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Aerial View of Emory University Campus, circa 1965

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Emory University Archives is pleased to announce the reopening of the Emory University photograph collection (Series 111). The collection recently underwent reprocessing, during which the collection's organizational structure was streamlined and simplified and descriptive resources, such as the online finding aid, were produced. The aim of the reprocessing project was to increase the accessibility and usability of the collection, making the collection itself more visible and its contents easier to discover, identify, and locate.

DVS Senior Honor Society composite, circa 1920

The Emory University photograph collection, which spans two centuries and contains approximately 22,000 items, provides researchers with the opportunity to explore Emory's history visually. It contains photographs in multiple formats and sizes, from cabinet cards to composites and panoramas. The subjects of the photographs vary broadly but are united by their connection to Emory University and its predecessor Emory College. Photographs depicting campuses, buildings, and construction, document Emory's growth and change while photographs and candid snapshots of students and events add dimension to our understanding of student life and the Emory experience.

Sock Hop at Dooley's Den, circa 1950s

Some highlights of the collection include pushball games, Dooley's week dances, student protest movements, early Emory College portraits, athletics, student societies, and musical and military groups.

Emory College Junior Class Baseball Team, 1906

To view the Emory University photograph collection and other primary sources documenting Emory's history, please visit the Emory University Archives in the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library.

Janice Rothschild Blumberg and Eva Dean in MARBL

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It happens sometimes that MARBL has multiple patrons visiting and using our reading room at the same time who are working on similar themes or researching the same collections. In those cases, we like to let the patrons know so they can possibly discuss their work and gain further insights into their research. On October 22, 2012, we were delighted to have Janice Rothschild Blumberg visit us. Her late husband was Rabbi Jacob M. Rothschild whose papers reside at MARBL.

On this same day, it happened that an out-of-town researcher, Eva Dean, arrived to work with the Rothschild papers for her final degree project. MARBL's Research Services Associate Archivist, Kathy Shoemaker, realized what a tremendous opportunity this could be and was able to bring Mrs. Blumberg and Ms. Dean together. The two spent a large portion of the afternoon discussing Atlanta's history. It was such a rewarding experience for everyone involved, including the staff of MARBL, that we thought we'd share with you some reflective thoughts on the afternoon sent in by Janice Rothschild Blumberg and Eva Dean.

Eva Dean

I just recently graduated on December 8, 2012 with my Bachelor's in History. This is what brought me to Emory on October 22, 2012. I was doing research pertaining to my Senior Seminar Paper, which is the last paper of my college career. My topic was The Jews of Atlanta in the Civil Rights Era: 1954 - 1968. When I started researching my secondary sources, the name Rabbi Jacob Rothschild kept reappearing over and over. I decided to look into it and that is when I discovered that he was the rabbi of The Temple, the one which was bombed on October 12, 1958.

Already having knowledge of the Temple from a previous paper I had written, I decided that I should look into Rabbi Rothschild much more in-depth. I found out that his papers were at the Woodruff Library because I had recently checked out Janice Rothschild Blumberg's book One Voice: Rabbi Jacob M. Rothschild and the Troubled South. So, I decided that October 22 would be the day.

Upon my arrival to the library, the staff was wonderful. They were very helpful to me on the whole process of what to do and what not to do. Shortly after I arrived I noticed two women come in and sit at a table behind me. A few moments later I received a phone call and stepped away to the designated area for talking on your cell phone. When I was done with my phone call one of the librarians asked me if I would be interested in talking to the women who donated Rabbi Rothschild's papers to the library. Immediately in my head I knew exactly who she was talking about and I thought to myself, really, there is no way. The funny thing is that all the way to Atlanta I was praying that I would find someone to help me with my thesis.

Mrs. Janice and I talked about kismet or fate as you call it that this was supposed to happen. Mrs. Janice and I talked for three hours and I will never forget it as long as I live. It was, by far, the most humbling and exciting experience I have ever had. Mrs. Janice was so willing to talk to me and answer questions and just share her story. I am truly in awe of this amazing woman, and the conversation we had will live in my memory banks forever. For me, I was and still am, in awe of the notion that I literally met someone who is an imporant part of Georgia's history during a time when the South was not always the safest place, and she knew two people who have amazing stories themselves, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Lucille Frank. I cherished every moment we spent talking and I look forward to meeting her again.

Rabbi Jacob Rothschild with Martin Luther King, Jr., January 27, 1965,
at the South's first racially integrated banquet, Atlanta, GA

Janice Rothschild Blumberg

There's no greater thrill than learning that you've made a difference in the life of a stranger. Even more exciting for me was the context in which I happened to be at MARBL on the afternoon that  Eva was working there. Above all, I rejoice in the knowledge that the life and work of my late husband, Rabbi Jacob M. Rothschild, continues to inspire enthusiastic, idealistic young scholars like Eva Dean.
 
To begin with, the Rothschild papers reside at Emory, rather than at an institution with which the rabbi was more closely associated, because when he died, over 30 years ago, our children and I believed that they would be used more there than they would be anywhere else. That assumption appears to have been correct.
 
