Archival Inclination

By Liesl Olson

Afew years ago, in the fall of 2018, Chicago writer and sociologist Eve L. Ewing made a visit to the Newberry Library. Ewing was poised to publish her third book, a collection of remarkable poems called 1919, an imaginative response to historical accounts of the race riots that swept through Chicago in 1919. She also had agreed to serve as an advisor on the Newberry’s year-long, collaborative series of programs exploring the history and legacy of the riots, including a program in which she would perform her new poems.

An admirer of Ewing’s writing and activism, I was excited to show her the Newberry. I had no idea that her visit would lead to an extraordinary new acquisition for the library: Ewing’s own papers.

I met Ewing in the Special Collections Reading Room, where I had pulled collection materials that I thought might interest her. Born and raised in Chicago, where she attended Chicago Public Schools and then the University of Chicago (where she is now an assistant professor in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice), Ewing is a daring, high-volume writer across genres. She published her first non-fiction book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side in 2018 while simultaneously writing a new superhero series for Marvel Comics. She is the coauthor with poet Nate Marshall of the play No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks (2017), which is performed by puppeteers, musicians, and actors working in shadow.

Ewing and literary scholar Kenneth Warren during a discussion at the Newberry, September 2019.

Ewing and Liesl Olson in the Newberry’s Special Collections Reading Room, December 2018.

“The report was like an old tapestry with loose threads sticking out. And I wanted to tug on them and see what I could unravel, see what new thing I could weave.”

For several summers, Ewing helped organize the “Chicago poetry block party,” an outdoor communitybuilding festival staged at places like the historic Wabash YMCA in Bronzeville and the National Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen. (I can attest that these were parties, the opposite of quiet and staid poetry readings.) Ewing has won more awards and accolades than seems possible for someone in her mid-thirties. From her 2018 appearance on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah to a 2020 interview with Terry Gross, a Twitter account with nearly 250,000 followers, and two prestigious 2021 fellowships, Ewing is a captivating thinker with a wide reach. Her brilliance and charisma had me a little starstruck.

Spread out on the table were photographs, letters, and literary magazines from Chicago. We looked at a 1961 letter from poet Gwendolyn Brooks to writer and editor Jack Conroy, which includes Brooks’s now-infamous recipe for a frozen fruit salad. There were a few photographs of the old Regal Theater and Savoy Ballroom and a large book of bright lithographs by Elizabeth Catlett illustrating a 1937 poem by Margaret Walker.

A little less spectacular, yet rife with Chicago history, was a fat typescript from the papers of Victor Lawson, publisher of the Chicago Daily News from 1876 until 1925. Lawson was one of twelve civic leaders appointed to the Chicago Commission on Race Relations after the 1919 rioting. The commission included six white men and six Black men. (Women, as Ewing joked, had not yet been invented.) The typescript contained minutes from a November 1919 meeting, following the riots, in which the twelve men discussed how they would document what had happened—and their hope of ensuring that it would not happen again. This commission eventually published The Negro in Chicago: A Study on Race Relations in 1922. A report of more than six hundred pages, it is one of the most important primary sources on race relations during the twentieth century. “Many of its passages immediately made me think about poetry,” Ewing writes in the opening pages of 1919. “They were so narrative, so evocative, so imagistic.” Largely written by the African American sociologist Charles S. Johnson, the commission report renders the everyday lives of Black Chicagoans in limpid prose and contains invaluable photographs, charts, and maps. The commission’s findings of systemic racism were voluminous, but very few of its recommendations were enacted. “The report was like an old tapestry with loose threads sticking out,” Ewing wrote, “and I wanted to tug on them and see what I could unravel, see what new thing I could weave.”

The Victor Lawson Papers include meeting minutes and other documents produced by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, a group convened by the city in response to racial violence in the summer of 1919. In 1919, Ewing incorporates text from the commission’s report into her poems.

Weaving together Chicago’s past using language that still resonates deeply today—this is Ewing’s signature style, a way of rendering history that also transforms our thinking about possibilities for the future. At the start of many of her poems in 1919, Ewing quotes from the commission report, provoking readers to think about where we have been, and where we might go.

