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Letter from Josephine Silone Yates to
Margaret Murray Washington,
29 February 1906, NACW Papers |
While conducting research for my graduate degrees, I realized that there was no one place (or even two or three) that I could go to to help me find significant primary (and secondary) sources related to black women in Alabama-- for
any historical period. I spent plenty of time talking with individual black women and gathering sources and resources related to black women in Alabama in the twentieth century. Truthfully, I was pretty shocked: the national black clubwomen's movement had roots in Alabama through the presence and work of Margaret Murray Washington and the Tuskegee Women's Club. Alabama also had some of the oldest federated clubs in the country. In spite of these facts, primary sources were lacking. I also found that the documentary evidence and artifacts related to black women's involvement in the Civil Rights Movement were few, even though women played a huge role in the Movement in Alabama. Therefore, I decided to create a place where historians and other scholars can come to find out where those primary sources related to black women's history are held. I also want to use this space as a platform to encourage black women (and their organizations) to donate their papers to local archival repositories so that they are available for scholars and researchers. As women's historian Mary Ritter Beard famous slogan states, "No documents, no history."
We need the documents that show the centrality of black women to the history of Alabama. They must be carefully preserved by professionals for perpetuity and they must be made available for scholars who write the articles and books that we read about these women's lives.
