No project description available

To support the arrangement and description of ten collections of organizational records, personal papers, and multi-media materials related to the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

The purchase of preservation supplies and environmental monitoring equipment and the provision of specialized training to preserve the center's manuscript, rare book, fine art, and oral history collections chronicling the African American experience from the Civil War to the present. The collections include the papers of prominent artists and political leaders such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Mary McLeod Bethune, Ellis Marsalis, and works of art by Jacob Lawrence, Henry Ossawa Tanner and Romare Bearden.

The staff at the Amistad Research Center (ARC) has recently turned their attention to creating a physical storage environment more in line with prescribed professional archival standards. Based on recommendations made in a recent (2009) Conservation Assessment Program (CAP) report, this grant will allow Center staff to purchase envirnmental monitoring equipment in both of ARC’s storage facilities, to obtain training in implementing this monitoring system, to purchase preservation supplies to improve the storage conditions of the Center’s most vulnerable audiovisual materials, and to attend a workshop on improving the physical environment for archival storage. At the conclusion of this project, ARC staff will develop a plan for storage renovation based on the information from the workshop, the data from the data loggers, and the previous CAP report.

The arrangement and description of 600 linear feet of archival materials from the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund (1967-1990) and the Emergency Land Fund (1971-1986), which document African American land ownership and agricultural communities in the southern United States.

This project will assist the Amistad Research Center to increase access to two large sets of related organizational records that pertain to African American land ownership and agriculture in the rural south from the 1960s through the 1990s. This project will entail the completion of archival processing for the two targeted organizational records collections, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund (FSC/LAF) and The Emergency Land Fund (ELF). Largely unavailable to researchers, due to their size and lack of organization, these records document an overlooked, but fundamental aspect of African American civil rights – access to land and to sustainable economic prosperity.

To support work on nine archival collections that document the role of local and national organizations in civil rights activities during the past two decades.