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In 1926, Carter G. Woodson established “Negro History Week” as a celebration of African American history. Each year there was a theme that explored historical issues, bringing the Black experience to the public eye. Continuing this tradition, every year the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) creates a Black History Month theme that “explores historical issues of importance to people of African descent and race relations in America.” 

 This year the theme is “The Black Family: Representation, Identity, and Diversity.” “Its representation, identity, and diversity have been reverenced, stereotyped, and vilified from the days of slavery to our own time.” Each Wednesday this month, the Program in African American History (PAAH) will share an image of a Black family from our collections, recognizing their struggles in keeping their families together, their passion in keeping traditions & the love they had for one another. 

 We begin with this photograph of an African American middle-class family from 1936. The image depicts several generations in front of a Christmas tree. 

On January 1, 1863 President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation that “freed all those enslaved.” 

This woodcut image on the cover of “Negro’s Friend: On the Ease, Safety, and Advantages of Liberating the Enslaved Negroes” depicts an emancipated Black family with work tools in the background and accompanying text that reads “Such is the great Author of our nature’s pleasure, who has made man free, and assigned to him the earth, that he might cultivate his possession with the sweat of his brow; but still should possess his liberty.” 

Here’s the story of “Old Joseph, the Patriarch.” On Christmas Eve in the 1850s, Joseph an enslaved man, learned that he would soon be sold, leaving his wife and child behind. This image depicts his family and others trying to comfort one another offering words of wisdom. While this particular image depicts a fictional story, stories like this transpired all the time during slavery!

-Jasmine Smith, African American History Subject Specialist and Reference Librarian

Congratulations to the 2019 RBMS Conference scholarship recipients, including our own Jasmine Smith, African American History Subject Specialist and Reference Librarian! 

Each year the Program in African American History offers a Post-doctoral fellowship to scholars researching African American history prior to 1900. The Mellon Scholars Research Fellowship Program aims to promote research in the collections of the Library Company and to enhance the production of scholarly work in African American history of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.

The 2017/2018 recipient is Dr. Cheryl Hicks from the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. In 2010, Dr. Hicks published her first book entitled, “Talk with You like a Women: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890-1935”. She is currently using African American collections here at LCP to research and write her second book, “Black Enchantress: Hannah Elias, Interracial Sex, Murder, and Civil Rights in Jim Crow New York”. PAAH offers our best wishes in all of Dr. Hicks’s future endeavors.

Check out her blog post to learn more about her research project and her time at LCP!

http://librarycompany.org/2018/…/10/fellows-spotlight-hicks/