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Our regular Doc Talk attendees are probably logging in right now and there's a little bit of a surprise Dr. Bird, cause we're not by ourselves today. (chuckling)

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Thank goodness. This is the biggest party probably they've seen in a while. It's true. It's true.

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Well, we always enjoy bringing some guests onto the doc talks. We've had some student research showcases and this is going to be, I think in that vein

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the doc doc talk is always is fun when it's more than just the docs. Agreed. I wanna welcome everyone who's tuning in.

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My name is Caleb McDaniel, I'm one of the co-chairs of the task force on slavery segregation and racial injustice and if you haven't joined our webinars

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before every Friday, Dr. Bird and I, the other co-chair of the task force hold a webinar at noon on Fridays, to talk about research that the task force

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is undertaking right now and to look at some documents that are being uncovered in our research, to ask what questions those documents help us to answer,

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what questions they raise for us and we're just delighted to have you here in the audience with us, hope that you'll spread the word

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and be with us every Friday. If you've missed some of our past Doc Talks, it's always a good time to remind you as well that on the taskforce webpage at taskforce.rice.edu

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you can find podcast episodes of right now about half a dozen past doc talks, but we're working on producing more episodes of the podcast as well, so that if you miss miss it live,

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you can also catch up with past Doc Talks and we're usually joined in those, always joined in those by Kate Coley for debrief discussions, a few weeks

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after the original live recordings. So check out taskforce.rice.edu, you can also find past events there. So today we're really excited because we are joined by staff

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from the Woodson Research Center in Fondren Library. We were just talking before we went live on the webinar about the fact that in our minds as historians and as co-chairs

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of the task force, these are all people who wear capes and are heroes for us, because they not only preserve the documents of the university's history,

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but have been invaluable supporters of the task force and conducting research and making sources available to us in digital form during this most unusual of years

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and providing leadership on an array of fronts in the university and so we're really grateful to have you joining us. Do you want to go around

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and introduce yourselves before we dive in to see a little bit about the Woodson Research Center and how it relates to the work that we're doing? Hello everyone.

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My name is Rebecca Russell and I am an archivist and Special Collections librarian here in the Woodson Research Center and I'm joined by my colleague.

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Hi, I'm Amanda Bogey, I'm the head of Special Collections, Woodson Research Center, I'm an archivist also, delighted to be here.

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And I'm Will Jones, I'm a post-doc working in the Woodson and specifically focusing on, questions and documents relating to the task force.

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Great, well thanks for being here. Some of you in the audience may have been able in the fall semester to attend a wonderful homecoming event where we had a chance to go into

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the Woodson Research Center and see some of the documents that are there and so we thought it would be a great idea to reprise that, but also look at some new documents

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that I think weren't shared in that earlier event. So I'm going to turn it over to you all to lead us through some of the documents that you wanted to share today

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and then we'll have some discussion about them. Okay. I'd like to start us off just for a moment talking about the nature of archives and archival research.

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I think if you've been watching the Doc Talks you have gotten a real sense of that, just the variety of places where these documents can come from and how difficult it can be

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to track them down or how serendipitous the process can be. Just wanted to take a moment to talk a little bit about that, but also since Rebecca and I

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are in the reading room together we just wanted to show it to you. This is usually where the research happens although a lot of it is happening online now

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because of what's become available online, but this is the Woodson Research Center on the first floor of Fondren Library and I'm just gonna live on the edge

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and turn the camera a bit. This is the reading room, we have tables where researchers come and sit and we bring the materials out to them,

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the physical materials. We see taskforce members in here very frequently, we have a reference desk that's what's behind me with the ubiquitous plexiglass screen.

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And then in the back, if I turn back this way a bit you can see an open door back there close to that blue recycling bin. That's the door back to where the collections are stored,

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there's shelves and shelves full of boxes and boxes and we also have offsite storage as well. So, you know archives are a totally different animal than working with published sources like books and journals.

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The way you locate them is different, we use what we call finding aids or collection guides for archives and so that's what you search to really

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find at a detail level what kinds of things are in the archive. It doesn't identify things that item-by-item, but it lists them usually I would say at the folder level

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and what Rebecca is going to show you today, are some folders of materials. So you have to search those finding aids and even that can be challenging because of the descriptive

00:07:05.580 - 00:07:17.250

practices over time that might not match up with the way a current day researcher would be thinking to look for things. So you might be looking for a topic of

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Black Faculty and Staff at Rice, that's a perfectly logical keyword search that you might apply and try to find things with.

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But, and so we don't have that, but what we do have one called Minority Faculty and Staff at Rice, so archival researchers have to be very creative

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and think of different keyword searches that they might use to get to these materials and the way archives work, there's not just one folder or one collection that

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relates to what the task force is interested in. It's not all pre polled into a subject specific group, that would be the dream of whatever researchers coming in, like I see my..

