Grant Story - Dr. Ida Jones

Honoring Dr. Irene Diggs

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Apply for a grant, no way. The paperwork and the detailed accounting were anathema to me. Nevertheless, a faculty colleague approached me and offered to partner. I agreed. The results are stunning! I am continually humbled to be a part of the information/instructional recovery process. The IMLS grant provided funding to digitize the Dr. Ellen Irene Diggs collection. Dr. Diggs a pioneering anthropologist and Morgan professor left her archival collection to Morgan where it remained housed in the library since 1983.

In 2020 the Beulah Davis Special Collections Department was awarded a grant aptly titled Ellen Irene Diggs: Creating Pathways for Young Pioneers Project. This moment was temporarily dulled by the pandemic shuttering the campus. The grant provided for archival instruction for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as, research methods in the field of anthropology. Concurrently, the grant included training K-12 educators to use archival materials in their classes and expose Baltimore public school students to archives and anthropology. In 2021 a Morgan contingent of faculty and students presented their research at the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting held in Baltimore. The presentation Ellen Irene Diggs: Recovery, Recognition, and Reimagining Truth in African American, Caribbean and Feminist Anthropology introduced her to a new generation of scholars. Of note were the beta-test pair of Morgan-alum elementary school teachers who shared how using primary source documents in the classrooms awakened interest in their students. The pandemic pivot allowed me to visit numerous classes of students to share items from the Diggs collection and interest many humanities-major students in the field of archives and research via paid internships. Several students expressed interest and worked in the Diggs collection. One history major utilized the internship to learn about digitization while using her Spanish class to translate documents from the collection. Her internship resulted in the topic for her senior paper on the Cuban experiences of Dr. Diggs. She is attending graduate school in the fall.

A doctoral candidate in English/Davis Room intern remarked “My experience as a digitization intern in the Davis Room, taught me a unique skillset when handling archival materials. Learning about Dr. Diggs inspired me as both a Morganite and Black woman.” Thanks to the IMLS grant, we traveled to Budapest, Hungary. We both presented invited papers on aspects of gender at Morgan. This was her first international conference where she made valuable connections with other scholars focusing on gender, class and race. The digitized materials continue to attract a host of international graduate students from Asia, Europe, and Central America.

The grant accentuated student success and well-being while cultivating relationship throughout Baltimore. Our teacher workshops, archival training, and toolkit are evergreen examples of what intentional collaboration offers humanities scholars and scholarship. There are healthy inter-departmental collaborations at Morgan moving the needle closer to R1 status. This grant my first will not be by last. It allowed me to participate in enriching archival usage and training for multiple communities Morgan State/Baltimore city; mutually inclusive and moving forward through history.