From Mammy to Big Mama: Caring for Collections on Our Own Terms

Where Items of Enduring Historical Value Are Made

Community-based archives are created in response to mis or under representation in predominately white institutions. Such archives, as one author writes, allow for the perpetual representation and empowerment of identities that intersect through the reclamation and ownership over one’s own narrative in the broader historical record. ¹ To do this, archives must start outside of normative, Eurocentric paradigms and situate their repositories where those historically marginalized groups are likely to reside. However, as the field of archival and memory work is predominately white, ² and the acquisition and maintenance of knowledge in the United Sates has been shaped and “grounded in whiteness,” marginalized communities must craft their own lexicons and archival repositories from scratch, rather than from within already existing institutions. ³ This leaves archives serving people of color (POC) turning toward those from similar backgrounds for assistance in the following four areas designated as the primary duties of archivists, as stated by the Society of American Archivists: (1) Assessment, (2) Collection and Organization, (3) Preservation, and (4) Access. ⁴ This article looks at one rare group of intersectional memory workers, Black women, to describe how their historical status as nexus points in their communities led them to create critically important repositories, as it relates to Hallie Q. Brown Community Archives (HQBCA).

As a result of the Great Migration, many city centers saw a growth of densely populated, majority-Black communities. These historically marginalized communities were often confined to areas of the city marked as undesirable by their white counterparts, leaving the newly arrived Black residents with limited access to opportunities for social and economic growth. During World War I, Black life in northern cities throughout the United States of America had grown to such a large population which created a Black genesis of racial self-consciousness and desire for spaces of political, recreational, and business activity. ⁵ These multi-service centers serving the poor migrants, called settlement houses, began as a movement in 1884 with the opening of Toynbee Hall in London, England. In 1889, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr would establish the first settlement house in the United States, known as Hull House, in Chicago, Illinois. ⁶ These American settlement houses, as Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn writes, “served as everything from employment bureau to day-care center, public bath to night school, gymnasium to union hall, and soup kitchen to salon.” ⁷

However, while these settlement houses were morally just in providing social and cultural services, there was a disparity in settlement houses serving poor, white immigrants and settlement houses serving poor, migrant Blacks. A great deal of this disparity and limited success can be attributed to structural racism in America, which led to a lack of funding opportunities for settlement houses serving Black communities. But also, some of this disparity can be attributed to white volunteers and staff members operating in positions of decision-making authority over Black people within these newly founded Black settlement houses in the early twentieth century. While white staff and volunteers were committed to community service and aid, their responsiveness to those they served was limited by the notion that Black people were incapable of possessing or achieving the same social and cultural attributes and success as their white counterparts. ⁸ To wit, as Mia Bay writes “White reformers had little to no confidence in the ability of Black people to plead their own case and were unwilling to place themselves in any kind of proximity to people of color.” ⁹ Settlement houses which did not share these racially charged, superiority complexes were often run by Black staff and volunteers living in the same area as the communities they served, such as the Phyllis Wheatley House in Minneapolis or the Hallie Q. Brown Community House in Saint Paul, Minnesota. ¹⁰ Culturally and politically responsive and aware, these settlement houses were typically led under the direction of Black women.

Hallie Q. Brown Community House (later renamed Hallie Q. Brown Community Center) was founded in 1929 by members of the local Union Hall Association after they identified a need for a social service agency which primarily served those living in Saint Paul, Minnesota. This settlement house was named after the educator, elocutionist, women’s suffrage leader, and author, Hallie Quinn Brown, who in the words of Herbert Howell, “contributed as much and perhaps more than any other Negro woman in America to the cultural and educational development of Negro manhood and woman hood.” ¹¹ The settlement house resided in the heart of a predominately Black neighborhood known as Rondo, which also contained many home and business-owners and provided an encouraging space for young Black learners to grow and educate themselves in a supportive environment. By 1939, Hallie Q. Brown Community House offered activities, programs, and social events such as nursery school and daycare; various sports and teen dances; photography classes; and meeting spaces for local clubs and organizations. ¹² In an excerpt from an article in the Saint Paul Recorder about the Annual Hallie Q. Brown dinner meeting, the author writes “The Hallie Q. Brown House has become a necessity in the life of the hundreds of boys, girls, men and women who use the facilities offered at the institution.” ¹³ The ability to serve hundreds and later, thousands, of people in a predominately Black neighborhood and beyond was done under the leadership of the settlement house’s first director, a Black woman, Miss I. Myrtle Carden.

