Archiving Student Activism Means More than You Think

Lae’l Hughes-Watkins was working as a university archivist at Kent State University—reviewing records from the infamous shooting of unarmed students at an on-campus Vietnam War protest in 1970—when she couldn’t shake a simple question: where were all the Black students?

Hughes-Watkins knew that hundreds of Black students had been enrolled at the school at the time. Yet, the iconic, Pulitzer Prize–winning photography documenting the aftermath of the shooting does not depict a Black student population. After some digging, she found that the tragedy itself, which occurred amid an antiwar movement with predominately white voices, had effectively eclipsed meaningful contributions of Kent State’s Black students. At the time, groups of Black students at Kent State had also been advocating for some of the most culturally significant campus changes of the antiwar era (think: greater inclusivity, additional cultural programming, and more diverse faculty).

“It really wasn’t captured in our records. I felt like there needed to be this type of repair, this type of reparations to reclaim and acquire those narratives that had been missing in our records,” Hughes-Watkins says.

But if a central aim of justice-oriented archivists is to dig through history, repair narratives, and fill in gaps, then a central challenge is that “digging” is never as simple as it sounds—especially when missing information belongs to communities that have been wronged or even excluded by the very institutions trying to create or expand the archive.

Hughes-Watkins worked on a reparative archives process exploring the service role of Black sororities and fraternities at Kent State. As part of the project, she recalled working with a community member: “I did have a certain assumption that ‘I’m a woman of color; she’ll trust me.’” When Hughes-Watkins was initially seen by the community not as an ally or friend—but instead as an extension of the university—the importance of slow, empathetic relationship-building began to sink in. “I called [the community member] a couple times a month and visited her house. I was invited to church service and Sunday school. I even met her children.”

Collections, central as they seemed, were becoming secondary. “I really did start to care about [the community member]. And I felt that even if I didn’t get the collection, it would go a long way if she had a great relationship with me and if I learned there were other materials in the community that might be of interest."

A big surprise, then, for a reparative archivist can be the sense of responsibility accrued along the way. Hughes-Watkins says you’ve got to be “comfortable and confident in your skin to do this job. They don’t talk about that in library school . . . but you got to be vulnerable. Because it’s not just paper. It’s their lives. So, you have to prove you’re going to be a good steward of the things they’re leaving behind.” In other words, building a relationship is just the start; for reparation to earnestly take shape, the insights gained from that relationship must be integrated into the way institutions talk about their identity and history.

Hughes-Watkins brings this approach to her work to document a present-day movement that is no less complicated than the periods she explored at Kent State.

Indeed, when 2020 brought with it a pandemic, economic hardships, and a reckoning with police brutality, activism in university settings reached an intensity that is arguably unprecedented. Alongside local communities, students spoke out, organized, and protested—pushing not just for change within their institutions, but also for broader action to address everything from state-sanctioned violence against people of color to judicial and health care systems fraught with racial inequities.

It was within this ever-charged, ever-changing new normal that Hughes-Watkins founded Project STAND (Student Activism Now Documented) to serve as an activism-focused, centralized hub for academic archives. Today, with Mellon funding, Project STAND is partnering with the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library—along with University of Maryland Libraries, 80 Project STAND Consortium members, and several Historically Black Colleges and Universities—to advance the community archiving of social justice initiatives among former and current college and university students of color.

Building on Project STAND's already-created Archiving Student Activism Toolkit, initial goals of the Mellon-funded work include establishing residencies during which cohorts of archivists create modules on how to use, and teach with, primary resources on student activism. There are also plans to create a podcast and oral history project that centers the voices of organizers, archivists, and historians who document student organizing and to share more on reparative archiving principles.

Hughes-Watkins says the work is fueled by a respect for students. “I dare not say it’s a tougher time than what our forefathers and foremothers have had to deal with, but students are dealing with this divisiveness—it is on another level that I just haven’t witnessed in my lifetime,” she reflects.

And while a key outcome is a deeper knowledge pool for researchers, community activists, and community archivists, the students engaged in documentation are seeing the fruits of the process, too.

“I never thought about Project STAND as being this place where people just want to come to just to have conversation and feel supported,” Hughes-Watkins says. “To know people are seeing us as a beacon in that way, it makes you feel good and say, ‘we have to continue this work because it is making a difference.’”