February 4, 2014: Events to Celebrate the Opening of the Claude and ZerNona Black Papers, Ruth Taylor Recital Hall

We are greatly anticipating this coming Tuesday, February 4, 2014, for our official, celebratory opening event for the Claude and ZerNona Black Papers. Here is the information for the event.

An exhibit accompanies the event, and opens Monday, February 3, 2014 -- we will have a large video display with two silent, 16mm movies to view, as well as an audio station with a playlist to listen to a selection of sermons, music, and speeches. The exhibit is located in Special Collections and Archives, 2nd Floor, Coates Library, and will be up throughout February, Black History Month. We hope to see you here!

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day March in San Antonio

San Antonio is well-known for its large scale Martin Luther King, Jr. Day March, evidence of which is found in the Claude and ZerNona Black Papers. Reverend Black himself was deeply aligned with the actions of Martin Luther King, Jr. on a national level when King was alive and locally, over the years, with the celebration of MLK. Jr. Day.
The 2014 march is on January 20, at 10 am. The City of San Antonio MLK Jr. Commission and Trinity University annual MLK Jr. Commemorative Lecture is this Thursday, January 16, 2014, at 7:30pm in Laurie Auditorium. This year, Julianne Malveaux, an economist, and noted author, will deliver the lecture. Malveaux has contributed to the public dialogue on issues of race, culture, gender, and how their economic impacts are shaping public opinion. The title of her speech is "From the War on Poverty to the War on Poor People. What Would Dr. King Say?"

Martin Luther King Jr. Freedom March photo album, San Antonio, 1987

Link 

Reverend Black on stage with Rev. R.A. Callies at Martin Luther King, Jr. March, 1993

Link

Reverend Black at Martin Luther King, Jr. March, 2006 (left to right with Reverend Black, are Reverend Edward K. Maney, City Council person for District 2, Sheila D. McNeil, and Chairman of Martin Luther King Commission, Reverend Herman Price)

Link 

One of the primary persons responsible for the first MLK, Jr. Day marches was Reverend Raymond Aaron Callies (1929-2011), founder and pastor of the First Gethsemane Baptist Church on San Antonio’s Eastside. According to the Callies family, the first grassroots MLK, Jr. Day march in San Antonio took place in 1972. A brief history of the San Antonio march, written by Mario Marcel Salas included in the 2005 MLK March souvenir booklet in the collection, states that the march grew to roughly fifty people between 1978 and 1980, and included some of San Antonio’s most active civil rights community members. Salas writes:

Many of the original fifty people involved in the initial march included Rev. R.A. Callies and family, Corine Duncan, T.C. Calvert, Bettye Roberts, Rick Greene, Mario Marcel Salas, Rev. C.C. Houston, Lillian Sutton Taylor, Rev. Christopher Griffin, Vashon Byrd, Jessie Mae Hicks, Bobby Roberts, George Clark, John Stanford, John Inman, Charles Middleton, John Allen, William Boyd, and many others, including members of the local chapters of SNCC, the NAACP, and ROBBED organizations. This initial effort did not enjoy community-wide support, nor was it very popular, as many saw the work of King concluded. The march received very little press coverage, but the marchers marched in all types of weather. In the early 1990s one such march involved freezing temperatures and sleet.




The earliest MLK, Jr. Day march document in the papers is the event brochure for  MLK Day 1986, the last march before the City and the MLK Commission (formed in 1986 by Mayor Henry Cisneros) sponsored the march for the first time in 1987. Reverend Black served with the city’s MLK Commission for many years.

This post features some of the documents in the Claude and ZerNona Black papers that relate to the MLK, Jr. Day observances, and are primarily found in:  Series 7: Printed Material, Sub-Series 8: Ephemera, Folders 1 and 2, Event Brochures: Juneteenth and Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebrations, spanning the years  1982-2010; and, in Series 4: Organizations, Sub-Series 6: Assorted Organizations, Conferences, and Meetings, Folder 44: Martin Luther King Commission, 1988-2010; and in various photographs and photograph albums in the collection.
-- Donna Guerra

Glad Tidings 2013: Wonderful Students and a Christmas Sermon from Reverend Black

It has been a while since I've posted, and things have been very busy with the Claude and ZerNona Black Papers project. We've finished work on one grant, and are beginning work with another grant-funded 16mm film preservation project. Preparations are underway for a busy Spring 2014 semester, which includes an official unveiling celebration of the Claude and ZerNona Black Papers; an academic panel discussion of the legacy of Reverend Black; and increased use of the collection in classes in the curriculum.

