Sarah’s pro tip: “Lunch is the most important part of the day because it allows you to step away from the sources for a while, think about what you saw, and give your eyes a break. Try to go outside during lunchtime and bring a notebook with you so you can jot down some notes about your main takeaways from the first half of your day. These notes will help you sort out your thoughts when you get home, because you won’t have to reflect on an entire day’s worth of sources.”
I am a third year ABD doctoral student. I will begin my dissertation research in July, visiting the Temple University Special Collections Research Center and Urban Archives, the Philadelphia City Archives, and the Philadelphia Area Archives at the African American Museum in Philadelphia. My research focuses on how Black Philadelphians in each property ownership category—homeowners, renters, housing-insecure, and unhoused—navigated the violent constraints of the urban real estate market on a daily basis between 1890 and 1985.
I will view organizational records from the Octavia Hill Association, the Housing Association of the Delaware Valley, and the Armstrong Association (a Philadelphia Urban League affiliate), organizations which tried to address the city’s Black housing crisis at the turn of the twentieth century. I will also view personal archival collections of Philadelphia’s Black elites (Marion Turner Stubbs, Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, M. Lee Montgomery, Clarence Farmer, Anna Russell Jones, Joseph E. Coleman) who were involved in labor and housing activism and philanthropy. I enjoy “aha” moments in the archive when I am reading a source and an answer to the “how we got here” question becomes just a tad clearer. Though it has been a topic of heated discussion in recent years, I deeply believe that the Black present is intimately tied to the past. Finding these continuities in the archive is both satisfying and bittersweet, but overall I love feeling closer to understanding more about both the past and the present when I wrap up a day in the archive.
