Archival Processing

Bethlehem United Methodist Church
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Opening the Archives

Opening the Archives: Bethlehem United Methodist Church Preserves More Than a Century of Community Memory

By Zha’Mauri Howard and T. DeWayne Moore
Wooden Cabinet
This old file cabinet contained the oldest church records in the collection dating from the 1910s [Photograph © T. DeWayne Moore 2026]

This week marked another important milestone in the preservation of African American history in Waller County.

Alongside my graduate student, Zha’Mauri Howard, and longtime church member Geneva Moore, we spent the day working inside Bethlehem United Methodist Church in Hempstead, Texas, organizing and assessing the church’s remarkable archival collection. We were also joined by Geneva’s daughter, Loretta Sanchez, making this a truly multigenerational day of historical discovery.

What we encountered exceeded our expectations.

For generations, Bethlehem United Methodist Church has carefully safeguarded its own history. Hidden inside cabinets, filing drawers, closets, and storage spaces were decades of church records waiting to tell their stories.

Among the materials we examined were:
  • historic photographs
  • anniversary and Homecoming programs
  • administrative records
  • membership materials
  • correspondence
  • church publications
  • handwritten notes
  • bound record books
  • and numerous unidentified historical documents dating across much of the twentieth century.
Every folder opened revealed another piece of the congregation’s remarkable history.
Geneva Moore and her daughter
Geneva Moore and Loretta Sanchez digging through old file cabinets that contained church records from the 1960s and 1970s [Photograph © T. DeWayne Moore 2026]
Loretta Sanchez
Loretta Sanchez digging through an old file cabinet that contained church records from the 1910s and 1920s [Photograph © T. DeWayne Moore 2026]

One of the most rewarding moments came as Geneva Moore and longtime church members carefully examined photographs and documents together. Their conversations transformed unidentified faces into named individuals, anonymous events into remembered occasions, and ordinary papers into living history. Archival work is never simply about preserving documents—it is about preserving memory.

The collection also contains records that will help document Bethlehem’s evolution from the nineteenth century through the Civil Rights era and into the present. These materials will significantly strengthen the church’s ongoing historic preservation efforts and provide future researchers with an extraordinary resource for understanding African American religious life in Waller County.

Geneva Moore and Albert Garfield
Loretta Sanchez and Albert Garfield
Three women and two men
(L to R) Zha’Mauri Howard, Geneva Moore, Albert Garfield, Loretta Sanchez, and Dr. DeWayne Moore [Photograph © T. DeWayne Moore 2026]

Our graduate student Zha’mauri Howard joined us throughout the visit, helping document the collection and learning firsthand how community archives are preserved through collaboration with descendant communities. Experiences like these demonstrate why hands-on public history training is so valuable. Students are not simply learning archival theory—they are participating in the preservation of history that matters deeply to living communities.

As Director of the Woolfolk Digital Preservation Lab at Prairie View A&M University, I am continually reminded that the most important archives are often still in the hands of the communities that created them. Rather than waiting for these records to arrive in a university repository, we can partner with churches, families, and local organizations to help preserve them where they remain most meaningful.

1976 Homecoming Program Cover
1976 Homecoming Program Cover
1986 Homecoming Program Cover
1986 Homecoming Program Cover
 
 
The photographs from this visit capture more than archival work. They document trust, collaboration, and shared stewardship. They show community members identifying photographs, examining decades-old records, exploring hidden storage cabinets filled with historical materials, and celebrating discoveries together.

 

 

This work represents the beginning—not the end—of Bethlehem’s archival preservation project. Over the coming months, the Woolfolk Digital Preservation Lab will continue working with the congregation to organize, preserve, digitize, and describe these materials while ensuring that the history of one of Hempstead’s most important African American institutions remains accessible for future generations.

 

 

History survives because people choose to preserve it.

 

 

At Bethlehem United Methodist Church, that work is well underway.
This handwritten financial ledger captures a meticulous snapshot of community contributions gathered on a single day in July 1920.
This handwritten financial ledger captures a meticulous snapshot of community contributions gathered on a single day in July 1920.
Meeting Log
This meeting log dated January 10, 1932 records the names of individuals who came to BUMC

This project reflects the mission of the Woolfolk Digital Preservation Lab: partnering with communities to preserve African American history through archival stewardship, student training, and public history collaboration.

Men unloading sugar cane truck
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The Texas Black Cooperative Extension & Home Demonstration Collection

 

The Texas Black Cooperative Extension & Home Demonstration Collection 

 
 
By Evelyn Todd and T. DeWayne Moore
Two Women display a reupholstered chair in 1953 Bowie County
Two women in the Bowie County Home Demonstration Club display a reseated chair in 1953 [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Bowie County, Box 1, Folder 24]

 

The Texas Black Cooperative Extension & Home Demonstration Collection is a monumental archival recovery effort that reshapes our understanding of Black rural experience, agricultural knowledge, and domestic science in twentieth-century Texas. The collections contains a total of 63 finding aids—one for each county in Texas for which records remain about the Extension service—163 archival boxes, and 3,219 acid-free folders.  Comprising tens of thousands of reports, maps, and photographs across more sixty-three counties, the collection documents the lives and labor of Black Extension Agents, Home Demonstration Agents, and 4-H youth leaders—many of them trained at Prairie View A&M University, a Historically Black College and University founded in the last days of Reconstruction in Texas. The Extension service provided vital educational, economic, and social services to rural Black communities during an era defined by segregation, economic exploitation, agricultural transformation, and state-sanctioned racial violence. The surviving records reveal a different and often overlooked reality—one in which Black farm families engaged state institutions, shaped local knowledge, and sustained communities across generations.

 

 

But the true significance of this collection is amplified by the fact that the work of preserving, arranging, processing, and creating finding aids for these records was completed by students—graduate student Evelyn Todd and undergraduates Malachi McMahon, Allena Preston, Kalayah Jammer, Lindsay Boknight, Noah Jackson, Kiliyana Williams, D’Asia Johnson, Kasedi Eason, Zynitra Durham, Jaylynn Brantley, Hannah Harden, and Kendall Douglass. Their work was more significant than mere technical processing: it proved a three-year long intervention into the histories of archival gatekeeping, addressing how archives have traditionally operated as mechanisms of exclusion and power.

 

Bessie Little represents the 14 4-H Club boy and girls receiving chicken from the West End Hatchery donated by Mr. Cliff Berkman
Bessie Little represents the fourteen 4-H Clubs of the Pleasant Green community in Victoria County, receiving chickens from the West End Hatchery of Cliff Berkman in March 1953 [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Victoria County, Box 1, Folder 11]
Home of Mrs. L.L. Gilbert
The Victoria County home of L.L. Gilbert in 1949 [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Victoria County, Box 1, Folder 7]
The Collection Through the Lens of Historical Scholarship

Historians such as Pete Daniel, Melissa Walker, Rebecca Sharpless, Katherine Jellison, Greta de Jong, and Adam Green have argued that Black rural life in the twentieth century was a site of profound creativity and resilience. Black Cooperative Extension Agents were knowledge producers: agricultural scientists, community organizers, nutrition educators, and mentors who functioned as intermediaries between federal agricultural policy and the everyday needs of marginalized communities.[1]

Pete Daniel, in Dispossession and The Shadow of Slavery, demonstrated how federal agricultural policy systematically marginalized Black farmers throughout the twentieth century. Yet Daniel also noted that Black Cooperative Extension Agents often served as critical buffers against discriminatory systems, helping rural families interpret programs, navigate bureaucracies, and resist economic dispossession.

This collection provides primary evidence of precisely this kind of grassroots advocacy.

Wesley Walker of the Stop Six community in Tarrant County and his champion Duroc exhibited at the Ft. Worth Fat Stock show
Wesley Walker of the Stop Six community and his champion Duroc exhibited at the 1946 Ft. Worth Fat Stock Show [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Tarrant County, Box 3, Folder 18]
Mattie Fuller, the blue-ribbon winner of the cake competition at the Bastrop County bread show, explains her successful cake baking methods on May 29th, 1948 [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Tarrant County, Box 1, Folder 8]
Mattie Fuller, the blue-ribbon winner of the cake competition at the Bastrop County bread show, explains her successful cake baking methods on May 29th, 1948 [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Tarrant County, Box 1, Folder 8]

Likewise, scholars of Black women’s history—Darlene Clark Hine, Ula Taylor, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Stephanie Shaw, Thavolia Glymph, Deborah Gray White—have demonstrated how Black women built alternative infrastructures of care, health, and education in the Jim Crow South. The Home Demonstration records in this collection are a testament to that labor, documenting programs in household budgeting, child development, sanitation, food preservation, and leadership training.[2]

Mrs. B.E. Crenshaw, 4-H Leader, is showing 4-H'ers and other leaders how to make delicious candy at home.
Travis County 4-H Leader B.E. Crenshaw shows young 4-H Club members and other leaders how to make delicious candy in 1953 [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Travis County, Box 1, Folder 10]
Mr. L.J. Hill, Voc. Agri. Teacher, Laneville, presenting the ribbons to 1st, 2nd, & 3rd place winners in county Pig Show; Second: Haywood Ballenger, Route 1, Tatum, Texas
Vocational Agriculture Teacher L.J. Hill, of Laneville, presents the 2nd place ribbon in County Pig Show to Haywood Ballenger, of Tatum, Texas, in November 1953 [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Rusk County, Box 4, Folder 22]
 

 

The archive also provides critical insight into youth development under segregation. Historians like Thomas J. Ward, Jr., Noliwe Rooks, Jarvis Givens, and Christopher Span have shown the central role of Black youth organizations—including 4-H clubs—in cultivating leadership, political consciousness, and community responsibility. The 4-H yearbooks, coronation programs, youth project lists, and meeting minutes preserved here confirm these scholarly arguments.[3]

Independence 4-H girls selecting and packing eggs for market.
Young 4-H Club members from the Independence Community select and pack eggs for market in 1951 [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Washington County, Box 1, Folder 8]
A group of corn and cotton growers with their adult leader of Bredmond Community
Robertson County farmers from the Bredmond Community in 1940 [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Rusk County, Box 4, Folder 22]

 

 

 

Yet the Texas Black CE&HD Collection is not only historically important—its contemporary handling is, itself, a historically resonant act rooted in Black archival traditions and critiques of archival power.

