Funded by the a grant from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Diaspora Pathways Archival Access Project (DPAAP) is a three-year collaboration between JHU’s Center for Africana Studies, the Sheridan Libraries’ Center for Educational Resources, and the Afro.  DPAAP seeks to explore and describe the contents of the Afro archives to make their contents publically accessible and searchable via the Web.

Five graduate and undergraduate students from Johns Hopkins, Morgan State University, and Goucher College are the first student interns to have unparalleled access to 116 years of African American and African Diaspora history recorded and created by the Afro newspaper. Following a two-week training practicum at Johns Hopkins provided in collaboration with faculty from Morgan State University, the student interns will work in the archives on a part-time basis during the academic year and the summer.   
 
Each day the DPAAP interns are confronted with an abundance of photographs, newspaper clippings, and manuscript materials.  In their first week at the Afro, they found items ranging from folders containing several hundred photographs of Little Rock civil rights activist Daisy Bates, to thousands of items chronicling the everyday lives of black Baltimoreans–from announcements of births, deaths, weddings, and graduations, to a photograph of Sudanese political leader, El Ferik Ibrahim Abboud walking with President John F. Kennedy.

The historic, transformative, and under-appreciated role of the Afro, is not only a community treasure, but a national treasure, and it is about to become accessible to scholars, teachers, and interested citizens.  As the students delve into the riches of the newspaper’s archives, the “finding aids” they create will enable anyone to efficiently search the contents of letters, business records, photographs and other unique materials held in this extraordinary archive.

For more information on the DPAAP project visit
http://www.library.jhu.edu/about/news/releases/pressrel07/afro-american.html

For more information about DPAAP and the Center for Africana Studies see
http://www.jhu.edu/africana/initiatives/dpp.html

Information about the Afro-American Newspapers can be found at
http://www.afro.com

Civil Rights activist Daisy Bates, ca. 1950.