00:08:07.120 - 00:08:17.540

If only we had, here is the folder containing materials related to slavery segregation and racial injustice. Yeah, it does not work that way

00:08:17.540 - 00:08:28.040

because the way archives are organized, we have the records of the president's office. We have the minutes of the board of trustees, they're restricted but we have those,

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they stay organized by the entity that created, or maintained them. So committee records stay as a body of committee records. We have all kinds of records from the university

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that are administrative and faculty and student life and all of those things stay organized by who created or maintained them, not by their subject. And so the guides do our best to describe them,

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it's not a perfect system, but anyway there is an art to searching for archives. I'm struck as you were talking, I was thinking about one of the ledgers from the 19th century

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that documents William Marsh Rice's accounts that dates from 1855 to 1856, I don't know at what point it was incorporated in the archive but the title of it is

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Rice Grocery Store Accounts, which may mean that, someone who was looking at it initially, saw some things that looked like groceries on the page, but as we've learned, there's a lot more in that

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in that ledger than groceries and in fact, there are references to enslaved people in the pages of that account book, that never would have appeared through a search

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in the finding aid or in the title. Exactly, I think that's a great example of a researcher's intuition. You can't just trust what the folder name says,

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or what the ledger name says, you have to know like that's a stone that I need to uncover and look at more, I can't just dismiss that ledger because of its title.

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You have to carry with you an understanding of the entity that created the material and what might be in there. And so like I was starting to say

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there really is an art to archival research and for our part as archivists, we're in the midst of trying to do some repairative description to go back and try to make that better,

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reworking some of the biographical notes in our finding aids putting things online and trying to provide transcriptions for them so that those kinds of details get uncovered and are searchable

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and very discoverable by researchers. And then just one other thing I just want to address is that we don't have everything to answer all the questions and we know that

00:11:05.930 - 00:11:16.220

and it is frustrating and the way things come into the archives is that people are aware of the archives and they bring them in or we do outreach and ask for them to come in,

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those things to come in, that too is not a perfect system. You know, sometimes there are things out there that people have and they think, well my little slice of the story, is not significant,

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so I'm not going to bother trying to put this in in an archive. And that's not the case, like archives really are interested in people's slices

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of experience, because it all builds up to tell the story, so there are a lot of reasons why there might be gaps in silences in the archives and it's something that we were aware of,

00:11:51.970 - 00:12:01.780

but I hope that people there will take that as inspiration to talk to archives and donate materials and help flesh out the story

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and one of the really important ways we can fill those gaps sometimes is oral history, if we don't have a way to put our hands on things but we have people we can talk to about their experience,

00:12:12.300 - 00:12:22.400

or their memories of their parents' experience. And I know, like Dr. Bird has been engaging in some oral history work with his students, and we're very excited

00:12:22.400 - 00:12:34.530

about those possibilities coming in as well. So just that's my few words about the archives and then I'd like to have Rebecca come on over and by the way, yes, we're in the same room together,

00:12:34.530 - 00:12:41.710

we're both fully vaccinated and usually all day wear our masks. So I'm going to go put my mask back on and here comes Rebecca.

00:12:47.640 - 00:12:58.930

So I think Amanda is also gonna put some links to some of the resources that we have created in support of the task force. So she will be putting those, I think in the chat,

00:12:58.930 - 00:13:12.070

so if people want to look at those, so I'm gonna show you some documents and I have cheated a little bit, I have more than one document, but I know from past Doc Talks,

00:13:12.070 - 00:13:26.590

that that is okay, so we're gonna go with that. So now I'm going to try and share my screen and then you will not see me on camera, but hopefully you can hear my voice.

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Okay, so I hope everybody can see a folder. Yes, great okay. So the document that I'm going to talk about, documents, plural come from the Chandler Davidson papers

00:13:41.810 - 00:13:55.930

and I wanted to highlight this for a couple of reasons. One is that it goes along with what Amanda was saying about how, archives come in, collections come into the archives from various people

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related to the institution. Dr. Chandler Davidson was a long time Rice professor in the department of social sciences. He recently, very recently sadly passed away April 10th

00:14:10.530 - 00:14:23.490

of this year at the age of 84, but because of his long time connection with Rice and his various research focuses, we have several collections of his

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that he donated to the archives. He was an expert on voting rights, and so we have a Chandler Davidson Voting Rights collection and we have an Oral History collection that he conducted

00:14:36.640 - 00:14:48.510

with various leaders in Texas politics, that many of those oral histories are available online. And then we have a collection, this collection the Chandler Davidson Academic Papers,

00:14:48.510 - 00:15:01.510

which document his participation at Rice, class notes, lectures, committee work and his interests here. So now I'm going to go off camera

00:15:01.510 - 00:15:16.530

and show you the first folder. So this is a folder from the Chandler Davidson collections, I can get that more like that and so archivists, we love a pencil

00:15:16.530 - 00:15:29.670

because you can you don't damage the document with a pencil, so you will see hopefully that there is some handwritten information on there that says "Minority caucus

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"Gilis Committee" and then there's a date 1994 and inside are the materials that Dr. Davidson collected

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from that committee and actually I should go back one, because I wanted to show this memo that shows how Dr. Davidson realized

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the importance of what he was collecting. This is a memo that he wrote to Joan Ferry in the Woodson Research Center, I hope that's somewhat legible

00:16:02.030 - 00:16:13.410

in which he says, "This file contains various "items regarding racial minorities, mostly blacks "at Rice in the decade or so after "they were first admitted as students

00:16:13.410 - 00:16:25.770

"please feel free to copy any of the material, "if it's of use to Woodson, "I would like the originals back however". So I love that because it shows that

00:16:25.770 - 00:16:39.460

he realized the importance of what he was collecting and he wanted to share it with the archive, which that is very important to us, but he also wanted to keep the originals

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'cause I guess he had more work to do with the originals, we did eventually get the originals. Okay, so back to what I wanted to show you.