Lindsay Boknight, Allena Preston, Kasedi Eason, D'Asia Johnson, Caleb Brookins, Noah Jackson, and Kalayah Jammer in 2022
PVAMU students and Digital PV Panther Project team members Lindsay Boknight (team leader), Allena Preston, Kasedi Eason, D’Asia Johnson, Caleb Brookins, Noah Jackson (team leader), and Kalayah Jammer in 2022 [Photograph © 2022 T. DeWayne Moore]
Noah Jackson working on the collection
Digital PV Panther Project team leader Noah Jackson organizing the collection in 2023 [Photograph © 2023 T. DeWayne Moore]
Kasedi and Noah processing the collection
PVAMU Students Noah Jackson and Kasedi Eason processing the collection in 2023 [Photograph © 2023 T. DeWayne Moore]
 
 
Archival Administration, Gatekeeping, and Power: Contextualizing the Student Work

 

The field of archival studies has increasingly turned its attention to the politics of documentation, preservation, and access. Scholars such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot, in Silencing the Past, argued that archives are not neutral; they are sites where power determines what is remembered and what is forgotten.[4] Toni Morrison echoed this view when she wrote about the “erasure” built into dominant historical narratives and the need for Black communities to recover their own voices.[5]

 

The Texas Black Cooperative Extension & Home Demonstration Collection exists today precisely because of such erasure. Historically, Black Extension documents were not prioritized by state institutions, and many were left unprocessed or inaccessible. This is what archivist Verne Harris calls the regime of the archive: a structure that privileges certain stories and obscures others.[6]

 

Students sitting at a desk
PVAMU Students Hannah Harden, Lindsay Boknight, and Noah Jackson processing the collection in 2022 [Photograph © 2022 T. DeWayne Moore]
Students working on computers
PVAMU Students Kalayah Jammer and Noah Jackson creating finding aids for the collection in 2023 [Photograph © 2023 T. DeWayne Moore]
Black woman at Lamar County Bi-County 4-H Camp in 1948.
A woman posing for a photograph at the 1948 Bi-County 4-H Camp in Lamar County [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Lamar County, Box 1, Folder 18]
School Dress Division, reading right to left, winners are as follows: 1st place - Lana M. Harmon of Roxton; 2nd Place - Dorothy Bass of Arthur City; and 3rd place - Ethel Grant of Cedar Hill
1948 Lamar County School Dress competition winners: 1st place (right) Lana M. Harmon, of Roxton; 2nd Place (center) Dorothy Bass, of Arthur City; and 3rd place (left) Ethel Grant, of Cedar Hill [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Lamar County, Box 1, Folder 18]

 

 

Moreover, archival studies scholars such as Tonia Sutherland, Lae’l Hughes-Watkins, and Michelle Caswell have articulated how traditional archival institutions enact archival gatekeeping—a set of personal and structural biases that discourage research and disproportionately deny access to important collections. They argue that community archives and HBCU student-led archival projects disrupt these systems by reclaiming control over representation, memory, and interpretation. The Digital PV Panther Project—through which these students work—is precisely such a disruption.

 

Background Image: In 1941, Jeff Manning introduces Herefords to diversify farming in the Willow Grove community [PVAMU Archives, Texas, Black Home CE&HD Collection, McLennan County, Box 1, Folder 1]

 

Mrs. Dena Collins, Food Preservation Demonstrator and 4-H Leader of Pilot Knob, shows her deep freeze, the different products she has frozen this year
Travis County Food Preservation Demonstrator and 4-H Leader Dena Collins, of Pilot Knob, shows off her “deep freeze” and its contents in 1953 [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Travis County, Box 1, Folder 10]
Second Annual Home Baking Program presented by Home Demonstration Club Women; August 23, 1947; County Agents' Office in Marlin, Falls County, Texas
On August 23, 1947, the Falls County, Home Demonstration Club presented its Second Annual Home Baking Program at the County Extension Office in Marlin, Texas [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Falls County, Box 1, Folder 10]
Kurten-Tabor 4-H Club taken during Play Day on May 2, 1947 in Brazos County
The young women of the Kurten-Tabor 4-H Club on “Play Day” – May 2, 1947 in Brazos County [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Brazos County, Box 1, Folder 15]

 

PVAMU Students as Agents of Archival Justice

Students such as Evelyn Todd, Kasedi Eason, Noah Jackson, Zynitra Durham, Lindsay Boknight, and others have encountered firsthand the dynamics described by Caswell and Cifor in their theory of “archival care ethics.”[7] They do not process documents as detached administrators but as caretakers of their own community’s memory.

Their labor challenges the archival gatekeeping that has historically diminished the visibility of Black Extension Agents. As Jarrett Drake argues, dismantling archival oppression requires shifting authority from institutions that have long controlled the historical narrative to the communities whose histories have been marginalized.[8] PVAMU students embody this shift by asserting interpretive authority over the Extension archive.

 

Specific Contributions, Framed Through Archival Scholarship

  • PVAMU Student Allena Preston’s careful arrangement of Anderson County materials reflects what public historian Randall Jimerson calls archival transparency—making the structures of documentation visible and legible.[9]
  • PVAMU Students Hannah Harden’s and Kalayah Jammer’s meticulous processing for Angelina and many other counties opens the doors for scholars Lauren Klein and Kim Gallon’s approaches to Black feminist digital humanities that foreground relationships, context, and community memory.[10]
  • PVAMU Students Lindsay Boknight’s and Kiliyana Williams’s extensive work across multiple counties models the distributed archival labor that public historian Terry Cook describes as essential for reshaping archival description in inclusive ways.[11]
  • PVAMU Student Noah Jackson’s work on youth materials aligns with the work of anthropologist Cristen Smith as well as literary scholar Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “critical fabulation,” creating interpretive frameworks that restore humanity and complexity to Black children whose histories have often been flattened.[12]
  • PVAMU Student D’Asia Johnson’s reconstruction of Brazoria and Waller Counties demonstrates the interpretive authority that archivist Brenda Gunn argues is necessary for archivists to ethically contextualize marginalized communities’ records.[13]
  • PVAMU Student Zynitra Durham’s finding aids and careful processing of Cherokee and Colorado Counties exemplify what Saidiya Hartman describes as “narrative repair”—restoring agency to historical subjects subjected to archival silencing.[14]
  • PVAMU Student Jaylynn Brantley’s work on McLennan County highlights the urban–rural hybridity historians such as Davarian Baldwin say traditional archives often ignore.[15]
  • PVAMU Student Kendall Douglass’s and Graduate Student Evelyn Todd’s restoration of coastal and Brazos Valley counties directly answers archivist Lae’l Hughes-Watkins’s call for “reparative description” that counters historical distortions.[16]

Men unloading sugar cane truck
Men unloading a truck of sugar cane in 1939 Austin County, Texas [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Austin County, Box 1, Folder 11]
Mrs. Mattie Fuller, blue ribbon winner on cakes at County-wide bread show. Mrs. Fuller tells the group the steps in successful cake baking.
Mrs. Mattie Fuller, blue ribbon winner on cakes at County-wide bread show. Mrs. Fuller tells the group the steps in successful cake baking in Bastrop County in 1948 [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Bastrop County, Box 1, Folder 8]
Women and 4-H Clubers give attention at county-wide exhibition, as Home Agent, and various Council members discuss blue ribbon winners of pot plants, center pieces, and what knots
On July 17, 1948, Home Demonstration & 4-H Club members attending an exhibition in Bastrop County, while Extension agents and council members deliberate over the blue-ribbon winners of pot plants, center pieces, and what knots [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Bastrop County, Box 1, Folder 8]
4-H Clubers and women as they inspect their blue ribbon articles at County-wide exhibition
4-H Club members inspect the blue-ribbon articles at a Bastrop County exhibition on July 16, 1948 [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Bastrop County, Box 1, Folder 8]
Digging Pit from Pit Toilet Demonstration
Several men conducting a Pit Toilet Demonstration in 1939 Bowie County [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Bowie County, Box 1, Folder 17]
Winning Ladies of the first Bread Show for the Negro Home Demonstration Clubs in Guadalupe County on Sept. 9th, 1947.
Winners of the first Bread Show held by the Guadalupe County Home Demonstration Clubs on September 9th, 1947 [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Guadalupe County, Box 1, Folder 27]
Miss Venell Clack, an older youth club member who had been taught crafts by her agent.
Having lost her hearing at a young age, 4-H Club member Venell Clack learned to make billfolds, coin purses, and car key cases from the Guadalupe County agent as a means of making an income in 1949 [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Guadalupe County, Box 1, Folder 2]
 

 

 

Re-Centering Black Knowledge Production

 

The Texas Black CE&HD Collection reveals a world of Black scientific expertise—soil analysis, livestock management, home budgeting, nutrition science, clothing construction, sanitation engineering, youth leadership training. Scholars like Hannah-Rose Murray, Monica White, and Catherine Stewart have shown that Black agricultural knowledge was often dismissed by white state authorities but remained central to community survival.[17]

 

The students working on the Digital PV Panther Project confirmed that, across county after county, Extension Agents recorded deeply technical knowledge that historians have only begun to grapple with. The Texas Black CE&HD Collection contains more than mere bureaucratic documents; they bring the intellectual histories of the reciprocal relationship between rural Black Texans and PVAMU to life.

