I’m not sure what I was expecting. Maybe dark cellar rooms that smelled like old books, or boxes filled with papers. Cobwebs, dust—I guess I could throw a few spiders in there too, for good measure. Is it just me, or is this beginning to sound like Hogwarts?
Now, the likelihood of finding this a few blocks from my apartment in Harlem, which is where I planned to visit for my first archive adventure, was very low. I suppose I knew that. But that didn’t stop me from picturing something like the above scene as I swung my backpack on my back and headed off to the Schomburg Center at the Countee Cullen branch of the New York Public Library with one of my classmates.
Both of us are working on crime-related stories that took place within the span of a decade, and we wanted to check out the Center for Research on Black Culture to see how our stories were covered in African American newspapers. I took the biting wind tunnel we charged into on our walk to the library as a sign of warrior-like ambitions: we were going to the archives!
No bags are allowed in the Schomburg Center, lest anyone make off with precious documents or books—which I also took as evidence that we were about to embark on an epic old document journey—and after we checked ours, we headed to the basement.
Discovering that the Center was a well-lit, very modern looking library was perhaps a let down, but I cheered right back up when I spotted a row of microfilm machines.
Now, I’m going to admit something a tad embarrassing here, the one time I ever looked at microfilm was in fifth grade, when my two best friends and I knew that if we just looked through old newspapers from our town long enough, we could find an unsolved mystery to solve. (Bless the souls of those librarians who spent hours helping us.) Sadly, we found nothing, and while that was probably the end of my crime-fighting, mystery-solving career, standing in front of the microfilm machine brought on a pleasant sense of nostalgia.
And then reality set in—what were we looking for, exactly? I mean, besides the obvious answer of “archives.” It was only then that I realized that I have no idea what it means to go searching through archives.
The librarian was moderately helpful, and brought up the ProQuest database on library computers. He swiveled in his rolling chair between different machines, opening various windows that I guess would lead us to different results. Honestly, I really have no idea what he did, which became apparent the second he walked away, and I stared at the computer screen—umm, so what now?
For the next couple of hours, my classmate and I sat at computers and read old articles from The Amsterdam News and other similar papers. It was probably what I didn’t find that was the most interesting; there was no coverage in the paper of the initial murder of Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert, two affluent white “career girls” who were brutally killed on August 28, 1963. That this murder filled pages and pages of the New York Times for months, yet received no mention in these, is certainly indicative of the racist and classist backbone of the whole ordeal.
Then I looked for coverage of the arrest and subsequent trials of George Whitmore, the suspect who was, it later came out, coerced into confessing guilt. The articles I found were somewhat more hyperbolic than the Times’ coverage, but overall, not too fiery.
After a good deal of research, I had a bunch of PDF files open. It was then that I learned that these particular library computers didn’t connect to the internet, nor did I have the foresight to bring a pen drive. (Never will that happen again, lesson learned.)
I wouldn’t say my experience was a total failure, but once my classmate and I realized that the Columbia library gives us access to the same ProQuest databases, I did kind of feel like a failure. Where were the private diaries of the girls’ families, or the personal paperwork of the presiding judge? We played around on the various databases, and found nothing.
My account ends with an appeal to my classmates and professor: can we talk about how to do archival research when you’re not even sure what you’re looking for because you don’t know what exists out there? And even more basic than that, what do we mean when we talk about “archives?” Oh, and if you can point me in the direction of Hogwarts-esque caves with rare documents, all the better!