Ewing has called herself an Afrofuturist: she creates new stories that see ahead—sometimes fantastical, threaded with elements of science fiction—in resistance to the erasure of Black people from American history. In the book’s last poem, she considers the legacy of racial violence and restores the life of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, a Chicagoan who was lynched in 1955 on a trip to Mississippi. “I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store” is the title of the poem, which begins:

Looking over the plums, one by one Lifting each to his eyes and Turning it slowly, a little earth, Checking the smooth skin for pockmarks And rot, or signs of unkind days or people

An everyday errand pays homage to Till’s gentle life in contrast to his violent death at the hands of a white mob. But the poem turns over the question, Is the earth rotten? Ewing’s poem also conjures other key poems in American literary history: Brooks’s two poems about Till in her 1960 volume The Bean Eaters and Allen Ginsberg’s 1955 “A Supermarket in California,” which imagines Walt Whitman, a “graybeard, lonely old courage teacher,” ambling through fluorescent-lit grocery aisles. Both Ewing and Ginsberg wonder about the fate of the United States. Ewing’s poem ends with a question to Till:

how are things going for you

oh he sighed and put the candy on the belt it goes, it goes.

If time is like the turn of a conveyer belt, then will Till’s terrible story of racial violence keep looping back around again?

During her visit, Ewing and I talked about how the materials I showed her in the reading room became part of the Newberry’s collection. What survives? What gets lost? Take Victor Lawson’s meticulous record of the 1919 commission. Are there other accounts of the commission’s conversations that might be recovered? Of less “official” histories?

Naturally, I asked Ewing if she kept an archive of her own. Yes, she said, she certainly did. Ewing has been amassing her own formidable archive since she started writing, including drafts of essays and books, art projects, photographs, cards, text threads, and marked-up manuscripts. She has kept materials related to her work with community organizations and children, and her letters and email correspondence with writers, scholars, and organizers in Chicago and beyond. We continued talking about where this material might end up, where it might be preserved for the future. Would she consider the Newberry?

It may seem surprising—the archival inclination of such a young writer—but Ewing’s impulse to collect has an important history. A commitment to archiving, as the Columbia University scholar Brent Hayes Edwards has argued, is an indispensable element of the Black radical tradition. For many Black writers and intellectuals, the aim of saving materials is not only to preserve the past, but also to challenge ideas about what is worth saving. Historically, most archival repositories like the Newberry did not prioritize collecting or preserving African American history.

Significant collections kept by Black artists and intellectuals sometimes remained in the attics, basements, or closets of their own homes. Preserving these collections oneself could become a form of resistance to the primacy of white-only narratives, as if to say, I’m saving what I know you won’t save. For example, poet and playwright Amiri Baraka, who died in 2014, kept hundreds of boxes in his basement in Newark, New Jersey, documenting his life as a writer, activist, and institution-builder. His work as a collector correlates with his work on the streets. Similarly, the origins of the DuSable Museum of African American History began in the Bronzeville residence of its founder, educator and artist Margaret Burroughs, who created an archive of Black history that she kept in her home.

A commitment to archiving . . . is an indispensable element of the Black radical tradition. For many Black writers and intellectuals, the aim of saving materials is not only to preserve the past, but also to challenge ideas about what is worth saving.

“Writers and archivists did me a kindness by making sure these materials stuck around for the future. It’s my responsibility to do the same.”

Some materials, of course, also come from the homes of less well-known people who save all kinds of material, from scrapbooks and newspapers to yearbooks and home movies. A recent exhibit marking the fifteenth anniversary of Chicago’s Black Metropolis Research Consortium’s founding points out how many Black historical collections have been “hidden” because they remained in private hands. The aims of the BMRC (of which the Newberry is a member) include expanding access to these collections and supporting Black communities as they save and preserve personal, institutional, and community archives.

When Ewing was nineteen, she took a course with Jacqueline Goldsby, a literary scholar then at the University of Chicago, now at Yale University, who oversaw an extraordinary project called Mapping the Stacks. The project, which began in 2003, aimed to identify and organize uncatalogued archival collections that chronicle Black Chicago between the 1930s and 1970s. This work has led to countless new books, projects, and programs related to the history and cultural ferment of Black Chicago. (My own writing would not be the same without the project.)

In Goldsby’s class, Ewing worked with archival materials from two African American newspapers: the Chicago Defender and the Chicago Bee. One year later, she looked at materials from the papers of Gwendolyn Brooks. One of the many gems in Brooks’s collection are her annotated copies of TV Guide magazine. Ewing could see the pages that Brooks tore out. (A revelation? Brooks loved soap operas.) These archives conserve a vital humanity. “Writers and archivists did me a kindness by making sure these materials stuck around for the future,” Ewing told me, “and it’s my responsibility to do the same.”

Ewing decided to donate her papers to the Newberry after further conversations that included Alison Hinderliter, the Lloyd Lewis Curator of Modern Manuscripts. A few months after our initial meeting, Hinderliter and I met Ewing in the library’s parking lot. This time, Ewing had packed her car full of plastic bins. We carted the bins up to a room on the library’s fourth floor, where the three of us spent several hours going through Ewing’s materials, a process that archivists like Hinderliter call “a rough sort.”

