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Howard High School of Technology
Howard High School of Technology
Wilmington, Delaware
Wilmington, Delaware
Wilmington's Howard High School of Technology was the first institute of secondary education for Black Delawareans. Originally founded in 1867 and named after General Otis Howard (who founded Howard University the same year), the school has taught notable alumni like the writer Alice Dunbar-Nelson and jazz trumpeter Clifford Brown. Dunbar-Nelson's niece, the activist and writer Pauline Young, served as Howard's librarian for several decades.
In the early 1950s, Howard was the focal point for anti-segregation lawsuits from Black families, and one case, Gebhart v. Belton (1952), continued to the Supreme Court as one of five that made up the Brown v. Board (1954) decision. Despite the court's ruling, Delaware schools still face inequality and the legacies of de jure and de facto segregation.
The original entryway to Howard's current location, built in 1927. Photograph by Wikimedia Commons user Smallbones is in the public domain.
For more on Howard's history, check out the excellent booklet they produced after renovations in 2018.
About Collections AID
About Collections AID
Every year, the University of Delaware's Museum Studies Program runs Collections AID (formerly "Collections SWAT"), a two-week intensive service "mini-internship" that gives graduate students experience with collections management and assists a local archive, museum, or heritage site. It's a rigorous week of hectic work, but a highly rewarding experience for both the students and the hosting institution.
For Collections AID 2022, we spent a day working with St. John AME Church in Newark, Delaware. My main project entailed assembling this glass display case, with less-than-transparent instructions. After getting it together, my teammate and I made sure to clean our fingerprints! Photo by Tracy Jentzsch.Â
Boxes and Boxes and Boxes of Books
Boxes and Boxes and Boxes of Books
A mountain of boxes greeted us at Howard on our first day.
A mountain of boxes greeted us at Howard on our first day.
They held books, newspaper clippings, memorabilia and artifacts, and much more. The sheer scope of the project forced us to adopt a "More Product, Less Process" approach, and we split into teams to rehouse and catalogue the material with enough information to let researchers find and use them, but as efficiently as possible.
I belonged to the books team, which devoted its time to grouping over 1,300 books by genre, assigning them catalogue entries and numbers, and rehousing the considerable ephemera found inside. We worked in a section of Howard's former library with gorgeous (if dusty) wooden bookshelves.
The Pile. We made it through all of this in about ten days.
Photo by Melissa Benbow.
There were A LOT of books. Our final count totaled over 1,300!
Photo by Melissa Benbow. When I arrived, these boxes had already been moved out of this room.
Kaari Newman (right) and I, making progress on cataloguing and shelving.
Photo by Melissa Benbow.
The job seemed simple on the face of it, but with
The job seemed simple on the face of it, but with
only four (sometimes five) people and a lot more ephemera than we anticipated, work progressed quickly but never seemed to end. To make things even more interesting, we realized about halfway through the project that we'd been using the wrong brackets to hold up the shelves, and the weight of all the books threatened to collapse them. We sprang into action, carefully transferring the books from the shelves, uninstalling the old brackets, and replacing them with the original, proper ones.
I don't think any of us would have been able to do it alone. And by the end of the second week, the Books Team had become a well-oiled machine, or as best a machine as we could be in such a short time.
Over two follow-up visits, a few of us returned to Howard to tie up some loose ends. On these days, I boxed the shellac and vinyl records, arranged artifacts in archival trays, and added the final labels to the bookshelves I had helped populate.
The books team, hard at work. We relied on collaboration to get things done effectively. (L to R: Kaari Newman, Corinne Freeth, Chris Loos, Maureen Iplenski). Photo by Melissa Benbow.
We stored the dozens of pieces of memorabilia--from trophies to knick-knacks to band uniforms--in metal cabinets such as this one. Part of my work on follow-up visits involved arranging these in archival trays. Photo by Chris Loos.
Part of my work on follow-up visits involved boxing the vinyl and shellac records, which included artists like the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Paul Robeson, and Harry Belafonte. Photo by Chris Loos.
One set of bookcases spanned topics such as Black Studies, Memoirs, and Education. We filled the extra space with artifacts like trophies and framed photos. Photo by Melissa Benbow.
Below: The newspaper clippings, periodicals, and print ephemera, now properly organized in archival boxes. Photo by Melissa Benbow.
Collections AID's work at Howard offered me incredibly valuable experience in quickly and accurately archiving a massive collection. I learned the ins and outs of book cataloguing (albeit in a very abbreviated form!), and got to hold some fascinating objects in my own hands.
Collections AID's work at Howard offered me incredibly valuable experience in quickly and accurately archiving a massive collection. I learned the ins and outs of book cataloguing (albeit in a very abbreviated form!), and got to hold some fascinating objects in my own hands.
But Collections AID is ultimately about service, and I am proud to have helped the people at Howard to share their history with others. We had the privilege of working alongside members of Howard's Alumni Association, vibrant community figures with amazing stories. They regaled us over lunch, but also stopped to open up when a document, photograph, or artifact brought back memories. And for me, getting to hear those stories might have been the most rewarding part of the experience.
While I graduate from UD in May and won't be able to participate in future Collections AID projects, I hope to embody its approach to history and service in everything I do going forward.
Some of the collection's highlights...
Some of the collection's highlights...
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