Marci Nelligan

Inside the Black Writers Museum

The sensory experience

Sampling the Archive

When I last wrote about the Black Writers Museum, I discussed how its unique mission was embroidered in every aspect of its physicality. When I returned to delve into the archive itself and bring forward some of its collection, I realized the best way to describe it was to offer it up in its collaged, multivalent reality. It’s a lot like being in a poem — an intense, challenging poem. There’s a sense of the disjointed collecting itself into something more powerful than its constituent words, lines, or images. Like poetry, the museum evokes a strong emotional response along with, or sometimes in conflict with, the intellectual response it simultaneously offers. Here is a small experience of wandering its shelves, a sample track lifted from the archive’s poems, newspaper headlines, magazines, pamphlets, books, vinyl records, and ephemera. Here, its hum, its dance, its moan. 

Thursday, New Year’s Day 1863

“It all seemed, and seems still, like a brilliant dream … The meeting was held in a beautiful grove, a live-oak grove, adjoining the camp … As I sat on the ground and looked around on the various groups I thought I had never seen a sight so beautiful. There were the black soldiers in their blue coats and scarlet pants. The officers of this and other regiments in their handsome uniforms and crowds of lookers-on, men and women and children grouped in various attitudes under the trees. The faces of all wore a happy, eager, expectant look.”

From The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten: A Young Black Woman’s Reactions to the White World of the Civil War Era. Ray Allen Billington, ed. WW Norton & Co, NY. May 1981

When I last wrote about the Black Writers Museum, I discussed how its unique mission was embroidered in every aspect of its physicality. When I returned to delve into the archive itself and bring forward some of its collection, I realized the best way to describe it was to offer it up in its collaged, multivalent reality. It’s a lot like being in a poem — an intense, challenging poem. There’s a sense of the disjointed collecting itself into something more powerful than its constituent words, lines, or images.

Through the door

An introduction to the Black Writers Museum

“A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.” 
― Jorge Luis Borges

 If Borges is right, then an archive of books is also a being, albeit a larger one, representing a far more vast “axis of innumerable relationships.” The Black Writers Museum in Germantown, Pennsylvania, bears out this theory, placing books at the center of a community’s identity and its plight. Its founder, poet and activist Supreme Dow, happens to also be something of a human athenaeum; a trove of knowledge of black literature, history, and civil rights. And so this particular archive is not the dusty repository of a distant past, but a being in relationship that breathes and walks among its readers.

 National in its scope—the only museum of its kind in the US—but also deeply local in its power and importance, Dow envisioned the museum as a place where he could expose the chasm between the way the media portrays black Americans and the way black Americans have written their own history, their own lives onto the page.