00:16:51.110 - 00:17:10.160

So in this folder, he's collected various meeting minutes and publications related to the topic of minority enrollment at national universities, universities around the country

00:17:10.160 - 00:17:28.970

and then specifically his notes from a meeting and they are handwritten notes with Dr. President Gillis President, Malcolm Gillis and the Black Student Association

00:17:28.970 - 00:17:43.980

about their concerns and specifically about the creation of the minority council that was created in 1994. So there are

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handwritten notes that can provide some information about what was mentioned, who was there and I know I wanted to highlight a couple of things. I mean, Dr. Davidson is mentioning that

00:18:08.030 - 00:18:22.140

minority recruitment is focusing on African-American and Mexican Americans, but there are other minorities at Rice or other minority students that you might want to encourage to come to Rice.

00:18:28.300 - 00:18:46.720

Here he's taking notes here, remove the stigma of affirmative action. And so what is interesting to me about this is he took excellent notes, but I also,

00:18:46.720 - 00:19:01.400

it raises the question what happened after those meetings? And I don't necessarily, I don't know the answer to that, I don't know if there was a report written,

00:19:01.400 - 00:19:18.060

I don't know if the recommendations that perhaps that council made were enacted, followed up on I guess this is where I kick it to the historians and say what do you think of these notes

00:19:18.060 - 00:19:29.300

and what might've happened? But it's wonderful to have that in the collection because, Dr. Davidson was passionate about this topic

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and so he collected this material and he also had the foresight to say that should be preserved in the university archives. And a lot of information that we do have

00:19:42.010 - 00:19:54.890

about minority enrollment and minority student welfare on campus is because of Dr. Davidson's papers. It's a small collection

00:19:54.890 - 00:20:16.110

but it has some very important folders with materials in there that document, that process. And then the last item and then this is a newspaper article

00:20:17.340 - 00:20:31.510

that Dr. Davidson kept, that discusses the creation of this council on minority affairs and how the council and provost will advise Gillis

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on minorities and try to improve the climate on campus for minorities. I think you can probably see that. So I know that we talk a lot in the archive about

00:20:52.560 - 00:21:06.880

the materials that we have related to William Marsh Rice and his involvement in enslaved persons and the slave economy and but it also, we wanted to show you just an example

00:21:06.880 - 00:21:24.800

of something from the more recent past, so this is from 1994 which is not that long ago, we wanted you to see that, we are constantly hoping to collect materials that document that history

00:21:25.790 - 00:21:42.120

and it's not all 19th century material in here and that's just one example. Thank you so much and the handwriting is better and easier to read as well,

00:21:44.070 - 00:21:53.930

but thank you for sharing that. I think it's a great example of how, what Amanda was saying about things that are relevant to the task force popping up in collections,

00:21:55.070 - 00:22:04.400

across the archives that might be related to particular people, particular time periods, particular offices, so thank you so much for sharing that document.

00:22:06.930 - 00:22:16.880

You're welcome and now I think Will is going to talk about something else from the 20th century. Yeah, I think so.

00:22:16.880 - 00:22:26.280

I think that transitions well. (laughing) We're going to show the actual, the original booklet that you found so yeah.

00:22:26.280 - 00:22:40.840

Yeah. Yeah, so this we're gonna talk about this document it's called Who Enters Rice. It's from 1968, the fall of 1968

00:22:42.850 - 00:22:49.390

and it's, I think it's 30 something pages. It seems bigger than that because it's only printed on one side, it's not double-sided pages.

00:22:53.690 - 00:23:09.160

The way that I came across this is actually a really great indicator of how research in archives and research online compliment one another. And so I was in the 20th century documents,

00:23:09.160 - 00:23:19.830

the presidential papers, the Chandler Davidson papers doing research about Rice's policies after the charter trial,

00:23:19.830 - 00:23:29.810

particularly toward diversifying the student body. What were committees up to, what were people thinking? What were they writing it and talking about?

