Black Scholarship Deserves to Be Read. The Griot Collection Is Open.
About Us
Our story
The Woolfolk Digital Preservation Lab (WDPL) at Prairie View A&M University is pleased to announce the opening of The Griot Collection. We invite students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community researchers to explore this important record of Black intellectual life—and put it to work.
Founded in 1983 by the Southern Conference on African American Studies, Inc. (SCAASI), The Griot publishes peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary scholarship. Its preservation offers an opportunity to bring generations of scholarly work into new classrooms, research projects, and public conversations.
A journal’s influence depends on people being able to find and read it. Articles can introduce unfamiliar histories, challenge inherited assumptions, and direct readers toward evidence they might otherwise overlook. Making this scholarship more accessible helps connect the questions earlier scholars asked with the questions students and researchers are asking today.
For WDPL, opening The Griot Collection advances a central purpose of our work: preserving African American history while creating opportunities for people to study, interpret, and share it.
This opening also represents the labor of PVAMU students. Ma’Nya Velasquez and Zha’Mauri Howard have contributed to digitizing and preparing historic issues for access. Howard also processed the collection and prepared its finding aid. Their work demonstrates the responsibility students can carry as stewards of Black intellectual history—and the lasting contributions they can make to the university’s research resources.
We encourage you to begin with a question.
Students: Find an article that connects with something you are studying. Examine its argument, follow its citations, and consider how it changes your understanding of the subject. A single footnote might become the starting point for your next paper, digital exhibition, or research project.
Faculty and instructors: Bring The Griot into your classroom. Assign an article, ask students to compare interpretations across time, or use an author’s evidence to demonstrate how scholarly arguments take shape. Invite students to think about who produces knowledge, where it circulates, and how access affects what gets read and remembered.
Alumni, staff, and community researchers: Explore the collection with your own interests and experiences in mind. Share the collection link with someone who might find it useful. If an article raises a question, recalls a connection, or contributes to your work, let us know.
Welcome to the Southern Conference on African American Studies!
Start at The Griot Collection page to explore the resources available. When using an article in your work, credit its author and provide the journal’s volume, issue, date, and page numbers.
The opening is an invitation. Read an article. Discuss it with your students. Follow a citation. Bring a new question to an old issue.
Help us give this scholarship a wider readership and a continuing place in the intellectual life of Prairie View A&M University and beyond.
Research is Respect.