 

 

Albert Jones, 4-H Club boy of Jeannetta Community with1 acre corn demonstration of selected seed.
4-H Club member Albert Jones, of the Jeannetta Community in Harris County, shows off his one-acre corn and peas demonstration. He also conducted a pig project in 1938 [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Harris County, Box 1, Folder 19]
The eight winners at the County Fair with Lankhart Cotton Show in Harrison County.
The eight winners of the Harrison County Fair with Lankhart Cotton Show in 1937 [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Harrison County, Box 1, Folder 1]

 

 

The students working for the Digital PV Panther Project are essential to the preservation and interpretation of the university’s archival collections. First, they know the cultural contexts. As Elsa Barkley Brown argues, Black communities are not monolithic; they function through intricate networks of mutuality. PVAMU students, many from Texas rural or semi-rural communities, perceive cultural nuances others might miss.[18]  Second, they inherit an institutional legacy. Prairie View A&M University trained many of the agents who spent long hours writing these reports. Students today continue that mission by preserving their intellectual output. Third, the students challenge gatekeeping practices and the dominant historical frameworks. Students’ interpretations refuse narratives that portray Black rural communities as passive or static. Instead, they show them as dynamic, resourceful, and self-determining. Fourth, they function as what Hughes-Watkins calls “activist archivists.”[19] By reclaiming control over the long-unprocessed, neglected records and narrative, these students disrupt archival hierarchies and restore dignity to historical subjects.

 

 

 

Conclusion:

Students as Disruptors in the Archives at PVAMU

Photo: Team Leader Noah Jackson and RISE Graduate Research Assistant Evelyn Todd stand in front of the fully processed Texas Black Cooperative Extension & Home Demonstration Collection in 2024
DPPP logo
 
 

The Texas Black Cooperative Extension & Home Demonstration Collection is not merely a record of the past. It’s a statement about the importance of disrupting power dynamics in the archives. It’s a blueprint for the collaborative processing of future projects on campus, and it demonstrates the dire need for digital preservation at PVAMU. Through the hands and intellect of McMahon, Preston, Jammer, Boknight, Jackson, Johnson, Eason, Durham, Brantley, Todd, Harden, and Douglass, the PVAMU archive became a site of reclamation, empowerment, and scholarly innovation. Their work demonstrates what scholars like Michelle Caswell, Verne Harris, and Tonia Sutherland have long argued: archives are not neutral—they reflect the power of those who shape them.[20] By entrusting the organization, processing, and finding aid creation to PVAMU students, the Digital PV Panther Project overturns decades of institutional gatekeeping and recenters Black communities in the production of their own historical narratives.

In 2021, the Division of Social Sciences received almost half a million dollars from the National Endowment for the Humanities to prevent the erasure of unprocessed manuscript collections at Prairie View A&M University through the Digital PV Panther Project. The award primarily supported the employment of upper-level undergraduates from a range of majors to help preserve some of the oldest and most fragile manuscripts on campus. From 2021 to 2024, Dr. T. DeWayne Moore worked alongside more than a dozen students to preserve evidence of the resilience, expertise, and innovation that shaped Black communities for generations, forging Prairie View’s position as a statewide educational and social institution. Dr. Moore wrote numerous internal grants to continue the processing project, including a total of five internal RISE grants to hire graduate research assistant, Evelyn Todd. He worked with Human Resources to hire work study students, and he created new student hourly positions using indirect funds from prior grants to continue employing team leader, Noah Jackson, long after the official NEH grant period had ended. 

The work of the Digital PV Panther Project is not merely archival processing. It’s a much-needed movement for archival justice at PVAMU. It’s HBCU intellectual power in action, and the Digital PV Panther Project works tirelessly to acquire additional funding to purchase new equipment and hire additional students to prevent the erasure of historic resources on campus. We still have much work to finish in regard to the Texas Black Cooperative Extension & Home Demonstration Collection, specifically the digitization of the documents and the online dissemination of the entire manuscript collection—an unfulfilled deliverable promised to the original sponsor of the project, the National Endowment for the Humanities. In Fall 2025, the Digital PV Panther Project relocated its student-driven preservation efforts to the Division of Social Sciences and opened the Woolfolk Digital Preservation Lab in Room 103 of the George Ruble Woolfolk Building. Named in honor of the longtime chair of the History Department, it’s one of several buildings on campus listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

 

 

WORK COMPLETED BY PVAMU STUDENTS

Counties processed:

63 counties across Texas – 100% student-processed

Boxes handled:

163 archival boxes labeled, filled, sorted, and reorganized

Folders described:

3,219 folders with standardized metadata and series-level classification

Reports organized:

More than 2,100 Extension reports including Annual Reports, Combined Annuals, Monthly Reports, and Annual Narrative Reports

Home Demonstration & 4-H records:

Over 1,100 youth and homemaking records documenting Black women’s leadership and rural child development

ESTIMATED HOURS OF STUDENT LABOR

Activity Hours
Physical processing of 163 boxes ~600 hours
Folder-level description ~1,250 hours
Metadata creation ~900 hours
Quality control & revisions ~350 hours
Digital publishing & formatting ~200 hours

 

TOTAL ESTIMATED STUDENT HOURS:

≈ 3,300 hours

Equivalent to:

2 full-time archivists working for a year, or

10 students working part-time across 4 semesters

The Texas Black Cooperative Extension & Home Demonstration Collection

All 63 Finding Aids – 200 Pages – in Alphabetical Order

NOTES

 

[1] Pete Daniel, Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Daniel, Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); Melissa Walker, All We Knew Was to Farm: Rural Women in the Upcountry South, 1919–1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Katherine Jellison, Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1913–1963 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Rebecca Sharpless, Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Jessamyn Neuhaus, Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Greta de Jong, You Can’t Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Adam Green, Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940–1955 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

[2] Darlene Clark Hine, Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Ula Y. Taylor, The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Stephanie Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers During the Jim Crow Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985).

[3] Thomas J. Ward Jr., Black Physicians in the Jim Crow South (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2003); Noliwe Rooks, Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education (New York: The New Press, 2017); Jarvis R. Givens, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021); Christopher M. Span, From Cotton Field to Schoolhouse: African American Education in Mississippi, 1862–1875 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

[4] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).

[5] Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, ed. William Zinsser (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 183–200.

[6] Verne Harris, Archives and Justice: A South African Perspective (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2007)

[7] Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor, “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives,” Archivaria 81 (2016): 23–43.

[8] Jarrett Drake, “Documenting Dissent in the Contemporary United States: A Theoretical Framework for an Activist Archives,” Archivaria 82 (2016): 23–47.

[9] Randall C. Jimerson, Archives Power: Memory, Accountability, and Social Justice (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2009).

[10] Lauren Klein, An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020); Kim Gallon, “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities,” Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

[11] Terry Cook, “The Archive(s) Is a Foreign Country: Historians, Archivists, and the Changing Archival Landscape,” The American Archivist 74, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2011): 600–632.

[12] Saidiya Hartman’s method of critical fabulation provides an essential historiographical framework for reconstructing the lives of Black children whose presence in the archival record has been fragmented, distorted, or silenced by the racialized logic of state power. In “Venus in Two Acts,” Hartman theorizes critical fabulation as a practice of narrating possibility within and against the gaps of the colonial archive—a way of restoring humanity, agency, and emotional depth to subjects whose experiences were systematically reduced to administrative fragments or juridical shorthand. This framework is especially generative for interpreting youth materials in the CE&HD collection, where the voices, achievements, and everyday lives of rural Black children appear only indirectly through enrollment lists, brief performance summaries, or adult-authored reports. As scholars such as Marisa Fuentes and Jessica Marie Johnson have demonstrated, the absences, silences, and distortions of the archive are themselves products of violent historical structures; therefore, reconstructing marginalized lives requires methodological approaches that refuse to reproduce that violence. When applied to 4-H records, achievement booklets, and scattered county reports, critical fabulation allows the historian to read beyond bureaucratic surfaces and to imagine the worlds of aspiration, learning, fear, pride, and creativity that shaped Black childhood in rural Texas. Rather than treating youth as passive objects of state programs, the method foregrounds their agency and lived experience. In this sense, critical fabulation becomes not an embellishment but an ethical imperative—one that recognizes that restoring complexity to Black children’s histories is part of a larger scholarly project of repairing the harms of archival marginalization; see, Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14; Christen A. Smith, Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Performance in Brazil (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016).

[13] Brenda Gail Gunn, “Archives and Human Rights: Contextualizing Archival Authority,” Archival Science 14, nos. 3–4 (2014): 277–290.

[14] Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019), xvii–xxii.

[15] Davarian L. Baldwin, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities (New York: Bold Type Books, 2021).

[16] Lae’l Hughes-Watkins, “Moving Toward a Reparative Archive: A Roadmap for Black Women’s Collections,” Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies 5 (2018): 1–12.

[17] See Hannah-Rose Murray, Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Monica M. White, Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019); and Catherine Stewart, Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

[18] Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Public Culture 7, no. 1 (1994): 107–46.

[19] Lae’l Hughes-Watkins, “Moving Toward a Reparative Archive: A Roadmap for Black Women’s Collections,” Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies 5 (2018): 1–12.

[20] Michelle Caswell, Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (New York: Routledge, 2021); Tonia Sutherland, “Archival Amnesty: Memory, Erasure, and the ‘Improper’ Archive,” in Critical Archival Studies, ed. Michelle Caswell et al. (Sacramento: Litwin Books, 2017), 87–110; Verne Harris, Archives and Justice: A South African Perspective (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2007).

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Counter-Archive of Survival: A Timeline of the Texas Black Cooperative Extension & Home Demonstration Collection (1923-1963)

Counter-Archive of Survival:

A Timeline of the Texas Black Cooperative Extension & Home Demonstration Collection (1923-1963)

 

By Evelyn Todd & T. DeWayne Moore
Explore the Finding Aids

The Geography of Black Land Loss in Texas

 

From 1910 to the 1990s, African American farmers nationwide lost over 90% of their land, a collapse driven by discriminatory credit systems, tax delinquency seizures, heirs’ property vulnerability, and USDA county committee decision-making. In Texas, counties such as Waller, Washington, Gregg, and McLennan were among those where Black-owned agricultural land declined most sharply.

The Texas Black Cooperative Extension & Home Demonstration Collection functions as counter-archives of survival, documenting Black farmers’ attempts to maintain land against structural pressures. Each archival footprint of the 63 counties in the collection reflects not only Extension activity but also the shifting landscape of rural Black land tenure.