00:23:29.810 - 00:23:38.660

And I noticed one of the key words, and Amanda talked about this, one of the main key words that they use, are minority student admissions, minority admissions

00:23:40.310 - 00:23:53.030

and that sort of formulation. And so I was just curious what I was missing in the Woodson that may be the thresher could, fill some holes and to portal of Texas history,

00:23:53.030 - 00:24:07.550

where all the threshers are digitized and keyword searchable and I just typed in minority admissions, minority student admissions. I targeted my search to the late 1960s

00:24:07.550 - 00:24:17.950

and I found a thresher article about this report, Who Enters Rice and they actually reprinted the first two pages of Who Enters Rice

00:24:17.950 - 00:24:31.080

and it's from November of 1968. And in the, there's sort of like a little a blurb at the top that says here, I quoted it,

00:24:31.080 - 00:24:43.310

so let me grab my notes real quick. It says that, the original document Who Enters Rice is now being distributed

00:24:43.310 - 00:24:52.470

to university departments and administration officials and is available to students at the reserve desk of Fondren Library and in the colleges. And then it will be subject

00:24:52.470 - 00:25:00.610

to a general forum tonight at 7:30 p.m in the chemistry lecture. So I thought, well, there's more than one copy of this thing and one of them

00:25:00.610 - 00:25:09.630

was definitely in Fondren at one point. So I wonder if we have it in the Woodson and so I shot an email off to Rebecca, who promptly found it

00:25:09.630 - 00:25:27.020

and here is the physical document. And I know I'll say it is, full of in social media terms, hot cakes. It has a lot to say.

00:25:27.020 - 00:25:44.920

It raises a lot of questions about what's going on at Rice in the late 60s, they start off telling us a little bit about who made the document, who Scour is,

00:25:44.920 - 00:25:57.720

or the student committee on university research. And we find out that it's a organization that is part of the Rice University Student Action Committee. I don't really know the full history behind that group,

00:25:58.920 - 00:26:09.160

I take it just from the report and other things that it's a fairly progressive activist student organization on campus. And they say right at the beginning on page

00:26:09.160 - 00:26:18.260

one of the report, 'We feel that the issue of race "and how it relates to Rice University is "the single most important issue at present, "and we have acted accordingly"

00:26:19.730 - 00:26:33.910

And what they're acting and the issue that they highlight throughout the report is the lack of, diversity at Rice, in particular, the lack of black students at Rice

00:26:33.910 - 00:26:47.320

and they create a plan to solve this problem. And so for them, they start with,

00:26:50.700 - 00:26:58.360

they start with a sort of history of race in the United States. They talk about race at Rice. So they talk about the 1891 charter

00:26:58.360 - 00:27:12.900

and the exclusionary charter. They talked about the Charter trial, they then go over recent efforts to admit black students at Rice, leading up to 1968

00:27:12.900 - 00:27:28.240

and then they start to roll out what their plan is and their plan, their overarching goal is on page four. And I'm partly saying that to myself

00:27:28.240 - 00:27:42.530

so that I can scroll to it. They propose that at least 15% of each entering class be from disadvantaged and or minority group backgrounds, at least 10% of each entering class should be black,

00:27:42.530 - 00:27:56.810

at least 10% should be from low income groups and then the rest of the report is how Rice is to achieve that. That includes things like going to Houston area

00:27:56.810 - 00:28:06.100

high schools, majority black high schools and recruiting students that includes a tutoring program in the summer to support students. They roll out a whole five-year bachelor

00:28:06.100 - 00:28:22.030

of Arts program for students at Rice. They have a whole section on reforming the counseling and tutoring, like mental health support at Rice for all students, but also for the minority students

00:28:22.030 - 00:28:33.480

that they hope to admit. They actually have a calendar of action laying out what they're planning to do that fall and then the following spring.

00:28:33.480 - 00:28:43.500

So it's a pretty, I think it's a pretty astounding document, I was not expecting for it to exist when I sort of saw it in the newspaper

00:28:43.500 - 00:28:53.380

but I think it raises a lot of questions. I don't know a whole lot about who the people are that wrote it, who are the members are of the student committee

00:28:53.380 - 00:29:12.430

on university research. So that's a major question, I know a little bit more about how it was received on campus from the thresher and it was,

00:29:12.430 - 00:29:21.850

I don't have a way of sort of generalizing how it was received, I know that the student, the Senate voted in support of the general aims at the proposal.

00:29:23.160 - 00:29:40.180

There are some editorials in the Thresher that are, shall we say mixed on it, there is seemingly, there's some friction between the members of this student committee

00:29:40.180 - 00:29:52.230

on university research and administration. There's a story about they had met and Dean Gordon they had met with Dean Gordon,

00:29:52.230 - 00:30:11.260

the meeting didn't go very well. And you know, one of the reasons one of the things that this report, one of the things that it illuminates for that period

00:30:11.260 - 00:30:27.160

and particularly if we place it alongside another group of documents that we don't have right now, is that multiple people at Rice in the late 60s, in the period after desegregation,

00:30:27.160 - 00:30:40.100

after the Charter trial, notice that Rice is not integrating the way that at least some people thought it would, that there are not as many minority students at Rice,

00:30:40.100 - 00:30:49.580

then some people think there should have been. And so these students attempted created this plan to attempt to solve the problem

00:30:49.580 - 00:31:05.540

and interestingly, and this gets into some controversy after it was published, that there were some faculty who also thought this, who also attempted to increase the number

00:31:05.540 - 00:31:16.090

of black students at Rice. And so sometimes these facts they're called the growth committee, or it's the, I believe the official name is

00:31:16.090 - 00:31:31.330

the Committee on Minority Student Admissions, it's sort of a sub committee of the faculty council and Alan Grove and this committee are mentioned in news articles in the Thresher about this report,

