Dr. Crystal A. deGregory
Keynotes that Sparked
The program featured an “electric” keynote, as attendees described it, by Dr. Ruha Benjamin on Sept. 3. On Sept. 4, a keynote panel and working sessions refined the bibliographies anchoring the work.
In an address that felt like both testimony and toolkit, Holly A. Smith, College Archivist at Spelman College, argued that radical empathy was action, not sentiment—a feminist ethics of care made concrete in policy, partnerships, and description practices that fundamentally shifted institutional behaviors toward equitable, just outcomes.
Borrowed from Smith’s talk, “Stack Sisters” is a nod to the stacks themselves and to the overwhelming number of women—across ethnicities—whose labor powered libraries. Their deep and abiding love was more than “shushing” patrons. Resourcing research was often intertwined with job hunts, housing or student-services referrals, tech troubleshooting, and everyday problem-solving.
Memory Workers, Not Neutral Custodians
Even so, Smith’s vantage point at Spelman was distinctive. The Spelman College Archives were embedded in the Women’s Research & Resource Center (WRRC), founded in 1981 by Black feminist scholar Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall, rather than a traditional academic library.
That positioning enabled an unapologetic focus on Black women’s histories and community collaboration.
“It’s a rare gift to be in a space where we can amplify Black women’s stories without having to justify it,” Smith said.
As a case study, the Archives stewarded the Audre Lorde Papers and the Toni Cade Bambara Papers—used by students, scholars, organizers, and artists. Recent initiatives, like Audre Lorde travel awards, emphasized public engagement with Black feminist memory. This was memory work—and its stewards were memory workers—connecting records to living communities.
Smith rejected the profession’s oft-invoked “neutrality.”
“Neutrality is a fallacy,” she said. “True collaborations are not co-optation.”
Archivists weren’t passive custodians; they were active collaborators—bringing situated expertise and their whole selves to reciprocal relationships with creators, descendants, students, and communities.
She emphasized “slow archiving,” building non-paternalistic partnerships, and holding grief and joy together in the work.
A Lineage of Care
BRE also surfaced an important lineage. I first met Dr. Aisha Johnson in the wake of the passing of Beth Madison Howse (1943–2012), the beloved Fisk University alumna and archivist whose nearly four decades of stewardship at the John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library set a high bar for care, access, and hospitality.
Behind every “great archival find,” there was a human being, like Howse, who made discovery possible and dignified. Her model centered access, hospitality, and care as operational policy, not personality.
Johnson—Associate Dean for Academic Affairs & Outreach at the Georgia Tech Library—has spent her career revealing Southern library history and asking uncomfortable questions about who got counted, hired, published, and centered. Widely recognized for scholarship on Black public libraries and the Julius Rosenwald legacy, she reminded attendees:
“Radical empathy is an intentional, conscious practice—not a feeling. It shapes who we hire, what we collect, and how we describe communities.”
The arc ran through Fisk as well. DeLisa Minor Harris, Director of Library Services at Fisk, leads Mellon-funded work to digitize and open the Rosenwald Fund collections—continuing Howse’s ethos of repair.
“As her student and, later, her successor, Ms. Howse taught me the archive is human work. Sustaining her legacy means greeting every researcher as kin, building rooms where people recognize themselves, and practicing repair—listening first, naming women fully, and rewriting what once erased them,” said Harris.
Curriculum Follows Practice
BRE’s simple thesis: curriculum follows practice. That was why the convening’s bibliographies mattered. They became blueprints for teaching future librarians to reject extraction, design community-authored description, and make room for archivists’ humanity at work.
This extended the intellectual and pedagogical line of Dr. Nicole A. Cooke, Augusta Baker Endowed Chair at the University of South Carolina. Cooke has long argued that sending graduates into the world without social-justice literacy is malpractice.
Together, Cooke and Johnson pressed that students must learn to assess harm, intervene in policy, redesign services with communities, and repair the archival record—especially through Black feminist archival perspectives.
The Greatest Good
In the ever-changing mores of institutions and politics on the state, federal, and global levels, empathy should not be flattened into catch-phrases or vibes. Whether back in Atlanta, like Smith and Johnson, or in South Carolina like Cooke, all of BRE’s presenters kept showing what that looked like.
Empathy in the hands of Black women, other women and minorities, and some “Stack Brothers,” too, was radical, revolutionary, and informative—a powerful tool to counter the violence of erasure. In fact, it might be the greatest good actualized amid all that would have us believe otherwise.
Empathy in the hands of Black women, other women and minorities, and some “Stack Brothers,” too, was radical, revolutionary, and informative—a powerful tool to counter the violence of erasure. In fact, it might be the greatest good actualized amid all that would have us believe otherwise.
Dr. Crystal A. deGregory is a historian and public scholar whose work centers Black women, HBCUs, and the fight for educational justice. She serves as the founding director of the Mary McLeod Bethune Institute for the Study of Women and Girls at Bethune-Cookman University and is the creator of HerDue, a forthcoming multimedia salon, platform and podcast honoring women whose genius has too long gone unrecognized. Her next book, “The Greatest Good: Nashville’s Black Colleges, Their Students, and the Fight for Freedom, Justice, and Equality,” is forthcoming from Vanderbilt University Press.