Typed map of African American communities in 1953 Waller County
A hand drawn and typed map of African American communities in 1950s Waller County, Texas [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Waller County, Box 3, Folder 8]
A scan from the 1923 Annual Narrative Report from Lee County [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Waller County, Box 1, Folder 10]
A scan from the 1923 Annual Narrative Report from Lee County [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Waller County, Box 1, Folder 10]

1922-23 — The Paper Trail Begins

Black Extension Work in Lee County, 1922–1923

The report begins with narrative notes describing early administrative steps to organize Black Extension work in Lee County. PVAMU instructor and CES District Agent Henry Estelle met with county commissioners and community leaders who approved the hiring of a Black CES agent. A. J. Mason was appointed the first Black farm demonstration agent for Lee County.

In the early 1920s, Black Texans controlled meaningful acreage in counties like Dallas, Lee, and Harris. However, foreclosure rates rose as discriminatory lending, inflated land values, and exploitative tenancy contracts increased. These early reports reveal what Black agents understood: farm visits and demonstration plots were direct interventions against looming land loss.

1923 — The Paper Trail Begins

 

The formalization of reporting became a tool for protecting Black farmers’ land interests. Demonstrations in budgeting, crop rotation, and soil fertility weren’t just agricultural—they were anti-dispossession strategies. Counties with systematic reports often show slower early rates of land loss, suggesting Extension networks helped stabilize ownership.

The earliest surviving reports in the collection come from Dallas and Harris Counties in 1923. Black County Extension Agents filed formal annual and monthly reports that documented farm visits, demonstration plots, and meetings with farmers and homemakers. These reports show that, even under Jim Crow, Black agents were already integral to state agricultural programs.

The 1923 Annual Narrative Report of L. G. Luper, the Black County Agent for Harris County, demonstates that the Extension Service coordinated community demonstration plots of cotton, Irish potatoes, corn, and sweet potatoes in communities such Addicks, Katy, Brays Bayou, Crosby, Spring, Almeda, and the proceeds were explicitly used to fund school improvements, including “the purchase of school land in their vicinity.” It shows institutional self-determination in a segregated educational system designed to underfund Black schools. This practice connects directly to the tradition that scholars such as Vanessa Siddle Walker and Heather Williams document—Black southerners’ long-standing strategies for building educational infrastructure through church networks, mutual aid, and community labor. In this sense, Luper’s agricultural extension work functioned as an educational reform project, enabling rural Black Texans to subsidize their own public goods when the state refused to do so.

A scan from L.G. Luper's January 1923 Monthly Report of County Extension Agents in Harris County [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Harris County, Box 1, Folder 27]
A scan from L.G. Luper’s January 1923 Monthly Report of County Extension Agents in Harris County [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Harris County, Box 1, Folder 27]
1936 Madison County Monthly Report on Farm Demo
A scan from the April 4. 1936 Monthly Report on Farm Demonstration Committee in Madison County [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Madison County, Box 1, Folder 18]
J.M. Calvert of Guadalupe County, who proudly displays a few of his feeders for the camera
Swine Demonstrator J.M. Calvert, of Guadalupe County, proudly displays a few of his feeders in 1936 [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Guadalupe County, Box 1, Folder 20]
Terraces being constructed on Griffin, Payne's farm of the Sunny Side Community in 1937
Griffin Payne constructed terraces on his farm in Waller County’s Sunny Side Community in 1937 [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Waller County, Box 1, Folder 12]
1936 Madison County Monthly Report
A scan of the 1936 monthly report submitted by Madison County Extension Agent W.C. David [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Madison County, Box 1, Folder 18]
W. Perry, Club Boy Demonstrator, in corn. 1 acre plot produced 60 bushels of Yellow Dent in 1937
McLennan County 4-H Club Demonstrator W. Perry proudly shows his one-acre corn demonstration corn, which produced sixty bushels of Yellow Dent corn in 1937 [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, McLennan County, Box 1, Folder 6]
J. A. Price. standing in his cotton field
The Extension Service helped curb unemployment by helping to purchase the farm of J. A. Price in McLennan County. In this image, Price shows off his cotton field that produced an estimated 1.5 bales per acre [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, McLennan County, Box 1, Folder 6]

1936 — Extension, Depression, and Accelerated Black Land Loss

 

The Great Depression devastated Black land ownership nationwide. In Texas, tax delinquency seizures accelerated in rural counties like McLennan and Waller. Monthly reports from 1936 reveal agents teaching record-keeping, cooperative buying, and farm credit management, practical strategies to keep land from slipping into white ownership.

In 1936, multiple counties—including McLennan, Waller, and Dallas—produced clusters of monthly reports. These Depression-era documents show Black agents helping farmers navigate credit crises, boll weevil infestations, and the new world of federal farm programs. Extension work became a vital bridge between Washington, D.C., and rural Black communities.

1937 — Coordinating Extension Service in High-Loss Counties

 

Gregg County’s surge in Combined Annual Reports occurs as Black farmers faced rising pressure from oil-linked land speculation and discriminatory credit practices. The Extension Service offered technical aid amid an emerging wave of forced sales, helping rural families retain small parcels when possible.

1937 Wood County Annual Narrative Report Cover
Wood County Extension Agent Robert Whittaker write this Annual Narrative Report in 1937 [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Wood County, Box 1, Folder 13]
Sam Deadman, Woodside Club of Harrison County, who received $1236 dollars conservation check in 1937 for practice in 1936.
Harrison County 4-H Club member Sam Deadman received a $1,236 dollar conservation check for plowing under over 200 acres of peas in 1936. He planted 36 acres of vetch in 1937. [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Wood County, Box 1, Folder 1]
1937 Wood County Annual Narrative Report on Farm Outlook in 1938
A scan of the 1937 Wood County Annual Narrative Report describing the farming outlook for 1938 [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Wood County, Box 1, Folder 13]
Four year old orchard demonstration at the home of Alis Washington Cedargrove Community in Newton County.
Alis Washington, of the Cedar Grove community, planted this peach tree orchard in 1933 when the Cooperative Extension Service came to Newton County. This image shows the pruning, whitewash, and pesticide treatment for shot hole boars in 1937 [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Newton County, Box 1, Folder 8]
A pruning demonstration being conducted in Colony Community of Fayette County on the farm of Volnar Derry
Fayette County Extension agents conducting a pruning demonstration in the demonstration orchard of Volnar Derry, of the Colony Community, in 1937 [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Fayette County, Box 1, Folder 3]
Hand drawn map of African American communities in 1940 Waller County
Hand drawn map of African American communities in 1940 Waller County [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Waller County, Box 3, Folder 2]

1938–1939 — 4-H as a Land Retension Strategy

 

As Black land loss intensified in the late 1930s, youth programs offered a way to anchor families to the land. 4-H competitions in poultry, livestock, and canning increased the productive value of farms, strengthening households’ ability to meet taxes and loan obligations. Oral histories often link these youth programs to families’ ability to hold onto acreage for another generation.

1941–1942 — Winning the War at Home

 

WWII created new markets but also allowed local officials to pressure Black farmers into selling land needed for industrial expansion and military facilities. Extension reports from this period show agents helping families boost productivity to avoid foreclosure, even as federal wartime land seizures disproportionately targeted Black rural communities.

Reports from Harris, McLennan, Waller, and Dallas in 1941–1942 show the Extension Service shifting toward wartime priorities: food preservation, victory gardens, canning campaigns, and nutrition education. Black agents and home demonstrators were critical to federal food security efforts, yet their contributions rarely appear in official wartime histories.

Safeguarding the water supply for the children of Elm Mott School in 1941 McLennan County [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, McLennan County, Box 1, Folder 1]
Safeguarding the water supply for the children of Elm Mott School in 1941 McLennan County [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, McLennan County, Box 1, Folder 1]
Will Nunley and his 5 A Cotton Demonstration in the Vandalia Community, Red River County. He harvested 410 lbs. of line per acre upland
Will Nunley and his Cotton Demonstration in the Vandalia Community of Red River County [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Red River County, Box 1, Folder 17]
James Owens', a 4H Club Boy, pig at Hopewell Community in Red River County in 1938.
James Owens and his pig at the Hopewell Community in Red River County [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Red River County, Box 1, Folder 11]
Illustrating Robertson County Victory Leaders, assisting in storing the 1943 potato crop and giving instruction on storing other vegetables and food crops.
Robertson County Victory Community Leaders assisting in storing the potato crop and giving instruction on storing other vegetables and food crops [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Robertson County, Box 1, Folder 12]
Orange Johnson of Hopewell-Swan Community, Smith County, is teaching his family how to grade strawberries in 1942.
Orange Johnson of Hopewell-Swan Community, Smith County, is teaching his family how to grade strawberries [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Smith County, Box 1, Folder 22]
John Mebane, poultry king, is shown with County Agent Edwards with his cockrels and 500 pullets
John Mebane, poultry king, is shown with Tarrant County Extension Agent Edwards with his cockrels and 500 pullets [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Tarrant County, Box 1, Folder 14]

1943–1944 — Home Demonstration & Economic Survival

 

Home Demonstration Agents were crucial for land retention. By improving household efficiency—canning, sewing, food preservation—they reduced cash outlay, enabling families to meet tax deadlines. In counties with high levels of Home Demonstration documentation, Black landholders sometimes show slower dispossession trajectories.

Monthly and narrative reports for 1943–1944 emphasize home management under rationing—sewing, clothing repair, substitute foods, and home sanitation. Black Home Demonstration Agents in counties like Gregg and Waller served as crisis managers, teaching techniques that kept families fed and clothed when store shelves were bare.

1945–1946 — Post-War Transition & Land Loss Acceleration

 

Returning Black veterans attempted to buy land with GI Bill benefits but faced county-level discrimination. Extension reports document increased demand for farm management training because banks routinely denied Black veterans operating loans. These documents show early signs of post-WWII land concentration into white agribusiness.

