Helton, Laura E.

OUR SYNOPSIS: Laura E. Helton illuminates how Black people shaped historical understandings of the United States by building archives and foregrounding Black stories in the first half of the twentieth century. By focusing on six individual collectors, she highlights “the intellectual stakes and gendered politics of acquisition, arrangement, and classification—the labors that made Black archives possible.” (29) She frames this work as in open defiance of societal attempts to silence Black histories, a struggle for preservation “by and for Black communities.” (32) Focusing on Black community branch libraries, HBCUs, and Black home libraries, she shows how collectors carved out space and built organizing infrastructure for Black memory. This “intellectual work of Black collectors was both tactile and social. They assembled files and scrapbooks, but they also assembled people, turning their collections into gathering spaces for the study of Black ideas.” (37) Storytelling was and remains a collective endeavor. Helton identifies “a core set of three principles in Black archiving,” that are to value “records of Black knowledge,” “to order—and when necessary, disorder—Black knowledge,” and “to take risks, at once physical and intellectual, to provide access to Black ideas.” (55-56)