Category Archives: Students and Interns

Civil Disobedience and the Church in North Carolina

The recent Moral Monday civil protests being held at the state legislature in Raleigh has become national news. Since late April, roughly 700 more protestors have been arrested at the civil disobedience demonstrations. The leadership of clergy within the Moral Monday movement–including Rev. William Barber II, President of the North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP–calls attention to the historical role of the church in civil disobedience and racial justice struggles, both in North Carolina and nationally.

herzogThe Frederick Herzog Papers at the Rubenstein Library provide just such a history. A review of the collection situates the Moral Monday protests within the radical traditions of clergy–particularly Protestant ministers but also rabbis and priests–established during the civil rights era and the ability of the Church to organize and influence direct action. Herzog was a liberation theologist and, from 1960 until his death in 1995, a professor at Duke Divinity. Ordained in the ministry of the United Church of Christ, Herzog played an active role in the civil rights struggles in North Carolina in the 60s. His papers give detailed accounts of not only his reflections but also reflections by various others on “wrestling with the role of the church in the face of current racial tensions . . .” (Letter from A.M. Pennybacker, a minister with Heights Christian Church in Shaker Heights, Ohio).

On January 3, 1964, Herzog and ten others were arrested on trespass charges for participating in a sit-in demonstration at a restaurant just outside Chapel Hill to protest segregation. They were beaten and hosed and spent a night in jail. The court offered to commute the sentences of several of the protestors if they affirmed that they would not take part in such demonstrations again. Herzog’s colleagues, William Wynn of the University of North Carolina and Robert Osborn of Duke University refused to say, for theological and moral reasons, that they felt they did not have the right to break the law. They were sentenced to 90 days in the county jail. Herzog, however, affirmed that he could not take part in such action again.

Herzog writes in a brief statement “Christian Witness and a Sit-In” (filed in the Papers under Writings and Speeches) that he initially understood his civil disobedience as an attempt “to fulfill rather than to break the law,” turning to both the Gospels and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. for justification of his act. Yet Herzog goes on to observe that the arrests of the apostles and Christ’s persecution were “not part of a technique of nonviolence or a planned civil disobedience campaign. It was the result of taking seriously the obligation to witness to Christ.” Their acts were not, in other words, a “crusade against only one specific injustice or wrong.” Herzog comes to the conclusion that this articulation of the Gospel was missing from his “attempt on January 3rd to witness to greater social justice.”

In his statement, Herzog further distinguishes between the refusal to obey a direct requirement of the state and the direct testing of existing laws, the latter which, he argues, characterized his participation in the sit-in. “Is it possible that civil disobedience is a misnomer when applied to this type of activity?” Herzog nevertheless affirms the necessity of reexamining “the forms in which the Christian witness finds expression in the protest movement” and concludes that marching to jail with our fellow men is only a partial solution. We must also, he states, become personally responsible for one another: “The person to person effort has to be tied to new political groups that in the democratic process openly engage in reshaping the societal structures.”

Klancross
Photograph of a KKK Cross in North Carolina, from the Frederick Herzog Papers.

Moral Mondays do not constitute a crusade against one specific injustice but rather employ the broader language of offering a place in society to our most disenfranchised citizens. Herzog’s statement nevertheless complicates and deepens the relationship between theology and protest, and prompts me to ask where Moral Mondays fall within his distinction between refusing to obey and direct testing? Would Herzog classify the occupation of the Capitol as civil disobedience?

Post contributed by Clare Callahan, Rubenstein Technical Services student assistant.

Heschel Highlights, Part 1

Welcome to the first post in a series documenting the processing of the Abraham Joshua Heschel Papers.

DSC_9316b
Photographs and documents from the Abraham Joshua Heschel Papers.

