has been an interesting study in the differences between how information traveled in 1910 or 1960 and how it travels in 2010.
Yesterday, I finished going through a box of letters and reports from Jessie P. Guzman. Guzman was director of the Institute’s Department of Records and Research from the late 1940s through the middle of the 1960s. There’s some interesting information about the costs of preparing and publishing the Department’s work, requests for examination or complimentary copies of some of their publications, reviews of their work, etc. There’s also an enormous number of letters.
There’s also an interesting parallel between then and now. There were a lot of different organizations and groups working on behalf of African-Americans and issuing reports on African-American economic, political, and social conditions. These organizations included the NAACP, the Tuskegee Institute, and Atlanta University. The scholars and leaders associated with these organizations had different goals and different philosophies—see, for example, the debates between W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington—but they were fundamentally involved in a cooperative process that ultimately achieved quite a lot.
