Culture Keeping: Womanist/Feminist Approaches To Community Archives And Memory Keeping

Archival work is Black feminist work. It is an act of communal mothering. It is an act of conjuring in the tradition of hoodoo, where the ancestors are always called to account.

When the writer Alice Walker recovered, the remains of folklorist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston, that was archival work.

After the Ferguson uprising, in 2014, I created a podcast, entitled Who Raised You? in collaboration with my friend, Jia Lian Yang. It is an archive of stories of activists, educators, and creatives, who all took part in direct actions and protests during the Ferguson uprising.

In 2015, I delved into poetry as an archive I completed *chop: a collection of kwansabas for fannie lou hamer,* which is a poetry book in the voice of Proto-feminist, civil rights warrior Fannie Lou Hamer.

In the mist of the pandemic, I created the podcast The Memoir My Dad Wouldn’t Write, which is a conversation with my father, Eugene, B. Redmond. The episodes are exchanges that talk through my fathers 85+ years chronologically. We cover his incredible life as a Black Arts Movement poet, one of the architects of black studies, and more.

Presently, I am collecting the stories of descendants of survivors of the 1917 East St. Louis Race massacre.

An archivist is defined as an information professional who assesses, collects, organizes, preserves, maintains control over, and provides access to records and archives determined to have long-term value.

Here at The Community Archive we center the stories and history of African-American and African diasporic communities.

If you would like to go to be included in the next Creating A Feminist/Womanist Archive course, join HERE.