In 1965, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, professor of Jewish Ethics and Mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, accepted as position as the Harry Emerson Fosdick Visiting Professor at Union Theological Seminary (UTS). Newspapers reported this occasion with headlines that proclaimed “Rabbi to Teach Christians” and “Seminary Gives Post to Heschel.” The prestigious visiting position speaks to Heschel’s influence in Christian-Jewish relations at the time. As we begin processing the Abraham Joshua Heschel Papers, there is evidence that Heschel’s dedication to interfaith work also made him a controversial figure in some Jewish circles. I recently processed a large folder of materials that Heschel collected during his tenure at UTS and discovered that Heschel preserved the views of his dissenters, tucked in alongside his lecture notes and grade records.

In a folder that contains programs from events honoring Heschel at UTS and Eden Theological Seminary and an excerpt from Reinhold Niebuhr’s Pious and Secular America, I found a fascinating newspaper clipping. The article, “Scholar Delimits Interfaith Talks,” discusses another rabbi’s view on interfaith relations. The article explains that Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, professor of Talmud at Yeshiva University, argued that Jews should avoid discussing theological issues in their relations with Christians. This article provides an intriguing counterpoint to the documents promoting Heschel’s theological lectures at Christian Seminaries.

In another folder, which Heschel labeled “Interfaith,” he included an excerpt from a letter written by the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson. In the letter, Schneerson writes, “there is no need for us whatever to have any religious dialogues with non-Jews, nor any interfaith activities in the form of religious discussions, interchange of pulpits, and the like” (2). Schneerson concludes, “religious dialogue with non-Jews has no place in Jewish life, least of all here and now” (4). This letter rests alongside an article written by UTS President John C. Bennett and Heschel’s itinerary for the Spring Semester of 1966 which included lectures at the Indiana Pastors’ Conference and eleven different Christian seminaries.

Adrienne and the Heschel Papers.
Adrienne and the Heschel Papers.

These dissenting opinions preserved by Heschel and included in folders that highlight his interfaith work provide an intriguing glimpse into Heschel’s world. We will leave it up to future researchers to discover the meaning behind Heschel’s inclusion of these opposition opinions in these particular folders!

Post contributed by Adrienne Krone, Heschel Project Assistant in Rubenstein Technical Services.

Faux Duke Stone

Last week, we watched “Duke Stone” panels going up on the construction fence surrounding the Rubenstein Library and the West Campus Union.  So we thought we’d take a few moments to write about the real Duke Stone!

Duke Stone panels being applied. Photo by Aaron Welborn.
Duke Stone panels being applied. Photo by Aaron Welborn.

Did you know that Duke Stone comes from a quarry in Hillsborough, North Carolina, just about 10 miles away from campus?  Or that there are 24 distinct colors in the stone: 7 primary colors with 17 distinct variants of the primary colors?  Or that, before choosing the Hillsborough stone, there were several other stone contenders?

Before the Hillsborough stone was chosen to construct West Campus, and before it was known simply as “Duke Stone,” the architects, designers, builders, and James B. Duke himself looked at many different stone samples.  They even constructed test walls of stone from other quarries on the East Coast to determine which one they liked the best.  Here’s one of the test walls constructed during that phase:

Test Wall on East Campus

And in this October 15, 1925 photo of construction on East Campus, the test walls are visible off in the distance.

An arrow points out the location of the test walls on East Campus.

It’s safe to say that we all know and love Duke Stone today—so much so that the panels are going up on the construction wall so that we don’t have to be without the look of it for too long.  Next time you’re on campus, see how many primary and variant colors you can find in the stone. Let us know how you do!

Post contributed by Maureen McCormick Harlow, 175th Anniversary Intern for the Duke University Archives.

Student Takes on Living Groups, 1992 and Now

This spring I assisted my supervisor in processing the Duke Student Government (DSG) Records. One day he called me over to look at a report he had found called “A Color-Coded Guide to Campus Living Groups.” Prepared in the summer of 1992 by Adrianne G. Threatt, this report truly was colorful. It was divided in two parts with maps of the campus living groups on Main West Campus, Edens Quadrangle, East Campus, and North Campus. Part II was straightforward, with four maps showing the approximate number of residents per living group. But Part I showed the same four maps with hand-written commentary about the “distinguishing characteristics” of each living group. Looking at these comments reminded me of my own experience with Duke dorms and their “distinguishing characteristics.”