At the ceremony when MARBL received the collection, I said—only partly in jest—that we chose Emory because, if there is actually such a thing as an after-life, we wanted Rabbi Rothschild to be with his friends. The collections of two very close friends, Hal Davison and Ralph McGill, were already there. A more recent addition was that of another close friend, Morris Abram, the attorney who defeated the county unit system in Georgia and enabled our Atlanta votes to be fully counted, initiating here the reality of one man, one vote. His niece, Cecily Abram, who lives in Washington, DC, wanted to see his papers, and as she was visiting me in Atlanta, I brought her to MARBL. That’s how I happened to be there on the afternoon that Eva was researching the Rothschild papers.
 
Serendipity? Call it what you want, it bore out for me in a very meaningful way the idea of placing a loved one’s visible remains in proximity to those of his friends. And the emotion of the moment—Eva's and that which her reaction aroused in me—can only be described as the thrill of a lifetime.

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Do you know any racists?  After having worked on MARBL's Neighbors Network collection, I feel as though I know hundreds, maybe thousands of them. The Neighbors Network records offer a chance to get to know the thoughts and personalities of virulent racists as well as the people who sought to monitor and ultimately thwart hate group activity in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Neighbors Network was founded in the late 1980s with the goal of countering "hate-crime and hate-group activity through research, education, victims' assistance and community action." The Network worked closely with other anti-hate groups in Georgia. They compiled an impressive cache of material relating to various Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazi, and Skinhead groups while also proliferating numerous original publications urging public action and rejection of hate group activity. The group also emphasized engagement with those wishing to escape racist groups despite those groups' highly dangerous and effective retention efforts. The Network never lacked a steady supply of material to report to the community. The counties surrounding and including Atlanta were hotbeds of racist activity in the time during which the Network was active.

My experience in arranging the Neighbors Network collection was nothing if not educational.  Before, I had never thought of white supremacists as three-dimensional people.  Racists did not have histories, life experiences, or formative moments.  They simply existed, fully formed and fully racist for no rational reason.  The Neighbors Network knew that a bigot had his/her reasons for being and thinking the way s/he did, and diligently uncovered the ideologies and (nearly always) erroneous beliefs that fueled hate groups' vitriolic rhetoric and actions.  The Network publicized hate group activities and spurious ideologies.  In so doing, it de-mystified the Racist in the public perception and made people aware of the danger hate groups pose to free societies.  The Network also made every effort to appeal to the humanity of white supremacists as it tried to rehabilitate group members.  The collection tells this threefold story of infiltration, publication, and rehabilitation.

Viewing this collection affords one the opportunity to see what ordinary people are capable of when primed with ideology.  In viewing the pictures, in reading the literature, and in analyzing the signs and symbols of these groups, one begins to feel as though they really know the people in the pictures and behind the words, for better or worse.

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As a literary scholar, I find it refreshing to take on historical projects in my second life as a graduate student archives processor in MARBL. I love getting to know figures I would never otherwise have encountered. But I became unusually drawn into the story of Edwin A. Harleston, and I will remember this collection long after I have left Emory. One of the South’s first African American portrait artists to earn some commercial success, Harleston had a rich personal and professional life that at times bordered on the Southern Gothic.

Harleston is perhaps best remembered for the Harleston Studio, which he and his wife founded in Charleston, South Carolina in 1922 to promote her photography and his portraiture. But researchers will find that Harleston’s place in Charleston went far beyond his renown as an artist. I was delighted to uncover the typescript of a World War I play he wrote, as well as many theatre programs from the 1910s and 1920s that document his activities as an actor, playwright, and director. Fragments of manuscripts for speeches to the Charleston Branch of the NAACP, which he helped to found, also show his proclivity for politics.

Harleston's sketchbooks and drawings will be a big draw for researchers. These show the development of his traditional portraiture aesthetic that often put him at odds with the New Negro Movement. Coming from a literary perspective, I noted that Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro came out in 1925, three years after Harleston began to gain widespread recognition. The principles of the movement do not resonate with Harleston's traditional themes and techniques, and his career struggled accordingly both within and beyond the African American community. Many of the sketches and drawings MARBL now holds were produced during Harleston's time at the school of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where he was the only African American in his cohort of over 200 students.

A quieter story that emerged as I processed the collection was that of Harleston's wife, Elise. Her story comes through most strongly in the hundreds of letters the couple exchanged during their seven-year courtship and marriage. The letters reveal Harleston’s vision of a marriage based on artistic collaboration that Elise never fully settled into. At her husband’s urging, Elise attended photography school and became South Carolina's first documented African American woman photographer. Although we cannot be certain of the provenance of some of the photographs we found among Harleston's artwork, it is likely that Elise took several of these photographs, particularly the ones that became models for Harleston's portraits.

One of the most difficult matters from a processing perspective was how to handle the massive amount of research compiled by Edwin and Elise Harleston's niece, Edwina Harleston Whitlock. She assumed the role of family archivist, building massive research files from the 1960s-1990s. She also undertook several unpublished book projects on the life of her uncle. Whitlock's daughter, Mae Whitlock Gentry, continued Harleston’s biography when her mother no longer could.