Along with my two exceedingly industrious student workers, Brandi Russell ('15) and Darcie Marquardt ('16), we have met our halfway mark to get 5,000 additional digital files into the digital collections.  Before I share the Christmas sermon, I want to share the goal-marking poster that Brandi was inspired to create completely on her own initiative -- it provides encouraging words along the way, and helps us appreciate our progress. With young people like this, we need not worry (as much!) about the future...Needless to say, it is a gift to have both Brandi and Darcie working on the project.

 

In the last few months we have put in hundreds of digital files of sermons into the digital collections. In this undated Christmas sermon entitled "Hours of God" from Sermons by Bible Book: Matthew (part 3) [image 14], Reverend Claude W. Black, Jr. preaches that the practice of love is redemptive of all the woes in the world:

The family experiences of love expressed at Christmas in giving and receiving gifts should be recognized as possessing world possibilities....."God so loved the world"  Love is not simply a family experience but can embrace the world as a redemptive power....

Love releases our gifts...

Love determines the character of our gifts...

Love is for you

With these thoughts to ponder, I wish all to have a celebratory season and a prosperous new year!

-- Donna Guerra

"Capitols, Washington and Austin," August 28, 1963

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the March for Jobs and Freedom (known as the March on Washington) in Washington, D.C., August 28, 1963. Commemorative events are planned from August 21 - August 28, and may be followed at the anniversary Twitter account and  hashtag: #MLKDREAM50.
The original Washington march was attended by approximately 250,000 people, both African American and white. A quote from that day by Josephine Baker, the only official female speaker at the March on Washington, conveys something of the spirit of the occasion:

"You are together as salt and pepper, just as you should be; just as I've always wanted you to be, and the peoples of the world have always wanted you to be."

(begin at 22:37 mins., from Celebrity Participation in the March on Washington, see sources and audio link)

On the same day as the March on Washington, Reverend Black, along with other black, white, and brown Texas civil rights leaders, participated in a sympathy march in Austin, Texas. This post is about that particular march.

The Claude and ZerNona Black Papers contain many audiotape reels, the majority of which have now been digitized through a Summerlee Foundation grant. One of these reels is pictured here:

We are very grateful that with the gracious permission of Mr. Greg Martin, Director of Operations, Border Media/KTSA Radio, we are able to stream this important audio that documents the Austin march, Austin Civil Rights March, Speeches, and Interviews, 1963.

This recording was produced by a reporter from KTSA Radio, San Antonio, Texas. The tape begins with an interview by the reporter with Bob Joiner of the Indignant White Citizens Council (IWCC). The recording also includes a fragment of a speech on Mt. Sequoyah, Arkansas; speeches by Reverend Claude W. Black, Jr.; Booker T. Bonner; Moses LeRoy; Attorney William J. Durham, Dallas, president of the Texas Council of Voters; and an interview with Booker T. Bonner (the total playing time is 39:18 minutes).

In an informative chapter by Martin Kuhlman titled "The Civil Rights March in Austin, Texas, 1963," from the book Bricks Without Straw: A Comprehensive History of African Americans in Texas (see sources below), we get a clear sense of the Texas context of the Austin march. Then Texas Governor John Connally, well-known as a segregationist, presented opposition to the civil rights bill being proposed in Washington. The Democratic Coalition, comprised of African American, Anglo American and Mexican American leaders across Texas, was working against the poll tax and the rhetoric that Connally and other segregationists were using that encouraged "voluntary" integration. Reverend Black puts the point eloquently in this excerpt from his editorial, "The Decision Takers":

"Voluntary integration leaves the Negro where he has always been - subject to the will of another man, for no other reason than the color of his skin. Voluntary integration compels the Negro to cultivate the favor of the white individual in an effort to receive those benefits that should be granted to him as a responsible citizen. It is at this point that the Negro citizen must weight the benevolent attitude of the white politicians. I am sure that many Negroes are weary, as I am weary, of those programs that require that I play the part of a second class man in order to survive in a white community."

Included in the additional and many writings of Reverend Black available in our Digital Collections is a commentary with his reflections on the significance of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, in Washington, D.C. as well as on the Austin, Texas Civil Rights March. His comments stress the ramifications for Negros who assume roles as leaders. 
Capitols, Washington and Austin, by Reverend Black, 1963

And, through the important film digitization work of the Texas Archive of the Moving Image (TAMI) in Austin, Texas, there is also a video from the Gordon Wilkison collection, Civil Rights Demonstration in Austin, 1963, that provides visual documentation of the Austin march.

In this time of commemoration of civil rights marches in 1963 and the issues represented, we can also celebrate access to the historical documents that  make study of them and social justice movements possible, and our appreciation for archives, donors, and all those who safeguard the evidence of our diverse history.


