First published Oct. 31, 2023 in Stories Beneath the Shell.
by Daranee Balachandar
2020’s racial reckoning drove university archivist Lae’l Hughes-Watkins to create a new collection highlighting activism on the University Maryland’s campus.
Hughes-Watkins, an associate director at the university’s library department, said she wanted to highlight issues that have fallen out of the nation’s consciousness.
“How could we be a part of that conversation and dialogue?” Hughes-Watkins said she wondered.
Some three years later, the associate director for engagement, inclusion and reparative archiving’s idea became reality. She unveiled the collection, entitled “Rising Up: 100 Years of Student Activism For Justice and Civil Rights At the University of Maryland,” to a gathering of roughly 60 people on Wednesday at Hornbake Library.
It wasn’t easy to document these stories though, university archivist Natalie Trapuzzano said.
“There’s a lot missing in historical records and archives,” Trapuzzano, who assisted Hughes-Watkins, said. “I think dominant narratives tend to dominate big institutional repositories.”
The exhibit documents protests for everything from the university’s story with desegregation that led up to the late 1990s to LGBTQ+ rights to women’s liberation in the 1920s, Hughes-Watkins shared. According to Trapuzzano, clippings from campus newspapers like the Diamondback and the Black Explosion, clippings from the university’s yearbook were used to put together the multimedia displays at the exhibition that includes oral histories.
Ladd Colston, who completed a doctorate in philosophy in 1985 at the university and was an artist for Black Explosion, remembers the Vietnam War drafts, civil rights protests, and the riots after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s murder well.
“This Rising Up exhibit portrays some of the socio-emotional experiences that I had as an undergraduate student,” he said, noting that he donated part of his collection to the university. “Remember that the late 1960s and early 1970s were tumultuous times here in America.”
Jennifer King Rice, the university’s senior vice president and provost, said the exhibit contains important lessons for today in her opening remarks.
“Now, while this exhibit is largely a look at our past, it has a tremendous impact on our present, on the moment we are living in today,” she said. “And it will also shape in very meaningful ways, our future.”
Hughes-Watkins said she hopes viewers will walk away with a greater understanding of the campus history and feel empowered.
“I hope this reminds them of how much power that they have on this campus,” she said. ”They are the bricks that built this institution.”
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