Meet the museum center director digitizing Fisk University Jubilee Singers' archives
Fisk University alum Doretha Williams came back to campus recently for a major project to modernize the institution's historical documents.
Fisk opened in 1866, initially as a school to educate formerly enslaved Black people, but it has become a venerated historically Black college and university (HBCU) educating leaders and thinkers including W.E.B. DuBois, Diane Nash and John Lewis.
Williams is the director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture's Center for Digitization and Curation of African American History.
She has been working on digitizing the archives of the Grammy Award-winning Fisk Jubilee Singers whose international tour in the 19th century caused the United Kingdom's Queen Victoria to dub Nashville "Music City."
Williams was a Jubilee Singer alternative for a semester and she returned to her first Jubilee Day celebration in 25 years.
On Episode 377 of the Tennessee Voices video podcast, she talked to me about the why preserving Black history is so important. Watch the entire conversation in the video above.
"We preserve local histories wherever we are," she said.
This has become incredibly important with the limiting or banning of books and materials featuring Black history in public schools and colleges that might be deemed as "divisive" by critics, whether the focus is on desegregating schools or talking about struggles under Jim Crow laws.
The center is stationed at Fisk until Nov. 4.
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David Plazas is the director of opinion and engagement for the USA TODAY Network Tennessee. He is an editorial board member of The Tennessean. He hosts the Tennessee Voices videocast and curates the Tennessee Voices and Latino Tennessee Voices newsletters. Call him at (615) 259-8063 or email him at dplazas@tennessean.com.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Fisk Jubilee Singers: Meet museum center director digitizing archives