00:31:31.500 - 00:31:43.160

because Grove's committee starts about two weeks before this report is published. And one of the things that Grove's committee will end up doing is going to Houston area high schools

00:31:43.160 - 00:31:56.830

and meeting potential black student applicants to Rice, meeting talking with guidance counselors in those schools, those sorts of things, which is exactly what the proposal

00:31:56.830 - 00:32:12.890

that is in the Who Enters Rice Program. And so there's actually in January of 69 when people are so making sense of Who Enters Rice,

00:32:14.670 - 00:32:25.440

Ivor Grouper, who's a history professor actually writes to the Thresher to correct the record on who came first, they Grove Committee or the Who Enters Rice Report

00:32:27.840 - 00:32:42.770

because the timeline had gotten sort of muddled between who came up with, particularly the visiting high schools plan. And Grouper says that Grove's Committee was formed

00:32:44.210 - 00:32:56.660

before the Who Enters Rice came out and I think we have the documents for the Grove Committee and so it does, I believe predate the Who Enters Rice.

00:32:56.660 - 00:33:13.810

But I think the fact that these two groups of people are sensing the same issue and having some of the same questions and to some extent kind of proposing the same solutions at the same time

00:33:13.810 - 00:33:26.990

is interesting and I think it tells us something about those years at Rice. So. Fascinating work, thank you

00:33:26.990 - 00:33:41.960

for locating it and sharing it with us. You know, I think this both of these documents together to me raise a lot of questions, one of them is when we looked at the Davidson notes

00:33:41.960 - 00:33:54.500

it was from a meeting in the 1990s that included leaders of the Black Student Union and that raises a question for me about this committee and both the student committee and the faculty committee,

00:33:54.500 - 00:34:09.120

whether black students were a part of these discussions in 1968, in 1969, as far as we can tell in the document. And then there's another question for me as a member

00:34:09.120 - 00:34:21.810

of the task force to connect these two moments in time. Is there any awareness over time of past efforts, or past discussions? So in the 1990s, when professor Davidson

00:34:21.810 - 00:34:38.190

was taking up these matters, are they aware of this report, Who Enters Rice and the earlier discussions? So I think one of those questions,

00:34:39.240 - 00:34:52.490

I can partially answer. When in the forward to Who Enters Rice, I believe it's page one, that it just like an acknowledgements page.

00:34:53.570 - 00:35:04.890

They, the authors of Who Enters Rice, they write this quote, "Special notes should be given "to the help of Rice's black students, "without who suggestions and criticism,

00:35:04.890 - 00:35:17.140

"this proposal would be meaningless". So that gives some indication that perhaps they forwarded the report around and again, we don't know, I don't know who the names

00:35:17.140 - 00:35:26.690

of the people are on the report, so some of them may have been black students, I don't know. Also in one of the, after the meeting with Dean Gordon

00:35:26.690 - 00:35:40.610

doesn't go so well, there's a rally held at the Founder's Memorial, to show approval or support of Who Enters Rice and of the main speakers at the rally

00:35:40.610 - 00:35:54.220

is identified in the Thresher as a black student. So it doesn't fully answer the question, but it gives some indication and in terms of the other ones

00:35:54.220 - 00:36:06.530

you had, to what extent do later, people who are working on the same question later in Rice's history, do they know about this report? I don't know, I have not seen it referenced,

00:36:06.530 - 00:36:15.540

I had been in and reading some of these committee meetings and things and I had not seen this report referenced before. Certainly some of them were at Rice and knew about it,

00:36:15.540 - 00:36:25.670

because they're in Thresher articles talking about it right? So (laughing) I just want to chime in and say, that's a perfect example of how hard it can be

00:36:25.670 - 00:36:35.570

to find archival resources and that you always just have to have your eyes open and try searching in different ways, I mean, none of us knew that there was this important

00:36:35.570 - 00:36:43.650

report called Who Enters Rice. That's a formal title, if you searched it in our collections, you'd find it and it's important.

00:36:43.650 - 00:36:51.850

You didn't know that before, you were just looking around, you were looking in the Thresher newspaper and it piped up that way.

00:36:51.850 - 00:37:03.870

You know, we do have a record group that's called the Charter Trial Records and you would think that that would be a gold mine for information about desegregation at Rice

00:37:03.870 - 00:37:17.100

but it's really, it's very useful, but I wouldn't say it's a gold mine, there's all these other related reports and committees and people's notes and newspaper pieces

00:37:17.100 - 00:37:28.020

and all this other, source material that needs to be consulted, because it's not just in what the university captain called the Charter Trial Records.

00:37:28.990 - 00:37:41.490

We've been working to digitize what's in the Charter Trial Records and we have a good amount of that up online now, it's a lot of the publicly available court documents

00:37:41.490 - 00:37:52.630

from the Charter Trial and also some internal communications at the administration here. Those things are up online 'cause we felt like we had the right to put those up online,

00:37:53.900 - 00:38:02.310

but that is a collection that we kind of are in communication with the General Counsel's Office here at Rice about whether it's okay to put particular things up or not.

