The New Orleans Tribune talks with Kathe Hambrick, the executive director of the Amistad Research Center, about her passion for Black History and her plans for leading the nation’s oldest and largest independent archive chronicling Black history and culture
Imagine pouring over any one of many handwritten letters drafted, in tidy cursive on ordinary loose notebook paper, by Fannie Lou Hamer to her friend and civil rights supporter Rose Carver Fishman of Boston, a woman Hamer described as a “mother” figure in one such a correspondence, although Hamer was the older of the two.
In one letter, dated Oct. 13, 1965, Hamer thanks Fishman for a package and apprises her on the struggle for civil rights, vaguely mentioning a “challenge” that, to her dismay, was dismissed. “That show (sic) how much hard work we have to do,” wrote Hamer.
She shares glimpses of her personal life – her husband’s two-week hospital stay for a slipped disc and concerns about her and her family’s safety as she tells about two cars filled with white people that stopped for no apparent reason in front her house, writing “Who do we report this to? Nobody because all of the killing of civil right workers in Ala. and Mississippi nothing has been done, nobody have (sic) been convicted . . . How can we say this is a free country when all of this can happen. Oh God, I wonder how long.”
In the same letter, Hamer hints at what sounds like regret that her work in the struggle for civil rights has rendered her less attentive to her own family as she writes about her pregnant daughter and anticipating the arrival of her grandchild.
Just imagine holding and reading that letter. It’s impossible not to be bowled over by it, not because it is especially remarkable. Instead, it is how normal and natural its words are that inspires awe – an example of the courage ordinary people summon to do extraordinary things – the essential molecule of which history is made.
Kathe Hambrick does not have to rely on her mind’s eye to visualize such happenings. As the new executive director of the Amistad Research Center, she gets to experience this, and much more, regularly, since being hired in February as the interim executive director of Amistad, a repository dedicated to collecting and preserving original documents, photographs, art work, manuscripts personal papers and other material that help define Black history, human relations and civil rights in America and throughout the African Diaspora.
In August, the word “interim” was dropped from her title. And in late September, the Amistad’s Board of Directors held a reception in her honor to mark the occasion.
While Hambrick is still relatively new to her role at Amistad, she is not at all new to the work. She is an educator, historian and author with 30 years of experience.
It’s that experience that makes members of the Amistad’s board confident in their selection of Hambrick.
“Without a doubt, Kathe Hambrick is the right person for this position at the right time. She lives and breathes this. This is who she is, ” says Kim Boyle, community leader and attorney who serves as president of the Amistad’s Board of Directors. “She is committed to this work and passionate about it. She knows what out story is, and she knows how to tell it.:
Hambrick’s career has long been about the celebration of Black history and culture. She is the founder and former executive director of the River Road African American Museum, now located in Donaldsonville; and she is a past president of the Association of African American Museums. A graduate of Southern University at New Orleans Museums Studies program, Hambrick also has served as the chief curator and director of interpretation for the West Baton Rouge Museum.
In fact, it was 30 years ago while preparing to open the River Road African American Museum at the Tezcuco Plantation in Burnside, La., that Hambrick says she was first exposed to all that Amistad had to offer, delving into its primary source documents to guide the River Road Museum’s mission of interpreting and celebrating the lives and history of African-Americans in rural Louisiana.
Where the Truth Sits
“There is not, I am sure, a history museum anywhere that exists without research done in an archives,” Hambrick says. “You know, museums don’t exist by just pulling information out of the sky. And of course, when I started the River Road African-American Museum it was before the Internet, back in the good old days and look at primary source documents on the table in front of you or through microfiche.”
In an age where many misconstrue stumbling upon information on Google as research, Hambrick laments that the exploration and examination of original records that document a period have become something of a lost skill.
“As technology has advanced to where most people think that all truth and information come from the Internet, I am proud to say that I am in charge of one of the world’s largest repositories for Black history. And this is where the truth sits – on paper and in the boxes that protect Black history here at the Amistad Research Center.”
Researching, preserving, celebrating and sharing Black history is Hambrick’s thing. Of course, that does not mean that she is still not astounded, from time to time, at the breadth, depth and rarity of the Amistad’s holdings.
The papers and personal libraries of Harlem Renaissance poet and playwright Countee Cullen and of poet and historian Tom Dent are there.
Fannie Lou Hamer’s papers are at Amistad. A collection of letters, mostly, belonging to Mary McLeod Bethune, highlighting correspondence between her and Roy Wilkins, Adam Clayton Powell Sr., Walter White among a number of other key historical figures are a part of the archival collection, as are papers and document that highlight the career of actor, playwright and civil rights activist John O’Neal.
Much more could be named, but all that the Amistad Research Center holds cannot be listed here.
“There are 900 collections, 15 million documents and manuscripts, (with the oldest dating back to 1780),” says Hambrick. “In one collection, there are 241 boxes. So imagine the number of pages in one box.”
