As of June 2018, the Obsidian Collection Archives is now available online. This digital collection of historic black newspaper archives was started when executive director Angela Ford realized that physical archives of papers like Chicago Defender were rapidly deteriorating and in need of preservation. ”To make matters worse, when she told her son about newsworthy things that had happened when she was growing up, he often found there was no record of those, either. ‘He’d go to Google it, and it wasn’t there,’ she says. ‘I thought, ‘Wait, what?… My past was disintegrating. That’s how I got involved: to save black history and to save myself.'” (Source)
Eight exhibitions are now live, with many more to be added.
Woman and girls on Maxwell Street, Shakir Karriem, Photographer 1983-08. From the collection of
The Obsidian Collection Archives.
From the Obsidian Collection’s mission statement:
Our primary goal is to preserve and share images from African American newspapers to future generations. As Black people moved about the country, the documentation of their lives was recorded on very few mediums. The African American Newspapers were of the few published tools of the first half of the twentieth century to capture any record of our lives, our goals, our suffering and our strength.
The list of partner newspapers can be accessed here, and you can read more about the project at Atlas Obscura and Smithsonian.com.