Revealing Black History, Retelling Black Experience: A Look Into the Smithsonian Transcription Center and the Freedmen’s Bureau

 by Samuel Ernst

To convert its vast collection of historical documents into a digital format, the Smithsonian Institution turns to an unlikely hero –  strangers on the internet. Or, to use the official term, crowdsourcing. The Smithsonian Transcription Center uploads hundreds of scans of the Smithsonian’s documents to its website, https://transcription.si.edu/. 

Volunteers can then click on any available document to transcribe it. In the process, they have to decipher a lot of archaic language and handwritten cursive. Most pages end up having several different people working on them at different points in time. Before the documents go off to the team at the Smithsonian, other volunteers give each document a final review.

I worked with the Transcription Center as part of my final project for my capstone English course. As our course covered Black women writers, I chose to work on documents related to Black history, intending to learn more about Black Americans’ lived experiences. My project essentially had one guiding question: What can the Smithsonian’s documents tell us about the experiences of Black Americans through history?

            A large part of the Smithsonian’s collection comes from an organization called the Freedmen’s Bureau. From 1865 to 1872, the Bureau helped formerly-enslaved Black people, as well as White refugees, adjust to living in freedom. According to the Smithsonian, “By most accounts, the Bureau was only partially successful. Congress did not provide sufficient funds or staff for the Bureau to be truly effective” (NMAAHC). Reading Freedman’s Bureau documents, the importance of material resources becomes apparent.

            Most of the documents in the collection take the form of requests or receipts for things like food or school supplies. When I realized this, it kind of disappointed me. When I set out to do this project, with this theme of Black experiences, I hoped to find letters written by formerly enslaved people. I thought I’d find someone’s life story, or read some inspirational tale about life after emancipation. But in reality, the vast majority of Black Americans in the nineteenth century couldn’t read or write. In many cases, teaching enslaved people reading and writing was illegal.

            In the age of social media, where nearly anyone can make themselves heard, we take literacy for granted. But being able to tell your story is a privilege. To learn about the lives of people without memoirs, without diaries, and without Twitter, seemingly mundane artifacts like government records become crucial. The Transcription Center performs invaluable work for academics, researchers, and family historians alike.

Let’s look at a few of the documents I encountered over the course of this project.

 

This example pertains to a legal dispute involving a mule. A Bureau leader, General Whittlesey, refers Mr. Simmons to the Civil Court system. northcarolinahistory.org gives us some more information on Whittlesey. In his time with the Bureau, he grappled with the issue of apprenticeships. Adrienne Dunn says, “Apprenticeship, which bound a child to a master, took children away from their parents. Whittlesey loathed the practice and mandated policies that soon undermined the apprenticeship practice …   In his opinion, the practice of apprenticeship resembled slavery.”

Even though Black people had been freed, plantation owners found new ways to take advantage of them. The Freedmen’s Bureau had to decide how it wanted to handle apprenticeships and indentures. Banning these exploitative labor practices would upset the government’s still-volatile relationship with the White plantation owners who benefitted from them.

 

This letter, also from North Carolina, discusses the custody of a child involved in an indenture. The writer asks whether the Bureau had custody, or a woman named Martha (possibly the child’s mother). “If Martha is recognized as the guardian then the indenture should be annulled,” he writes. This letter shows how much control the Bureau had over people’s lives. Whatever their decision, it determined the course of this child’s future.

While some Bureau officials like Whittlesey cared much about Black Americans’ well-being, they certainly didn’t make the best decisions all the time. Bureau leaders’ place in society differed greatly from the people they worked to help, and so they couldn’t fully understand Black Americans’ experiences and what kinds of help they needed best. And, as we can see through these documents, Bureau leaders’ actions sometimes depended on the government’s considerations rather than what might best benefit people.

Stephen Moore, a Freedmen’s Bureau leader, sent this letter to the Department of Agriculture after receiving a delivery of seeds. He feels disappointed that the Department’s “supply is too limited to send more”. The Bureau clearly had a lot of demand. Moore says, “my motive in sending for them was to benefit the Freedmen and Poor Whites of this Sub Dist[rict] who are destitute of a proper variety of Garden Seeds.”  

