Remaking the Past: Collecting, Collectivity, and the Emergence of Black Archival Publics, 1915-1950

This dissertation charts the making of early-twentieth-century African American archives in order to understand the relationship between historical recuperation, forms of racial imagination, and black social movements. It focuses on five collectors in New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC: bibliophile Arturo Schomburg; scrapbook-maker L. S. Alexander Gumby; librarians Vivian Harsh and Dorothy Porter; and historian L. D. Reddick. At a moment when most scholarly and popular accounts rendered blackness as unlettered and absent from history, these collectors assembled texts by African diasporic subjects, organized “Negro collections” in local and university libraries, and made such collections active sites of black public life. In so doing, they did more than simply bequeath to the future a storehouse of research materials. They also made Schomburg’s urgent declaration—that “the American Negro must remake his past in order to make the future”—a recurring idiom of black movement-building in the twentieth century. My research draws upon records that hide in plain sight: those of, as well as in, archives. Elucidating the stakes of what appear to be perfunctory artifacts—catalog cards, bibliographies, or price lists for books, for example—this work offers new insights for the fields of African American, gender, and American intellectual history, as well as for literary and archival studies. First, in locating collectors’ fraught deliberations about which artifacts might bear value—both market value and social value—for the black present, it complicates accounts that have portrayed the Negro History movement as singularly preoccupied with the veneration of race heroes. Second, while recent studies have examined archives as a technology of state or colonial control, this dissertation positions archive-building as a mode of counter-public authorship in the context of entrenched racial violence and segregation. And, by treating genres like bibliographies and classification schemas as efforts to map the scope of blackness, rather than as mere lists, my work challenges gendered assumptions about the boundaries of intellectual production. More specifically, it brings into focus a group of knowledge workers—often women—who authored information systems and infrastructures of memory in lieu of monographs or treatises. The scaffolding these collectors built proved remarkably durable. Nearly every major collection used today for the study of black culture in the United States originated roughly a hundred years ago. And yet, scholars have asked neither what these archives meant to their founding generation, nor how these archives underwrote imbricated claims to rights and roots in later decades. In answering these questions, this dissertation reveals a scaffolding for black historical consciousness across the long arc of the freedom struggle.