Glad Tidings 2012 -- Updates and Themes

Glad tidings for researchers! Our web presence is growing, with the online appearance of the Claude and ZerNona Black Papers finding aid, as well as with initial digital content in the CONTENTdm Digital Collections.  Over time, most of the digitized items will be linked from the finding aid to the digital collections website. Wherever a green arrow is seen in the finding aid (like the one highlighted in the following image), clicking through will arrive at material in the digital collections. Green arrows that indicate the presence of digital content are also found within the body of the finding aid, but the initial arrow at the top allows the researcher to view all the linked digital content from the top of the finding aid without having to scroll through and find it.

 

Clicking through from the green arrow at the top of the finding aid to the item “The Christmas Message” will take the researcher to an editorial by Reverend Black, in which he expresses his thoughts on the spirit of Christmas, and how it is usually not found in commercial greeting cards. Here is the direct link to that editorial:
The Christmas Message, by Reverend Black, 1963

Regarding the spirit of Christmas, commercialism, and greeting cards, the collection also includes some ephemera directly related to this topic – African American Christmas cards, specifically, “The Christmas Soul” assortment, “18 Golden Trimmed Christmas Cards With Soul Sentiments.”

The cards were manufactured by a company called Merchant Prince, started by Berkeley G. Burrell, a businessman and advocate for minority enterprises, who was active in private and government-appointed positions.

In an article in Jet Magazine entitled "Greeting Card Firm to Pass $1 Million in Sales" (December 3, 1970, p.24), Mr. Burrell states that he started his business because the greeting card industry “has neglected the Black market and today’s strongly emerging attitude of self-pride and self-identification among Blacks.”  The cards in this set contain images such as a Black Mary and infant Jesus; Black three kings looking toward the star of the East; and, a Black drummer boy, among other depictions. The interior sentiments are predominantly religious, with wishes for peace. love and brotherhood.

Here's to many wishes for a happy holiday season, and for a productive new year, filled with digital content from the Claude and ZerNona Black Papers! 

-- Donna Morales Guerra, Project Archivist

Theatre

It’s no secret that I’m an enthusiastic thespian. I talk (read: complain) about rehearsal far more than I talk about anything else, and I complain (read: brag) about all the hours that I spend in the theatre building to most everyone. So it should come as a surprise to no one that when I’m at work in Archives, and I have completed all of my tasks, I flip through the card catalog, searching under all possible terms for information about the theatre department. Most recently I came across some very exciting photos of our building right after its construction in 1966. I marveled at how much the same certain things looked but even more at how different others looked. Most astonishing were the pictures of rooms and places that I could not identify, like a huge and mysterious tech booth, the location of which I could not fathom:

If actors were actually astronauts...

The theatre was remodeled in 2000, so the Stieren house and stage look strikingly different.

The space that we misleadingly refer to as “The Café Theatre” was clearly an actual café at one time:

We're all pretty upset we lost this classiness.

One change that has been enormously positive has been in how we use our lobby. I think any Trinity student knows that when you want to find a theatre student, the first place to look is in the lobby of the Ruth Taylor building, but this wasn’t always the case. Our lobby used to look like this:

Foyer 1966

Apparently, the department was very strictly against students lollygagging about in “The Foyer,” and instead students could use a green room off the Stieren (that no longer exists). Personally I could not imagine our building without at least three or four students diligently doing homework (read: gossiping unashamedly) in our space. Still, though almost fifty years have passed since these pictures were taken, I don’t feel so distant from them. It’s the faces that all seem the same. The spirit hasn’t changed at all.

TUPS Meeting

--Kate Cuellar '15, Special Collections and Archives Student Assitant

Get out the vote! Election Day, November 4, 1961

Article about the political rally

On Saturday, November 4, 1961 in San Antonio, Texas, Reverend Black presented an appeal to vote for Texas State Senator Henry B. Gonzalez for the United States Congress. Vice President of the United States Lyndon Baines Johnson and G.J. Sutton (another prominent African American citizen from San Antonio) also spoke at the rally. In addition, Glenn Kothmann (Texas House Representative), and Mexican film star "Cantinflas" were present.

Whereas today’s rallies are commonly held at community halls and government locations, this rally was held on the back of a truck at an H.E.B. grocery store on the East side, at N. New Braunfels Avenue and Center Street (the store is no longer there). The article is from the SNAP News newspaper from November 10, 1961, part of which is lacquered onto the plaque, and is one example of many collection items created by Reverend Black and ZerNona Black which memorialize the events and issues they deemed important to their lives.

Framed letter from LBJ to Reverend Black

A letter dated November 24, 1961 from Vice President Johnson to Reverend Black praises the speech Black gave at the rally, calling it “one of the most moving, impressive oratories” he has ever heard. Henry B. Gonzalez was elected to Congress on that election day.

Johnson writes:

I think we proved something in San Antonio on November fourth for the eyes of the world. Each affirmation that this is still the home of the brave and the home of the free is a cause for rejoicing. Your eloquent testimony makes my heart glad and runs the bigots a little farther underground.

Entries from November 4, 1961 from the Lyndon B. Johnson Daily Diary Collection provide the background information that ties the newspaper article on the plaque to LBJ’s presence at the rally as well as to the letter.

 

Silently Moving, all Over the Globe

The Claude and ZerNona Black collection has three cans of 16mm Kodachrome, double notched (no soundtrack) film. This week I decided to tackle finding out the condition and content of the films, because confirmation of this is essential to deciding whether or not digitization is worth the expense.

How I wished for a Steenbeck to accomplish my task, as I decided that the brittleness and dryness of the film would make putting it through the available projector too risky.  No matter, I decided to unwind manually and look at the frames through a light box and 10x loupe. (Yes, it was more than a little time consuming.) But, within a workday, I knew everything I needed to know in order to make the decision to digitize.

Each of the three films is in the “amateur home movie” genre. For many years, films such as these have been regarded as throwaway or lacking in depth, certainly not worthy of scholarly research. But, the tide has turned in archives and film studies, and keeps turning. The preservation of amateur home movies is now regarded  (rightly, in this archivist’s opinion) as rich with meaning and potential for interpretation. Some will view the films as mildly entertaining, and others will find them a gold mine of clues embedded in a social and cultural context. The importance of home movies has produced a Home Movie Day©, endorsed by movie auteur Martin Scorsese and critic Leonard Maltin. Relative to home movies and similarly small, popularly produced films with no known author, the National Film Preservation Foundation was created to provide awareness and financial support for the preservation of orphan films, “as the then little-known films came to be called,” which “painted a portrait of America not found in history books.”

The digitization of these three films will contribute to a growing effort to preserve this ephemera in motion, so informing American popular history.

I believe this is A. Philip Randolph on the front porch of
Claude and ZerNona Black's home, film processed July 1959

Two men at airport, about to board a plane,
film processed July 1959

In my frame-by-frame examination, I attempted to photograph on the light box, partly to try to identify certain people present in the films, but also to share here on the blog. Here are four of the shots I obtained – they’re a bit fuzzy because of my photography method, but the actual image on the frames and the color quality are surprisingly good.

ZerNona in Paris

Claude and ZerNona in the Middle East,
on camels

Brochure for the Claude and ZerNona Black Papers

I am posting this brochure I created to share more details about the contents of the Claude and ZerNona Black Papers. Please feel free to share any comments or questions about the collection that you may have. I am currently processing away, as well as writing for newsletters, announcements, and grants, and gearing up for Fall plans for digitization, student workers, and a preview exhibit in Special Collections and Archives!