Black Lives Matter: Civil Rights Movement Documented in Washington University Special Collections

by Meredith R. Evans, PhD
Associate University Librarian

The sound of helicopters hovered over our new home as I cuddled with my young son late into the evening. I remember the innocence in his eyes as he looked up at me and said, “Mom, did you like that art?” What art, I thought to myself. “The one that had ‘black lives matter’ on it?” he continued, as if reading my mind. The art he was referring to were the boarded up windows that prevented us from getting our usual cupcake. It was nothing like the two prints in my office by artist Maxine Noel (also know by her Sioux name, Ioyan Mani, which means “Walk Beyond”), but the art my son noticed moved me just the same. My work in Special Collections helps me walk beyond my experience and think about ways to comprehensively document a person, place or event — collecting evidentiary materials to provide context to questions like the one posed by my son.

In Olin Library hangs a picture of Dred Scott, an enslaved man who legally fought for freedom and eventually died a free man. On my desk lays a special edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Michael Brown and race relations. One hundred fifty years separate the deaths of these two black men, both buried in St. Louis, both denied rights, both instrumental in bringing awareness to civil rights in America. Again, I am reminded of the importance of archival work.

The Special Collections Department at Washington University is comprised of Rare Books and Manuscripts, University Archives, the Modern Graphic History Library and the Film and Media Archive. Each unit contains materials that together chronicle the civil rights movement in St. Louis and the United States.

Available to the public are prints in the James E. and Joan Singer Schiele Collection that document slavery, abolition, emancipation and reconstruction to the collaborative community digital repository, Documenting Ferguson. There are stirring images from the Robert Weaver Collection (a pioneer illustrator in the visual journalism movement who used his talents to document social conflict and realities in America), like the sketch above of a woman in protest from the 1960s. There are records of the Urban League of St. Louis from 1923–69: Boxes full of reports and clippings on race relations, employment, and health and housing in the city. This collection provides insight into the affects of the 1917 riots in East St. Louis and the impact of this organization’s role in the Freedom Movement.

Available in our department are film collections that bring to life the paper records of the Urban League as well. In the Richard Beymer Collection is A Regular Bouquet: Mississippi Summer (1964), a rare portrait of segregated Mississippi. Beymer spent significant time working with Freedom Summer volunteers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); his film influenced other films and documentaries as well. In addition, Special Collections has the definitive documentary of the civil rights movement, Eyes on the Prize, in the Henry Hampton Collection. The collection consists of all of the materials created or collected by Hampton and his film company, Blackside Inc., during the production of these series — including interviews, archival footage, correspondence, scripts, producer notes, and more.

The uniqueness of the holdings in the Washington University Special Collections is that they don’t contain only popular representations of the civil rights movement, which is often centered on national leadership and events. Our collections include the local component and provide evidence of the strategies used to organize. As I stare at a photo of unidentified boys in Mississippi taken during the Freedom Summer Project (left), I ponder my son’s questions. I’m not sure I answered, but I know I cherish the materials that are securely and safely stored for his generation. Soon, he will have a better understanding of the art that he saw. In the meantime I’m content with him knowing that all lives matter.