In spring 2018, I attended Theaster Gates’s Laureate Town Hall at the Wyly Theatre in Dallas, when he was awarded the Nasher Prize, becoming the first American and first Black man to be selected. Accompanied by Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, Gates, sitting under an image from his collection of a recovered Harold’s Chicken Shack sign, both questioned and affirmed the connection and relationship between the immaterial world and the material world. Utilizing a gospel-themed analogy of the wooden, Christian cross, Theaster explained that material objects by themselves have no “intrinsic value” to us, and these objects are “simply a thing waiting to be filled” by our immaterial and temporary power. He uncovers how “things we can’t quite grasp” like historical events, can be activated by art, artists, and archivists. These words resonated deeply with me. In them, I saw my mother, her disciplined religious practice, and her refusal to throw things away. And I saw myself.
At that moment, I realized I had been in search of myself, trying to remember the places, events, and people who, as I continue to live, I struggle to remember. The word ‘remember’ is a symbol for the act of bringing what exists in our memory back to one’s conscious mind and present thoughts. ‘Remember’ acts as a literal and figurative analogy when applied to the context of history and historical significance; it implies a physical act of re-membering the disconnected parts of the human historical record to reproduce a happening, an existence, or a life. This is a huge responsibility and it requires dedication, passion, resources, time, research, critical thinking, empathy, love, care, and concern. This is the work of the archivist, who appears in many forms, such as a scrapbooking grandmother, an institution-building Afro-Puerto Rican, or a lesbian collector from the Bay Area. I believe archivists are engaged in surgery of the collective memory. The operations and interventions they choose determine what we value in the present and future.
In the epilogue of her book, Dallas: The Making of a Modern City, Patricia Evridge Hill explicated that “most of Dallas’s past remains undocumented.” In White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001, Dr. Michael Phillips shared that “academic neglect of Dallas . . . represents amnesia by design . . . . City leaders transformed the community into a laboratory of forgetfulness.” What does memory work mean in a city designed to make people forget?
In my role as Executive Director of Dallas Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation, I am tasked with confronting the truth about how the false belief in a hierarchy of human value has arbitrarily created different life experiences and varying outcomes for all of us. My initial exercise (and the first guiding principle of Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation) was to attempt to compile a community racial history, or a historical analysis of the people of Dallas in terms of race, policy, and place from Indigenous times to the present. It was essentially a massive archival project I had already started years earlier upon moving to Dallas, and it meant compiling as much of the accessible historical record as possible to share widely. I started collecting books about Dallas (which was extremely difficult because Dallas has so few texts written about its history and its people) and moved to other ephemera, such as pamphlets, photos, and postcards. The goal in collecting these materials is to use them to change the prevailing narrative about who we all are. Renowned organizer, educator, archivist, and abolitionist Mariame Kaba affirmed this objective in a conversation we had in 2022, in which she explained the purpose of cultural organizing through her archival practice:
“My archival orientation is to pull from the past to make a better future. . . .I collect things and then I tell stories with those items that I hope will draw people in . . . and engage us differently around social change and transformation, and get us to see the past in order to better understand our current moment. . . .My collections are really intended to be used. I don’t collect for the sake of just hoarding or holding on to information, and I want my collections to be activated. Because why do I have them? I don’t want something just in a shoebox. I want something that a young person can look at and be like ‘Oh, that’s so interesting. I want to learn more about that!’ I want to have THAT experience for people. You know? A spark!”
All my life, I have collected things. I value things.
I archive Black people’s things. They are important because the lives that Black people live are important and have high value, and that meant that my life was also important enough to remember and preserve. I have always thought that I was part of history and, concurrently, making history. My collection of objects, ephemera, albums, magazines, and books is deeply personal and weaves my life experiences through a wider Black American and African diasporic tapestry. I ask you:
What is the value of an object?
What is the value of a human?
What is the societal value of a human
when the social perception of that human’s
personhood has been . . . an object?
Within these pages, I’ve shared some highlights from my personal archive.
I draw my inspiration to archive from people I am in community with who activate the available archive. Artists like Vicki Meek and Ángel Faz utilize the archive to help us remember what was lost in Dallas through oral history, sculpture, and printmaking. Historians like Dr. Marvin Dulaney and Amber Sims scour through manuscripts and newspapers in the archive to piece together the disappearing stories of Black Dallas. Genealogists like Donald Payton and the late Dr. George Keaton actuated the archive to share rich narratives about the lives of Dallas’s enslaved and newly emancipated. Institution builders like Dr. Harry Robinson, President and CEO of the African American Museum in Dallas, and Brenda Sanders-Wise, Executive Director of the Tarrant County Black Historical & Genealogical Society and the Lenora Rolla Heritage Center Museum in Fort Worth, are preserving archives so we all can learn from them and grow together. Memory workers like Marilyn Clark, a community-centered legend-archivist, and Priscilla Escobedo, a Tejana archivist and President of the Dallas Mexican American Historical League, are guides to a more equitable future by showing us what the archives can teach us about our troubled past.
Image credits in order of appearance:
Dr. Angela Y. Davis, feminist political activist, philosopher, academic, and author, appeared on the cover of Jet, a Johnson Publishing Company weekly magazine, five times. These are all five covers. I brought her to Dallas in 2023 and had the honor of interviewing her on the stage at Moody Performance Hall in front of a sold-out audience. I had archival material of her onstage with me. She told me she was impressed by my research, and it may be the highlight of my career.
Jerry Hawkins at his home, August 2024. Photo by Nan Coulter, courtesy of the Nasher Sculpture Center
These are poll tax receipts from various municipalities in Texas. Texas was, and still is, one of the most difficult states to exercise one’s right to vote in this country. Black people, and later other disenfranchised people, were forced to pay a poll tax—a fee meant to suppress voter turnout. If you look closely, you can see the occupations of these brave people who often risked their lives and livelihoods to participate in a system not designed for them. The use of poll taxes was not abolished in Texas until 1966, two years after the ratification of the 24th Amendment.
Istarted collecting postcards in search of the infamous 1910 lynching postcard of Allen Brook in downtown Dallas, pictured here. I could not find it at first, so I started acquiring Dallas postcards to try to piece together the physical environment of this lynching, and to find any other traces of Black life in Dallas. I found very few. One of the few instances I found was a postcard of the Hall of Negro Life building, part of the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition in Fair Park. This is one of the few photos that mark its existence. It was the first building torn down after the centennial closed.
I collect vinyl partially out of guilt. My parents had a good collection, and because of the new technology during my childhood, including cassette tapes and CDs, we treated their collection poorly. It went extinct. I remember my father playing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “I Have A Dream” speech on vinyl over and over, and every Sunday, my mother religiously played gospel vinyl LPs like Tramaine Hawkins and The Clark Sisters. I have been piecing their collection back together, and imagining my own, especially with an emphasis on hip-hop, soul, and activist-centered LPs. Pictured are a few items from my vinyl collection that focus on the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s social and political activism.