DSG_EastMap-web
Click to enlarge!

One day shortly after my freshman year began, I walked into my dorm, Giles, to find all my friends crowded around a single laptop. My roommate was pointing to the screen animatedly, so I stopped to see what all the girls were looking at: it was a list of all the dorms on East Campus, with blurbs about the reputations of each. Giles, it said, was “home to pretty girls who like to have a good time.” Being freshmen, we of course knew everything on the internet is true: we all must have been placed in Giles because the all-knowing, all-seeing Duke housing lottery deemed us pretty girls who liked to have a good time.

Seeing the color-coded maps, then, I was eager to find out the “distinguishing characteristics” for Giles in 1992. According to the guide, Giles was “the dorm for women who were serious about living in an all-female dorm, but their man-hating image has declined in the past couple of years. Now they have a more main-stream group of girls.” To say the least, a far cry from what my friends and I had read 18 years later, in the fall of 2010.

What else had changed about East Campus? The first thing I noticed was that East was not an all-freshman campus. There were fraternity sections, for one thing, and “swing dorms,” which were used as either upper-class or freshman dorms.. In Wilson, there were three fraternity sections—ΣX (Sigma Chi), ΦKΣ (Phi Kappa Sigma), and ΔKE (Delta Kappa Epsilon)—which the author of the maps noted as “apparently a disastrous arrangement.” The “artsy dorm” in 1992 was Epworth, whereas Pegram had that title by my freshman year. Half of Bassett in 1992 was AEΠ’s (Alpha Epsilon Pi) section and the people who chose to live on the other half of Bassett were described as having “group unity” and as being “really religious.” I have only known Bassett as the dorm where all the basketball players lived.

Despite all these changes, many things have stayed the same. In 1992, KA’s (Kappa Alpha) section was in half of Brown; the author described KA as “the Southern fraternity,” who likes “big parties and cooking out.” This reputation holds true today. AEΠ was known as “the Jewish fraternity” and as a “great group of guys” who had “cool theme parties, like Casino night, but their kegs are pretty lame.” AEΠ is still the Jewish fraternity and still considered to be a great group of guys who have fun parties. As to their current kegs quality—no comment.

Being at Duke is exciting because the history that is everywhere makes us feel like part of a much bigger legacy. Yet, we are still able to make that legacy our own. This is why we see both reputations that persist through the years and reputations that constantly change. I would be interested to hear how other students and alums feel about Duke’s “distinguishing characteristics” over the years.

Do you see your Duke in the color-coded guide to the Duke of 1992?

UPDATE: The Duke University Archives has added the three other maps of campus living groups to their Flickr photostream. Here are the maps for West Campus, Edens, and North Campus!

Post contributed by Julia Eads, Trinity ’14, Rubenstein Library Technical Services and Duke University Archives student assistant.

Radio in the Rwandan Genocide

The Rwandan audiotapes of the International Monitor Institute (IMI) records are comprised almost entirely of the transcripts of radio broadcasts translated from Kinyarwanda into French and English. These are the broadcasts which aired in 1994 during the Rwandan genocide, which took place from April through early July of that year and in which 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were massacred. The genocide was triggered by the assassination of Hutu President Habyarimana on April 6, 1994. An IMI piece on radio as a tool of genocide (available in the organizational records) summarizes these events: “His plane was shot down on his return from Arusha, Tanzania, where he met with RPF leaders and signed an agreement further limiting his regime’s hold on power (known as the August 1993 Arusha Accords).”