As World War II ended, reports and plans of work from McLennan, Harris, and Waller Counties highlight rural housing improvements, electrification, health campaigns, and veteran reintegration. Black Extension professionals helped transform wartime skills into long-term community development projects.

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Alma Arnold, of Sweet Home, watches the Guadalupe County demonstration agent examines her recently canned food [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Guadalupe County, Box 1, Folder 2]
Miss Venell Clack, an older youth club member who had been taught crafts by her agent.
Guadalupe County 4-H Club member Venell Clack learned to make billfolds, coin purses, and car key cases from the local Extension agent [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Guadalupe County, Box 1, Folder 2]
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Laila Watson learns how to make a candlewick spread from the Guadalupe Home Demonstration Agent [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Guadalupe County, Box 1, Folder 2]
UA0035_Guadalupe_b1f2_1949AnnualReports_Todd0007
The Guadalupe County Home Demonstration and 4-H club exhibitions being judged by Home Demonstration Agents Elnora Bryant, Alice Kineheon, and Roberta Moore [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Guadalupe County, Box 1, Folder 2]
Winning Ladies of the first Bread Show for the Negro Home Demonstration Clubs in Guadalupe County on Sept. 9th, 1947.
Winners of the first Bread Show for the Home Demonstration Clubs in Guadalupe County [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Guadalupe County, Box 1, Folder 27]
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The Harrison County Home Demonstration Agent and Aldocia Williams discuss the long-term plan for landscaping her yard in the Longridge Community [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Harrison County, Box 2, Folder 25]
Hand drawn map of African American communities in 1947 Washington County
Hand drawn map of African American communities included in the 1947 Plan of Work from Washington County [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Washington County, Box 2, Folder 1]
Hand drawn map of African American communities in 1947 McLennan County
Hand drawn map of African American communities included in the 1947 Annual Narrative Report from McLennan County [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, McLennan County, Box 2, Folder 6]
Hand drawn map of African American communities in 1947 Smith County
Hand drawn map of African American communities in 1947 Smith County [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Smith County, Box 3, Folder 11]
The Better Baking Show sponsored by Bewley Mills, Ft. Worth, Texas for Caldwell County Home Demonstration Council. Forty one women entered - clover leaf rolls, braids, Sweedish Tea Rings and loaves.
Forty-one women entered baked goods into the Caldwell County Home Demonstration Council’s Better Baking Show in 1947. It was sponsored by Bewley Mills, of Ft. Worth, Texas [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Caldwell County, Box 1, Folder 17]

1947 — The Best Documented Year & High Dispossession Rates

 

1947 stands out not just in your archive but also in Texas’s land history. The late 1940s saw one of the sharpest declines in Black-owned farmland statewide. The explosion of reports suggests Extension agents were actively responding to crises in credit, tenancy, and land market volatility.

Every county in this collection—Dallas, Gregg, Harris, McLennan, Waller, and Washington—has multiple reports from 1947. Combined annuals, narrative reports, enrollment lists, and plans of work make 1947 the single best-documented year for Black Extension activities in Texas, capturing the program at peak reach and complexity.

1948–1949 — Black Women’s Clubs & Land-Based Community Wealth

 

Home Demonstration clubs helped women generate income from gardens, sewing, and food production. This supplemental household revenue was critical to keeping land taxes current. Washington County’s strong Home Demonstration footprint correlates with slightly higher Black land retention into the 1950s compared to neighboring counties.

In Washington, Gregg, and Dallas Counties, 1948–1949 saw a surge in Home Demonstration enrollment lists, yearbooks, and auditor’s reports. These materials document Black women’s clubs organizing around nutrition, clothing, home improvement, and civic work—evidence of a powerful, gendered infrastructure of rural leadership.

Designed by Victoria County 4-H and Home Demonstration Clubs, this float carried examples of the work products in the county
Designed by Victoria County 4-H and Home Demonstration Clubs, this float carried examples of their work products [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Victoria County, Box 1, Folder 6]
Tarrant County 1948 Northern District Kiddie Cars, Hobby Horses and Merry-Go-Rounds provided entertainment for the kiddies at the Annual Harvest Carnival in the jones Center Community; 5x7
Kiddie Cars, Hobby Horses and Merry-Go-Rounds provided entertainment for children at the 1948 Annual Harvest Carnival in the Jones Center Community of Tarrant County [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Tarrant County, Box 2, Folder 1]
Hand drawn map of African American communities in 1952 Grimes County
Hand drawn map of African American communities in 1950s Grimes County [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Grimes County, Box 3, Folder 10]

1950 — Modern Tools, Old Inequalities

 

Around 1950, new plans of work and narrative reports describe electric appliances, pressure cookers, water systems, and soil conservation practices. Black farmers and homemakers adopted modern technologies through Extension demonstrations, even as segregation and discriminatory credit practices limited their access to land and capital.

While these counties show strong Extension programming, Black farmers often lacked access to USDA purchase loans for tractors and irrigation. This created a technological divide that later contributed to forced land sales and consolidation. Extension records show the desire for modernization but also the barriers imposed by discriminatory county committees.

 

1951–1952 — Bureaucratization and the Shifting Land Economy

 

These years mark the shift from smallholder farming to a more industrialized agricultural economy. Black farmers lacking capital to scale often lost acreage during this transition. Extension reports from Harris County reveal efforts to help small farmers remain competitive through training, record-keeping, and cooperative marketing.

Harris, McLennan, Waller, Washington, and Dallas all show dense clusters of reports in 1951–1952. Combined annuals and narrative reports reveal a mature, bureaucratically sophisticated Black Extension system with clear goals, evaluation forms, and elaborate statistics on meetings, farm families served, and youth reached.

Hand drawn and typed map of African American communities in 1952 Hopkins County
Hand drawn and typed map of African American communities in 1952 Hopkins County [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Hopkins County, Box 4, Folder 13]
Tom Lacy showing R.P. Gooden his cattle guard he built
Tom Lacy showing R.P. Gooden the cattle guard he built in 1953 Rusk County [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Rusk County, Box 4, Folder22]

1953 — A Snapshot Before Accelerated Decline

 

1953 is heavily documented across all counties. But this is also the last stable moment before Black land ownership in Texas began collapsing at unprecedented rates. The archive preserves the final robust generation of Black-operated farms before the 1960s–1970s collapse linked to mechanization, heirs’ property, and USDA discrimination.

Almost every county holds multiple 1953 documents: annual reports, plans of work, 4-H yearbooks, and enrollment lists. Taken together, these records form a composite snapshot of the Black Cooperative Extension Service at mid-century—its staffing, programs, and the everyday concerns

1957–1958 — Urbanization & Pressures on Rural Black Land

ty

Urban expansion—especially in Dallas and Houston—drove forced sales and rezoning that displaced rural Black communities. Youth programs grew as rural-to-urban migration increased. Meanwhile, land retention became harder as farm consolidation intensified.

Dallas, Gregg, and other counties generated numerous reports in 1957–1958. Yearbooks and plans of work show more emphasis on improved livestock breeds, mechanization, and expanded youth programs, including urban 4-H clubs linked to migration into cities like Dallas and Houston.

Hand drawn map of African American communities in 1957 Dallas County
Hand drawn map of African American communities in 1957 Dallas County [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Dallas County, Box 3, Folder11]
1963 Waller County Monthly Report
A scan from the January 1963 Waller County Monthly Report [PVAMU Archives, Texas Black CE&HD Collection, Waller County, Box 2, Folder11]

1960–1963 — From Segregated to Integrated Extension

 

By the early 1960s, the segregated Black Extension Service was ending. But this period also saw the most rapid decline in Black-owned land. Reports show agents traveling farther to reach fewer remaining Black farms—a quiet indicator of widespread dispossession.

These documents are some of the last archival traces of communities whose land bases would soon be eroded by systemic pressures.

From Archival Fragments to Digital Futures

 

The reports and photographs from each of the counties in this timeline represent only part of a larger, statewide network of 63 counties documented from 1923-1963 in the Texas Black Cooperative Extension & Home Demonstration Collection. By processing and creating finding aids for these materials through the Digital PV Panther Project, PVAMU students are transforming bureaucratic reports into tools for land-loss research, family history, and a new history of Black rural Texas.

For more information on the Digital PV Panther Project and the processing of the collection, please click HERE.

Explore the Finding Aids
Kasedi and Noah processing the collection
Team Leader Noah Jackson and student Kasedi Eason processing the collection in 2023
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$50,000 Grant from the Texas State Library & Archives Commission

DPPP logo

$50,000 Grant from the Texas State Library & Archives Commission

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In January 2024, the Digital PV Panther Project (DPPP) worked with the John B. Coleman Library and the Waller County Historical Commission (WCHC) to submit a $50,000 TexTreasures grant to the Texas State Library & Archives Commission (TSLAC).

This project is made possible by a grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services to the State Library and Archives Commission (Grant# TXT-25009 – 2024 – Preventing the Erasure of Black History in Texas)

In 2021, DPPP received a $25,000 TexTreasures award from TSLAC to hire two archival consultants and create processing plans for over 30 manuscript collections in the archives. The 2024 TexTreasures grant will fund:

  1. the hiring of 4 students majoring in Social Sciences for one year
  2. the purchase of a 32 Terabyte server for digital storage
  3. the purchase of archival supplies to process and digitize several manuscript collections in the archives.

The 2024 TexTreasures grant can be extended for three years and $150,000 total.

It’s the 6th external grant awarded to the DPPP since 2021.

DPPP logo

Grant Abstract

To build upon the success of a previous TexTreasures grant, the Digital PV Panther Project (DPPP) will collaborate with the John B. Coleman Library and Waller County Historical Commission to hire four undergraduates at PVAMU to finish processing, digitizing, and creating finding aids for the Cooperative Extension & Home Demonstration Collection. The team will submit the finding aids to TARO and publish digital finding aids on our websites. The team will also digitize the remaining manuscript collections of former PVAMU professors and administrators, which were processed for a previous 2021-22 TexTreasures grant. Moreover, the team will procure archival supplies, process, and create finding aids for the PV Educational Conference Collection, the TAMU System Board of Regents Collection, and the Woolfolk Collection—all of which have processing plans created during previous NEH grant projects.

