The St. Louis Civil Liberties Committee began on May 7, 1920, with about a dozen volunteers, both men and women. For its first decades, the group and its actions remained focused on advocacy and education about civil rights. By 1932, the national ACLU noted that St. Louis was focusing “chie...
Washington University doctoral student Sarah Siegel (PhD 2019) utilized a number of archival collections from the Julian Edison Department of Special Collections in researching her dissertation, “By the People Most Affected”: Model Cities, Citizen Control, and the Broken Promises of Urban R...
In the ACLU of Missouri’s archives in the Julian Edison Department of Special Collections, I found this delightful letter from Harry S. Truman. In 1959, the organization went by the name St. Louis Civil Liberties Committee and was a small volunteer-only advocacy organization. While the form...
While preparing materials for a faculty workshop last fall, I happened across a brief correspondence from Langston Hughes in the St. Louis Urban League Records. November 29, 1940 from Los Angeles, California, Langston Hughes wrote, “Dear Mr. Clark: I read with much interest of your plans f...
Campus 2020 I snapped this photo on campus last week, while classes were on an extended Spring Break On a spring day in previous years this grassy field would have been full of students playing soccer, Frisbee, lounging in hammocks between trees and poles, or just sitting with friends. But in 20...
A number of years ago while preparing to scan some requested documents from the Steedman Fellowship in Architectural Competition Collection, some letters with beautiful little sketches caught my eye. I looked a bit closer at the letters and discovered they were not just perfunctory reports abou...
In February while meeting with some history students visiting the archives, I came across some unexpected photographs of John Lewis as a young man. They capture one brief moment — a Sunday afternoon in May 1963 as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in St. Louis hosted an...
In times of trouble or change historians by nature turn to stories from the past. As a historian and archivist, that is certainly true for me. Archivist online My work as a curator (custodian, caretaker, shepherd) of local history collections at Washington University is usually a mix of physic...