220px-Juvénal_Habyarimana_(1980)
President Juvénal Habyarimana

During colonization from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, the German and Belgian colonial elite manufactured a native elite in the Tutsis, a process of colonization that Franz Fanon describes in The Wretched of the Earth. Hutus thus experienced discrimination in education and various sectors of the economy. In 1959, Hutus took control of Rwanda following the independence movement, forcing many Tutsis to seek refuge in neighboring countries. In 1990, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) comprised of exiled Tutsis, invaded Rwanda, initiating a civil war. Habyarimana’s assassination resulted in an escalation of Hutu anxiety that the Tutsis would seize power of the government and that discrimination against Hutus would be reestablished.

Radio became a powerful weapon used to incite and direct the Rwandan genocide. The majority of radio broadcasts in the Rwandan audiotapes collection are from the privately-owned Radio Télévision Libre des Milles Collines (RTLM). What I found especially interesting about the content of these broadcasts (the transcripts of which can be found in the IMI organizational records and the audiotapes of which can be found in the Rwandan Videotapes and Audiotapes inventory) was the way in which its efforts to direct the extermination of the Tutsi population was paralleled by its efforts to claim authority over the telling of history. The radio broadcasts reveal a struggle over who gets to tell history and, therefore, a struggle over a monopoly on truth. In other words, the RTLM broadcasts exhibit a phenomenon which seems to be more universally true, which is the political necessity of storytelling.

There are a few particularly conspicuous aspects of the history-telling of the RTLM broadcasts, one being the discourse of revelation or enlightenment – the idea that if we only peel back the layers, we can finally see the truth. And this encounter with the truth is the basis for political action, or, in this case, the basis on which genocide becomes justified. “Slavery,” for example, is a term that is repeated throughout these broadcasts. Several journalists recall the state of Hutu slavery during colonization in order to characterize the discrimination Hutus experienced. Drawing on such a vocabulary, the radio broadcasts attempt to illuminate the Rwandan genocide as a slave rebellion. Freedom from slavery, according to this narrative, lies in the ability to discover the true history and nature of that discrimination, in opposition to the stories of the colonizers and the native elite. For the same reason, I’m less interested in the truth or accuracy of this, or any, construction of history than in the need and tendency to construct history more generally.

In one broadcast which aired on April 12, 1994 (6 days after Habyarimana’s assassination),[ii] Georges Ruggiu gives his audience a history lesson. He evokes Tutsi discrimination against Hutus in the colonial educational system and the ways in which the Germans and Belgians perpetuated this discrimination. Ruggiu situates the RPF’s efforts to seize power in Rwanda and oppress Hutus within that context. “Now we are going to continue with history,” he begins one segment. He goes on to describe how Hutus, beginning with the first school for Tutsis in 1917, were denied education and how, as a result of this denial of access, the Hutu became slaves to the Tutsi “who, according to the colonial legend, were born to rule.” I suspect that Ruggiu does not understand Hutu slavery as merely metaphorical. The discourse of slavery in these broadcasts seems to represent Hutu slavery as naked reality; that is, these broadcasts understand historical Hutu slavery to be literal. Indeed, in the segment that follows, Ruggiu draws on historical documents that testify to the fact that historically “Tutsis killed Hutu kings and enslaved Hutu people.”

Listen to an excerpt of this broadcast here.

In a second broadcast from April 17, 1994 (11 days after the assassination), journalist Agenesta Mukarutama leads a roundtable discussion about how the RPF seeks to return Rwanda to its pre-revolutionary time in which the Tutsi commanded and the Hutu obeyed. “But,” the broadcast tells us, “Rwandans have learned their history and are ‘saying no’ to a repetition of history.” Genocide is perceived as the only way to break out of an historical cycle of discrimination and oppression. Murego argues that “what it [the RPF] did not understand is a lesson from history. In fact, the political skeleton before ‘59 is clear: Some people command and others obeyed, and the RPF inserted its objectives in that scope . . . Since the conditions have changed, there is now no way to impose oneself as it was before . . . what happened is that it is a genuine restoration of the former reality where some people commanded, you understand who, and others have learnt to say ‘no.’ That is where the president of the PL [le Parti libéral] has made an important statement: ‘those who are saying no today, they are saying no considering their history, the history of their country . . .’” (emphasis is mine).

