“An Impressive Basis For Research”

On September 19, 1961, Fisk University librarian Arna Bontemps wrote to Shirley Graham Du Bois and let her know the W.E.B. Du Bois Collection had arrived at campus safely and securely. “It will naturally take time to process this important material,” he observed. “But we look forward to it with excitement and pleasure.” The following day Bontemps got to work. He composed a three-page press release about the Du Bois archives describing the scope of the collection and plans for processing it. Bontemps wrote proudly that Fisk had scored an archival victory since at the time many institutions were attempting to obtain Du Bois’s papers. The new Du Bois archive accompanied other major collections at Fisk acquired under Bontemps’ tenure as librarian such as the Charles Chesnutt Papers and the Julius Rosenwald Fund Archives, among others. Bontemps’ press release described the physical presence of the collection as it arrived at Fisk. “The contents include at least six steel files of manuscript material,” containing correspondence and unpublished pieces along with “several large boxes of pamphlets and hard-to-find fugitive publications collected by the scholar over three-quarters of a century, perhaps two thousand books (many of them scarce), and scores of miscellaneous items.” The Du Bois Collection, concluded Bontemps, “forms an impressive basis for research.” Bontemps’ vivid descriptions of the Du Bois papers’ contents and the physical arrangement of the manuscripts themselves presents a captivating entry point to explore an archival history of the Du Bois Collection at Fisk. This article considers Du Bois’s own collecting practices over time in conjunction with historian Herbert Aptheker’s custodial oversight of the materials and writer (and Du Bois’s spouse) Shirley Graham Du Bois’s curatorial arrangement of the manuscripts. It traces the history of Bontemps’ archival labor in obtaining the Du Bois Collection by considering his larger efforts as Fisk’s librarian and as a memory keeper of Black history and culture. Bontemps’ literary luminosity as a Harlem Renaissance writer informed his librarianship as a historian-archivist, a descriptor adapted from literary scholar and Bontemps biographer Kirkland C. Jones. The documentary foundation of his creative writings rooted his work in history; the energy of his collecting efforts at Fisk created a record of his intellectual accomplishments as a librarian. Framing this article as archival history recognizes my disciplinary home as a historian while it names my intellectual indebtedness to archival turns in American historical and literary studies. Following Michelle Caswell, it seeks to both acknowledge archival studies and to converse with the field’s history and scholarship. Most specifically, this essay draws on recent work in Black