00:38:02.310 - 00:38:16.610

You know, for example, there are letters in there from alumns, who were here at the time, writing to the administration about their thoughts of how things were going

00:38:16.610 - 00:38:28.560

and what things might look like in the future. And those are things that we'd want to have clearance from the author of the letter, to put up online publicly before we do that,

00:38:28.560 - 00:38:37.090

that's not our copyright, that's not, Rice's copyright, it's the person's copyright, so there are reasons sometimes, where we don't put things online,

00:38:37.090 - 00:38:43.920

even though we have them in the archive and they're relevant and they're interesting, and they're not restricted. Like if you were in the reading room,

00:38:43.920 - 00:38:55.710

you certainly could see those things and quote from them in a fair use kind of spirit, but we don't just chuck everything up online, 'cause sometimes there are privacy concerns.

00:38:58.090 - 00:39:11.210

This report the Who Enters Rice is online, so anyone can go and go read it at scholarship.rice.edu Yeah that, because of Will's work,

00:39:11.210 - 00:39:22.410

we were able to identify it and digitize it and put it online and so this, we've been able to uncover a lot of things that we have preserved here in the archive

00:39:22.410 - 00:39:42.670

but they just haven't been as publicly available before. Yeah and I think this has been more than implicit, so I don't mean to suggest that this larger point has been hidden, but I think one of the great things

00:39:42.670 - 00:39:56.890

about the Woodson and the research part of libraries in general, is is to my mind, they exemplify what's best about libraries,

00:39:59.870 - 00:40:16.870

and that, I sometimes feel that in given the power of current research strategies, right? The things that we can do from our home with Google and using the portal of Texas history

00:40:16.870 - 00:40:32.120

at University of North Texas, one of the things that this type of work does is it tends to stress the importance, of the individual aspect of historical research, right?

00:40:32.120 - 00:40:43.870

Which if you leave historians alone, we may drift in that direction anyway, but thank goodness, right? That even in the past, we didn't have the materials

00:40:43.870 - 00:40:59.690

that we needed in our house, because what archives do is they force historians, who sometimes might not talk to many people at all right? Is that they force historians into public areas

00:40:59.690 - 00:41:12.620

and in ways that underline the importance of conversation and interaction, right? And so I know sometimes I'll get questions from students saying they can't find X

00:41:12.620 - 00:41:26.380

or they can't find Y and in the current day and age, sometimes I ask, "Well did you ask someone at the library?" And there'll be a kind of "Ask, who would I ask?

00:41:26.530 - 00:41:39.790

"I searched for it on the computer". But because of the issues of working with archival materials, right? Oftentimes there's no better source, right?

00:41:39.790 - 00:41:49.010

than the people who are working in the archives and if you work in the archives one of the things that you'll see right? Is people will walk around and someone will say

00:41:49.010 - 00:41:56.890

"What are you working on?" Right? Or and that " what are you working on?" is the same as, "How can I help you?"

00:41:56.890 - 00:42:07.650

Right? And I think it's just wonderful. One of the questions that I have, right is that, Will seized this report mentioned

00:42:07.650 - 00:42:21.330

in the Rice Thresher and he has the benefit of emails, so he asked Rebecca, the part of the story is that, that's missing, is that Rebecca just goes and gets it, right?

00:42:21.330 - 00:42:37.130

But, that's the part that I would actually like to know more about, because without Rebecca, right? Then we may be at some type of dead end, which underlines the importance

00:42:37.130 - 00:42:50.110

of real live human resources. So I would appreciate hearing a little bit more about what Rebecca does after she gets this email. After I get the email, I go,

00:42:50.110 - 00:43:00.630

I don't know about that report. Where is that report? And luckily, because it was cataloged by librarians here at Fondren,

00:43:00.630 - 00:43:12.980

I was able to do a search in the library catalog and find a call number and a location, and physically walk to the shelf and Amanda's showing you.

00:43:14.790 - 00:43:23.070

That's stored in an envelope on the shelf, along with the book. And and was able to say- It was in the public shelves.

00:43:23.070 - 00:43:29.600

No, no, it was in Woodson shelves. Okay. (laughing) So somebody cause as Will said,

00:43:29.600 - 00:43:41.480

this was a publication that was given to every department on campus in 1968, so someone at Fondren in 1968 said, "We need to keep this

00:43:41.480 - 00:43:54.860

"and not only that we'd catalog it". So that was made my job very much easier, because I know one thing that you've talked about in other Doc Talks is the State of Black Rice,

00:43:54.860 - 00:44:07.760

which was printed in 1990. That is not cataloged in the library catalog, it's in Dr. Davidson's papers. I would blame the editor of that document for that.

00:44:07.760 - 00:44:18.330

Well, yeah. (laughing) But now, because Will saw it in there, it has been digitized and is now online.

00:44:18.330 - 00:44:30.910

So it is available. That kind of raises a material question about you know, when I look at the single-sided TypeScript report and you're telling me

00:44:30.910 - 00:44:44.880

that it was sent to every department on campus, what does that involve in 1968, 1969, versus what it involved, even in 1991, or what it involves today with email?