IMI records, box PH1, Tutsi Refugee Camp, Nov 93(for blog)

By suggesting that “there is now no way,” that is, that it would be either impracticable or unbearable for Rwanda to return to a pre-revolutionary state governed by colonial structures, Murego essentially makes a philosophical statement about history – not just what the content of that history is, but more specifically, the temporality in which revolutionary history operates. The Rwandan genocide here is not just a “saying no” to Tutsi rule; it is a “saying no” to a particular conception of the temporality of history that stands in opposition to the revolutionary conception of history. Murego’s argument, here, seems to be that the RPF does not understand how historical time actually works. Ngirumpatse, a participant of the roundtable, follows this up:

“First thing, at the risk of disappointing many Rwandans, especially the educated people, I have always considered the Arusha Agreements as an exception in the people’s history. No any people make a revolution just once. France has made a Revolution, it had two or three restorations, it took 100 years for the Republic to impose itself. When I say Republic, I mean the power of people.  . . . So I consider the Arusha Agreements as an exception in the people’s history.” Ngirumpatse makes this claim repeatedly:  “I consider the Arusha agreements as an exception in history.”

Ngirumpatse refers to the Arusha Accords as exceptional insofar as they are exceptionally generous; this generosity, it seems, arises from the mistaken belief among Rwandans that their revolution was finished once and for all. But again, what is more interesting to me is the temporality of the historical discourse within the broadcasts themselves – the repetition of the insistence that history cannot and will not repeat itself.

Post contributed by Clare Callahan, graduate student assistant in Rubenstein Technical Services and the Human Rights Archive.

Digitizing the LCRM Update #10: A Project Milestone and an Iconic Signature

In this month’s Digitizing the Long Civil Rights Movement update, we are happy to announce that initial scanning for all of Duke’s manuscript content in the Content, Context, and Capacity Project is complete. Over 66,000 scans are now either published or are being processed to enable publication as soon as possible. We encourage you to check out the CCC Content Page as a portal for looking at all of Duke’s CCC Collections as well as those digitized by NC State, UNC-Chapel Hill, and NC Central. Meanwhile, we are beginning work on digitizing the audio oral histories from North Carolina found in the Behind the Veil Collection, which will be our primary focus during the upcoming third year of the grant.

For our collection highlight this month, we turn to the Charles N. Hunter Papers. Born to enslaved parents in Raleigh in 1851, Hunter would go on to become one of the most prominent African-American educators and advocates in North Carolina. Aside from industrial activism and prolific writings, Hunter served as a teacher and principal at several schools, mostly in the Triangle and its environs. As part of that work, he corresponded with the Tuskegee Institute and its founder, Booker T. Washington.

Letter, Booker T. Washington to Charles N. Hunter, July 7, 1914.  Charles N. Hunter Papers
Letter, Booker T. Washington to Charles N. Hunter, July 7, 1914. Charles N. Hunter Papers, Box 2, Folder 2, Item ID: cnhms02002037. Click to enlarge.

The letter shown here is from Booker T. Washington to Charles N. Hunter. Written in 1914, it concerns a project, led by Hunter, concerned with building rural schools for African-Americans throughout the South. Hunter worked with Washington and the Tuskegee Institute for this project and continued to correspond with the institute after Washington’s death in November 1915. Given Hunter’s work with Washington, it is appropriate that the last school at which he served as a principal was Booker T. Washington School in Johnston County.

The Charles N. Hunter Papers, and other CCC Collections, will be published in the coming months.

For more information on the CCC Project, please visit our website or like us on Facebook.

The grant-funded CCC Project is designed to digitize selected manuscripts and photographs relating to the long civil rights movement. For more about Rubenstein Library materials being digitized through the CCC Project, check out previous progress updates posted here at The Devil’s Tale!

