Week Eleven: "We Built This City"

Mr. Kelvan Franklin, myself, and Ms. Franklin. July 24th, 2026.

Hello, reader! I can’t believe the Summer 2026 semester is ending next week. It seems like I just blinked and two months flew by! This week, I received some exciting news regarding my STARS project. After providing the fields required by Digital Commons, as well as a digital banner with specified dimensions and test TIFF files to upload, I received a link to the test site for the future Gladden Exhibit. I was delighted to see my plans for the Gladden Exhibit in the first stages of its creation, given the careful respect that Ms. Boykin and Mr. Gladden deserve. While I don’t plan on hosting the entirety of the Gladden Collection as part of the digital exhibit, I can’t wait to start curating more objects to communicate the importance of Apopka’s Black community to Mr. Gladden’s safekeeping practices. Since there is barely any recognized academic literature on the subject of Black community historians and archivists unaffiliated with traditional archives, I hope that my exhibit will be the beginning of a series of resources on the history and motivations behind safekeeping. Sarah Norris and I will be meeting the first week of August to discuss further issues of accessibility and copyright for certain varieties of artifacts found within the Gladden Collection. Additionally, the STARS team has offered to help me digitize the larger Gladden artifacts so that they will be able to be included in the Gladden Digital Exhibit. I truly look forward to finally having these artifacts digitized for long-term storage and accessibility. 

On Tuesday, Dr. French and I also discussed an idea for a future project. As I have discussed in my blog posts before, Special Collections at UCF Libraries holds certain Gladden artifacts purchased by Carol Mundy, a Black history collector. These artifacts were likely donated to UCF shortly after their acquisition. On STARS, Special Collections did make certain parts of Ms. Mundy’s extensive collection accessible to the public. However, none of the Gladden artifacts that they have are accessible to view. When I meet with Sarah Norris next, I want to propose the idea that I could work with Special Collections to digitize their Gladden artifacts to be stored on STARS. If Special Collections is amenable to the idea but has copyright conflicts, it could just be a sister gallery I could link to my digital exhibit. Though I’m not sure if this will work out, it never hurts to ask! From what I’ve been able to gather, the Mundy Gladden artifacts have invaluable information on Mr. Gladden’s executorship of George Oden’s estate and actions as an intermediary for Ella Walls. I truly believe that both community members and researchers should have access to their history- as is the purpose of the Gladden Archive. Hopefully, I could at least get an audience with Special Collections for this proposed project! 

On Friday, July 24th, I visited the Franklin family again to record an extremely special oral history. On July 28th, Ms. Louise Franklin will be turning 90 years old! Mr. Kelvan requested that I record a birthday-themed oral history. For this session, Ms. Boykin decided to join Ms. Franklin on camera to discuss their friendship, Zora Neale Hurston, local gossip, and everything under the sun. The oral history ended up being almost an hour and a half long! It was delightful to see Ms. Franklin so happy and engaged for our oral history session, and I’m looking forward to setting up the Franklin Collection page on the Gladden Archive as soon as I get a chance. More to come next week, reader! See you then!