Before discussing the first directors of Hallie Q. Brown Community House, it is prudent to contextualize the importance of Black women leaders in relation to their predecessors. In contrast to Black women pre-1920, Jacqueline Jones writes that young single working women post-1920, “experienced a brief interlude between the end of their domestic apprenticeship at home and the beginning of their responsibilities as wives and mothers.” ¹⁴ While Black women experienced a noticeable improvement concerning career prospects and opportunities for self-fulfillment, the majority of job opportunities open to them for advancement did coincide with what was regarded as women’s work—such as childcare, seamstresses, and hairdressers. Yet, this liberating freedom to work was often born out of necessity—as Black men were not paid as much as their white counterparts and so relied on the additional income of their spouses to pay the costs and bills associated with American life and child rearing. ¹⁵ In this way, Black women in the United States are, and have always been, responsible for both the traditionally feminine and masculine labors—dating back to the period of American slavery.

Nonetheless, these opportunities allowed Black women to become entrepreneurs and influential leaders during a time when Black culture was starting to be recognized and interpolated into white mainstream consciousness. ¹⁶ Black women leaders during the 1920s and 30s, formed national networks of communication between activists working at the grassroots level to those working on the national stage. Black women such as Ida Wells-Barnett, Hallie Quinn Brown, and Nellie G. Francis, were all working for the educational, societal, and political improvement of their communities, while also being tasked to continue the often-unrecognized work of keeping and maintaining a home. ¹⁷ In Saint Paul, Minnesota, one Black woman, I. Myrtle Carden, was also doing her part—and then some—to educate and impower the local Black community.

In October of 1934, five years into Miss I. Myrtle Carden’s twenty-year tenure at Hallie Q. Brown Community House, a newspaper article written for the Saint Paul Recorder described Miss Carden as “[. . .] the ring master. She holds up the hoop while others jump through.” ¹⁸ In her position as a community leader, Miss Carden rallied groups of Black and white people around causes relating to social change and interracial cooperation. In addition to her regular administrative duties, Miss Carden would often speak on various topics concerning the community she served at various locations throughout the cities of Saint Paul and Minneapolis. On one occasion, she presented a speech to the public on behalf of the Women’s Auxiliary of St. Thomas Episcopal Church wherein she discussed the “Women of Our Community” and the importance of service work throughout the Twin Cities. ¹⁹

So admired was Miss Carden for her exemplary work that, upon attempting to resign from her position as director in 1949, due to illness, the board members of Hallie Q. Brown Community House rejected her resignation letter. Instead, they gave her six months of fully paid leave. Upon her death in August of 1950, the Saint Paul Recorder reported that she “worked herself to death.” ²⁰ This description of self-sacrificing, unselfish, and devout servitude invokes the familiar image of the Black mammy, a historical stereotype of Black womanhood characterized by traits such as nurturing, loving, and asexual behavior. ²¹ The journalist’s push to describe the act of overworking oneself to the point of exhaustion as inspiring ignores the realities of Miss Carden’s personality and echoes the plight of POC memory workers today. POC memory workers are so few and so invisible to the majority of audiences that they often find themselves competing with each other and masking their authentic selves, so that they can succeed in an environment that rewards and privileges whiteness. ²²