Post contributed by Josh Hager, CCC Project Graduate Assistant.

A Tale of Two Archives; or, The Persistence of ‘Girl Land’

Anyone reading this blog knows that archives are full of wonderfully weird ephemera just waiting to be discovered and discussed, of conversations waiting to happen. This is the story of two archives that, it turns out, have a lot to talk about.

The John Rylands University Library at the University of Manchester has had this drawing on its webpage for some time:

Sunday evening in St. Jame's, Barton
“Sunday evening in St. James’s, Barton,” from the John Rylands University Library

Ostensibly, this is a doodle, maybe an early comic. It depicts an ordinary meeting between preachers and parishioners. Only one thing stands out: the stocky girl just off the center dressed in bright pink and orange, while everyone around her wears drab brown. Look closer and you see that she her awkwardness is not limited to her dress: oblivious to the women gossiping behind her, our young heroine “stands, patiently, while her papa shakes hands with all the colliers, not knowing but she must do so too – a perfect pattern!  Dear lady!” This oblivious fool is also the artist.

Cut to our own archive: Two summers ago, I was working in the Frank Baker Collection of Wesleyana and British Methodism when I came upon some poems. Having cataloged plenty of manuscript materials within the collection, I wouldn’t have thought much of them, except I noticed that they were tied together with string. Fanciful English student that I am, I recalled that Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts had been likewise fashioned together, and so began my grandiose visions: had I stumbled upon the British Emily? Could these poems help to reinvigorate the field of 18th-century women’s poetry – revolutionize it, even? It’s the fantasy held dear by every budding academic: to discover the next Milton or Frost, to shake the scholarly world to its core. Needless to say, literary scholarship remains unshaken, but it does have a new name on its register: Sarah Wesley.

The poems I found were written by our pink-and-orange artiste, the daughter of Charles Wesley, a co-founder of British Methodism. What is so fascinating about Sarah Wesley is her outright resistance to the restrictive practices of her every-day life – and how, perhaps as a result of that resistance, she has since all but disappeared from most histories of British Methodism.

SW_bound manuscript
Bound manuscript with Sarah Wesley’s writings in the Frank Baker Collection.

Her poetry in particular served as an outlet for questioning her father’s religion, as well as engaging with emergent conversations about the rights of women. Even while Wesley’s social commitments were progressive, she remained a devout Methodist throughout her life. But through her writing, most of which she kept hidden away from the judgmental eyes of her community, Wesley takes us to a place we don’t often think of when we read the eighteenth century: the private mind of the teenage girl.

Caitlin Flanagan’s recent book Girl Land (Little, Brown and Co., 2012) makes a compelling case for the fundamental significance of a particular marker of female adolescence: that time when a girl recedes into her room for a few years and emerges a brooding melodramatic for a few more. Flanagan posits that as a society, we take too lightly “a girl’s sudden need to withdraw from the world for a while and inhabit a secret emotional life” (1). But in fact, this is time and space that young girls need in order to come to terms with the world and their place within it. And so, Flanagan urges us to celebrate, rather than denigrate, the importance of this space she calls “girl land.”

Flanagan’s study is predicated on a particular reading of the history of the teenager. But even before “adolescence” became a discrete intellectual category in the twentieth century, Sarah Wesley was, in many ways, a typically modern teenage girl.

She wrote poetry that was evocative, romantic, and highly self-reflexive:

The Pilot Reason stays on Shore,
The boisr’ous Passions more,
Youth is the Ship and Hope the Oar,
And O! the Sea is Love!

~from “Sonnet,” 1770

In particular, much of her work is preoccupied with exploring her budding sexuality:

Her Eyes enraptur’d shall your Beauties own
Her snowy Fingers be your Virgin Lone!
Her Lips shall bid Thee with a sigh Adieu!
Her Lips shall greet Thee with ambrosial Dew!
Descending showers shall fall from Heaven to gaze!
Within your silken Folds shall Graces lie
And panting Zephryss on your Bosom die!
The Muse shall stamp Thee with Idalia’s Crest,
And Venus court Thee to adorn her Breast.

