Preservation
Here you will find resources about preservation's important role in nurturing healing within communities, which is a vital step in telling the story. Without preservation, artifacts and records deteriorate, essentially vanishing history. Click each image to review resources.
African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund
Article
This source offers a detailed background history of African American museums and disenfranchisement of preservation. The reader will gain an understanding of how systemic racism and white privilege have created preservation gaps that essentially erase African American history.
Evaluation: This is an incredibly informative article detailing the history of historic preservation. It breaks down how racism has resulted in the disparity of funding for projects and museums. The article focuses on the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund and its executive director, Brent Leggs, who has extensive experience with developing preservation projects. The information in this article is a foundation for museum and archival professionals to see the importance of inclusive preservation and the chain reaction of systemic racism throughout America’s history. It also offers some solid examples of museums and organizations that are successfully diversifying preservation.
Case Study: Ackworth, Georgia and the Power of Community
Article
This is part one of two, presented by the National Council on Public History and focuses on a community project in Ackworth, Georgia. It details how the project began, as well as the partnership between the city of Ackworth, Georgia, and Kennesaw State University’s Department of Museums, Archives, and Rare Books (located in Kennesaw, GA). Doyal Hill Park in Ackworth, Georgia, is a historically African American neighborhood and its history was often left out of the story, which this project corrects.
Evaluation: This is an exciting project because it involved the community, both on a local citizen level and between the city officials and a well-known area university. It is a hopeful example of the positive things that can happen when we work together and use history for a good purpose and with truth. It also speaks of the uplifting power of history to empower the community. Part Two focuses on how they took research and devloped it into an outreach exhibit. Read it here.
Uncovering African American History in Oregon
Article
This article highlights two preservation projects related to Oregon’s African American history and explains the valuable importance of its preservation.
Evaluation: The author gives good insight into the challenges faced within the realm of preservation and African American history. Two groups, Oregon Black Pioneers and the Oregon Commission on Black Affairs are highlighted as key organizations overcoming these challenges. This will be helpful even for archivists, historians, and museum professionals in other states because it offers two successful examples from which to learn.