Protecting our Precious History

Breaking news, March 28: “Trump Calls the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History ‘Divisive, Race-centered, Corrosive’” and issued an executive order to “redefine the narratives presented by the Smithsonian” and install board members who share his vision of a “a more traditional celebration of American heritage.” This executive order leaves no doubt that our precious history is under attack. It is a call to arms to take protective measures.

For members of Coming to the Table (CTTT), answering the call to safeguard the full truth of American history is how we act on one of the organization’s four approaches: “Uncovering History … researching, acknowledging and sharing personal, family, community, state and national histories related to race, inequality, injustice and oppression, with openness and honesty.” The members of  CTTT’s Linked Descendants Group (LD) are descendants of formerly enslaved people, descendants of enslavers, or descendants of both. They work with documents in hard copy and online, review, make or collect photographs, access data from archived and online lists and databases, view and make video records, and examine artifacts of their own and in collections. All these sources are valuable for research and precious as the pieces that make up the stories of their ancestors and their ancestral communities. These researchers use the resources carefully, wanting them to remain intact and available for generations of researchers to come.

But as the breaking news story makes clear, both the sources for and the products of this kind of research are in danger from those who fear and hate what they consider objectionable areas of study and publication: African American history and culture, the history of slavery and the American slave trade, the history of the Jim Crow era and the Civil Rights movement, and the revelations of hidden histories, episodes of violence and oppression of African Americans carried out by white supremacists. These topics are referred to as “CRT” or “DEI” topics.

Authoritarian regimes seek to dominate historically marginalized groups by cutting them off from their roots and deeply held values and traditions. In the current resurgence of white supremacy in the United States, the anti-CRT, anti-DEI movements are means for dominating and destroying all the cultures in the country that are not the mainstream white European-derived culture, e.g., eliminating African American history and culture. The culture-destroying campaigns are being carried out by government departments at all levels and in state school and library systems. In addition, individuals feeling emboldened by what they hear from authority figures may commit acts of destruction and vandalism.

 

In late February 2025, a researcher asked what measures colleagues could take to protect records, documents, photographs, videos and artifacts related to African American history and culture. How were they ensuring the preservation of information and objects held personally or in collections from the risk of theft, harm or destruction by white supremacists? 

I was immediately inspired to tackle that question because protecting records is a way to honor the Ancestors and, for enslaver descendants, a way to take reparative action.

Who contributed: I reached out to a network of people in the public history world, and they generously sent information. The majority are African Americans based in the Southeast, including professionals associated with the National Archives, independent researchers and public historians, people associated with historic sites and their descendant communities, librarians, and professional genealogists.

Urgency of preservation work: Every person contacted started the conversation by saying protection of documents, data, photos, video, audio, and objects related to African American history and culture is imperative, and the safekeeping efforts need to be going on currently or started as soon as possible. Every respondent expressed concern that efforts to erase and destroy these precious records have already started and would expand. They are worried that a great cultural erasure program would be carried out in larger federal and state institutions, under orders of authorities, and among smaller institutions, private groups and individually by small groups or individual attackers.

For example, webpages at the Pentagon and the Arlington National Cemetery were erased following orders from the Secretary of Defense and included the military service of baseball great Jackie Robinson, the contribution of the Navajo code talkers, and civil rights leader Medgar Evers. Pages on the history of the National Cemetery, such as the one about the Freedman’s Village, were also removed. Widespread protest led to the information being restored, but there is no guarantee the same kind of dismissal of history will not be tried again.

 

 

The risks: Some of the collections that may be at risk include:

• The documents, images and artifacts at larger, better-known institutions and organizations working with African American history and culture are at greater risk of attack. Some of them may need volunteer help. See below for names and links.
• Online materials, personal and institutional – websites, databases, archives – are at greater risk than physical items because it is easier to access, erase or deface materials on the internet.
• Online storage sites such as Google drive are not safe from hackers.
• The online records and libraries of academic and research institutions are vulnerable because they are only useful when they allow significant access by researchers and contributors.
• The evidence that the online databases of genealogical organizations are at risk was revealed when one of them experienced an ethnically targeted data breach in 2023.
• The archives and collections in smaller, more local organizations that promote African American history and culture may be at risk of damage in proportion to how well known and outspoken they are, and how intense the anti-DEI activities around them may be. For example, an historic site well known in its area suffered arson attack in 2020.

At the individual level, there is a constant low-level threat to personal records, photos and videos on blogs, personal websites, storage services, or social media from random hackers. The more widely known someone and their work related to African American history and culture  is, the risk of damage to online and physical possessions goes up and the need for safekeeping intensifies.

