Jill Borin (left) and Jan Alexander (right) receive their awards during the Chester NAACP Awards Dinner on April 27 |
(Thursday,
May 10, 2012) The Chester Branch of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) honored two Widener University librarians
for their work to preserve the history of the NAACP and the civil rights
movement in the city of Chester. They were honored on April 27 at the 101st
Annual NAACP Chester Branch Awards Dinner.
Jan
Alexander of Media, Pa., archivist and reference librarian; and Jill Borin of
Chadds Ford, Pa., assistant archivist and reference librarian at the Wolfgram
Memorial Library at Widener, received the George T. Raymond Freedom Award for
preserving the historic papers of George T. Raymond, the man for whom their
award is named. Raymond served as president of the Chester NAACP for 25 years
including during the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. He died
in 1999.
Alexander
and Borin scanned and digitized hundreds of documents, newspaper clippings, and
photographs from three scrapbooks which were part of the Raymond papers that
were donated to the university by his family in 2009. Two of the scrapbooks,
created by Raymond, chronicled the civil rights movement in the ’40s, ’50s, and
’60s. The third book, created by Patricia Taylor for the Chester NAACP,
captures the tumultuous year of 1963–64, which drew national attention to the
city. They also scanned numerous additional documents that were part Raymond’s
collected papers. The digitized collection is available to researchers and the
general public online at http://digitalwolfgram.widener.edu.
Alexander
said she was “deeply honored” by the award and called the Raymond papers “a
very valuable historical resource.”
“There is a
movement across Pennsylvania to preserve black history in the state,” Alexander
said. “The Raymond papers are a perfect example of what needs to be preserved.”
Borin echoed
Alexander’s sentiments about the award and their work on the project. “When we
received these papers, I realized what a treasure trove of history they contained,”
she said. “I was so pleased to have the opportunity to make them available to
researchers.”
No comments:
Post a Comment