black history

Library Receives CPA Grant to Digitize “Black Art and Joy in Boston (and Beyond)”

Black and white image of Elma Lewis writing at a desk while wearing a cap and gown
Elma Lewis at the New England Conservatory of Music where she was conferred an honorary degree in 1977

The Northeastern University Library is proud to announce that the Archives and Special Collections has been awarded a City of Boston Community Preservation Act (CPA) grant to fund the project Black Art and Joy in Boston (and Beyond): Elma Lewis and the National Center of Afro-American Artists. This grant of almost $460,000 will support the digitization, cataloging, and publication of primary source materials from four archival collections that document the extraordinary work of Elma Lewis (1921-2004) and the cultural institutions she founded.

Dan Cohen, Vice President for Information Collaboration and Dean of the Northeastern University Library, said, “The University Archives and Special Collections department carefully preserves and protects access to some of the deep history and stories of Boston’s Black community. This project will augment and complement their and the Library’s Digital Production team’s effort to digitize significant portions of the Freedom House’s historical collection. We are thrilled to partner with the City of Boston and the Community Preservation team on this project.”

Lewis was a transformative force who trained a full generation of African American dancers, singers, musicians, actors, and visual artists in Boston. She formed the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts in 1950 and established the National Center of Afro-American Artists in 1968, along with its museum in 1969. Her outsized influence on the Black arts movement in Boston, and how her ideas and techniques spread nationally and internationally, represents a crucial chapter in the city’s cultural history.

Black and white image of ballet dance class
A ballet class at the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts, 1975
A green program for the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts Children's Theatre presentation of FACES (A Play with Music)
A program for a children’s play at the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts in 1981

This project amplifies the voices of those who were in Lewis’s orbit as teachers, collaborators, or students. It also highlights the influence of Afrocentric organizations on Boston, a necessary element to understanding Black civil rights work in the city and the rich network of organizations and individuals focused on community-building and empowerment.

The digitized collections will shed light on the decades of labor and coalition-building that are foundational to Boston’s existing Black arts infrastructure. By publishing them online, we make this history accessible to Bostonians at any time and for any purpose, while also reaching larger local and national audiences through participation in Digital Commonwealth and the Digital Public Library of America.

The curricular potential of this collection represents one of its most valuable forms of impact. The project will build on the successful Boston Public Schools Desegregation Collection, a collaboratively built collection of scanned archival materials documenting the desegregation of Boston’s public schools, in collaboration with the district itself. That project demonstrated how archival materials can be integrated into K-12 curriculum design, bringing primary source materials directly into classrooms across the city.

An archival box from the Elma Lewis collection, with a selection of photos and papers
A box of archival materials from National Center of Afro-American Artists records and some of its contents

These digital collections will enable Bostonians, including relatives and friends of those who appear in the collections, to access this evidence of their community’s rich cultural history. The materials will be freely available online, searchable, and integrated with our existing digital collections to provide a deeper and richer pool of resources illustrating the activities and accomplishments of Boston’s Black residents and leaders.

As we embark on this preservation effort, we honor not only Elma Lewis’s remarkable legacy but also the ongoing vitality of the Black arts movement in Boston that she helped establish. Through the CPA’s support, we ensure that future generations will have access to these invaluable records of creativity, resilience, and community building.

For more information about the project, please contact Giordana Mecagni at g.mecagni@northeastern.edu or 617-373-8318.

To learn more about what collections from Elma Lewis we hold, visit our research guide Finding Elma Lewis in the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections.

This blog post was co-written by Giordana Mecagni, Head of Archives and Special Collections, and Molly Brown, Reference and Outreach Archivist.

The HistoryMakers Digital Archive: An Essential Resource for African-American History

Looking for a primary source for an essay or digital project? Do you want to know more about, say, the Montgomery Bus Boycott from someone who lived through it? Or are you just bored and looking for something educational to watch? Well, dear reader, have I got the archive for you.

I’d like to present to you the HistoryMakers Digital Archive, a video collection of oral history interviews that is available to all Northeastern students, faculty, and staff. With a focus on African-American history, the Digital Archive is a resource that can be both useful and fascinating to everyone in academia, even if they’re not studying history.

A collage of notable African Americans surrounding the HistoryMakers logo

So, what is oral history? It’s certainly not the history of public speaking or how humans dealt with cavities, nor is it simply anecdotes passed by word of mouth. The Oral History Association defines it as “a field of study and a method of gathering, preserving and interpreting the voices and memories of people, communities, and participants in past events.” Besides being the oldest form of history-gathering, oral history holds special significance to African Americans and other groups of the African diaspora: Not only do many African peoples have long, storied traditions—perhaps most famously, that of the West African griot—that venerate the keepers of oral history as professionals who are just as vital to the community as the soldier or the healer. Further, due to historical laws that either made it illegal or difficult for African Americans to be taught how to read and write, oral history has been one of the crucial ways that we can learn about certain events and periods. For example, during the Great Depression, the U.S. government commissioned a collection of oral history interviews from formerly enslaved people across 17 states. The collection of transcribed interviews, which is available online, is an incredibly valuable resource in broadening your understanding of the experiences of Black people during slavery.

The HistoryMakers Digital Archive follows in this honorable tradition. It compiles oral history interviews with nearly 2,700 historically significant Americans of African descent, designated as “HistoryMakers.” They’re significant for a variety of reasons, but all have made some notable contribution to the fields of medicine, art, music, politics, technology, science, literature, journalism, and more.

The archive includes interviews that provide insight into the lives and deeds of some of the most well-known people in the world—John Lewis, Whoopi Goldberg, Angela Davis, Harry Belafonte, Barack Obama—as well as many other fascinating folks worth learning about who you might not have known about. For instance, there’s Elma Lewis, a Roxbury native who founded her own art school here in Boston. There’s Ed Bullins, a noted playwright and former professor at Northeastern. And then there’s Sylvester Monroe, a journalist who recounts the perils he faced while covering the desegregation of schools in Boston. Heck, I even found an interview from William Ward, the former mayor of my hometown of Chesapeake, Virginia. And that’s just scratching the surface. You can watch interviews from literally thousands of HistoryMakers, each of which offer their own take on their fields, their lives, and the historical events that shaped them.

Part of the beauty of the Digital Archive is how simple it is to use: after spending just a handful of minutes on the website, you’ll more than likely get the hang of it. But if you’d like a step-by-step guide on how to access, navigate, and utilize it, I’ve created a LibGuide that will hopefully be helpful.

In addition, HistoryMakers is hosting a contest in honor of Black History Month. Learn more and sign up here.

Have any further questions about the Digital Archive? You can contact me directly at moyler.h@northeastern.edu or send a note attached to a carrier pigeon to [redacted] Street in Mission Hill.

February Exhibits @ Snell Library

NU Student Groups on Campus Have you been thinking about joining a NU student group? Snell Library is highlighting student groups on campus and the contributions they make to the Northeastern community. Take a look at the groups that have exhibited. You might find something to spark your interest!
  • Campus Girl Scouts
  • NU Barkada
  • Spectrum Literary Arts Magazine
  • Distilled Harmony
  • Sigma Delta Tau
  • Nor’easters A Capella
The exhibit will be up through the month of February in the foyer of Snell Library, so come and check it out. Also in the library exhibit case is an exhibit celebrating Black History month. This exhibit, put together by Kantigi Camara, Head Librarian, O’Bryant African American Institute Library, celebrates the lives of African American men and women who have made an impact on American life and culture. Come and check out the posters and statues. It is a great visual exhibit!