Donning a pair of blue latex gloves, Sauda Mitchell sifted through more than a half-century of NAACP documents that once belonged to Savannah civil rights icon W.W. Law. Hired by the city in January as the collection’s archivist, Mitchell now spends much of her time in City Hall’s archives reading the correspondence Law collected until his death in 2002 at age 79. Mitchell’s tasks include separating the documents into groupings to make it easier for researchers to find things, which gives her one of the first glimpses of historic records that have been out of the public’s reach for 14 years. Letters from historic figures such as former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and civil rights activist Medgar Evers are intermingled with requests from residents seeking Law’s assistance. Mitchell’s arrival in February came after Chatham County Commissioners agreed last summer to transfer to the city about $507,000 in voter-approved sales-tax revenue to pay for archiving Law’s collection. The former reference assistant for the Georgia Historical Society said she left that steady job for the opportunity to promote the history within Law’s collection. “As an archivist of color it was very important for me to select projects to where I felt the end result would be just access for the community to get information that would help them discover information about themselves,” she said. ‘In good hands’ After taking ownership of the collection from the WW Law Foundation in March 2014, the city is working to make sure the materials are accessible to the public. In addition to hiring Mitchell, the SPLOST funding has paid for supplies, equipment and cataloging software necessary for the preservation effort. “I feel good about the SPLOST money and what we’ve been given to work with and what we’ve accomplished so far,” said Luciana Spracher, director of Savannah’s Research Library and Municipal Archives department. It will be a couple of months before Mitchell sorts all the NAACP papers, but some other materials are now available. The city has made viewable more than 1,000 photographs taken between 1868 and 2002.
Comment on City continues efforts to archive W.W. Law collection
Eric Curl, Savannah Morning News
Sat, 04/02/2016 - 8:00pm
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