Sources:
Celebrity Participation in the March on Washington. (08/28/1963). Boston, MA: WGBH Media Library & Archives. Retrieved 20 Aug 2013
http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/march-bc109d-celebrity-participation-in-the-march-on-washington

Kuhlman, M. (1997). Chapter 9: The Civil Rights March on Austin, Texas, 1963. In, Bricks Without Straw: A Comprehensive History of African Americans in Texas (p. 153). Eakin Press (a.k.a. Sunbelt Media).  Retrieved 20 Aug 2013
(Permalink): http://libproxy.trinity.edu:80/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=tih&AN=19177376&site=ehost-live

Texas State Historical Association, "Civil Rights." Retrieved 20 Aug 2013
https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/pkcfl

Student Days -- Reverend Black at Andover Newton Theological School, 1940s

Here at Trinity University, all anticipate the end of the semester, and student and faculty life is abuzz as projects and papers are due, and seniors wrap up their undergraduate life.  The digital collections contain two sets of photographs that represent Reverend Black's own time as a student at Andover Newton Theological Seminary (as it was called in those days) in Newton, Massachusetts, which he attended from 1940 to 1943.  The photographs are candid snapshots, primarily of Reverend Black and his fellow students studying, or enjoying leisure time and each others company in their residential dormitory.
Over the years of his life, Reverend Black often remarked that his time at the school was the first time he had ever lived in a non-segregated society. The experience was no doubt similar for other African Americans from the South attending Andover Newton Theological Seminary in the years before desegregation of the South. As is seen in the second photo, Samuel H. James, Jr. was also at the school at the time. He became Reverend S.H. James of the Second Baptist Church in San Antonio, was the first African American elected as councilman to the San Antonio city council, and was a founding civil rights leader in San Antonio in his own right.
Others who went on to become influential ministers also appear in some of the photographs, such as Alfonso Leon Lowry and Edward McCreary. The Trinity Digital Collections provides access to the thesis Reverend Black wrote to gain his degree, Communism as a Religion, made available by kind permission of the Franklin Trask Library at Andover Newton Theological School.

Claude W. Black, Jr. at study
Andover photos, part one 

Samuel H. James, Jr.

Andover photos, part one

Group photo
Andover photos, part one 

Student reflections Andover photos, part one

Playing chess

Andover photos, part two

The "Lunch Bunch"

Thanks to Jeremy Donald, our Faculty Technology Liaison Librarian, a "blog/share" button has been added to the all of the images in the Trinity Digital Collections to allow embedded sharing of images in blogs or websites. Below I have shared a photo from the Claude and ZerNona Black Papers, using the button:

Reverend Claude W. Black and the Lunch Bunch group, 2001

Link

A post on the blog of Elias Tzoc, a Digital Initiatives Librarian at Miami University, talks about the PHP and Java code he put together for this function, and I thought it would great to see if it would work with our collections. Happily, it does. If you use CONTENTdm and are interested in using this feature, Elias provides instructions for creating the "share-it" button.
The button provides greater potential for student and researcher access, as by clicking on the word "Link" below the image, it links back to the image in the Digital Collections, providing the information necessary to understand and properly credit the source.
The image seen here portrays a meeting of the "Lunch Bunch" (a monthly gathering of a variety of friends interested in local activism and social justice, and that Reverend Black met with from the 1960s at least until 2006). This particular 2001 meeting photo includes (from left to right) Arnold Flores, Herschel "Herky" Bernard, Reverend Black, Albert A. Peña, and Charles [surname undetermined].

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!

ZerNona Stewart comes to San Antonio, 1943

ZerNona Stewart Black was a person who pursued her goals with energy, all throughout her life.  After completing a YWCA-USO course in New York City and field training at the USO office in El Paso, Texas, (then) ZerNona Stewart arrived in San Antonio in 1943. Shortly thereafter, she began her new position on July 5th of the same year, as assistant at the YWCA-USO at 112 Sycamore Street.

In the book, Grandpa Was a Preacher: A Letter to my Grandson (by Claude W. Black, Jr. with Taj I. Matthews, Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2007), Reverend Black reveals his impression of ZerNona's qualities when first meeting her at the USO:

She told me that she had always set high goals for herself and felt the need to do more for others. I believed her...She was a go-getter.  (p. 53)

The Young Womens Christian Association (YWCA) was instrumental in the formation of United Service Organization clubs, or USOs, all over the United States. The USO club was formed to support the morale of military personnel and their families during the Second World War. As a reflection of the times, USO clubs were racially segregated (or not), based on the practice of local communities. The Sycamore Street USO was segregated, based on the Jim Crow practices in San Antonio at the time.

