Welcome to Working History, a production of the Southern Labor Studies Association. Become a member online at www.southernlaborstudies.org. I'm series host Beth English and today I'm speaking with Tracy Drummond, archivist for the Southern Labor Archives at Georgia State University in Atlanta, where she acquires materials appropriate for inclusion in the archives, makes collections available for research, and provides outreach to university, scholarly, and labor communities. Tracy Drummond, welcome to Working History.
Hey, good morning. Let's get started with a little bit of an introduction to the Southern Labor Archives. Can you first of all tell us about the genesis of the archives in its mission? Yeah, actually.
This is a little story that's sort of near and dear to my heart. The archives was founded on the Georgia State University and by professor named Marlle Reed, who was actually very active in labor studies around the late 1960s. He had gone to a Labor History Conference and met, I believe, Professor George Green from UT Arlington, where they had already established a labor archives, I think, in 67. They were talking about that.
So Dr. Reed came back and he was like, oh, well, I think we need one here at Georgia State since there's so much activity around labor studies right now. He actually reached out to the local labor community to start it. And they, within their community, were looking for a way to honor Joseph Jacobs.
And Joseph Jacobs was a longtime labor organizer for textile workers. He was active during the uprising of 34, but he also had become a labor lawyer and had his practice here in the Atlanta area. And local labor folks were looking for a way to honor him. So when they were approached by Dr.
Reed, the idea became very clear for everyone that they would start having this sort of labor awards banquet. In the first one, honored Joe Jacobs. But the proceeds from it were to be set aside to help establish the archives. And so, and Dr.
Reed was also working with the folks at the library. It's called University Library Now, but at the time it was the Pull-In Library. And so he was working with the library here at Georgia State to establish room for it and funding for it and a budget line and all of that kind of stuff. So all the paperwork was signed in 1969.
And the first archivist started in 1971, David Gracie was the first archivist here. And as a side, if I may, David Gracie, before I knew that he had worked here was actually my professor and my mentor and my advisor and my graduate program at the University of Texas. And so when I came to this job and I kind of put everything together, it was all that much more meaningful for me, of course, because someone that I greatly admire and respect had started the archives here. So that, and we didn't even have University archives at the time.
So the very first collecting area here at Georgia State was the Southern Labor Archives. Great. So as a whole, how do you see the collections in the archives as helping to tell the history of the South? One of the things that I really love about this collection, because I have a very working class background, is that I'm able to tell the story of working workers.
And I think when people think of archives, typically generally they think this politician or this president or this general or this, you know, that there are people who sort of have these larger, much more public lives than rank and vote workers. And so I'm glad that there is a way to maintain that history and tell that history and share that history. Right. Right.
So I'm sorry. No, I was just going to say, when we think about telling the history of the South, you're telling a history of sort of the more inclusive history of the South because of the Sarcives. Right. Exactly.
And so, I think that the history of Southern labor in general is so difficult to see in the South and difficult to tell. It's certainly sort of preserving that part of the story to the people who organized who wanted better lives, better wages, things like that. And I think it's hard to tell that story in the South. So not only is it not told, but when you try to, you get pushed back from people.
So it's definitely preserving that part of the South's history. Right. Right. And I think as well, it seems that the sort of history of Southern labor in a lot of ways is often seen as one that either in the negative or as sort of in a defeatist kind of light that labor in the South always lost.
And it seems that some of your collections really try to rethink that and retell that story in a way. Yeah. When I teach classes to the undergrad's, coming for the history of the three thousand class, and I'm like, so do we have unions in the South? And they're all like, no, of course not.
And then I get the point out that then things that they see every day, every time they walk into a choreography store, every time they see a Georgia Power Truck or an AT&T truck or people just keep it quiet. And I think that we have that legacy, of course, when the uprising of 34 that people just don't talk about unions in the South in general because they are so much fear and stigma around it. And then when I tell people like, every time you're on a Marta bus, the Falcons are sports teams here. They've got a contract.
You know what I mean? Sure. They really start seeing it differently, thinking about it a different way. And they're really surprised to hear, you know, any Kroger you go into no matter how small the town in the state of Georgia is organized with the United Kingdom commercial workers.
So it's like things that reflect their everyday lives. And I think that really surprises a lot of folks. Right. Right.
So let's talk more about the specific collections that are in the archives and maybe veered toward the digital collections since those things would be the most accessible, right? You don't actually have to travel to the archives to see those. So could you talk first of all about what the range of content is in terms of your digital collections? What's covered in them?
