Recently the National Archives announced 47 grants totaling $6,510,701 for projects in 27 states and the District of Columbia to improve public access to historical records. Many of these grants relate to African Americans.
The University of Illinois at Chicago received a $125,000 grant for a program to develop lesson plans for the teaching of the history of Black nurses in Chicago.
Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, received a $145,566 grant that will fund research of public records relating to the history, culture, and family of African American female landowners in the Alabama Black Belt.
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University received a $150,000 grant to support the Chicago Covenants Project, which draws on volunteers to locate, digitize, and make available every racially restrictive covenant in the analog land records of Cook County, Illinois, in order to explore how covenants were key tools of racial segregation and how they continue to affect society.
The University of Tennessee, Chattanooga received a $144,049 grant to support a project to process and describe 125 linear feet of archival material amassed by Tommie F. Brown (1934-), an accomplished civic leader, educator, researcher, and state legislator whose career is defined by historic firsts, including serving from 1992-2012 as the first Black woman to represent the 28th District in the Tennessee House of Representatives.
Tulane University in New Orleans received a $72,441 grant to support the Amistad Research Center’s project to provide access to 21 archival collections totaling 109 linear feet documenting historically Black colleges and universities, public school integration, African American arts administration, cross-cultural efforts between the U.S. and Africa, the history of the NAACP, housing discrimination, and intergroup and race relations.
The University of Maryland College Park received a $160,000 grant to support the Freedmen and Southern Society Project on the history of emancipation.
Villanova University in Pennsylvania $120,000 to support the Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery project. The project seeks to identify, digitize, transcribe, and publish ads placed in newspapers across the United States (and beyond) by formerly enslaved people searching for family members and loved ones after emancipation.
Stanford University received a $160,000 grant to continue support for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project.
Indiana University obtained a $132,412 grant to edit the Frederick Douglass Papers project.
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln received $159,792 to support research on the Charles Chesnutt Archives. The project will examine 250 items of correspondence to and from Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932), a pioneering African American writer, lawyer, and voting rights activist, to be published to the Charles Chesnutt Digital Archive.
The University of Virginia received a $160,000 grant to support a project to edit and publish the papers of Julian Bond, a civil rights advocate, legislator, and professor.