00:44:47.190 - 00:45:01.170

I think it indicates the lengths to which the committee must have had to go to print that up and get it distributed to every department. Yeah, that's a statement of how important

00:45:01.170 - 00:45:12.290

they thought it was and it was, but it's not like we're swimming in copies of that over here. It's still, even if it was distributed in that manner,

00:45:14.070 - 00:45:20.990

that's the only copy I'm aware of. That's the only copy I'm aware of. Interesting. Well, I do have to push back a little bit against

00:45:20.990 - 00:45:32.250

Dr. Bird saying that historians don't like to talk to people, it's that they don't talk to us. That's the way I see it, but this is your chance to talk to us.

00:45:32.250 - 00:45:41.460

We want to hear from the audience as well, I know there are some questions in the chat and also you can use the Q and A button at the bottom of the screen.

00:45:41.460 - 00:45:55.700

If you have anything that you'd like to contribute to the conversation and I see that, we do have some comments from one of our regular audience members who worked in the office of admission

00:45:55.700 - 00:46:09.620

as the assistant director from 1973 to 1975, who had not heard of that report, but that it does seem like there were efforts, that grew out of this report,

00:46:11.120 - 00:46:23.130

with the informal committee, the Grove Committee, and that there might even be alumni on the call today, or certainly within our alumni community, who've benefited from some of those recommendations.

00:46:30.520 - 00:46:43.580

One thing I thought I might talk about just for a moment is sort of an upcoming initiative , is that we're working on those William Marsh Rice ledgers and we'd had talked earlier in this session

00:46:43.580 - 00:46:55.240

about how one of them's labeled as Grocery Store Accounts, it's really worthwhile and important to go through page by page and see what's on those and so we're getting ready to collaborate

00:46:55.240 - 00:47:10.930

with some Rice alumns, Sarah and Ben Brumfield on their crowdsource transcription software platform, that's called From the Page. And so we're getting ready to try to explore some

00:47:10.930 - 00:47:24.450

of these ledgers and transcribe them, so that the data can be used and understood by historians and seen by everyone and crowdsourcing is a great way to do that.

00:47:24.450 - 00:47:36.720

You know, you can get multiple people involved and have a lot of transparency in terms of who's worked on which pages and sort of what percentage of completion of transcription is this ledger at?

00:47:36.720 - 00:47:51.530

Because these ledgers are, some of them are 700 pages long, pretty much none of them are 50 pages long with clear handwriting, 0% are like that. So it's very it's time consuming,

00:47:51.530 - 00:48:07.310

it takes people who can read that script handwriting and understand what the abbreviation conventions would have been at that period of time. It really takes them context and understanding

00:48:07.310 - 00:48:14.980

to be able to transcribe those, it wouldn't be for everyone, but they're very revealing and so we're excited about that collaboration

00:48:14.980 - 00:48:26.960

as we get it underway, we'd like to show you how that looks. Yeah, that would be fantastic. Well, have to have you back on a future Doc talk to show our audience what that looks like,

00:48:28.090 - 00:48:37.470

but I'm grateful to the research center for leading that effort and we're hoping to involve, members of the university community in that,

00:48:37.470 - 00:48:51.720

that work as well. Dr. Jones actually sent me a letter before this Doc Talk that he was thinking about sharing that I think is a great example of the need

00:48:51.720 - 00:49:02.590

for that sort of project, because it shows it's a letter from a man named WR Sledge, I don't know if you have it Will to pull up, but it's a letter from a man named WR Sledge

00:49:02.590 - 00:49:17.550

to William Marsh Rice, that gives us a little of insight into how those ledgers were kept and why they were important. So this is Sledge's handwriting here,

00:49:17.550 - 00:49:31.540

and he's talking about an account that he has with Paul Bremen, who was the if I'm remembering correctly, the father of William Marsh Rice's first wife, Margaret Bremen Rice

00:49:31.540 - 00:49:40.500

and he was a frequent business partner with William Marsh Rice. Many of these account books have many pages with accounts with Paul Bremen

00:49:40.500 - 00:49:57.190

and this is William R Sledge writing to Rice saying that because Bremen owes him some money Bremen has asked Rice to sort of credit some goods from his store to Bremen's account

00:49:57.190 - 00:50:07.920

and give them to Sledge. It's kind of complicated, but basically Sledge is saying I've got this copy of a letter from Bremen

00:50:07.920 - 00:50:19.180

that says he owes me money and to pay me back, he can basically have a, you know a gift card to your store, the Rice and Company store,

00:50:19.180 - 00:50:30.470

and come in and buy some groceries or goods that he might need. But what's interesting for us is that, if you zoom in, part of the reason why Bremen

00:50:30.470 - 00:50:46.620

owes Sledge is apparently because Bremen had rented some of the labor of some enslaved people that Sledge either controlled or was an agent for and that was that's indicated here.