While Whitlock and Gentry never managed to produce a biography of Edwin Harleston, dozens of typescripts with radical revisions testify to their decades-long devotion to documenting their family history. The most polished attempt came in the early 2000s with Mae Whitlock Gentry’s Companions in Time: The Art of Edwin and Elise Harleston. The manuscript features Elise Harleston's career alongside her husband's, retelling the Harleston story through the letters the couple sent back and forth during Harleston’s long absences. I found this approach particularly affecting after having dated and arranged many of these personal letters myself.  

The research and writing that did not amount to publications in Whitlock's lifetime will now be widely available to researchers. I was glad to have a place in continuing the preservation and documentation of the little-known lives of Edwin and Elise Harleston.

Theatre, Maurice Maeterlinck, 1901-1902,
modern morocco binding with delicate color detailing

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Today we take for granted that if we purchase a book it will come with a protective paper or cloth binding but this has not always been the case. The concept of the publisher printing and binding a book is a relatively recent phenomenon, dating from the first half of the 18th century. Before the Industrial Revolution books were made entirely by hand, from the paper production to the typesetting to the binding.

Sanctorum Kalendarii Romani, Christophe Plantin, printer, 1580,
fanfare binding, a distinctive style that was the height
of fashion in 1580

Generally each part of the production was performed by a separate business but, in contrast to today, the binding took place after it had been purchased by the consumer. The bookseller sold the books in a crude protective paper cover with the expectation that the consumer would have the volume bound to their taste and budget. This explains why you can take six examples of a 17th century work and find they are all bound in different materials and different styles. Cheaper bindings would have paper covers or use cheap leather such as sheep. The brown leather binding we’re familiar seeing on rare books is calf while the most expensive bindings would use goat skin, commonly known as morocco. Morocco has an attractive grain and takes color well. More expensive bindings could also be extravagantly decorated with gold tooling.

The Art of Contentment, Richard Allestree, 1675,
English binding from the 17th century with
distinctive "drawer handle" tooling

Cover of Conditions: Five
"The Black Women's Issue"

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MARBL is honored to add Conditions: a magazine of writing by women with an emphasis on writing by lesbians to our holdings. Conditions comes to MARBL through a generous gift made possible by Professor Cheryl Clarke of Rutgers University and Julie Enszer of the University of Maryland. First published in 1977, the magazine spans multiple genres of writing, with an emphasis on the work of lesbians of color and/or working-class lesbians. The magazine's all lesbian editorial collective established itself in Brooklyn, New York in 1976 and published 17 issues between 1977 and 1990.

Contributors to Conditions include Dorothy Allison, Gloria Anzaldúa, Ellen Bass, Lorraine Bethel, Cheryl Clarke, Jewelle Gomez, Amber Hollibaugh, Gloria Hull, Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Joan Nestle, Pat Parker, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Sapphire, Mab Segrest, Barbara Smith, and Adrienne Rich among many others. As a magazine, Conditions ceased publication in 1990 due to funding cuts. Attacks on lesbian women's writing led to the defunding of Conditions by several federal funding agencies (including the National Endowment for the Arts, which characterized Conditions as "more lesbian than literature"). The literary contributions were, for many of the now renowned feminist writers, their first publications. In addition to poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction pieces, Conditions published scholarly essays, interviews, and book reviews. Conditions' commitment to publishing the work of feminist writers and scholars who address issues of social justice and social difference, such as race, class, sexuality, and nationality, provided a platform for feminist work that challenged the predominance of white, middle-class feminist concerns in the women's liberation movement.
    

In Conditions' second issue, Barbara Smith's essay, "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," forged new language for theorizing Black feminist literature. As a member of the Combahee River Collective, Smith grappled with the difficulties of confronting multiple forms of social oppression in her scholarship. She writes, "I was attempting something unprecedented, something dangerous merely by writing about Black women writers from any perspective at all. These things have not been done. Not by white male critics, expectedly. Not by Black male critics. Not by white women critics who think of themselves as feminists. And most crucially not by Black women critics who, although they pay the most attention to Black women writers as a group, seldom use a consistent feminist analysis or write about Black lesbian literature." Smith's essay garnered much support and provoked much discussion. Along with Lorraine Bethel, Barbara Smith was invited to guest edit issue five, titled "The Black Women's Issue." This issue sold over 3,000 copies in less than four weeks, making history among feminist presses. The overwhelming interest in "The Black Women's Issue" led Smith to anthologize those works, along with additional essays, in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, published by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1983. A second edition of the anthology was published by Rutgers University Press in 2000. Home Girls continues to be recognized as a watershed text in the history of feminist thought in the United States.

Conditions enhances MARBL's extensive collections in African American history and culture, MARBL's development of LGBT collections, and MARBL's collecting areas in American literature, social justice, and civil rights movements. In addition to preserving Conditions for future generations of readers, MARBL is committed to democratic access to all of our holdings. Any person, regardless of institutional affiliation or reason of study, may request to view materials.