What destruction can look like:

– erasing electronic records displayed or shared anywhere
– removing and hiding records from websites, electronic repositories, and institutional or individual storage
– defacing electronic records in place
– creating the denial of services to make records inaccessible

With physical items, vandals may:
– steal and shred or burn documents
– erase or demagnetize audio and video materials
– steal and destroy objects
– damage storage facilities, including museums, archives and libraries

Precious History – Protective Measures: safeguarding history has its challenges:

• Funding: Protecting precious history has costs – time, storage media, facilities – and requires funding. 
• Vulnerability of digitized material: Online storage is inevitable, but everything displayed, shared or stored online is vulnerable to hackers. The “cloud,” including Google Drive or any other cloud storage service, is not at all protected from hacking, erasure and theft. 
• Technology changes: Offline devices protect electronic records, but those devices, but the technology will change. Once records are stored offline, there will need to be a plan for monitoring and updating.
• Digitization is a top priority step for institutions and individuals to protect their records. Digitizing documents can be handled by volunteers or by a friend or family member.
• The Multi-media Approach: To protect written records, having redundant copies including one hard copy and one digitized version, improves the odds of longer-term protection, both for personal records and for those stored in institutions. Photographing documents is another level of redundancy.
• Holding Treasures  in Diverse Locations: Have storage sites in more than one place, e.g., a fire-proof box at home or in other buildings; a storage box with a family member, with fellow researchers, or with a partner institution; a safe deposit box in a bank, a safe in a headquarters office, a secure self-storage unit.
• Partner with a (larger) Institution to store personal records or the records of a smaller organization. A site manager explained their site collaborates with a large, better resourced library for keeping the site’s records backed up. An individual has turned the originals of her records over to a public library.
• Online availability vs safekeeping: Organization whose staff, volunteers and patrons use their records for ongoing research have to set up procedures to give access to the research crew while keeping records safe from access by bad actors. Solving this dilemma will need a unique approach for each organization, keeping user logs and doing frequent electronic back-ups.
• The size of the project: Ask for help to protect larger repositories. Offer help to family, friends, fellow researchers, and small locations. For example, the National Archives has programs for volunteers to protect its records. FamilySearch uses volunteers to digitize the Freedman’s Bureau records. These projects are more important than ever. Please consider signing up. Another example is the Volunteer Community Historic Records Digitizers Project, through the International African American Museum and their Center for Family History (Director, Brian Sheffey). In-person volunteers are helping digitize National Archives collections like the African American Homesteaders Land Files, and the Buffalo Soldiers Files. There are also opportunities to help remotely. 

Descendants of enslavers can offer to help digitize the photos or documents kept by an African American researcher or provide support for a nearby historic site focused on African American history and culture, to copy and store its documents, photos, and records.

Steps to Take: Here are steps anyone can take to preserve individual precious research sources and findings as well as the new records, photos and family trees resulting from the research. The same steps are useful for volunteer projects to safeguard the precious sources kept by institutions.

• For European American researchers, think through how to be collaborative: Whether you take part in safeguarding individual history, family history, community or institutional history, focus on consulting and collaborating with everyone else who needs to be involved. European Americans also need to pay attention to how their passion and high levels of self-confidence can interfere with their intentions to help African Americans to preserve precious history. Make sure the heirs of the history take the lead, and as their helpers, listen and take instruction.
• Plan: Commit to taking steps, and make a manageable plan of action.
• Prioritize: Set out priorities for what to protect first. For example,
  • Items that are most precious, that everyone would be most heartbroken to lose.
  • Items (records and objects) that would be most difficult to replace.
  • Items that have the most direct bearing on the purpose of individual’s or organizations’ research.
• Organize & catalog: Come up with a way to organize what is already recorded so that it can be accessed later. Make a catalog of items and where they are located. For example, organize by
  • Person, family, community, by time period, by place, by relationship to significant events
  • Type of record or medium, e.g., all photos, all videos
    For the materials belonging to another person or an institution, consult and collaborate on cataloguing.
• Turn to expert resources if needed: Archives, museums, libraries, genealogical societies, and historic sites have information about preservation techniques and materials. Consider archival services offered by institutions or publishers, video or music houses, photography professionals, and others, and choose a collaborator with the same care you would use to find a childcare service.
• Choose storage devices: Acquire digital devices as needed, of the best quality the budget can handle. Use fire and waterproof containers for documents, photos, newsprint, and tapes as well as precious objects. If necessary, consult about how to store photos, fabric, and any other perishable materials.
• Get started: There is growing urgency about protecting the cultures and histories of people of color and diverse gender identities. Start soon and work steadily. Having some of the research preserved is better than having nothing.

 

 

 

Author: Prinny Anderson is the five times great niece of an enslaved woman and the four times great granddaughter of the enslaved woman’s half-sister and enslaver. Her identity is shaped by a complicated web of connections among her linked ancestors and their linked descendants. There are enslavers among all the branches of her family. She is committed to supporting people facing their connections to slavery and its legacies and contributing to dismantling systemic racism. Prinny is a founding member of Coming to the Table, of the Linked Descendants Group, and BitterSweet: Linked Through Slavery. She is retired from a career in international leadership education, executive coaching, and systemic consulting, and is the author of six books in those fields.

 

 

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