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Johns Hopkins Project Mines Afro-American Archives |
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MICUA Matters
Summer 2008
Johns Hopkins has launched a student internship program to
mine the wealth of historic material contained in the archives of The Afro-American Newspaper, the publication of record for Baltimore's African-American
community since 1892. In order to preserve the newspaper’s archival holdings
and make them accessible, the Center for Africana Studies and the Sheridan
Libraries’ Center for Educational Resources have embarked on the internship
program funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The program selected
five students from Johns Hopkins, Goucher College, and Morgan State University
as its initial cohort to uncover and describe the contents of the paper’s
archives. Their work began in January. In their first week, the interns found
such treasures as photographs of civil rights activist Daisy Bates, a
photograph of Sudanese political leader El Ferik Ibrahim Abboud walking with
President John F. Kennedy, and thousands of clippings chronicling the everyday
lives of black Baltimoreans through announcements of births, deaths, weddings,
and graduations.
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