Atlanta library earns $220K grant to preserve ‘the Black experience’
Long before archives like the Auburn Avenue Research Library would consider her work historically significant, Mary Parks Washington was turning the everyday Black experience into art — using old insurance policies, family records, photographs and handwritten documents.
In “Aunt Gussie,” a 1996 acrylic and collage portrait of a woman clutching the umbrella she carried “rain or shine,” Washington layered Aunt Gussie on top of an old insurance policy to fuse personal history with the collective story of Black Atlanta before the Civil Rights Movement.
“Aunt Gussie loved her umbrella and carried it rain or shine,” wrote Washington, an Atlanta native and 1945 Spelman College graduate who died in 2019. “Perhaps it was her shield of protection from the unhappy world she lived in. Her focus was paying her weekly insurance policy and planning for a fine funeral.”
Now, Washington’s work and archives are among the collections being preserved and digitized at the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, thanks to a $220,000 grant from the Getty Foundation to help the institution continue to support and preserve Black artistic and cultural history.
“Our collections document all forms of the Black experience,” said Derek Mosley, head archivist at the library. “Everyone deserves to have their story preserved, and that is what we aim to do.”
The library traces its roots to the Sweet Auburn Branch of the Carnegie Library of Atlanta, the first branch created for Atlanta’s Black community during segregation.
The archives, founded from a collection that dates to 1934, was established by Black librarians Annie L. McPheeters and Alice Dugged Cary and has since grown into one of the nation’s leading archives dedicated to Black history and culture.
The Auburn Avenue Research Library is one of eight institutions — including the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit — that will split a $1.8 million Getty grant to preserve various art mediums, including artist papers, exhibition records and photography, by enhancing the institutions’ access to materials to digitize archival elements.
Victor Simmons, administrator of the library said the grant helps further its goal of showcasing an already rich and diverse collection, including the papers of former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, civil rights leader Hosea Williams and attorney Donald Lee Hollowell.
He added it was especially important for the library to highlight their other “robust” collections, too, like the Black LGBTQ+ and now Black arts collections.
“Our institution is unique in that we are one of only a handful of public research libraries dedicated to the collecting and preserving of Black culture and history,” said Simmons, who along with Mosley is currently in Harlem at a summit at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black culture. They are meeting with the Getty Foundation and other grant recipients to discuss ways to share their work.
“It is not a small task to undertake, but we believe that we are one of the pieces that help flesh the stories out,” Simmons said.
With its $220,000 share, the Auburn Avenue Research Library plans to highlight collections tied to the Neighborhood Arts Center, the National Black Arts Festival and other organizations, along with the works of Black female leaders like Washington, Kathleen Joy Peters and Stephanie Hughley.
Hughley, the co-founder of the National Black Arts Festival, said she thinks it’s important for everyone to tell their own story so future generations will have access to the different perspectives.
“History becomes his story unless we take control of the documentation and assets that we create as Black women,” she said. “So that others coming behind us will have opportunities to hear the truth.”
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