What relevance does all of this have to archives and collecting institutions as a whole? First, it identifies and contextualizes one of the most popular spaces in which Black people gathered at the turn of the twentieth century. Second, it identifies the vital role of Black women as leaders and as nexus points for support and belonging within predominately Black communities during a time rife with racial segregation and sexism. Third, it identifies how Black women are frequently asked to spin straw into gold at great expense to themselves for some greater good which they may or may not live to see or be widely remembered for. But most importantly, this introduction to Hallie Q. Brown Community House identifies the how and why a community-based archive was able to grow and begin to thrive from inside an organization that never officially posited itself to be a collecting institution. As it is because of the existence of an organizational photography club which operated out of the Hallie Q. Brown Community House which allowed for records of enduring historical value, such as photographs, to be created. These photographs, taken by the HQB Camera Club, documented everyday Black life from the perspective of fellow community members. These fragments of the past would become invaluable after the 1960s when the construction of an interstate highway through the Black neighborhoods in the Twin Cities had been completed, displacing over one million people, destroying homes, and causing multiple Black-owned businesses and local services to close.

It is because of Black female leaders, such as Miss I. Myrtle Carden and, later, Janabelle Taylor, that Hallie Q. Brown Community House kept records which would later become foundational collections of the Hallie Q. Brown Community Archives. The residents of Rondo selected Hallie Q. Brown Community House as one of the primary public stewards of their precious memories and materials because of the inherited trust and commitment fostered under the leadership of Miss Carden and Janabelle Taylor over ninety-four years. These critical reference materials chronicle Black life in Saint Paul before, during, and after the destruction of one of America’s many thriving Black neighborhoods.

Labors, Limits, and Language

The mission of the Hallie Q. Brown Community Archives (HQBCA) is to collect and preserve items of enduring historical value primarily relating to the Rondo Neighborhood in Saint Paul, Minnesota. HQBCA started as an all-volunteer project in 2016. The goal of these volunteers, who were a mix of undergraduate students, history professors, and local community members, was to create a repository for all the tangible documents, digital materials, and oral histories stored in various closets and backrooms within Hallie Q. Brown Community Center (formerly Hallie Q. Brown Community House). While valiant in their efforts to create an archival space and index the materials held within the Center, there was a clear need for a professional archivist to be brought on for proper preservation, cataloging, program development, and database management of collections materials. As I like to remind the students that I lecture, just because you can drive—doesn’t mean you know how to build a road. The people who build the roads we use get to determine what is worthy material to build roads out of, what types of vehicles should be allowed on said roads, what is the language on corresponding road signs, and which direction those roads lead. In archives, an effective archivist creates thousands upon thousands of networks (roads) to corresponding datapoints (places of interest). It is up to the archivist and the community they serve to decide which roads are worthy of being built and ensuring these roads are accessible. This is a powerful position—and when our road builders and archivists are not reflective of the community where they are operating in, it can lead to the destruction of neighborhoods and distrust in collective attempts to create a more holistic historical record. Through the tedious work and partnership of Dr. Catherine R. Squires, professor emerita at the University of Minnesota and Dawn Selles, the Center’s former Development Director, these two Black women were able to secure funding which would be used to hire the first professional, Black archivist for the Center in August of 2021.

One of HQBCA’s most notable collections at present are the Murphy-Taylor Family Papers. The collection contains hundreds of photographs and personal papers relating to the Murphy-Taylor family; materials dating from approx. 1860 to 2000. The most relevant member of the Murphy-Taylor family in regard to HQBCA is H. Janabelle Murphy-Taylor, born in December of 1920 to Ida Mae and James Edgar Murphy. ²³ A Saint Paul native, Janabelle, was no stranger to Hallie Q. Brown Community House, as her father, James Edgar, had served as a member of the same Union Hall Association that organized the founding of the organization. Like her mother, Ida Mae, Janabelle was very active in both church and social club gatherings. Janabelle’s journey from her youth into her young adulthood is starkly contrasted against popular images of Black women and girls who came before her—depicted as enslaved, piccaninny, and mammie-maids in popular films, like Gone with the Wind (1939). She was raised in the Rondo neighborhood during its socio-economic peak, and her many accomplishments are evidence of how her upbringing prepared her for a lifetime of success. Janabelle was an adventurer, driving across the nation to visit beaches on the eastern shore (see Figure 1); she was helper, working as an aid in various programs at Hallie Q. Brown Community House as well as Phyllis Wheatley House during her teenage years; she was a community activist, frequently engaging in professional relations with members of local and state government; and she was a leader and an educator who served as the Program Director for the Center for over twenty years. ²⁴

