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Vol. 26:2 ISSN 0160-8460 June 1998
From the Editor
In addition to our regular coverage of current Commission events, this issue is devoted to the NHPRC's efforts to preserve and make available to the public the records of African-American institutions and organizations and the papers of prominent African-American individuals. In the past, much of the historical voice of African-American individuals and institutions was not heard because the primary research materials, so essential for scholars and researchers, had not been collected and made available.
Through its grants for archival preservation and publication, the Commission has helped save, preserve, and make accessible valuable documentary collections important for understanding African Americans and the important issues surrounding their lives. It has supported a number of projects at institutions around the country to rescue records in deteriorating condition and to arrange, describe, and produce finding aids to make the records available to researchers. It has also supported projects to collect, edit, and publish microform and book editions of documents relating to African-American history. In revealing significant new information and insights in numerous areas of our past, these collections of papers and edited publications are changing the way we look at our history and how that history is taught in our schools.
We begin this issue with the White House's announcement of a million-dollar award to five Founding Fathers papers projects as part of its Millennium Council's "Save America's Treasures" program. We also welcome our new executive director, Ann Newhall. Loren Schweninger then explains the purpose and the accomplishments of the Race and Slavery Petitions Project. His article is followed by Carter B. Cue's story of efforts to preserve the records of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, or HBCUs. Our next article covers the publication of the Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.
We then come to a report on the Commission's June meeting, and welcome our newest Commission member, Peggy Grafeld, who succeeds William Z. Slany as the representative of the State Department. Next, Geoffrey P. Williams presents an account of the work of the Capital District Black History Project, which resulted in the preservation of the records of numerous area African-American organizations by the archives of the University at Albany, SUNY. We then explore the publication of the papers of Frederick Douglass, arguably the most prominent African American of the mid-19th century. We also note the receipt of the American Library Association's Dewey Award by Winston Tabb, who represents the Librarian of Congress on the Commission.
E. Murell Dawson then provides an account of the efforts of Florida A & M University's Black Archives to preserve the records of Florida's all-Black elementary and secondary schools from the segregation era, many of which were virtually abandoned after integration and rescued by concerned members of the African-American community. We next present articles on the Freedom and Southern Society Project and the Howard Thurman Papers Project. It is then our sad duty to euloge a great historian and documentary editor, Arthur S. Link.
We note the publication of Documents of the Emerging Nation: U.S. Foreign Relations, 1775-1789, a college-level reader derived from the Commission's award-winning three-volume documentary edition The Emerging Nation: A Documentary History of the Foreign Relations of the United States under the Articles of Confederation, 1780-1789. We also report on a ceremony marking the publication of two new volumes by the First Federal Congress project, after which we report the availability of a pre-collegiate educational kit on U.S. foreign policy, 1783-1789, derived from The Emerging Nation.
We then present our regular report on records products and publications recently received. On another sad note, we observe the passing of Lillian B. Miller, editor of the Peale Family Papers and Historian of American Culture at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
Our back-page photograph depicts a group of Florida African-American school-bus drivers in 1948. We hope you enjoy this issue; at 24 pages, it's the largest we've ever attempted!
