Dienstag, 11. Oktober 2011

Amistad Research Center

Tuesday, October 4, started with a visit at the Amistad Research Center on the campus of Tulane University. Christopher Harter, Director of Library and Reference Services introduced us to the history and background of the facility and afterwards gave us a very interesting tour through the current exhibition The Revolution Will Not Be...: Print Culture of the Civil Rights Movement.

The Amistad Research Center is named after the Amistad incident in 1839, a slave revolt aboard the ship La Amistad. More than two months after the initial mutiny, the ship eventually reached the coast of the United States where the enslaved people were charged with piracy(mutiny?) and murder and put in jail. A group of abolitionists formed the Amistad Committee and fought for the freedom of the Africans. The case eventually went to the US Supreme Court which ruled in their favor since the international slave trade had already been stopped officially. The Amistad Committee developed into the American Missionary Association (AMA), an organization which primarily established schools for formerly enslaved people. Amongst others, Fisk University in Nashville evolved from these efforts, where the Amistad Research Center was eventually founded in 1966. In 1987 it was moved to the campus of Tulane University in New Orleans.

The collections of the Amistad Research Center include more than 15 million manuscripts, 250.000 photos, oral histories, videos, and pieces of art. Most of the materials are donated to the center by individuals and organizations. One of the focus areas is the history of New Orleans and Louisiana, a branch of the collection which proved to be particularly valuable after Hurricane Katrina in 2005: Many residents of New Orleans, in fact, came to the center to search for lost family documents such as photos which, for example, had been preserved in the collection of newspapers.

The center also curates temporary exhibitions. The current one is titled The Revolution Will Not Be...: Print Culture of the Civil Rights Movement and shows how various groups used the different outlets of the changing media landscape in the Civil Rights Movement. This includes flyers and posters, e.g. produced by the Black Panthers, and African American newspapers such as the Freedom’s Journal. One piece in the exhibition we found particularly interesting and entertaining, namely the ‘dollar bills’ that were printed for Dick Gregory’s presidential campaign in 1968. The bills showed the portrait of the candidate who ran for the Freedom and Peace Party and although they were hardly to be confused with real money they still worked, for example, in change machines.

Christina

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