The 2021 TexTreasures grant proved transformational at PVAMU. It allowed the DPPP to process, rehouse, and create findings aids for more than 30 collections of former professors and administrators at PVAMU. Until that time, the PVAMU archives had no processed collections or finding aids.

Today, the archives has processed and created finding aids for almost 100 collections as well as submitted the original 30+ collections from the TexTreasures grant to Texas Archival Resources Online (TARO). DPPP digitized 18 of the collections and created interactive finding aids with hyperlinks on the project website, which allow researchers to examine the manuscript collections from the comfort of their homes.

For example, the John Henley Williams Collection documents his activities as a Cooperative Extension agent in Texas from 1932 to 1947. While it contains mostly correspondence with other agents, the collection also features certificates, annual reports, and meeting minutes from the U.S.  War and Food Administration.

Since 2021, DPPP has worked tirelessly to make archival collections available to researchers at PVAMU. 

Processed Collections

90+

Digitized Collections

18

Digitized Photographs

10,000+

George Ruble Woolfolk
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Dr. George Ruble Woolfolk, “Prairie View: A Success Story” – 1981 Homecoming Convocation

The Golden

Anniversary

Homecoming

Convocation

 

October 29th, 1981

Dr. George Ruble Woolfolk – “Prairie View: A Success Story”

George Ruble Woolfolk
George Ruble Woolfolk circa 1950s

 

Analog tape digitized by Michael Lee at Rare Records in Winchester, TN in Fall 2022

Digital audio transferred from the Google Drive to Microsoft Teams by Lindsay Boknight on February 10, 2023

Edited by Jaylynn Brantley on November 10, 2023  

Edited and Curated by T. DeWayne Moore on November 12, 2023

 

LINK to the 1981 Convocation Program

Alice Clemons, Miss Prairie View 1981-1982, delivers the introduction of Dr. Woolfolk.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. It is my pleasure to introduce our speaker for the occasion. I know the speaker was born, raised, and educated in Louisville, Kentucky. He earned the Bachelor of Arts degree in History from Louisville Municipal College and the University of Louisville, the Master of Arts in History from Ohio State University, and the Doctor of Philosophy in History from the University of Wisconsin.

This learned historian is a member of the Executive Council of the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History, a member of the Board of Editors of The Journal of Negro History, a member of the Executive Council of the Texas State Historical Association, the technical advisor to the Waller County Historical Commission and vice chairman of the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission of Texas. I could go on and on with his many professional involvements, but [I] would like to mention a few of his publications.

Included among his numerous publications are “Cotton, Capitalism, and Slave Labor in Texas” in the Southwestern Social Science Quarterly, June 1956; “Taxes and Slavery in the Antebellum South,” in the Journal of Southern History, May 1960; “Social Literacy, the Social Studies, and Negro Youth,” in The Texas Standard, June 1962; “And The Word Became Flesh,” in The Journal of Negro History, Spring 1966; a book entitled The Free Negro in Texas 1836-1890, published in 1976, and perhaps his most special treatise, published in 1962. Prairie View: A Study in Public Conscience, 1878-1946.

Our illustrious speaker, who is married to the former Douglas G. Perry, has one son, George Jr. At this time, I take great pride in presenting to you the chairman of the History program at Prairie View and an outstanding member of the Prairie View family since 1943, our speaker Dr. George Ruble Woolfolk.

[Pause for applause]
At 3 minutes and 3 seconds, Dr. Woolfolk begins his address:

I’d like to speak briefly this morning on the general subject, “Prairie View: A Success Story,” in keeping with the theme of the golden anniversary for this year. At the homecoming convocation, it is fitting that we review the accomplishments of this institution.

It is [fitting that we] take pride in its development, in what it has done, and how our students have contributed to the great development of the state, nation, and their particular localities. I said in some writing a few years ago, in thinking about the institution:

One hundred years is a long span in the life of a man or an institution. What do the years mean? For a man or an institution; if they are filled with the honest sweat of service to humanity–with the patient following of that higher law of unflinching fidelity to the dictates of a calling–the years are a benediction.

Prairie View is an institution. A public institution. But an institution is an empty thing without the beating hearts and the yearning souls of mortal men. And down the 100 years of Prairie View’s existence, men have lived and dreamed here until every blade of grass and every rock, in that wise primordial way in which the primitive earth knows and cares, has joined the choir invisible to bless their memory. For every man whose foot has touched his hallowed soil has found his spirit and has broadened and deepened it until what started out as an ambitionless meandering stream has become a purposeful river upon whose tide, now turbulent, now tranquil, floats the destiny of countless hopes and dreams.

The spirit of an institution is a compound of many things—a strange and often quixotic amalgam of unrelated, sometimes contradictory, elements. Founded, symbolically, upon the ruins of the slave plantation, this university was authorized in the spirit of fair play of the Constitutional Convention of 1876, where wisdom would not allow vengeance to triumph over justice. The men of the parent school at College Station, growing ever wiser with the years, have translated the sense of justice into an ever-broadening channel. The humble student—from every nook and cranny in the land—has left the echo of his laughter upon the wind. His hopes within the lurking shadows of our halls and byways.

The giants [and] the world shakers have stood on our hill to mingle their search for truth with the fledging hopes for life. And men of dedication have worked here–worked to bring a new heaven and a new earth often with only faith and their hands–often without the spiritual and material compensation that their sacrifices merited–but always with a sense of mission–with a sense that somehow, someway, time would reward their efforts–would give to those to whom they had given their minds the victory of a new world–of an enlightened society.

And it is within the context of that quotation, which I wrote several years ago, that we would like to cast the evaluation of this Golden Anniversary Convocation. Because in it is to be seen the true thrust of the meaning of an institution, which is evaluated in spiritual terms, terms of the minds and the hearts of those who dream of it, who bring to it their vision and their awareness.

We have been very fortunate here in the dreams of the leadership of the men who have headed this institution. There have not been many. Some have been of long duration. But all of them had within their heart and their mind some concept of what our people might become, and we pay tribute to them today. Because those who will be returning over the next few days are a living memory of what they dreamed. They bear in their bodies the mark of those dreams.

Though L.W. Minor was not here long, he was the first of the dreamers. He opened the school in the plantation house. And here on Kirby’s acres, they planted the seed. And the two Anderson brothers. One [E.H. Anderson] died soon. L.C. [Anderson] dreamed of an institution that would lead…the leaders, the Black leaders of this state in a consortium of educational men, who would bring to bear their strength in the uplift of their people.  He created the state teachers, the Black State Teachers Association. And he gave a long arm to the institution. He would leave here and go on to Austin, where they named Anderson High School in Austin for him. And his name is Laurine. Our Anderson Hall is named for him.

And then came our Edward Lavoisier Blackshear. The immortal Blackshear. Dreaming the Tuskegee dream. Are the people capable, strong, able because they could come to grips with economic realities of poverty and lack of opportunity? Blackshear wrought well and was well-loved.

And then [came] John Granville Osborne, who created the four-year college here. His tenure was short. But for the first time, this institution operated under his management as a college institution. And I told his family that were here for the last convocation in the spring, how fortunate they were to join in the continuing recognition here on this path of their relatives. It made such a signal contribution to the ongoing of this institution. His was a great dream. He dreamed of medical schools here. He was a medical man. He brought the hospital here. He brought the nursing program here. He brought the four-year college here. His was a dream of excellence, and his was the dream of total service.

And then he was followed by that tall, gaunt, determined man, William Willett Rutherford Banks, who claimed that the entire state of Texas was his campus. And whose motto, “Prairie View serves Texas,” became the byword. Who served…who sought to serve every need. Was it medical? Was it educational Was it spiritual? Whatever. Come to Prairie View. We will be the focal point of your program. Was it research? The first fledging research program merging as a dimension of the black educational ethos began with the Banks administration.

And then, of course, he was followed by another dreamer, Edward Bertram Evans, who carried the institution into the international realm…who himself personified what it meant to serve on the world scene. Recognized by both the federal government and the United Nations as an authority competent to operate in the international arena and to advise both in Africa and the [Middle East], he became a symbol of excellence in a period when Prairie View became the symbol of world significance.

 

We have never retreated from that position.

His successor, Alvin I. Thomas, has not retreated from that position. He dreams larger dreams than have ever been dreamed before on this campus—a dream of first class…of joining the mainstream of American life. He dreams beyond all dreams, a dream that has no limits of race, of color, of creed. This president has dared the lightning by dreaming a dream that says Black men have no limit, have no boundary. Black men have no barrier. We shall turn this institution into a place and into a situation where the world…and the concerns of the world, and the occupations of the world will be its concerns and its infancy.

And so all of the men who have headed the school have been pioneers. They have been a step ahead of the awareness of their people. They have dreamed for their people. Dreamed great dreams. Great thoughts. And those who come back, they come back to dreamland, and that truly is the function of an institution of higher learning. It is the place of dreams. Because the scriptures have truly said, “Without a vision, the people perish.” And, of course, Prairie View is a success story because the university continues to expand its interest in research. I dare say, from these fledgling days of the Banks administration, the administration of Dr. Thomas has emphasized strongly experimentation, research…both sponsored research by government and by foundation as a part of the normal program and the normal dimension of the institution of higher learning. Where we used to receive pittance, now we receive millions of dollars for research.

Because without the money to stimulate the mind of researchers, without the inquiring mind, an institution is sterile. Without the inquiring mind, an institution has nothing to put back into the stream of knowledge to justify its existence. Without the inquiring mind that can produce both theoretical and functional knowledge, an institution does not live.