Later, ZerNona Stewart would become Director of the club.  Articles about her work and photographs of club programs and events appeared regularly in one of the local African American newspapers of the time, the San Antonio Register.  Again, from the book, Grandpa Was A Preacher, Reverend Black talks about ZerNona's work at the USO:

In my opinion, her leadership of the USO was outstanding. ZerNona had the ability to motivate those young people. She had created successful programs, provided job training, and improved the overall services that Colored USOs offered. (p. 51)

 It was in 1946 that ZerNona Stewart and Claude W. Black, Jr. would be married. I will share more on ZerNona Stewart Black's background and life in future posts.

In the Archival Trenches

It has been a few months since I began work with the Claude and ZerNona Black Papers here at Coates Library.  The majority of the first two months work was primarily a combination of surveying, physically acquiring, and preliminary accessioning and processing, all at once.  The following photos will give a glimpse into that journey.

  The collection in its raw state --

not for the faint of heart!

Sifting through dusty, deep piles of  materials (wearing nitrile gloves) across three rooms of a house, a remote office and an outdoor shed, has yielded approximately 100 cubic feet of an archival collection.  The three pictures seen above give a candid view into what an archivist might find as the original point of entry -- somewhere in there I had to find the collection. The endeavor took 120 hours of February and March afternoons. Happily, I found a very willing volunteer in Elias Guetaneh, who had been an intern extraordinaire for me at the City of San Antonio Municipal Archives and Records. Elias joined me for the March portion of this treasure hunt.  His cheerfulness, excellent eye, and enthusiasm (and height!) made the evaluation, heavy lifting, photographing, access to materials near the ceiling,  and copious note-taking much less daunting.
Spying original order was a challenge, but it was possible to find meaningful arrangement -- each physical location revealed rough time frames and materials relevant to them. The attic, for instance, had some of the earliest records (from the turn of the century), and most of the Baptist Convention materials (Reverend Black was active with the American Baptist Convention for many years), and most of ZerNona Black's community organization records and educational materials.

Progress, ready for pickup, as shown in the office

When packing materials up, I retained meaningful groupings whenever possible and made notes on the box itself and on a spreadsheet, giving each box a unique identifier with an indication of the room it came from.  In my experience, you never know how useful that information can be until after the fact, at the time of processing and creating the finding aid. Because the storage of the collection over many years has been in a hot attic, a turn-of-the-century home with highly fluctuating environmental conditions, and an outdoor shed, the materials are being treated anaerobically (no chemicals, but deprivation of oxygen in a vacuum chamber) for pests and cleaned by hepa vacuum. I eagerly await the arrival of a clean collection any day now.

After having gone through this process, I have laid eyes on most of the items in the collection. In addition, with all the documentation so far, I have started background research, put together a preservation supply order for the entire collection, begun solid work on the finding aid in Archon, and am exploring digitization needs and costs for formats that we cannot do in-house.
So, for now, "Onward, ho!"

Eighteen Negro Ministers Protest Selma Violence, March 10, 1965

This 1965 newspaper clipping from one of Reverend Black's carefully assembled scrapbooks is a powerful one.  From the March 10, 1965 edition of the San Antonio Light newspaper, it reveals how the power of place can be used to magnify an important message -- here, kneeling in prayer in front of the Alamo, eighteen ministers express solidarity with the peaceful voting rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama. On March 7th of the same week, televisions across the nation showed Alabama policemen attacking the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers, in what would later be called "Bloody Sunday" by President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

In Reverend Black's own words:

"We come to this place because we recognize it to be a symbol of freedom."

Trinity University Acquires the Claude and ZerNona Black Papers

This is the first blog entry for the Claude and ZerNona Black Papers acquisition by the Special Collections and Archives in the Elizabeth Huth Coates Library, Trinity University.  I was hired as a project archivist for the collection in February 2012, and have been busy packing up the collection at the donor's home (I'll have more on that in the following posts -- an adventure in itself!).

I have posted a of couple images of the Trinity University press release from February 28, 2012, as it introduces the significance and the breadth of the collection. One important aspect of the collection is that it fills an historical need for primary resource material about the civil rights movement not only in the city of San Antonio but in the southwest region of the United States.

My entries in this blog will serve in part as a kind of travel diary, on the processing journey of this very large archival collection. It will also provide an opportunity to share discoveries along the way, so that the vigorous activity and influence of both Reverend Black and his wife, ZerNona, will become more widely known.

I look forward to posting here, so check back often!

-- Donna Morales Guerra, Project Archivist for the Claude and ZerNona Black Papers

Trinity University press release from February 28, 2012