~from “On receiving a Nosegay,” n.d.

However, she was not without some snark when it came to matters of romance:

Both Truth and Malice on one point agree
That my outside is the worst part of me
Small is the censure, whilst it stands confest
Bad as it is, thy outside is the Best!

~“Epigram: on receiving a rude Speech from a Crooked Gentleman,” 1777

SW_rude speech

As we saw in the drawing from the Manchester archive, she held some anxiety over her appearance and the perceptions of others.

And in perhaps the defining feature of “girl land,” she was adamant about challenging the values she inherited from her family in order to come to her own understanding of her world (for more on the particulars of Wesley’s intellectual rebellion, see my essay in the Winter 2013 volume of Eighteenth-Century Studies, which expounds on her feminist and abolitionist interests).

SW_elopement
“The Elopement” figures prominently in Koretsky’s article, “Sarah Wesley, British Methodism, and the Feminist Question, Again,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 46.2 (Winter 2013), pages 223-237.

So did my work in the Frank Baker Collection yield the next Emily Dickinson? Not exactly. At the level of versification, Wesley’s poetry is derivative at best. But in the connections she asks us to draw between religion and the secular discourses of the key social issues at the end of the eighteenth century, Wesley’s voice raises many productive questions, which I hope eighteenth-century scholars will continue to engage. And further still, the familiar tenor of her poetry demonstrates the persistence of “girl land,” and how productive that sometimes alien-seeming place can be.

Post contributed by Deanna Koretsky, a Ph.D. candidate in the Duke English Dept. and a graduate student assistant in Technical Services.

Nevermind: The Concert That Wasn’t

Hello again from the Duke University Union records!  When last we met, I told you about a mysterious memorandum concerning CORE and the fact that it was not known to suffer from any communist infiltration.  Now, I have an equally interesting tale, involving an unlikely cast of characters: President Keith Brodie, Coach K, and Nirvana.

This undated paper was in a folder titled simply “Concerts Lost.”  It details the negotiations that apparently took place before it was decided not to book the willing-to-play Nirvana at Duke.

Notes about possible Nirvana concert, 1991? From the Duke University Union Records.
Notes about possible Nirvana concert, 1991? From the Duke University Union Records. (Click to enlarge.)

While the document more or less speaks for itself, I will highlight two of my favorite excerpts:

“Even [President] Brodie is unable to make Krzyzewski move practice.”

“If we could talk them into one of the other dates, Brodie would buy tix for senior class.”

Buried deep within the record is a notation that helps us to date the document as being from 1991: “talked to Brodie today; he’s excited about Nirvana because that’s one of the bands they tried for last year.”  This is a key clue in dating the record for the following reasons:

  1. In May, 1990, Nirvana played both in Chapel Hill (at Cat’s Cradle) and Charlotte.  Because of the proximity, it would be reasonable that Duke would have also tried to get a date on their first major headliner tour.
  2. Nevermind, Nirvana’s first major label success album was released in the fall of 1991.  Based on the fact that Durham is not located in suburban Seattle, it seems like a safe bet that they were relatively unknown in the area until they started to play the college circuit in 1990, and then they were catapulted into the spotlight with the release of the international hit album Nevermind.

Nirvana, of course was a band that was riddled with both controversy and tragedy.  Frontman Kurt Cobain famously battled a heroin addiction and, in 1994, committed suicide.  However, Nirvana is also largely credited with expanding the grunge—and later, alternative—rock genre beyond the Pacific Northwest.

Unfortunately, the story of Nirvana at Duke is found only in records of the Duke University Union, in a folder entitled “Concerts Lost.”  A final note about this record: Duke won the 1991-1992 seasons National Championship for men’s basketball.  Apparently those unmoveable practices paid off that year.