Amistad’s holdings also include more than 250,000 photographs, some dating back to 1859. More than 2000 periodicals, 25,000 plus monographs, books, dissertations and articles are also at Amistad – all coming together to tell the story of a people.
With all of that, it is also much more than a collection of documents and papers.
“We have 1100 works of art by 19th and 20th century masters,” says Hambrick.
Its holdings include works of by Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, Gwendolyn Bennett and John T. Scott to name just a few.
Boyle notes that the Amistad Research Center also houses collections of documents and papers representing each of the Black fraternities and sororities as well as of Prince Hall Masons. The papers of Justice Revius Ortique Jr., and Justice Bernette Johnson, who were the first and second African American, respectively, to serve on the Louisiana State Supreme Court, are also at the Amistad.
“We want people to know who we are, what we have and be able to access it,” says Boyle, adding that the desire to connect to community is what makes Amistad’s Conversations in Color, a free public cultural speaker series that couples items from the Center’s collections with featured artists, educators and community activists discussing their work, race, economics, politics and more, so important.
Community leader and Amistad Research Center Board Member, Ronald Carrere echoes Boyd, saying that his vision for the Center is to own its rightful place.
“Amistad is a national and international treasure,” he says. “We have the entire spectrum of Black art and culture, and we have to continue to put ourselves on a national and global stage.”
Amistad is gaining the recognition it is due, to be sure.
In June 2022, the Amistad Research Center was one of six institutions to receive the 2022 National Medal for Museum and Library Science – the nation’s highest honor for such organizations.
And while the vast majority of its holdings are not openly displayed, they are available for review to anyone – the student, the writer, the genealogist, the historian, the researcher – anyone in search of insight into any aspect of Black history, culture and experiences.
“Amistad is a national archives utilized by academics and researchers around the globe,” Carrere says. “As African-American history gets more attention, the Amistad serves as an epicenter. There’s no story that Amistad can’t tell.”
Shining A New Light
Among the Amistad’s holdings, there are items that compel even Hambrick to pause and take them in – like the letters from Hamer to Fishman that were being pulled from a larger collection to comprise their own smaller compilation or an original program from Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s funeral.
Hambrick says she took a moment to peruse the document before it was shipped on loan to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.
It was in “pristine condition, the original paper, in a maroon colored ink, she says. She noted the names of pallbearers – W.E.B. Dubois and Paul Robeson were among them, if her memory serves her. The funeral program was a part of a file belonging to the Barnetts – the family of the crusading journalist’s husband Ferdinand Lee Barnett, a Chicago attorney and newspaperman who championed civil rights along side his wife.
An independent, non-profit institution, Amistad relies on the grants, as well fees charged for loaning items and exhibitions to other institutions and museums, along with charitable donations, for its operations. Users also pay nominal fees for use of the archives and photocopies of documents and material.
For those who have never been to Amistad or who have not visited the repository in a while, now is a good time. Hambrick is on mission to expand the Center’s already vast holdings.
For example, she is working now to get the rest of the papers and documents of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Ph.D., the New Orleans-born American historian and professor whose work focused the history of slavery in the Caribbean, Latin America, Louisiana and Africa. Hall, who was one of Hambrick’s mentors, died in August 2022 in Mexico. Since her passing, her son has reached out to Hambrick, she says, interested in sending the rest of his mother’s extensive work to Amistad now that Hambrick is at the helm.
Amistad’s new leader is excited about the prospect of completing the collection of Hall’s work and papers at Amistad; and while expanding holdings is important, she is also anxious to showcase the Center a brand new light.
Though she waxes nostalgic for the “good old days” of research and hopes to help reinvigorate the lost skill by working closely with area schools and school librarians to encourage and organize more school field trips to the Amistad, Hambrick and Amistad’s staff also work to ensure that the institution remains technologically relevant.
The Center uses funds from digitization grants to make more of its rare documents available online, says Hambrick.
“Through our website, amistadresearchcenter.org, we want people to use and take advantage of technology. You are able to look at some of those documents, photos and art through our virtual exhibits and in Conversations in Color,” says Hambrick. “But research means that you don’t just use the Internet. Libraries are still important. Archives are still important. Books are still important.”
Still, for Hambrick, the work is more than promoting Amistad, protecting its contents or engaging in efforts to amass new material. That part is the profession – what she is trained and educated to do.
The passion is something different. There is a pride she projects about Amistad, in the history it holds and where it sits. She feels it, and wants others to, as well. And while it is true that the Amistad Research Center is a national archive that only happens to be in New Orleans, Hambrick speaks as if it were meant to be here.
She even provides this writer, who can admit to long carrying just a bit of disdain over the Amistad Research Center – a fountain of Black history and culture – sitting on the campus of Tulane University, a predominantly white institution located in uptown New Orleans another perspective with just a few historical footnotes.