Moore attempted to fulfill their need, but he could only do so much. The inability to receive tools they need to thrive would leave Black Americans dependent on organizations like the Bureau. Just as they could not write their own stories, Black people came out of slavery reliant on White-led organizations like the Freedmen’s Bureau, without the ability to lead themselves.

Interestingly, Dunn describes how Whittlesey formed a Black-led farm, to show that Black people “could be in charge of their labor”. This practice apparently did not become widespread, but it shows one method the Bureau explored that could have put more power in the hands of Black people.

    The documents I showed above form only a miniscule part of the Freedmen’s Bureau’s records, which span multiple Southern states. I encourage you to check transcription.si.edu to learn more and maybe even transcribe some documents yourself. 

    In keeping with the theme of my project, I also wanted to see how the works our class read from Black women writers echoed the historical experiences of Black Americans. One poem we read this semester struck me as relevant to the Freedmen’s Bureau documents.

    Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem, “kitchenette building”, describes daily life in a poor apartment building – a “kitchenette building”, where multiple families shared one bathroom. Written in the 1960s, it takes place in a much different time than when the Bureau operated, but its discussion of poverty and dreaming can help us imagine what Black Americans in the late nineteenth century might have thought and believed.

            (Source: Poetry Foundation)

The building’s residents spend all of their energy trying to get by. They have to feed their family, take out the trash, and pay their rent. To people struggling through poverty, dreaming feels abstract, farflung, and frivolous compared to their more immediate concerns. It “makes a giddy sound, not strong”. Dreams have to “fight with fried potatoes / And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall”, to get people’s attention.

The people helped by the Freedmen’s Bureau faced very similar issues.

At first, I wondered why the documents only dealt with material needs – but as Brooks’ poem shows us, poverty prevents people from even thinking about their dreams. Factors like racism, slavery, and poverty have done great harm to countless people, keeping them from reaching their full potential.

            Of course, I want to end this blog on a more optimistic note.

These people can still have their stories told. By writing a poem about impoverished, working class people, Brooks makes them something greater. She chooses not to write about beautiful, elegant situations, the kind of things we might typically think of as “poetic”. Poems like “kitchenette building” allow ordinary people in downtrodden lives to attain a greater stature.

While I can’t say I’ve ever read a poem about the Freedmen’s Bureau, I feel like Brooks channels their struggles as she relays the experiences of the impoverished people around her. Many other Black authors look to their past and give voices to people without one. Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, centered around a formerly enslaved protagonist, or poet Tyehimba Jess’s book Olio, which includes poems from the perspective of nineteenth and early twentieth century Black stage performers represent just two out of very many examples.

And of course, the Smithsonian’s transcription projects also honor people. Could any of the leaders or people helped by the Freedmen’s Bureau have imagined that people like us, a hundred years in the future, would read their names and think about them? Or imagine what their lives were like?

 I wanted to make a blog post for this project because I wanted to share what I found, with an audience wider than just myself. While transcription does  help more people access the Smithsonian’s documents, not many people might know they exist at all. They could very easily stay hidden in the depths of the Smithsonian's website. I hope in sharing this project with you, I also got you to learn more about these archives and the Black people who history has often forgotten.

 

(Disclaimer: Although I undertook this project for my capstone course, my work on this project is my own. Any opinions or beliefs expressed in this project, this blog, or any of my social media is my own, and does not reflect the opinions of the College

Photographs of documents are my own screenshots of the Smithsonian Transcription Center’s website. All documents belong to the Smithsonian. The transcriptions include my own work as well as those I encountered of other volunteers.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sources:

 

“Beloved.” goodreads, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6149.Beloved.

Brooks, Gwendolyn.”kitchenette building.” Poetry Foundation, 1963, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43308/kitchenette-building.

Fielder, Vaughn Ashlie. “Books.” TyehimbaJess.net, 2021, https://www.tyehimbajess.net/books.html.

Dunn, Adrienne. “Eliphalet Whittlesey (1821-1909).” North Carolina History Project, 2016, https://northcarolinahistory.org/encyclopedia/eliphalet-whittlesey-1821-1909/.

National Museum of African American History And Culture. “Freedmen’s Bureau Transcription Project Frequently Asked Questions.” https://transcription.si.edu/sites/default/files/uploads/instructions/FreedmensBureau/FB_FAQ_05_04_17.pdf.

“Smithsonian Digital Volunteers: Transcription Center.” 2021, https://transcription.si.edu/.