Conscious Editing for Racial Equity: Reframing Archival Description of Plantation Records

Wilson Special Collections Library’s Southern Historical Collection holds hundreds of archival collections that document Black people, who were enslaved on plantations and farms, at mills, fisheries, railroads, ports, colleges, and universities, and in towns and cities across the American South during the 18th and 19th centuries. These collections include documents created by the enslavers to manage their assets in the people they claimed as property. The enslavers often recorded information including names, ages, birth dates, death dates occupations, illnesses, and acts of resistance, that cannot be found anywhere else in public records. The documents are available for research, but they are obscured by the archival principle of provenance and by archival description that centers white people and marginalizes Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. This presentation is a call to center Black people in archival description of records of enslavement