The Center is located inside Tilton Memorial Hall, which sits on the front of Tulane’s campus. Outside its perimeter, adjacent to that area is a gated neighborhood of fenced-in mansions on private roads. But more than 153 years ago, that same tract of land between what is now Audubon Place and Audubon Street was the original home of Leland College, a historically Black college founded in 1870 in New Orleans on St. Charles Avenue before moving to Baker, La.
There is more. Just a few blocks down St. Charles, near Broadway Street in the uptown Carrollton of New Orleans was a place once called the Village of Greenville. In 1866, Greenville was the site of a post-Civil War military encampment where the U.S. Army’s African-American 9th Calvary Regiment was formed and stationed. The 9th Calvary was one of the four all-Black regiments that would collectively be known as Buffalo Soldiers.
Altogether, those facts are reminders that Black people, Black institutions and Blackness belong everywhere.
“As I walk to work . . . as I take the street car . . . as I sometimes complain about trying to find parking, I think about the historic landscape of this part of New Orleans,” says Hambrick. “We need to let New Orleans know the importance of this institution still being in New Orleans. I can think of no better place for the collection about racial justice, social justice, liberation and freedom of Black people throughout the diaspora for this archives to exist.”
An Archive of Liberation
A Story of Freedom
The Amistad Research Center was founded in 1966. But Hambrick has jotted the Center’s timeline on a dry erase board in her office; and the beginning is different. She marks it as 1839. As is the case with any history, it does not start with pages in archives, but with people and actions.
In 1839, after being kidnapped from Sierre Leone, taken to and sold in Cuba, then forced to board another slave ship, La Amistad, bound for a Caribbean plantation, a group of 53 Africans – Mende people – revolted, commandeered the ship, and ordered its navigator to bring them back to Africa. He, instead, piloted the schooner to the United States, where La Amistad and the Africans were taken into custody off the coast of Long Island, NY, before being taken to Connecticut.
The Africans were held for two more years, facing murder charges and extradition to Cuba. Meanwhile a group of abolitionists, who took their name from the slave ship, called themselves the Amistad Committee, raised money to support the Africans, hiring lawyers to represent them as a legal case quickly worked its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Caribbean plantation owners that illegally purchased the human cargo tried to convince authorities that the Africans were enslaved individuals bought and sold domestically.
The Africans asserted that they were born free and had recently been abducted from their native country. Though slavery was legal in 1839, international slave trading had been banned many years earlier by laws established in Europe and the United States, making the Africans’ mutiny an act of justifiable self defense, not murder.
In 1841, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Africans had been illegally transported and sold into slavery. The court ordered the release of 35 Africans (the others died during the mutiny or while in prison). In November 1841, the surviving Africans set sail for the coast of West Africa, arriving in January of 1842.
The Amistad Committee would later become the American Missionary Association, which continued to push for an end to slavery and racial equality, while also turning attention to education, playing a role in the founding of nine HBCUs: Atlanta (now Clark-Atlanta), Fisk, Dillard, Hampton and Howard universities, along with Huston-Tillotson, LeMoyne (now LeMoyne-Owen) Talledega, Tougaloo colleges.
Fast forward to1961, Le Moyne-Owen College professor, Dr. Clifton H. Johnson, was asked to organize the AMA’s historical records at Fisk University. By 1966, the AMA was ready to formally archive those documents and founded the Amistad Research Center to do so – again, taking the slave ship’s moniker.
The Center made its first home at Fisk, one of the HBCU’s the AMA helped found. In 1969, it became an independent non-profit organization and moved, in 1970, to the campus of another HBCU with AMA ties, Dillard University in New Orleans. It was in the 1970s at Dillard that the Amistad’s holdings began to significantly expand beyond the AMA’s records to include other material of social, cultural, and historical importance to Black history and the African Diaspora – becoming the go-to repository for noted organizations, individuals or their heirs that entrust the Center with the responsibility of housing and preserving the material, and managing how it is shared with others.
In need of more space, the Center moved again in the early 1980s to the US Mint in the French Quarter and finally to Tulane University, where it has been since 1987.
In the past, it has been explained that the Center was simply named to honor the Africans on board La Amistad and the AMA’s role in supporting them. Hambrick’s dry erase notes seem more fitting. The Center’s name is not just some honorary nod; its history actually begins in 1839 with 53 brave Mende and their bold fight for freedom, and not the 1966 founding of a reference library. Yes, that seems right; because that fight and the embodiment of that spirit – much like the fight of Fannie Lou Hamer, Ida B. Wells Barnett and so many others – are the heart of the truth that sits at Amistad.
“People come here sometimes thinking we are an archives of slavery or about slavery,” says Hambrick. “But we are an archives of liberation, because . . . well you know the story. And if you know the story, you know it’s a story of freedom.”