00:50:46.620 - 00:50:56.500

Now, what I find interesting if you scroll down a little bit, Will is that Sledge, stay on the first page there. He says that above you will find a statement

00:50:56.500 - 00:51:10.810

of account due for sundries of Paul Bremen, well, one of the things you see in these ledgers is, that's probably the most common word in the ledgers, sundries that in these accounts,

00:51:10.810 - 00:51:20.670

rather than writing out everything that was sold on a particular line, the clerk would just say sundries, but this document, if you scroll back up,

00:51:20.670 - 00:51:31.960

shows us what those sundries could sometimes include, Never would be recorded in the account book, but the sundries in this case included the labor of enslaved people

00:51:31.960 - 00:51:40.800

and so this is an example though, of why that kind of transcription project is going to be so important because, you know, Dr. Jones asked me,

00:51:40.800 - 00:51:49.740

"Have you ever seen William in Sledge's name "in the accounts?" And right now there's not a good way to search those account books to see

00:51:49.740 - 00:52:04.310

if there's a page to Sledge. I would have to go through the book from 1858, to 1859, or 59 to 62 and scroll through all 700 pages, looking for an account with William M Sledge

00:52:04.310 - 00:52:14.390

and from the page transcription project might enable us to do, is make that a lot easier once we find a document like this, you could write, you could type in Sledge's name

00:52:14.390 - 00:52:27.000

and know there's a page with Sledges account in this ledger on this page. I'm ready for that to happen, I've wanted it to happen,

00:52:28.070 - 00:52:43.790

but I also just want to underline the importance of the difficulty of the work that historians do and why it is often important not to skip that part of the difficult work.

00:52:43.790 - 00:53:04.530

So one of the skills that Dr. Jones and Dr. McDaniel possess, is an understanding of the entirety of some of Rice's account books and what that understanding of them in their entirety allows

00:53:04.560 - 00:53:23.970

is for them to bring those skills to bear on specifics. And what researchers often have to be aware of in the digital age, is overdependence on search in a way that strips a document of its context.

00:53:23.970 - 00:53:37.070

And, and so in ways, right? Especially, I would love to have a collection called Blacks at Rice already put together at the Woodson,

00:53:37.930 - 00:53:51.670

but in some ways I wouldn't right? Because one of the principles that Amanda alluded to, is that the ways that documents are actually put together, right?

00:53:51.670 - 00:54:09.810

Their provenance, how they are organized by the person who who owned them is also evidence, right? It's also evidence that enslaved Africans, in some account books are listed next to livestock,

00:54:09.810 - 00:54:27.230

or cattle or included as sundries right? The file systems of the people who produce these materials also speak to us. Such a great point and even if we had those ledger books

00:54:27.230 - 00:54:37.520

transcribed, you could search for sundries and find all the pages on which sundries appear, but that wouldn't necessarily tell you what that other document is showing us

00:54:37.520 - 00:54:47.360

and so you can't just rely on keyword searching, I think that's a great point and it's why we're so grateful to the archivists who've joined us today, for all of the work they do

00:54:47.360 - 00:55:00.720

to help us get a view of the entire collection and how they relate to each other and I hope that you and the audience have appreciated this conversation as well.

00:55:00.720 - 00:55:10.810

I'm noticing in the Q and A, a black alumni from the university, noting that it was enlightening to find out what was going on behind the scenes,

00:55:10.810 - 00:55:21.340

before she arrived as a black student in 1970 it was a bigger deal than my friends and I realized, and I think that's interesting too to see, in these documents

00:55:21.340 - 00:55:34.660

what was happening that even students at the time might not always have been aware of. And as always we really are grateful for the contributions of the audience to helping us

00:55:34.660 - 00:55:44.650

add to this context as well, because you have valuable information and insight that's often not in the collections as well and hearing from you is so important.

00:55:44.650 - 00:55:56.520

Do you want to say anything about that, Amanda as we close out, how could people contact you if they had materials or they had insights that they wanted to share?

00:55:56.520 - 00:56:04.380

Yeah, definitely. We have a departmental email, that is a good, easy one to remember it's woodson@rice.edu.

00:56:04.380 - 00:56:15.370

So W-O-O-D-S-O-N and so we would welcome your emails there, thank you for putting it in the chat, that gets tracked every day,

00:56:15.370 - 00:56:22.630

a couple of times a day and that way you don't have to remember a specific person's email, but we would love to hear from you

00:56:22.630 - 00:56:35.210

and I saw in some of the questions today, that people were like having thoughts about people who might be candidates for oral histories. Absolutely, it's such an important tool,

00:56:35.210 - 00:56:46.950

it really can fill in gaps that don't have a way to get filled otherwise, or can bring up we can call them clues, for other kinds of ways we might search our resources.

00:56:46.950 - 00:56:57.500

So we would love to hear from people for either of those topics, for getting things into the archives, or for oral history suggestions.

00:56:57.500 - 00:57:14.290

We want to hear from you. Yeah, thank you so much for taking the time to join us and I want to let everyone know that if you enjoyed hearing from people other than Dr. Bird and myself,

00:57:14.290 - 00:57:25.770

you're also going to have a great time next Friday, because we're going to be joined by another group of student researchers who have been doing work for the task force.

00:57:25.770 - 00:57:34.330

So put it on your calendar right now to join us again next Friday, for another student research showcase and thank you again, Amanda and Rebecca

00:57:34.330 - 00:57:42.090

and Will for sharing your insights and all of the work you're doing, we really appreciate it. Have a great weekend everyone.

00:57:42.090 - 00:57:44.400

Thank you. Thank you everyone. All right.