The E.S.C.A.P.E. Times: What is the Amistad Research Center?Brenda Square: The Amistad Research Center was organized in 1966 on the campus of Fisk University, and Fisk is one of the schools established by the American Missionary Association. That organization began as an anti-slavery, abolitionist effort in 1846. So the center actually preserves a large number of anti-slavery records, original documents written by abolitionists and activists beginning in the 1800s.
The collection is an on-going effort, so the records date even to 2010; I'm still documenting. Public education is an area that we are particularly strong in our holdings because the American Missionary Association focused on abolishing slavery and then building schools so we have a tremendous amount of information on the history of black education. Because of the school experiment in New Orleans, I felt that it was necessary for me to document these changes.
TET: How did the Amistad Center come to be in New Orleans?
Brenda Square: In 1970 the Amistad Research Center moved to New Orleans, accepting the invitation from Dr. Dent, then president of Dillard University. The Center was going to be homeless because it had outrun the space at Fisk University. The collection moved to New Orleans and was first housed in a library at Dillard, another school established by the American Missionary Association. Growth continued and then the Center moved to the U.S. Mint in the French Quarter. It stayed there for a few years and once again outgrew the space. Once again the Center was going to be homeless, many of the larger universities extended an invitation. Eventually the Center came to Tulane and we've been here since 1987. This is a permanent partnership between Tulane and Amistad. Tulane offered the building and retrofitted it for archives; this was last used as a business library.
TET: Who are the types of people that use the Center?
Brenda Square: We get undergraduate students from around the city, families, the general public, but primarily scholars. A lot of graduate students writing papers, university professors, people doing documentaries, creative writers are inspired by some of the materials we've collected. It's a broad spectrum of researchers.
TET: You mentioned writers and filmmakers. Have you heard about any works that came out of research here?
Brenda Square: Yes, if you look at our Website you'll see a list of publications based on research here. But the film that comes to mind immediately is Amistad, the film by Steven Spielberg and Debbie Allen. Debbie Allen actually was here and she made some copies of documents and took those things to Steven Spielberg and encouraged him to make the movie. Now the Amistad event is known by a much larger audience. The film has a way of reaching the people. But that's just one, we have a long list of things. Anybody writing about slavery, the anti-slavery movement, the modern civil rights movement, Deacons of Defense, Righteous Lives, I can go on and on listing books based on research here. That is one of the ways we gauge our success.
TET: I had a question about the focus of the Center. Would you say that it's about African-American history, or are there other things that you all focus on?
Brenda Square: American race relations is well-covered in the collections here. Civil rights, interracial cooperation, the Race Relations Institute was established in the 1940s on the campus of Fisk University, which did a lot of research on race relations and programming and a lot of those relationships were part of the civil rights movement, so those records are here. But we also document ethnic American history. The missionaries that worked for the AMA established schools for Native Americans, schools for a lot of immigrants that came to America. So it's a center for researching ethnic American issues as well as African-American history. We have a large amount of material on African-Americans because the AMA focused on ending slavery and Black education. We also have a great art collection, which is going to be traveling in a new exhibit beginning next month ["Beyond the Blues"].
TET: Did moving to New Orleans change the direction of the collection at all?
Brenda Square: No, it remains a national focus. We were able to acquire a lot of early Louisiana material when we moved here and allowed the center to document Negro archives that had been collected by historians and early activitists. In fact, a lot of it was preserved from Katrina, which things would have been lost had we not preserved them. So, the focus remains national but because we are here, at the site of a major disaster we know that it's our responsibility to preserve what we can.
TET: How do you think you're going to go about documenting the specific challenges that New Orleans is facing?
Brenda Square: What we're doing is collecting oral history interviews. It began first with just looking at what was happening when the schools were re-opened and there were no people around to answer questions, so it began with just taking pictures of buildings, talking to the teachers, then I ended up joining a community group, working with the kids, trying to get hot lunch, because they had frozen sandwiches. Trying to get social workers and counselors, trying to get IEPs [assessments] for special education students.
TET: Given your focus on ethnic Americans and Hurricane Katrina being an event that disproportionately affected ethic Americans, could you go into more detail about how you've guys have been documenting that?
Brenda Square: People who have damaged documents are bringing them to us and we look at them and preserve them if we can. I went out into the neighborhood and made photographs because people will be interested in seeing what these communities looked like right after the storm, so we collected photographs. We've also collected oral history interviews with people from the Lower 9th Ward, Podstring Park and other historic African-American communities; we felt that it was important to have a record of those.
Also, through vertical files and clippings, major events, the Internet now has a lot of newspapers, but things don't stay there forever, so key documents are printed and preserved, so that we have them available for people that come in and look at them. Issues around public education in particular are what we're covering, but there's so much going on we can't get it all. Because of the historical mission of the Center and its relationship to education, I felt it was necessary to document public education.
TET: How do you define Social Justice and how it relates to your work here at the Center?
Brenda Square: I would define Social Justice as the idea of creating an environment where people will be free to pursue opportunity freely. Where we have equity of opportunity, education and employment. The work at the Amistad Research Center focuses on social justice in education, because we preserve the material in order to share it with scholars. Once scholars access the material, they're transformed because of the information gleamed from these collections. So we have a strong commitment to social justice and, in fact, the Amistad case embodies freedom and justice for all. And the people whose records are preserved here are Black people, White people, Native American Indians, Latinos who've all worked in the area of social justice.
For more information about Amistad, visit their Website, www.amistadresearchcenter.org.
