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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