And then we continue to contribute to society. We now know that we must stay on the frontier of opportunity for our people. If we will, if we ought to escape that peculiar position of becoming the underclass, where there are no job opportunities for our people at all, we must continue to pioneer in the economic arena. Opening more doors, expanding minority opportunity into new areas of opportunity. And we go forward now in the areas of engineering and the other new technological fields that are opening for Black people, and we must continue to go forward in these areas if we ought to, ought to keep abreast all the time, and to keep young black men and women alive and alert. If we do not pledge ourselves to continue our contribution of graduates both to our traditional areas and to new areas, we will die. The question of what we will do—our functional significant—will be settled.

So there is something fitting, therefore, in the fact that after 100 years or more, we are the university is returning to the full realization of its founding as an agricultural and mechanical emphasis. We are now operating in instructional areas, which the system to which we attach [had] better understand, admissions of the two institutions now coincide more and more with the better concern for creativity and knowledge than we had before. We have come from a small fledgling institution to a modern university with concerns which are worldwide.

We enter our 2nd century in this Golden Anniversary with a deep concern for our nation. And we hope those who come back to us for this convocation do the same. And we are also aware that we have a debt to our people, but our success is imperative. We must be a success because we serve Black youth and Black youth will only understand the success of Black men. We must be a success here, because our success is necessary. In the concept of success—as all youth know what success is—we must furnish the role model, because Black youth can understand the success of Black men. And to that success, we commend you. We are proud of the heritage of the success at this institution.

On this golden convocation, on this golden convocation anniversary, we present to those who come back to us a pride, a continuing pride in achievement, a heritage which they can come back and bask in the glory of, confident that their institution has a continuity, a purpose, and a function that will never die.

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Photo by Michael Lee, 2022
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A Tale of Two Professors at Prairie View

A Tale of Two Professors at Prairie View

By Lindsay Boknight

Finding Aids (Coming Soon)
(Photo: The Myrtle Garrett Papers, The Special Collections & Archives Department, PVAMU)

Myrtle E. Garrett receiving an award for her outstanding service in the 1960s.

(Photo: The Myrtle Garrett Papers, The Special Collections & Archives Department, PVAMU)

 

In my first few weeks working on the Digital PV Panther Project, I had the opportunity to process the manuscript collections of several former professors in the PVAMU Archives. The Texas State Library & Archives Commission (TSLAC) awarded Ms. Earles and Dr. Moore almost $20,000 for their TexTreasures grant proposal, and it gave me the opportunity to learn more about the amazing careers of Myrtle E. Garrett and Oscar John Thomas. After working countless hours to build the reputation of PVAMU, the two former professors donated their research, lesson plans, and other artifacts to the university in the 1970s, but the archives never had a chance to fully process the collections, create finding aids, and make their papers available to researchers until the fall of 2022. This blog post examines the lives and legacies of two former professors and encourages researchers to visit the archives to examine the collections for themselves!

Myrtle Elwyn Garrett

Myrtle Elwyn Garrett, the fifth of thirteen children of Jack and Cora Teel Garrett, was born April 9, 1912 in Longview, Gregg County, Texas.

She received her early education at Rollins Elementary School and was valedictorian of her graduating class at Longview Colored High School. She earned the bachelor and master of science degrees in home economics at Prairie View A&M University and pursued further studies at George Washington and Texas Tech Universities.

She taught at Rollins Elementary School for approximately 13 years, She then joined the Extension Service as county home demonstration agent in Falls County with headquarters in Marlin, where she served for three years. She was then promoted to district agent with headquarters at Prairie View A&M University where she supervised the work of home demonstration agents in 21 counties. She later transferred to Texas A&M University, where she served as program specialist until her retirement. She provided training for working with low-income homemakers and served as the head the 4-H Club for all of Texas. She was most proud of the Leadership Laboratory, which promoted leadership among youth. 

(Photo: The Myrtle Garrett Papers, The Special Collections & Archives Department, PVAMU)

Myrtle Garrett created lesson plans for education and training programs in the Cooperative Extension & Home Demonstration Service.

(Photo: The Myrtle Garrett Papers, The Special Collections & Archives Department, PVAMU)
Myrtle Garrett demonstrating the use of washing machine

Myrtle Garrett working as part of the Home Demonstration Service

(Photo: The Myrtle Garrett Papers, The Special Collections & Archives Department, PVAMU)

Garrett belonged to many community and professional organizations, including Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, and she received numerous awards, the most prestigious being the Distinguished Service Award. She gave to many charities and organizations, the most notable of which was an endowed scholarship to needy students attending Prairie View A&M in the amount of $50,000 in memory of her parents and aunt (Miss Hattie Garrett, second mother), who gave their support to further her education.

She attended St. Mark C.M.E. Church, and she donated pews in memory of her parents and aunt. Her services for First United Methodist, College Station, included chairman of the administrate board and fundraising.

Miss Garrett was also a world traveler. She visited Africa, Hawaii, Canada, South America, the Caribbean and six countries in Europe. 

The majority of her work focused on the negative impact of racial segregation, and she published a host of research on the subject during her career. In 1974, she was gifted an honorary “Mug Book” from Texas A & M University, which recognized her tireless efforts and accomplishments.

In December 1995, she passed away, leaving 13 nieces and nephews (her children), Dr. David L. Garrett Jr., Clemogene Wilson, Carolyn Williams, Jacquelyn L. Tims, Hattie Marie Newhouse, Garrett O. Williams Sr., Rosalind D. Tims, the Rev. Reginald Garrett, Janice E. Garrett, Cedric T. Williams Sr., Frederic S. Tims, Sharon R. Garrett and Tracey Adkins, and 20 great-nieces and nephews.

Myrtle Garrett and the 4H Club #2

In this photo, Myrtle Garret (far right) poses with the 4-H Club.

(Photo: The Myrtle Garrett Papers, The Special Collections & Archives Department, PVAMU)

Oscar John Thomas

Born July 10, 1896, the second son and the fourth child of nine children born to the late Isaac and Emma Thomas of Trawick, Nacogdoches County, Texas, He spent his childhood days in the rural community in which he was born. His early training was received in the neighborhood school which was located one mile from his residence. After completing the ninth grade he passed a state examination and at the age of 17, taught a one teacher school one year.

Realizing that his education had only begun he entered Prairie View State College the following year and enrolled in the sophomore normal class. He graduated from the normal department in the spring of 1920 and completed his college work in 1927, receiving the Bachelor of Science Degree in Agriculture. His first years of experience were in one teacher schools of Nacogdoches and Shelby Counties, where he taught alternate years while attending Prairie View State Normal. In August 1920, he began work at Texas College in Tyler, Texas as teacher of General Agriculture and the Farm Manager.

Oscar John Thomas circa 1940s

Oscar John Thomas circa 1940s

OJ Thomas High School

While at Texas College, he married Bessie Aleda Hardeway of Ponta, Texas. After working at Texas College for three years, he accepted the position of Principal and Teacher of Vocational Agriculture in Cameron, Texas, where he served in these two capacities and taught high school mathematics for eight years. 

 

 

After completing his eighth year at Cameron he was relieved of his work in Vocational Agriculture by another teacher. He served as principal and teacher of mathematics seven additional years. During his fourteenth year, the school was renamed in his honor as Oscar John Thomas High School.

Oscar John Thomas High School

Oscar John Thomas High School

On July 13, 1938, Thomas accepted the position of State Itinerant Teacher Trainer in Vocational Agriculture at Prairie View State College. In addition to his regular duties as Teacher Trainer, he worked as the state adviser to the Texas Association of New Farmers of America. His professional activities included service as the President of the Teachers State Association, Regional Vice President of the American Teachers Association, and First Vice President of the American Teachers Association. He also served as President of the Prairie View Alumni Association for a period of six years and as Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Texas Interscholastic League of Colored Schools.

In 1944, while studying at Prairie View State College, he conducted a study of successful practices and procedures used in the best cooperative teaching program, which evolved into his master’s thesis in Agricultural Education. His research was later published as a monograph titled Suggested Principles and Practices for Cooperative Teaching with Special Reference to Vocational Agriculture.

World War I Registration Card

World War I Registration Card

World War I Registration Card

Like many other young scholars who attended PVAMU, Oscar John Thomas registered to fight in the First World War. One of the most popular collections in the archives, BLACKS IN THE MILITARY, focuses on the contributions of African-Americans to U.S. military history.

 

 

World War II Registration Card

At the age of 47, Oscar John Thomas registered to fight in the Second World War as well. The Double V Campaign, which sought victory against fascism abroad and victory against Jim Crow at home, was popular among African Americans who served in the 1940s.

World War II Registration Card

World War II Registration Card

Oscar John Thomas passed away in 1977 at age 81.

Oscar John Thomas passed away in 1977 at age 81.

He was buried in Prairie View Memorial Gardens Cemetery on the campus of PVAMU.

He was buried in Prairie View Memorial Gardens Cemetery on the campus of PVAMU.

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Redesigning the Past

In July, my work on the Digital PV Panther Project has been fun and light. After the initial field research trips to Bellville and Brenham–as well as the delicious, chicken strip lunches at the Dairy Queen–we have been in the office getting busy! My fellow archival assistants and I have been processing the manuscript collections of former PVAMU professors and administrators who made amazing strides for the betterment and exposure of the university. Our efforts in this regard have helped archival consultants Miguell Caesar and Sheena Wilson–both from the Gregory School in Houston–complete their TexTreasures grant, which is funded through the Texas State Library & Archives Commission (TSLAC).

Since the early twentieth century, Black people have dedicated their lives to making sure that PVAMU produces productive panthers. Whether it’s productivity in historical research, setting up tours for the historically famous marching band and a cappella choir, the PV Singers, fighting for a better quality of life in the violent context of Jim Crow through the Cooperative Extension Service, or operating local bookstores for students, Black people have in some way, shape, or form helped to BUILD A LEGACY!

(Photo: Kalayah Jammer 2022)

In the archives–located on the fifth floor of John B. Coleman Library–we are making a lot of headway as far as re-foldering documents and re-labeling folders. We have also been examining the documents and relabeling them in the index to better explain what we have in the finding aids. Carrie B. Coss, who started teaching at PVAMU in the 1940s, donated her papers that span her career of over 25 years. TALK ABOUT DEDICATION!

