Following the Return Migration of Black Americans to the U.S. South

Summer Perritt is a History PhD candidate at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Her work looks at the return migration of Black Americans to the U.S. South in the post-civil rights period. Her project consists of oral history interviews with migrants as well as traditional archival sources such as those collected by the Stuart A. Read More …

Sybil Kein’s Transnational Louisiana Creole and Exchanges with Michel Fabre

Rachel Kirk is a PhD student in French Studies at Louisiana State University. She is interested in how colonial-shaped environmental changes and disasters have influenced literary and cultural production in Louisiana and the broader Francophone and Creole-speaking Caribbean. Rachel is a recipient of an African American History and Culture short term fellowship for visiting researchers.  Read More …

Operation SEEK: Finding New Pathways for Collegiate & Carceral Cross-Education in the Archive of artist Benny Andrews (1930-2006) 

Sinclair Spratley is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Art History & Archeology at Columbia University. She is the 2024 recipient of the Benny Andrews Award, which provides funding for researchers exploring the collection of visual artist, teacher, activist, critic, and writer Benny Andrews. I had the privilege of spending time in the vast Read More …

The Last Slave Ship: The Wanderer Logbook

In 1858, the American schooner, The Wanderer, sailed along the Eastern coast of the United States. The vessel’s log, written by an unknown sailor, contains simple and brief entries that record the weather, speed, and course of the yacht. There are a few details concerning other ships and visitors on the Wanderer scattered throughout the log. However, the Read More …

Uncovering Enslavement on the Main Emory Campus: Two Receipts from the Civil War Era

Mark Auslander is a historical anthropologist and former faculty member at Emory College and Oxford College. Let us consider two receipts issued during the Civil War in the town of Decatur, Georgia. Both cast light on the structures and experiences of enslavement on the lands that would become, many decades later, parts of the main Read More …

In Memoriam: On the Passing of Reverend Doctor Joseph Echols Lowery

  The recent passing of Reverend Doctor Joseph Echols Lowery on March 27, 2020 has been sobering to say the least.  The fiery minister, civil rights pioneer, human rights advocate, and challenger of injustice everywhere was not only a truth speaker, he demonstrated and encouraged the necessary actions that could and did lead to the Read More …

Examining the “Fluidity of Citizenship”: My Residency at the Stuart A. Rose Library, Emory University

In fall 2017, independent scholar Dorrie Wilson conducted research in Rose Library’s Michel Fabre archives of African American Arts and Letters and the James Baldwin Letters to David Moses. Michel Fabre and Me: The Rose Library residency was my first opportunity to work with a renowned collection of African-Americana on my independent research project: “The City Read More …

Words are Power: Remembering the Storyteller Julius Lester

Among the thousands of authors found in the Stuart A. Rose Library, Julius Lester (1939-2018) is a giant. An essayist, writer, folklorist, civil rights activist, and teacher, Lester’s work has been an integral part of helping African Americans maintain the oral tradition of storytelling.  Through his creative explorations into the past, we are more aware Read More …

The Billops-Hatch Butterfly Project

“When I leave our loft, it will be feet first, or in a butterfly net.” – Jim Hatch, April 18, 2004 In the 1970s, Camille Billops and James V. Hatch started inviting friends and students into their New York City loft to record public conversations with visual artists, writers, poets, actors, and musicians. During this Read More …

Sigma Pi Phi Records Come to Emory

Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library is pleased to report acquisition of the current archives of the Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity, the oldest African American Greek-letter fraternity in the United States. Known as the Boulé, the organization was initially organized in Philadelphia in 1904 as a post-graduate society for black professionals. Read More …

Hammurabi in the (MARBL) House

Two volumes in MARBL open a fascinating window onto the world of Black Chicago in the late 1920s and provide firm evidence of the vibrancy of what has been characterized as the “Chicago Black Renaissance.”  Published respectively in 1927 and 1929, the 1927 Intercollegian Wonder Book or 1779-The Negro in Chicago-1927 and The Book of Read More …