At one point, Ewing unfolded a tiny triangle of notepaper, folded like origami, from her high school days at Northside College Prep. She read it, laughed, and folded it back up again—should we keep these notes about high school crushes? We also discussed Ewing’s digital collection. How might we preserve years of text messages between Ewing and famous fellow writers? And how do we protect the privacy of so many living people?

We asked Ewing how long she would like to keep some materials restricted, in order to protect the privacy of her correspondents. She asked for 75 years. That means that her letters, emails, and texts will be closed until November 13, 2094. “Hopefully I won’t live to be 107,” Ewing told me, “or I’ll have a lot of awkward conversations to handle when the appointed date for them to go public rolls around.”

As for all of Ewing’s messages and interactions that are “born-digital,” the Newberry continues to develop the technological tools and staff expertise to preserve this material. Perhaps most importantly, our discussions with Ewing will be ongoing, as digital materials require trust between the creator of an archive and the archive’s keeper. The ephemerality of digital messages, the passwords required for access, and the planned obsolescence of computers, phones, and storage devices require archivists to think about the preservation of historic documents in ways that go beyond paper or book conservation.

Recently, I was inspired to ask Ewing to compose new poems for an upcoming Newberry exhibition called Chicago Avant-Garde: Five Women Ahead of Their Time (on view at the Newberry from September 10 through December 30, 2021). The exhibition will illuminate the work of five women who took radical risks in their lives and in their art: dancer Ruth Page, art dealer and curator Katharine Kuh, dancer Katherine Dunham, painter Gertrude Abercrombie, and poet Gwendolyn Brooks. The women of Chicago Avant-Garde creatively and often subversively challenged constrictions on their lives, especially the limitations placed on them because of their gender. They were committed to making and supporting provocative art that would activate social change. They created a cultural landscape in Chicago and a mode of being ahead of the times that seems, to my mind, a striking precursor to Ewing.

During the pandemic, I sent Ewing emails full of digitized material about the women of Chicago AvantGarde, including postcards, photographs, dance clips, and correspondence. Out of this archive of material, Ewing

“The Newberry has been an impressive archival steward, and I have all the faith in the world that the institution will care for my materials long after I’m gone.”

produced five new poems, based upon a moment in the life of each woman. These poems will be included in the catalogue for Chicago Avant-Garde.

One of Ewing’s new poems focuses on Gwendolyn Brooks in the moments before she found out that she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Another poem, titled “that morning,” imagines Katharine Kuh coming into her gallery to find the windows shattered, likely the work of a vigilante group that hated modern art. Another poem rethinks something Ruth Page said about classical ballet in an interview with Studs Terkel: “You have to look fragile, but not be fragile.” Two surrealist paintings by Gertrude Abercrombie inspired a poem with the opening line, “the tree weeps, bark split from the last storm.” And in a moving poem titled “Steps of the Gods,” Ewing imagines Katherine Dunham observing dancers in Haiti, an epiphany moment, catalyzing Dunham’s key decision to pursue a life in dance.

Ewing’s papers have found a repository in the center of Chicago, free and open to the public, where they will be preserved and accessible to a wide range of readers. “The Newberry has been an impressive archival steward, and I have all the faith in the world that the institution will care for my materials long after I’m gone,” Ewing told me. She also added, “But my real reason for donating my papers to the Newberry is … I hate clutter and I don’t want them in my house!” This is not the first time that the Newberry has benefited from good housekeeping. Just consult the papers of journalist, playwright, and screenwriter Ben Hecht.

Ewing’s papers complement and amplify other Newberry collections related to the cultural life of Chicago, especially many collections that illuminate the historical links between art and activism. Perhaps one day, in 2094, students will arrive at the library looking for connections between the riots of 1919 and the pandemic of 2020. Or a scholar might seek voices from the arts that register the impact of social inequality upon the lives of young people. Or a curious reader might come to the library looking to understand the process through which poetry gets made. These visitors to the Newberry will find plenty of material in the newly opened papers of Eve L. Ewing, an extraordinary thinker who knows enough to see forward into the future.

Liesl Olson is Director of Chicago Studies at the Newberry. She is the author of Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis.

Left to right: Gertrude Abercrombie, Katherine Dunham, Katharine Kuh, Ruth Page, and Gwendolyn Brooks, the subjects of an upcoming Newberry exhibition titled Chicago Avant-Garde: Five Women Ahead of Their Time, are the inspiration for five new poems by Eve Ewing.