This week I reviewed the websites for Tougaloo College and Millsaps College, both small, religious institutions in the Jackson area. Despite being small, both colleges have archival collections and have curated digital collections online. Tougaloo is famous for its involvement in the Civil Rights Movement and has leveraged partnerships with Brown University to create a digital collection online and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to house the bulk of its civil rights collection. Tougaloo also has parts of its collection digitized through the Mississippi Digital Library. Millsaps College has utilized grant funding to digitize its campus publications, including the student newspaper and yearbook, both of which could be interesting sources for research.
Both schools utilized WorldCat for their online catalog. Search filters differed between the two but were generally less flexible in identifying resources belonging to archival or special collections. While Millsaps offers post-graduate degrees, neither institution appeared to have student thesis/dissertation collections in their catalog or digitized. Likewise, I was unable to find catalog entries for any of the named collections. Online finding aids were not posted on either school's website, however, Millsapps had brief descriptions of their special collections and Tougaloo had collection titles named. Because of the small size and my increasing familiarity with Mississippi history and the continued search for secondary research resources, I spent some time researching possible LGBTQ connections with named persons. Howard (1999) discussed the connections between the LGBTQ community and the civil rights movement, and his work is cited in Leighton's expansive dissertation about gay and lesbian activists in the civil rights era (2013). Through recognizing names or cross-referencing names in LGBTQ history resources, I was able to identify additional collections.
I was worried that the research I've done in identifying LGBTQ figures would not deliver results. I am trying to use a couple of credible sources to connect people to places and other people, so that I can either go back to search potentially related institutions or use federated databases (like ArchiveGrid or WorldCat) to search for records. Smaller institutions like Tougaloo and Millsaps that may not have catalog entries for collections will need to be reviewed independently. Having reviewed the bigger institutions with more resources for archival description and access, this method will probably be my best track in finding manuscript collections for LGBTQ persons as I survey smaller archives.
Supplemental Reading & Research:
Leighton, J. E. (2013). Freedom Indivisible: Gays and Lesbians in the African American Civil
Rights Movement. Dissertations, Theses, & Student Research, Department of History. 61.
Mississippi Humanities Council. (n.d.) Mississippi Encyclopedia [online resource].
Summers, C. Pebworth, T.-L., and Rapp, L (eds.). (2003). GLBTQ Archives.