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Spring 2026

Collecting Ourselves

Archives, Family History, and Black Southern Migration to Chicago

by Sumayya Ahmed

“By searching for the archival traces of my family’s pre- and early migration life, I become my family’s historian, putting primary sources in conversation with family lore and oral histories.”

In summer of 2020, the Alabama State Archives issued a statement acknowledging its role in upholding systematic racism by, among other things, putting into practice a collection policy focusing on the Lost Cause. This meant that it had “declin[ed] to acquire and preserve materials documenting the lives and contributions of African Americans in Alabama.” This statement came at a moment that was believed by some to have been an opening following the Ferguson protests after the murder of Mike Brown and tragically punctuated with the murder of George Floyd, toward a heretofore unattained reckoning with racism in the United States. The statement had two-fold potency for me as an African American archival scholar with great-grandparents from Alabama. It signaled potential and acknowledged loss. It came at a time when I was embarking on a project using archival records to piece together my family’s trajectory from the Jim Crow South to Chicago in the 1930s. During the project, I observed and documented how the effects of discriminatory archival appraisal, arrangement, and description practices limit the possibilities for Black people to find accurate information about their ancestors in traditional repositories.

This is an abstract. Read the full article for free on Project Muse.
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