DPAAP Begins Digging

Five student interns have begun the work of uncovering and describing the contents of The Afro-American Newspapers archives. The 116-year-old Baltimore-based newspaper company is the longest running family-owned African American newspaper in the nation.

Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Diaspora Pathways
Archival Access Project (DPAAP) is a three-year collaboration between JHU’s Center for Africana Studies, the Sheridan Libraries’ Center for
Educational Resources, and the Afro.  DPAAP seeks to explore and describe the contents of the Afro archives to make their contents publically accessible and searchable via the Web.

The DPAAP employs five graduate and undergraduate students from Johns Hopkins, Morgan State University, and Goucher College.  These students will have unparalleled access to 116 years of African American and African Diaspora history recorded and created by the Afro newspaper.

Each day at the Afro, the DPAAP interns are confronted with an abundance of photographs, newspaper clippings, and manuscript materials.  In their first week in the archives, interns found items ranging from folders containing several hundred photographs of Little Rock civil rights activist Daisy Bates, to thousands of items chronicling the everyday lives of Black Baltimoreans through announcements of births, deaths, weddings, and graduations, to a photograph of Sudanese political leader, El Ferik Ibrahim Abboud walking with President John F. Kennedy. 

The historic, transformative, and under-appreciated role of the Afro, is not only a community treasure, but a national treasure, and it is about to become accessible to scholars, teachers, and interested citizens.

For more information on the DPAAP project visit
http://www.library.jhu.edu/about/news/releases/pressrel07/afro-american.html

For more information about DPAAP and the Center for Africana Studies see
http://krieger.jhu.edu/africana/initiatives/dpp/index.html

Information about the Afro-American Newspapers can be found at
http://www.afro.com