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Figure 1.

Murphy-Taylor family papers. Jane, Barbara, and Kathleen, circa 1945. Hallie Q. Brown Community Archives. St. Paul, MN.

Eight years after her death in August of 2009—fifty-nine years to the day of Miss Carden’s passing—Janabelle’s sons agreed to donate the assorted papers of not just Janabelle, but those of Ida Mae and James Edgar Murphy to HQBCA. This action demonstrated a consciousness, on the donor’s side, for the importance of creating a historical through line from the past into the future. It also demonstrated a desire for memories to be retained and preserved by the communities that made such materials possible, as opposed to donating to traditional, predominately white, collecting institutions or venues.

A large part of my job as an archivist is to categorize people, places, things, and cultures for the discovery, research, and contextualization of others. Yet, despite knowing how categorization is critical in human understanding of the world around us, I frequently find myself wanting to shrug away from the categories that others assign to me. While at work, I often listen to 90s R&B and other music by Black artists while cataloging. I find it relaxing and fortifying—a way to reinforce that the space that I am in is centered around Black people and values. One such song that I adore is Q.U.E.E.N, by Janelle Monae, featuring Erykah Badu. In the song, Monae exclaims, “categorize me, I defy every label.” ²⁵

To state that a person could exist without neatly fitting into at least one defined subject or tag might sound impossible to those whose job it is to assign said labels. However, if we contextualize Monae’s quote within the broader themes of the entire album—how Black lives survive in a maelstrom of white oppression and performative minstrelsy—the nebulous idea of existing outside of all pre-defined, Eurocentric-labels is realized. ²⁶ To “defy every label” requires the active rejection of external entities—a commendable stance to take in a field such as librarianship or archival science, which have prided themselves on remaining neutral to maintain an air of resolute authority. ²⁷ The language used to describe Black people and their cultures needs to be defiant—it needs to be political in showing that a stance has been taken in support of Black survival and prosperity. It is through this type of active, politically aware description that one builds trust and equity in the field of memory work and among historically marginalized communities.

One of the collections in the HQBCA repository, the Henry M. Smith Photographic Slides Collection, contains 35 mm slide transparencies depicting people and places throughout South Africa in 1969. An excerpt from the introduction to the collection, which all must read before viewing the collection, reads as follows:

When viewing this collection, it is important to remember that these images were taken through the lens of someone who did not live in South Africa, who was not oppressed by their pro-segregationist laws, and was not a photojournalist actively seeking justice for the oppressed people of South Africa. These are the slides of a group of people seeking to have a fun, memorable vacation. ²⁸

Without the above contextualization of images within the collection, it would be all too easy to reduce the visuals to one-dimensional interpretations of charming vistas or to fetishize cultures that operate so far removed from American norms and values. Some will argue that the above statement is political and therefore antagonistic for viewers and researchers. However, avoiding metadata and catalog descriptions in collections where race and racism is inextricably linked to the materials held therein will limit the ability of researchers to discover works relevant to the topic, while also encouraging the bias in vocabularies centering whiteness. ²⁹ Frequently, the ones who can afford to remain neutral on issues of historical misrepresentation or narrative absence are those who remain personally unaffected by historical subversion of marginalized groups. ³⁰

It can be intimidating to assign vocabularies and write descriptions to reflect the multi-faceted histories of marginalized people and places to which one has little or no relation. While academia can provide a solid start for peer-reviewed, verifiable fact, it is also good practice to consult and compensate the voices and words of those denied the traditional education or public platform for diffusion of thought and knowledge but are as one writes “nonetheless deserving for their intellectual achievements.” ³¹ Cataloging is an iterative process and revision should be treated as an opportunity for celebration instead of shame or ignorance.