You know, what, maybe what time frame, you know, they span in those sorts of things. Okay. Well, the digital collections actually go across all the collections here at Special Collections and Archives. So in addition to the Southern Labor Archives, we do have University collection.
We have popular music and culture that has a lot of really fantastic broadcasting collections. And when I say popular music, it's more like that great, you know, songwriter style from like the 40s on Johnny Mercer is sort of one of the cornerstone collections for popular music and culture, but it also has broadcasting. There's even like a fantastic comic book collection as part of that now. We have the Archives Sir Research on Women and Gender, which was in a couple of other women's collections, started with the idea to sort of document the attempt to pass the ERA in the state of Georgia, but it's really grown to include a lot of different activist women organizations and individuals and to include the LGBT community.
We have a social change collection because we've got a lot of social strength between labor and the women and gender stuff. We've got a lot of LGBT collections. So we started a social change collection that is small and it's only a few years old to sort of capture collections that maybe don't easily sit into either, you know, women or labor. And we also have a great Georgia government documentation project that was sort of started by Cliff Cune and added to you by different people who had written about government in the state.
It's not a collection that grows, but it is a collection that we service here. And then we have a lot of really fantastic photograph collections, commercial photographers that worked in mid-century in Atlanta area, but then also the Atlanta General Constitution photographs more. You will see all of those and more covered in our digital collections. I'm not going to bring that up because I think people would go in and this isn't labor and that's why because it covers everything in the department.
And when we start looking at items to put in there, you know, I think it's always about access, but it's always about what's going to have the biggest impact and be the biggest use. And then when we look at a really big project like in 2010, we applied for granted digitized the PAC code records that we have here. And in 2011 was the 30th, about a math, 30th anniversary of the strike, 81 to 2011. So we sort of thought like, let's apply for this great now.
This was a very important strike in the history of the US. And so we put that on the uprising of 34, which had so many access issues because of all the video. You know, we looked at that on there to make it more accessible. And it was both an access issue, but also a preservation issue because with all the media, certain the video time has not been kind to it.
So we were glad to put that up. And then more recently the Eastern Airlines collection and Eastern is a little different than most of the stuff I have here really directly relates to the labor movement and unions. But with the Eastern stuff, we have stuff, of course, from the Airline Pilots Association, the machinists and the transportation workers within like Frank Orman, who was president and CEO for a long time. We had this correspondence from this time at Eastern.
We also got the collections of two PR people, one at the Miami office and one at the Atlanta office, which, you know, have like press releases and photographs and information about destinations. And, you know, so just, you know, really this wide overview of day to day operations and the work of the airline. And then we were able to reach out to a woman who worked with, oh, forgive me, I can't think of the ad agency now, a new or bad agency to do all these really great early 70s commercial scheduling or some well sport Eastern Airlines. And they're as handy and drunk as you can imagine, they're still fantastic.
And so they're all for different destinations. And so we were actually able to bring together content from all these varied collections and put them into one collection that really tells a lot of different, you know, so it's not we're not just focusing on the Eastern strike and shut down the entire history of the airline and their advertising and their employees, you know, white collar and blue collar to just really tell their story. And it's very rewarding. We have an exhibit coming up soon about Eastern to like a physical exhibit.
And so, and I feel like it's something that will be a great research used to folks. And so when we are thinking about digital collections, we think what's going to have the most impact, what's going to maybe like with a present 34 with hard to access. So my approach is always sort of founded in those two things. And then we sometimes like with Paco, enter for definitely require grant funding to get to get the because they're such a project.
And not everything has grant funding. Some of them are smaller. We digitize their stats and Kennedy stuff. A lot of folks know who's at Kennedy is.
If you could just remind us for those who don't. Okay, so Kennedy was this fantastic civil rights human rights, just machine and author. He's probably best known for infiltrating the Klan in the 1940s. One thing that led to was him having the charter for the Klan revoked in the state of Georgia in the 1940s, he invoked on after infiltrating them.
But the other part of that story is that he was also telling their sort of secrets, like their secret handshakes and information about their meetings to the folks who were writing the Superman radio program where there's a book that came out maybe 10 or so years ago now that had that information in there. And then there was a big retraction in and economics was the book and about that particular story. But there's also a joint history episode about specifically about that. And I believe that it's been picked up for a movie treatment at this point.