Post contributed by Maureen McCormick Harlow, Drill Intern for the Duke University Archives.

Digitizing the LCRM Update #9: Remembering the Allen Building Takeover

This month’s Digitizing the Long Civil Rights Movement update pauses to look back into Duke’s own past struggles with racial equality.  On February 13, 1969, students in the Afro-American Society occupied the Allen Building where the university’s primary administration offices were (and still are) located.  These students demanded that Duke take steps to enact racial equality on campus, including the founding of an African-American Studies department, the hiring of more African-American professors, and the establishment of an African-American cultural center on campus.  Similar demands had been made before from members of the Black Studies Program, as featured in our fourth update in this blog series.

What distinguished the Allen Building Takeover from the previous efforts for reform was its forcefulness—on both sides of the debate.  The Takeover marked the first such occupation by students in Duke’s history.  The administration’s response also became notable for what some members of the student body perceived to be its brutality.  Police officers dispatched to the scene used tear gas to disperse a crowd that had gathered around the building, leading to a “riot” on the main quad of West Campus.

Photos from <i>The Chronicle</i>, February 16, 1969.

Photos from <i>The Chronicle</i>, February 16, 1969.
Both photos from The Chronicle, February 16, 1969.
Allen Building Takeover Collection, Box 1, Folder 10: abtms01010035

In the wake of the Takeover, students rallied to enact the suggested agenda of the original occupiers.  Eventually, most of the demands did become standard practice at Duke, but the change occurred more gradually than what the galvanized student body had wanted in February 1969.  The items selected above are from a photo essay published by The Chronicle (Duke’s independent student newspaper) that encapsulated the events of Takeover.

We are happy to announce that the Allen Building Takeover Collection and its wealth of primary documents and remembrances of the important event will soon become available online to researchers.

For more information on the Content, Context, and Capacity Project for Digitizing the LCRM, please visit our website or like us on Facebook.

The grant-funded CCC Project is designed to digitize selected manuscripts and photographs relating to the long civil rights movement. For more about Rubenstein Library materials being digitized through the CCC Project, check out previous progress updates posted here at The Devil’s Tale

Post contributed by Josh Hager, CCC Graduate Assistant.

Investigating CORE in the Duke Student Union Records

For the last several months, I have been processing the collection of the Duke University Union for the Duke Archives.  The collection contains a wide variety of records and information: want to know how many people were injured during the Grateful Dead concert at Duke?  Check the Union records!  Interested in a local artist that showed her work at Duke in the 1970s?  The Union records are the place to be!  But the subject of this blog post involves this curious, unsigned letter that I found in the records:

Unsigned letter about CORE, November 7, 1963. From the Duke University Union Records.
Unsigned letter about CORE, November 7, 1963. From the Duke University Union Records.

CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, was an interracial civil rights organization that, according to its website, began as “a nonhierarchical, decentralized organization funded entirely by the voluntary contributions of its members.” By the early 1960s, chapters and projects existed in many states and were self-funded and self-led.

The early 1960s were a pivotal time for CORE chapters, particularly those throughout the south. 1960, of course, saw the Greensboro sit-ins, and CORE was instrumental in formulating responses throughout the region. In 1961, CORE chapters, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and other civil rights organizations both participated in and organized “Freedom Rides”  throughout the segregated south in order to desegregate interstate travel. And during 1964’s Freedom Summer, CORE members James Chaney, Andrew Goldman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered in the infamous “Mississippi Burning” case.

Perhaps it was something about the “nonhierarchical, decentralized” language that piqued the curiosity of Duke administrators and compelled them to check with both the United States Department of Justice and the House of Unamerican Activities Commission before approving a CORE chapter at Duke.  The motivation behind such actions may have been lost to time . . . or maybe it’s buried deeper in the Union records!

Post contributed by Maureen McCormick Harlow, Drill Intern for the Duke University Archives.