To archive it like it is: Alice Walker's autobiography project and the preservation of Black women's history in the Mississippi freedom movement, 1968–1970
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This article examines Alice Walker's 1968 Negro History workshop as a foundational act of Black historical geography. Through her pedagogical project in the Mississippi Delta, Walker empowered rural Black women to produce autobiographies that challenged colonial archival practices and Jim Crow educational inequalities. These life narratives—grounded in oral history, intergenerational memory, and spatial experience—offered a counter-archive to dominant historical geographies, documenting Black women's lives not only as personal testimony but as situated spatial knowledge. Framing the autobiography as a method of Black feminist geography, the paper argues that Walker's workshop constituted a radical archival intervention: it preserved and elevated the everyday geographies of Black resistance, labor, displacement, and care. By reading these autobiographies as spatial histories, the article shows how Black women narrated place from the vantage of cotton fields, floodplains, kitchens, and church pews—producing insurgent mappings of the Delta and reimagining the archive as a terrain of Black survival and self-fashioning. Ultimately, the paper contributes to historical geography by theorizing ‘Black historical geographies’ as a reparative, place-based methodology rooted in care and refusal. Walker's classroom archive offers a critical model for scholars seeking to center Black women's voices and build alternative geographies of memory, pedagogy, and resistance. • Alice Walker's 1968 Negor history workshop becomes a foundational act of Black historical geography. • Autobiographies as counter-archives challenging colonial and Jim Crow archival practices. • Reimagining Black women's everyday geographies of resistance, labor, and care as historical geographies. • Theorizing “Black historical geographies” rooted in care, refusal, and insurgency.
Source: Journal of Historical Geography
Author: Teona Williams
Institution: Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,220
OpenAlex ID: W4414278608