How colleges are preserving slave records, an emotional part of Georgia’s black history
What the Bibb County Superior Court Clerk found in the courthouse shortly after taking office in 2013 made the hairs on her arms stand up straight.
In the mezzanine, among the hundreds of thousands of hand-written books containing property transaction records that date back to the city’s 1823 establishment, Erica Woodford made a shocking discovery between pages of documented horses, dry goods, furniture and land lots.
Here’s what was printed:
“John Rowland, his executors and administrators and assigns, are selling the following negroes: A negro named Anthony, a negro woman named Mimsey and her female child named Beck and a negro woman named Rose and their future issue,” according to the penned entry from March 6, 1830.
The five human beings were sold for a total of $1,240.08.
“It gave me such a chilling feeling just to actually feel, touch and see these records, which are the history of our county and our country,” Woodford said. “It was really mind-blowing.”
In some ways, Woodford said, she was comforted in knowing the nearly two-century-old records had been preserved.
“A lot of counties, their courthouses were destroyed either by fire or by flood (in) the early 1900s or late 1800s,” Woodford said. “Basically, the history of that county and the history of those people in that county were destroyed with those records.”
At a lunch date shortly after the 2013 rediscovery of the documents, Woodford shared news of her discovery with Chester Fontenot, PhD, professor of English and director of Africana studies at Mercer University, where she studied as an undergraduate.
“After lunch, we went right to her office … and started going through some of them,” Fontenot said. “I said, ‘This is something that we have to do something with.’ ”
An online database in the works
Fontenot wanted to preserve the records first and then find a way to contextualize them “so people understand the significance and importance” of them, she said. The pair hatched a plan to digitize the records and make them available to the public.
Last summer, two Mercer students began taking inventory, a job the school paid them for as part of its Research That Reaches Out initiative, which aims to equip students with skills needed to engage in sophisticated research.
Africana studies students Addison Robinson and Tiffani Alexander spent the better part of 10 weeks thumbing through the centuries-old pages, taking notes on their findings and counting the number of slave transactions book-by-book.
“We’re getting a real good idea of what exactly we have,” Fontenot said, adding the students are for now focusing only on 1823-1865.
More than 600 documents detailing the sales of human beings in Bibb County had been recorded as of 2019, Fontenot said. The process of taking inventory of the records will continue this summer with two new student researchers.
Woodford and Fontenot are hoping to acquire $350,000-$400,000 in grant money to help pay for the records to be digitized by a private company.
In two or three years, the documents will be posted online, where they can be accessed from anywhere by anyone with an internet connection.
The Library of Congress is among institutions that have expressed interest in the project, which Fontenot said provides “a real portrait of what life was like for black people in the 19th century.”
The documents will serve as a primary source for history and Africana students and a tool to help trace heritage by genealogists.
“It creates in me very mixed emotions as an African-American whose ancestors were slaves in Louisiana,” Fontenot said, “to read those records and then to feel how these people must have felt being bought and sold and treated like property.”
Families not forgotten
The Baldwin County courthouse burned to the ground Feb. 24, 1861, with “nothing left but the bare smoking walls which are threatening to fall every minute,” according to a brief account published in The Telegraph.
The courthouse in Milledgeville is among 75 Georgia courthouses that have suffered 109 events resulting in the loss or destruction of records, according to the 2013 book “Georgia Courthouse Disasters,” by Paul K. Graham.
Though Baldwin County may not have the trove of archives dating back as old as the ones in Bibb County, it shares a commonality: a university that is taking measures to preserve black history.
Georgia College’s Ina Dillard Russell Library recently received a $12,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Common Heritage Program to help ensure “that our collection of local history is inclusive and reflective of a multitude of experiences . . . particularly for the African-American community” interim library director Shaundra Walker said.
Enslaved people were only referred to by their first names and described often only by the color of their skin in all 1800s property records, making it a challenge to trace ancestry.
On Saturday, Shanee Murrain, assistant professor and archivist for the University of West Georgia, will present best practices for handling materials that are old and fragile.
The preservation workshop is free and is slated for 10 a.m. - noon at Allen’s Market, across from the John Marlor Arts Center near campus.
Whether it is old photos, documents or textiles, Walker said Murrain also will be available to do assessments and provide advice on how to better take care of family heirlooms.
“A lot of times I think what happened is information about marginalized groups and their experiences are sort of a subset of a large narrative,” Walker said. “So you don’t learn a whole lot about them unless it relates to how they have interacted with more powerful people.”
Later this summer, the grant will pay for mobile scanning stations set up around town so residents can go and have their documents digitized at no cost. Participants will have a choice on whether they want to share their family memories with the digital collection at Georgia College, which is part of the Digital Library of Georgia and the Digital Public Library of America.
This story was originally published February 27, 2019 at 12:27 PM.