(Photo: Kalayah Jammer 2022)

Have you ever heard of an A Cappella Choir Tour? PVAMU had one and it was instructed by none other than Dr. Edison Anderson, who added a lot of extra excitement and adventure to the A Cappella Choir scene. As former director of Vocal Choral Music and director of the renowned Prairie View A Cappella Concert Choir during the 1960s, Dr. Anderson was very enthusiastic about working with young people and groups of all sizes as well as with those who have been inspired toward a professional goal. He was invited to become a professor of music at his Alma Mater, and he had much personal pride and interest in counseling music students, many of whom gained prominence in the music world of today.

Painting of Wilhelmina R. Delco, located 4th floor John B. Coleman Library.
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New Beginnings

The Historical Marker for Wyatt Chapel Community Cemetery (Photo: Lindsay Boknight, 2022)

Within my first week as an archival assistant working on the Digital PV Panther Project, I learned a great deal about the rich history of Prairie View A&M  University (PVAMU). My first task was to sort out tape recordings from different events that took place on and around campus. Many of the events took place around the early 1960s to the late 1980s. Events included, summer and spring convocations, dance recitals, ministry conventions, homecoming parades, sports banquets, and athletic games just to name a few. Each tape recording contained the speeches of Former PVAMU President Dr. A.I. Thomas, PVAMU professors, and special guests and speakers, such as Jesse Jackson and Rosa Parks. If you’re wondering, yes the tapes are still in good condition and are playable.

My journey into the archival collections at PVAMU continued at Wyatt Chapel Community Cemetery on the back side of campus. For those who may not know, PVAMU was built on top of Jared Ellison Kirby’s former enslaved labor camp, Alta Vista, and he set aside a small plot of land for a burial site for the enslaved. The cemetery behind dormitories “Phase 3 & 6.” The burial ground contains six headstones of the deceased, while the rest of the cemetery holds the unmarked graves of our ancestors. In the upcoming fall 2022 semester, PVAMU Assistant Professor of History Dr. DeWayne Moore and Special Collections Librarian Lisa Stafford will hire an archaeological firm to conduct a ground penetrating radar study of the cemetery. You can read more about the study HERE. The ground penetrating radar will scan the burial ground to determine the location of grave shafts. Using this technology, we will finally be able to determine the burial locations of our ancestors and other internments in the cemetery.

Family portraits and chair of Wilhelmina R. Delco
(Photo: Lindsay Boknight, 2022)

After exploring Wyatt Chapel Community Cemetery, I visited the fourth floor of the library and learned more about the history of Wilhelmina R. Delco. Born in Chicago, Illinois on July 1, 1929, Ms. Delco was an active student. She served as student body president and member of the National Honor Society. She obtained her Bachelors of Art degree from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. She majored in Sociology and minored in Economics and Business Administration.
Moreover, Ms. Delco served in the Texas House of Representatives. She began her career in 1974, when she was elected the first black, female, African American official from Travis County. She was sworn into office January 1975 and she began serving her very first term during the 64th legislative session.

Painting of Wilhelmina R. Delco, located 4th floor John B. Coleman Library (Photo: Lindsay Boknight, 2022)

She worked with the community and state on numerous social, educational, and political issues. Her most notable work was done in the area of Education. In 1979, Ms. Delco was appointed Chair of the House Higher Education Committee, on which she served until her next appointment as Speaker Pro Tempore in 1991. In January 1995, she retired from her tenth term and twentieth year in the Texas House of Representatives.

Ms. Delco received many awards, honors, and recognitions throughout her career–two of them being here at PVAMU. The Wilhelmina R. Delco building is home to the Whitlowe R. Green College of Education. Along with an unprocessed manuscript collection of papers, which sits in the PVAMU Archives, the John B. Coleman Library curated an exhibit about her life and career on the 4th floor. It contains an enclosed display of personal pictures, letters, documents, and other media that Ms. Delco used during her time as a representative. These items are up for display, open to staff, students, and the public.

Desk and gavel of Wilhelmina Delco (Photo: Lindsay Boknight, 2022)

Between the work of Wilhelmina Delco and the acknowledgment of the Wyatt Chapel Community Cemetery, I have became deeply involved in historic preservation at my HBCU. There is a lot of history that has yet to be uncovered. I cannot wait to see what the rest of the year has in store for the Digital PV Panther Project. And remember, PVAMU is the place to be!

Sincerely,

Lindsay Boknight

Men in the Belgian Congo canning tropical fruit
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“They Can Tropical Fruits”

In my first weeks as an archival assistant for the Digital PV Panther Project, I helped process the manuscript collections of former professors and administrators involved in building the Prairie View community. On my first day, Dr. Moore gave me a tour of Room 109 in the library, the Archival Annex, which contains collections that date back to the 1920s, including the media collections of PVAMU staff photographer Tom Goodwin, longtime History Department chair George Ruble Woolfolk, and the Cooperative Extension & Home Demonstration Collection. The Archives Annex also contains an unprocessed collection of blueprints for every single building on campus. As an architecture major, I’m sure this collection might provide the source material for a future project of my own.

As we continued the tour, we entered the last of three elevators in the library–one of two that go up to the 5th floor, which many students, including myself, did not know existed. The library’s fifth floor contains the Special Collections & Archives Department at PVAMU.

Zynitra Durham at her high school graduation
(Photo: Donzel Jefferson, 2020)

As we exited the elevator onto the fifth floor, Dr. Moore introduced me to a fellow archival assistant, Malachi McMahon, and Ms. Phyllis Earles, the University Archivist and Co-Principal Investigator for the Digital PV Panther Project. Dr. Moore also introduced me to Ms. Lisa Stafford, the Special Collections Librarian working in the archives. I also had the opportunity to discuss the processing projects with Miguell Caesar, the manager & head archivist at the Gregory School in Houston, Texas. He works alongside Ms. Sheena Wilson, the processing archivist at the Gregory School.

After the tour, I sat in one of the wooden chairs in the archives reading room beside Malachi, and I asked him several questions about onboarding, such as how to fill out my timesheet in Workday. He also explained more about the work and his experience working in the archives thus far.

Zynitra Durham, Malachi McMahon, and Kalayah Jammer
in Room 111 in the Coleman Library
(Photo: T. DeWayne Moore, 2022)

After the brief introductions, I got to dive right into archival processing, specifically rewriting the titles of old folders in manuscript collections onto new, acid-free folders. In the first weeks, I worked on the collections of Calvin Hoffman Waller, who worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. His research focused on scientific farming techniques, particularly more efficient ways to plant and conserve food. He conducted one research project in the Belgian Congo. In an article titled, “Live-at-Home Principles Stressed at Mission in Belgian Congo,” he explained how the residents in McKinney, Texas, and Kabinda in the Sakura District of the Belgian Congo found ways to prolong the preservation of food to make it last a lifetime. During the years of the study, Presbyterians found ways to cook and seal all types of fruit, meats, and vegetables to save them for a later time.

“The natives in the picture aid in canning fruits, vegetables, and meats at a Presbyterian Mission in the Belgian Congo. Fruits shown in the picture are pineapples, lemon, mangoes, and cocoanuts.”

The picture shows a wide selection of tropical fruits, including mangoes, papayas, lemons, coconuts, oranges, and grapefruit, which were canned for later consumption. Some of the fruit in the Belgian Congo was extraordinary, such as the pineapples that weighed roughly 12 to 13 pounds and grew larger than the average human head. “During the orange and grapefruit seasons, we bottle a good supply of the juice for use out of season,” Waller stated in one interview, “We can bottle tomato juice.”1 During the growing season, natives hunt wild hogs and several types of antelopes, and they can put the different meats together to enhance the flavor.

The collection of Calvin H. Waller was not the only one I had the chance to help the process. I also worked on the manuscript collections of PVAMU History professor Florida Yeldell and Home Demonstration agent Patricia Brown. The task of rehousing and rewriting titles on acid-free folders was tedious and laborious. Yet, it helped the archivists move forward with the larger processing effort for 31 manuscript collections. In the coming weeks, we will assist in the creation of finding aids for the collections, and I look forward to digitizing and adding the collections to the Digital Commons.

Sincerely,

Zynitra Durham

End Notes

  1. C. E. Dowell, “They Can Tropical Fruits,” Texas Extension Service Farm News, 17:1 (Fall 1946): 4. This periodical can also be found in the Calvin H. Waller Papers.
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The First Few Collections

Over the course of my first few weeks of being an assistant in the archives and making my way through the various collections, I have learned a lot more about the history of my HBCU. My first job on campus in 2020 was in the Cooperative Agricultural Research Center (CARC), but it was not until last week while going through the manuscript collection of a female extension agent who worked at PVAMU and TAMU named Myrtle Garrett that I learned the history of the CARC. It began as the agriculture department and was segregated by gender, Home Economics for women and Farming/Agriculture for men. In the 1960s, Myrtle Garrett spent her time as a Home Demonstration Agent as well as serving as the Program Specialist for the Limited Income program of the Texas Agricultural Extension Service at A&M. She helped over four thousand families in Texas during her time as the Program Specialist.

DeZhane Johnson in the archives
(Photo: T. DeWayne Moore, 2022)

Garrett spent her entire career being of service to the people around her while simultaneously spearheading a program that helped thousands more all across Texas. By the end of her archival collection, I learned how Myrtle had become an extremely well-respected and beloved figure in her community. Myrtle worked over 30 years as a federal employee for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. For 20 years, she was a charter member of the alumnae chapter of Delta Sigma Theta at PVAMU.

Her collection features a farewell binder filled with adoring letters from the women of all races whom she had taught or worked alongside throughout her career. Her collection not only inspired me to be a more involved member of my Prairie View community but to also learn more about the people that were crucial to the making of the Prairie View I have come to know and love.

Sincerely,

DeZhane Johnson

DeZhane Johnson (L), Malachi McMahon (C), and Miguell Caesar (R)
in the archives (Photo: T. DeWayne Moore, 2022)

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