How Archives Tell the Truth America Tries to Forget

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Some Exhibits to Come – One Hundred Years of Jim Crow

Bibliography – One Hundred Years Of Jim Crow

Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

Freedom’s Heroes During Jim Crow: Flossie Bailey and the Deeters

Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

An Iconic Lynching in the North

Claxton Dekle – Prosperous Farmer, Husband & Father of Two

Ancient manuscripts about mathematics and astronomy from Timbuktu, Mali

Some Exhibits to Come – African Peoples Before Captivity

Shackles for Adults & Children from the Henrietta Marie

Some Exhibits to Come – The Middle Passage

What I Saw Aboard a Slave Ship in 1829

Life After Hate: A Former White Power Leader Redeems Himself

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February 4, 2026

Shanna Ward, Word in Black

As federal power expands and history is contested, one archivist says that Black records reveal patterns America refuses to confront.

At a moment when public memory and historical truth are being contested, archives aren’t simply about the past — they’re tools for understanding the present.

I am an archivist by instinct, long before I ever claimed the title. I collect what was never meant to survive: old deeds, wills with Black names misspelled, faded church minutes, letters written carefully because paper itself was a risk. I document not because I love the past, but because I know what happens when records disappear. Silence is never neutral. It always benefits power.

That is why my recent book, “The Bequest of John T. Ward,” matters right now.

When moments like this arise, people ask why we keep digging into history. Why look backward when everything feels urgent in the present? My answer is simple: because what we are seeing is not new. It is familiar. And without documentation, familiarity becomes inevitability.

Long before emancipation, freedmen gathered and studied Revolutionary War records to learn how liberty had been fought for and how it might be claimed again. Knowledge was strategy. Archives were survival tools.

Learn what Ward discovered in those archives.

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