SOUTH CAROLINA: Avery Research Center Gets $2 Million Grant to Enhance Exhibits
CHARLESTON, S.C. — The Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture just got its biggest-ever boost thanks to a $2 million grant awarded by the Mellon Foundation.
The money is meant to support the Avery Research Center “in collection processing, digitization, and outreach and engagement activities,” according to the foundation. It will enable the Avery, which is part of the College of Charleston library division, to double the size of its staff, create a fellowship program, enhance its collection and archives, digitize papers and documents, mount exhibits, engage artists, advance its restorative justice programming and do more to tell the story of its own history, its leadership said.
All of the money will go to the Avery over the course of four years. The award is one of four of its kind to be distributed nationwide by the Mellon Foundation. The other three recipients have not been announced.
“It’s one of the largest grants the College of Charleston has ever received,” noted John White, dean of libraries. “It’s rare for a school our size to receive a grant like this.”
The grant application mostly was the work of Aaisha Haykal, manager of archival services, and Erica Veal, research archivist and interpretation coordinator, White said. Support came from other library staff.
Tamara Butler, director of the Avery, said the foundation found in the Avery an institution with a compelling mission to document African American culture and history, and an important history of its own.
Tamara Butler is director of the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture. File/Gavin McIntyre/Staff
A request for comment from the Mellon Foundation on Jan. 19 could not be accommodated on short notice, the foundation said.
The Avery’s first iteration was a “normal school” that served Black students during the period of legal segregation, from 1865 to 1954, training students for professional careers and leadership positions. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s succeeded in breaking down Jim Crow, after which the Avery Normal School on Bull Street floundered.
In the 1970s, Lucille Whipper, who at the time ran the College of Charleston’s Head Start program, and other Avery alumni determined to transform the institution into an asset of the college. The Avery Institute of Afro-American History and Culture launched in 1985.It has evolved since then, its trajectory full of ups and downs. In 2020, Tamara Butler was named director, and despite disruptions caused by the COVID pandemic, the Avery Research Center forged ahead with ambitious programming and goals.
It secured $100,000 from the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation to support an oral history project called “Documenting the Arc.” It received an audio recording of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech delivered on July 30, 1967, at Charleston County Hall, along with a recording surreptitiously made of a Ku Klux Klan rally the night before King’s appearance and a speech Ralph Abernathy gave in Charleston on April 1, 1969, during the hospital workers strike.
Avery staff now are preparing a public exhibition dedicated to King and featuring his Charleston speech.
Meanwhile, the center’s Race and Social Justice Initiative continues, other exhibits are planned, and the staff is contemplating ways to share publicly the history of their institution.
Christa Poparad, associate dean of College of Charleston libraries, said the big grant shows that the library system as a whole and, by extension, the college, is “ready to go to the next level.”
College officials have been preparing for years to reclassify the institution as a research university. To achieve that status, it would need to expand its academic programs and provide the infrastructure necessary to aid graduate students in obtaining master’s and doctorate degrees.
“You can tell the quality of an institution by the quality of its library,” White said.
The Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture just got its biggest-ever boost thanks to a $2 million grant awarded by the Mellon Foundation.
The money is meant to support the Avery Research Center “in collection processing, digitization, and outreach and engagement activities,” according to the foundation. It will enable the Avery, which is part of the College of Charleston library division, to double the size of its staff, create a fellowship program, enhance its collection and archives, digitize papers and documents, mount exhibits, engage artists, advance its restorative justice programming and do more to tell the story of its own history, its leadership said.
All of the money will go to the Avery over the course of four years. The award is one of four of its kind to be distributed nationwide by the Mellon Foundation. The other three recipients have not been announced.
–postandcourier.com
