Rare Home Movie From the Claude and ZerNona Black Papers Has Been Preserved

We are pleased to share with the world a piece of history that was in danger of being lost forever.  “Home movie: Travel scenes in the United States, Europe and the Middle East, circa 1959” is an amateur film/home movie from the Claude and ZerNona Black Papers that Donna Guerra, our former Project Archivist, had the foresight to protect.  She successfully acquired a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation to send the film to Colorlab for preservation.  The film is now available for anyone to watch streaming online.

This silent 16mm film, shot in the late 1950s, is one of three home movies that we are fortunate to have in the Claude and ZerNona Black Papers. Thanks go to Donna Guerra for all her hard work in making this film available to the public and preserving it for future generations!

Donna Guerra has enumerated a number of reasons why this is an important film to preserve and I include them, in her words, below:

• “Although other areas of the United States have 16mm films available that reflect African American life in the 1950s, I have not been able to locate such films by amateur or non-professional African American persons from the Southwest United States. Therefore, the relative dearth of access to such films, both regionally and locally in San Antonio, makes preservation of and access to our film of critical importance.  One local repository at the University of Texas at San Antonio holds a small quantity of archival materials created by local African Americans.  However, the Claude and ZerNona Black Papers stand alone as the most single and substantial (100 cubic feet) African American collection in San Antonio.  In addition, the two films already digitized are the only 16mm films created by African Americans from San Antonio in the 1950s that are available on the world wide web.  And further, preservation of this film would complement the two digitized films to which we already provide world wide web access.”
•  “One of the main contexts of the film is that it provides evidence that African Americans engaged in international travel, and that the impetus for this particular travel was faith-based.  Reverend Black was very involved with various local, regional, and national Baptist organizations.  Reverend and ZerNona Black, along with other United States attendees, were part of a Baptist World Alliance (BWA) travel group.  The BWA was established in 1905 in London, England, as a more liberal voice and often times has been a vocal defender of human rights.  The film provides a ground for sociopolitical considerations regarding the conditions that made it possible for African Americans to travel overseas in the 1950s.  Would travel have been made more possible as a faith-based activity, rather than for leisure alone?” 
•  “The particular portion of the film that takes place in London shows signage that reads, the ‘American League Incorporating the Coloured Peoples Benevolent Association Office,’ at 27 Red Lion Street, Holborn WCI.  There is a speaker standing, with a sign below him that says ‘Coloured Peoples Welfare’. After doing some research on the internet, in British web catalogs and in academic subscription databases, on the association names and the address, I was able to find very little.  I did find a small amount of evidence that revealed that the address of 27 Red Lion Street has historically been home to a variety of radical and socially progressive groups, including the Freedom Press, a radical bookshop and publisher… I believe the evidence of the event depicted at 27 Red Lion Street in the context of the BWA Golden Jubilee Congress holds excellent research value.”

 

•  “The rarity of African American home movies depicting work and social life, and events, puts the film in a rare category.”
•  “There is no real likelihood that the film exists in duplication anywhere, which qualifies it as rare and unique.”

We are grateful to the National Film Preservation Foundation, Colorlab, and Donna Guerra, for making it possible for us to share this rare film with you. 

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!

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!"

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