I myself do not have a degree in library information science. I have an undergraduate degree in Museum Studies and several years of experience working as an archivist. There are those who would say that the lack of a certain set of letters behind my name means that I cannot call myself a professional archivist as I am likely to not possess the same academic lexicon and professional rigor expected of those with a Master of library and information science degree.

Much like how HQBCA’s on-site repository were not originally designed for collecting activities, I did not expect to become a founding member and the head of an archive with my undergraduate degree alone, yet here I am. The reception from community visitors and researchers when arriving in person to browse HQBCA’s collections has been positive. This, I believe, is due to the openness and transparency of my archival work and my readiness to meet this predominately-Black community where they are in terms of a shared background, expectations, and communication styles. Over time—through multiple revisions and learning opportunities—all of these factors contribute to navigable networks of finding aids and online collections with descriptions that reflect the values and priorities of the people of Rondo, thus expanding an ever-growing, multi-faceted historical record and re-establishing a local historical through line from the past into the present.

The Tucker Family Papers, an HQBCA collection which largely features the personal papers of Anita Franzetta Bracy Tucker (Brooks), PhD, features a collection description created through a collaborative effort between myself and Dr. Tucker’s daughter, Pamela Tucker-Coaxum. In that description, I wanted to highlight the importance of religious faith and literary arts in Dr. Tucker’s life, to remind the reader of the person behind the materials they are about to view. To wit, the collection description of the Tucker Family Papers ends with the epilogue included in her dissertation, a poem which reads:

I need not search

For identity

I AM.

I need not struggle

To survive,

I AM HERE.

I need not worry

About tomorrow,

I AM BECOMING (Tucker 1977). ³²

Conclusion

The use of the suffix “-mama” within Black and Brown communities is often regarded as an affectionate diminutive or term of endearment. It is not innately sexual, unless married with suggestive undertones, but is almost always meant to convey a preference or deference towards the recipient. One nickname that my mother called me in my youth was “Kayla-mama,” while she called her mother (my nana) “mama,” and everyone in our family called her mother (my great-grandmother), “Big Mama.” Deborah “Debbie” Montgomery, pictured as an infant above, is an Afro-Latina woman who was the first woman to serve as an officer for the St. Paul Police Department in Minnesota, also came from a family where her grandmother was known as “Big Mother” (see Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Debbie Montgomery papers. The First and Fourth Generations: Big Mother and Deborah. 1946. Hallie Q. Brown Community Archives. St. Paul, MN.

As opposed to the mammy stereotype, wherein Black women were seen as dimwitted, asexual beings expected to care for the progeny of their oppressors, these Black communities put their trust and respect in their multifaceted matriarchs. These older generations of Black women, these “mamas” represent a level of love, wisdom, and devotion balanced against tiring labors, measured leadership, and advocation for their family. ³³ The Black journalists, Black nursery school workers, Black socialites, and Black directors operating at the spout of historical record creation made it possible for me to receive and preserve memories of enduring historical value further down the river of information for others who look like me. By their will they were able to guide burgeoning Black neighborhoods in northern cities to be thriving communities wherein people wanted to document and share their good fortune and memories. Rather than attempting to overcome an inherited bias against predominately white institutions and continue to forge fundamentally inequitable agreements regarding possession of their items of enduring historical value, the people of Rondo started to look inward, amongst themselves. The good faith that the Black women of Rondo instilled among their communities forged an inherited trust between the Rondo that was, the Rondo that is, and Hallie Q. Brown Community Archives.