But he did so much more than that. I mean, he was involved with the works of the administration of Florida. He ran as a progressive candidate in the state of Florida. He was a really good friend of Woudika III.
And they have a long history together. And he just, I mean, he passed when he was like 93 or 94. And just a few years earlier had been like, Adam March in Washington, marching with kids. And he was just, he was such a vibrant person and such a lively person.
And so you have that collection and it's digitized or no, it is digitized. Yeah, it is. I'm sorry. Yeah, that was a long, maybe that was a longer description than you wanted.
You know, but there's so much to say about that. Sure. And yeah, so that is digitized. And then we have like some photo, like, and you know, a few smaller things.
But the Eastern one has probably been the most rewarding to be able to tell all different aspects of the story. But then of course that causes some problems really because I've got my white collar downer. So we're like, the union's caused a strike and a shutdown. And then I've got my union donors.
You are like, well, it was all the management and blah, blah, blah. You know, and of course I have my opinions about how all of that went down. But so you have these sort of competing interests that you're the mediator for to try to get this information out to a broader, broader public. Yes.
And I feel like I feel like it being like, you know, almost 25 years out from that, I think, now that we can talk about it and try to still be angry. Although people really do carry a lot of still carry a lot of resentment about Lorenzo and the way he did the airline. So so when you're collecting, you talked about, you know, when you're choosing what to digitize its impact, its preservation, it's a number of things. So how then does that process play out when, you know, for example, with the uprising of 34 collection, which is giant, you know, it's this huge massive amount of information about the 1934 textiles, right?
So how do you, how does that process work to get it then online? Do you sort of do it by chunks? Do you, you know, do you just sort of do small parts that you think are the most important and then work back if you can? How does that work for you?
Okay. So for people who don't know about the uprising of 34 documentary, I'm not going to go into the entire history of the strike, but the documentary was started by a few filmmakers that sort of grew out of this Southern Textile Workers Project. And they wanted to go around and interview people who had been there during the strike and they weren't sure what story they were ultimately going to tell in the documentary. So as they started doing that, they interviewed so many people and then some of it's just like shots of like where old mills used to be.
And there's this, you know, one great section that's they're recording at an African American Catholic Church in that South Carolina. And so really getting into the communities there and understanding how the communities function, the documentary ended up being about an hour and a half and really focused on sort of like the shame and hurt that came out of the strike for the workers and how the workers were blamed. And they, you know, some workers were killed, others were harassed and roughed up. They were blacklisted and not able to be hired at any other mills in the area.
So it really impacted all of these communities. It was mostly North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee. And so the documentary is small, but there's like almost 300 hours of footage. So when we wrote that grant for that, we got an NHP or C grant for it and we included, we worked with Crawford Media, who's a local, they do all kinds of stuff, but what we use them for is digitization.
So we worked with them to get a quote and then we worked with a transcription company to get a quote for transcripts. And when we submitted the grant application, it included not only hiring someone to kind of do all the work here, but to pay for those costs. I mean, that was primarily it, right? You know, getting all that work done.
So with something like that, we didn't, I have to make decisions about what to do. We were lucky that we were, you know, awarded the grant and were able to do all of it. So fortunately, in that case, we didn't have to pick and choose and the full interviews are up. You know, we didn't edit anything to put on mine.
So it's all there. So what new collections have you brought into the archives lately and what new is in the pipeline? So some of the newer collections that we're working on, you know, we have some education collections here. We've got a couple of AFT locals here in the Atlanta area, Fulton County, but there is an organization called the Georgia Association of Educators that acts like a union, although they are sort of really uncomfortable.
You know, I was like, so we all AFL-CIO affiliated and they were like pearls were collections. No, you know, so while the organization does the same thing a union would do, it just doesn't have the AFL-CIO affiliation. So we brought that in and it's processed. So we're digitizing their periodicals.
One of the interesting things about that collection though is that there were two predecessor organizations, the Georgia Educators Association and the Georgia Teachers and Educators Association. One was White Women's African American and they sort of come together around 1970 when the state was finally like, okay, schools, you need to integrate now. So they really tell the story not only of the integration of schools in the state of Georgia, but also of these organizations. And I'm really excited about that collection.
I think it'll have a lot of use. Last year we also brought in this fantastic collection of materials collected by a woman who was an administrator at the Grady School of Nursing, which is here in Atlanta, part of the Grady Memorial Hospital. And with that collection, I mean, she's got phenomenal stuff from like maybe the, I mean, some things sort of bits and bops back to the early 20th century, turn to the last century, but this is really nice chunk of stuff, mid-century forward to tell the history of the work and workers down there. And Grady, the hospital actually has an anniversary, maybe 110 or 115 next year.
