Week Ten: Reaching for the STARS

A box of Marie Stapler Gladden's teaching materials, courtesy of Ms. Francina Boykin.

Hello, reader! This week, I went full speed ahead on laying the groundwork for the STARS Gladden exhibit. Last week, Sarah Norris provided me with a list of structure request questions required by Digital Commons to set up the basics of the community space and collection space pages. On STARS, a community space is a page that typically houses links and serves as the first introduction a viewer makes to your online exhibit or collection. For the community space, I designed a banner with the title of my exhibit, “The Man Behind the Receipts: Preserving the Legacy of Michael Gladden Jr.” I also wrote an introductory text for the community space that gives a brief overview of Michael Gladden Jr.’s role as not just a grocer, but a community archivist and safekeeper. In the few contemporary materials in which Michael Gladden Jr. is referenced, he is always only described and defined by his profession. In light of the Gladden Collection’s discovery, I hope to bring attention to the important role of a safekeeper in Black American communities, examining the motivations behind this longstanding behavior born out of necessity.

My ultimate goal for the digital exhibit is to humanize the “man behind the receipts” through a carefully curated artifact collection dedicated to Michael Gladden Jr., Marie Stapler Gladden, George Oden, Ella Walls, Joseph Cauley, William Gladden Jr., and Ms. Francina Boykin herself. As long as it is possible, I hope to include an in-depth bio for each person included in the digital exhibit to provide much-needed context to the viewer. For the purpose of scheduling a sandbox meeting with Sarah Norris, I provided four samples of digitized artifacts in TIFF format for her to upload to a test site. I included the scan of the Jake Brown Safekeeping Receipt, the 1927 photograph of Michael Gladden Jr. and Joseph Cauley, the photograph from the founding of Washington Shores Federal Loan and Savings Bank, and Michael Gladden Jr.’s diploma from Bethune-Cookman College. I hope for each of these objects to be included in Michael Gladden Jr.’s collection space, alongside other curated store receipts and other paper documents that I plan to upload once the base site is established. Additionally, I provided basic metadata keywords in the Digital Commons document to reflect the overarching subjects that will be included in the Gladden artifact metadata descriptions. I look forward to hearing back from Sarah soon in order to schedule our first sandbox session.

In other news, I spoke to Ms. Boykin this week over the phone and made a very interesting discovery. Ms. Boykin told me that in her garage, she has multiple books that Marie Stapler Gladden used to teach her elementary classes. From what I could see in the photo Ms. Boykin sent to me over text, the books include two volumes of a dictionary set, a history book entitled “The Last Two Million Years,” and an art book covering classic paintings which bears Mrs. Gladden’s handwritten name and address. Though I did not get to scan my larger artifacts this week, I’m glad that Ms. Boykin brought up these teaching materials to include alongside the materials I had originally planned to digitize. By housing them on the Gladden Archive and perhaps the STARS exhibit, I think they would provide researchers and community members with valuable insight into what Black American children learned from school in the early half of the 20th century. When I meet with Ms. Boykin next, I will be sure to update you more about these artifacts! More to come next week, reader. See you then!