So we brought that in and we're working on it. But with the Grady stuff, we've also already created a digital collection for them and we've digitized yearbooks and we started putting oral histories up for the Grady School of Nursing stuff. Because I'm going back to talk to women who went through the program, not only women who worked here as administrators, but women who were students there. And what is fascinating, but not surprising, are the differences in stories that you'll hear from the white women in the African American women about any aspect of the work.
And so I feel like that's going to be very interesting and also very useful because we also have a nursing program here at Georgia State. So it's always great and we can add to our nursing collections for their use. And then there was, there's a woman named Deborah Katz-Pashil who is a donor and she worked for the FAA. She was an air traffic controller.
She started in the 70s and she was harassed. So thoroughly that she filed the first sexual harassment lawsuit against the US government. And so we started getting her legal records. And some of her personal stuff will come with that too.
Because it's all, this story has been so much of her entire life. It's not like the lawsuit ended and then everything moved forward. It's sort of been ongoing if you can imagine since the late 70s and early 80s. And so that's, and I think that'll be really interesting and it'll have interest too for the folks coming to use the women and gender collections.
And it's really unlike anything else that we've got. So I am also quite excited about that collection. This might be a tricky question. What is your favorite collection that you have?
The M.H. Ross papers. It's not tricky. I mean I think that all of the collections here, you know, some of them are evidentiary.
They just tell you that these things happen at this time. Some of them are more than the sum of their parts. And some of them are only like their parts. But they're all important in telling the story.
So, so, so, so when I say I have a favorite, it's not to be confused with. Make the best one. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
And I'm just a man of such fine character. And he was a labor organizer, my known smelter workers. He moved his family around a lot. Around the south, they got, you know, he got harassed a lot by folks.
And then once the person he was running from found out he was a labor organizer, then, you know, the family we kicked out of the houses. But he, he ran as a progressive candidate. I believe in North Carolina. He studied law and he was not allowed to take the bar because he was accused of being a communist.
And he ended up later in life working with coal miners in West Virginia. And he got like maybe close to 200 oral histories that he did with them. You know, a very lengthened, bearing topics because he was working on a book about coal miners. But he also dedicated like his last years of his life to sort of being a community liaison to help miners with all the medical problems that come with being a miner.
When we give personal papers in, they're often pretty relatively small collections. And it's, you know, it's like these V awards I want. And these are the positions I held. But with his, it's, it's unlike anything else we've got here.
It's as wide as it is deep in terms of topic. Like it's not just subject files. It's like, you know, entire sub series of information about different topics. And it's just, it's just a really phenomenal collection.
And it's, it's great. I hope I don't sound too dessy about it. It's just like, it's such a great collection. That might be a good segue into the last bit that it was hoping that we could talk about.
And that is a question that kind of revolves around what makes things archive worthy, right? From an archivist perspective, what is the best way, well, a couple questions related to this. What is the best way for individuals to preserve the history of their involvement or perhaps a family member's involvement with the labor movement number one? And then number two, you know, say you find a box of miscellaneous records from grandma grandpa's time in the union or mom of dad's time in the union.
What do you do with it? Right? What makes it something that is, you know, interesting family history and what is something that makes it archive worthy? What's the difference?
Okay. I love the term archive worthy. So number one to preserve history, you know, it's good for families. If they've got, um, thing, you know, think, like we will often get families here like I found, I found on all of my grandfather's do's books and do's books are like these little sort of leathered covered books that are maybe like four inches by two inches that they would put stamps in for each month of a year that they paid their dues.
And it usually has a little info in the front about the local number and maybe what kind of work they did when the person. So people are always like, so I'm going to kind of answer both questions at once. Do you want these? And it's, well, we don't because that doesn't tell us it won't give a researcher enough info to really like dig in.
It's not, it's not information rich and we have so many examples of them. It's not like we need additional examples. And in terms of preserving history, you know, there's some basic things that we would tell anybody, which is, you know, don't keep stuff in the attic, the basement, the garage or an air conditioned storage unit, you know, that's just like the top level. And then, you know, there are, you know, there are different like, um, companies that sell archival supplies usually have a family kit, which is like a manuscript box and some acid refolders and some photographs leaves.
So there are ways for them to actually do a little bit of, you know, preservation itself. And then the Northeast Document Conservation Center has an amazing variety of flyers for textiles or digital records for, you know, for everything, um, preserving history too. While people are still alive, label your photographs. They were these people where were they?
Right. But then the best way is always to sit down. And I think, and I think the most important way, the best way and the most important way just is to sit down if you still know this person and know people that knew this person well and talk to them and record their histories. That's always, that's always the best way, I think, to really get the picture because allowing people to tell their story and their own words is just, you know, as incredible as it is to have a letter or a photograph to hear their voice and hear their story, um, I think is just so, so very important.
So then this, this summer will be my tiffy or in the stop. And for a variety of reasons, we have to really think about what we bring in, including space because it's not just labor, you know, we've got all the collections here. You know, sometimes when a union wants to donate stuff, all we really need from them are like, your contracts, if they've got meeting minutes, if they've got a newsletter, you know, maybe some membership roles so we can kind of track how membership changed over time. Not so much where genealogy or who was their perspective at like a numbers point of view and some financial records.
I'm not routine ones like canceled tracks or bank statements, but like audits or financial reports or stuff. And then, and with that, we can really have a full understanding because sometimes it's all pretty straightforward with the union and they don't have, you know, a big strike to talk about or, you know, collective bargaining woes. And then some unions can really, you know, like with Petco really have a much bigger story to tell in the, you know, they were in a national stage. What I've learned in these 10 years, that's when I started out with that, is that sometimes I can go into a local that's merging or shutting down or maybe just need some more space and that, you know, for whatever reason they want to donate stuff.
And I can go in and I can like say, well, we really only need these few things. And then the more stories a local has to tell that typically the more stuff we want to get from them or unions in general, I guess not just locals. And then we always try to do an offer to do oral histories with, you know, some of the retired folks or people who have been in the job and officer for a long time or been around a long time so that we can get the story behind the story. It's good that it tells us what they did and that's important, but it's not always this bigger story, if that makes sense.
And it's hard to sometimes hard to tell people that when they're so proud of like, look at all these 5,000 boxes of grievances. And I'm like, I only need 5% or 5 boxes, whichever is left. So it's sometimes hard to tell them. And then sometimes people will call with stuff and they're like, oh, I've got this charter for this local, how much we buy it and like, we aren't able to purchase collections.
Well, then I'm just going to sell it on eBay. I'm like, well, good luck to you. You know, I'm sorry, we can't buy it. But I probably wouldn't purchase a charter because it just gives us such a very limited amount of information.
The thought process is there are like so many things to consider when you're going into a place and looking at the stuff. Right. Well, no, I think that makes sense because even with anything that's old or antique, I think the assumption automatically is, oh, it's valuable because it's old automatically. And I think the same thing.
Oh, this is automatically something someone's going to want. But if there were 10,000 of these particular tables made that are still out there, that's not unique, right? It's more sort of what's unique, what can contribute to this sort of bigger picture, I think that is what you're trying to get at it. I'm not taking that away.
So what do you, what do you either sort of accents or expands upon information we already have, what covers gaps where we don't really have anything? And what does it in a way that it provides like a really information rich document or set of documents to tell that story? Like a head of woman wants to send me a picture of her husband, had marched with Dr. King.
And she's like, look at this, great. I'm like, okay. But if it's the only thing we don't, we literally don't know anything else about this man or what he did or if he even knew Dr. King.
I mean, a lot of people were at those marches, you know, and somebody's can, like a family can look at that and be really proud, but it doesn't really add to the historical record. Right. And there's a difference there. I think that's the key issue, right?
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
And so sometimes where we might not want the documents they have, if they wouldn't mind sharing a whole history with us, we, you know, we would definitely take that because that's more information rich than just a, you know, a handful of items. Okay. Well, that gives us a whole lot to talk about and potentially some marching orders to go out with our iPhones and, you know, voice recorded bunch of people talking about their time in the union or the civil rights movement or whatever it might have been. Yes.
Okay. Well, Tracy Drummond, thank you for joining us on this episode of Working History. My pleasure. All right.
Thanks, Tracy. Thanks again to Tracy Drummond, archivist for the Southern Labor Archives at Georgia State University in Atlanta. And thank you for listening to this episode of Working History produced by the Southern Labor Studies Association. Become a member online at www.southernlaborstudies.org and follow Working History on Twitter at Working History.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Yes. Yes.