Collecting area: Africa

Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA to request materials from this collection.

Founded in 1953 by a multi-racial collective of educators including Horace Mann Bond, then President of Lincoln University, and William Leo Hansberry, a professor of history at Howard University, the Africa American Institute has encouraged and supported African students in pursuit of higher education in the United States. From its early years, AAI provided financial and social support for African students studying in the U.S., but it has expanded its activities in scope with the goal of helping to building leadership for Africa within the academic, professional, business, and policy making classes. It has become a vibrant intellectual center for developing human capacity, drawing together thought leaders, researchers, and entrepreneurs interested in issues relating to the continent.

A massive body of material documenting the history of the AAI from its founding in the early 1950s to the present, the collection is a remarkable resource for study of American relations with Africa as the continent emerged from colonial domination. With a focus on the history of educational support and exchange between the continents, the collection contains a vibrant record of the growth of leadership in Africa.

Educator, sociologist, scholar, and author. Includes personal and professional correspondence; administrative and teaching records; research data; manuscripts of published and unpublished speeches, articles and books; photographs; and Bond family papers, especially those of Horace Bond’s father, James Bond. Fully represented are Bond’s two major interests: black education, especially its history and sociological aspects, and Africa, particularly as related to educational and political conditions.

Correspondents include many notable African American educators, Africanists, activists, authors and others, such as Albert C. Barnes, Claude A. Barnett, Mary McLeod Bethune, Arna Bontemps, Ralph Bunche, Rufus Clement, J. G. St. Clair Drake, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edwin Embree, John Hope Franklin, E. Franklin Frazier, W. C. Handy, Thurgood Marshall, Benjamin E. Mays, Pauli Murray, Kwame Nkrumah, Robert Ezra Park, A. Phillip Randolph, Lawrence P. Reddick, A. A. Schomburg, George Shepperson, Carter G. Woodson and Monroe Work.

Center for International Education

Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA to request materials from this collection.

The Center for International Education (CIE) was established in 1968 as a research and implementation organization within the Department of Educational Policy, Research, and Administration in the College of Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In partnership with the academic program in International Education, CIE helps to foster a community of learning and practice on campus and in international development settings, offering opportunities in the areas of International Development Education, Education Policy and Leadership, Nonformal/Popular Adult Education, Basic Education and Literacy, and Internationalizing U.S. Education. The Center has a long and successful history of grant and contract management for projects designing, implementing, and evaluating educational initiatives internationally, and does additional work locally, including Massachusetts Global Education for teachers, and educational and leadership trainings for transitioning students and for immigrant and refugee communities. Additional material from CIE is available through the university’s institutional repository, ScholarWorks.

The bulk of this record group consists of files associated with CIE projects, organized by country and topic, including projects in Central Asia, South Asia, Central and South America, the Middle East, North America, and numerous projects in Africa. The records of CIE faculty member David R. Evans are heavily documented, particularly his work in Uganda. This material also includes multiple examples of “games” used by the Center in various teaching and training sessions to stimulate discussion and creativity. Additional records cover the administrative history of CIE, including founding materials and early files, reports and committee records, newsletters, photographs, and information about Center activities, celebrations, and visitors. A number of CIE publications, including their series, Technical Notes, are also available.

The Gilbert L. Woodside Professor of Zoology at UMass Amherst from 1975-1993, Vincent Dethier was an authority on the biophysics of insect chemosensation and neuroethology. Born in Boston in 1915 into a family of accomplished musicians, Dethier received his doctorate at Harvard in 1939 for a study of the feeding behavior of swallowtail butterfly caterpillars. After service with the Army Air Corps in North Africa and the Middle East during the Second World War and a stint at the Army Chemical Center in Maryland, he resumed his academic career, joining the zoology faculty at Ohio State, Johns Hopkins (1947-1958), the University of Pennsylvania (1958-1967), and Princeton (1967-1975) in succession. His appointment at UMass marks the founding of the university’s program in Neuroscience and Behavior. In addition to over 170 scholarly papers and five scholarly monographs on insect physiology, Dethier wrote several popular works on natural history as well as short stories and children’s books. The recipient of numerous honors during his academic career, Dethier was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1960), the National Academy of Sciences (1965), and the American Philosophical Society (1980), and was recipient of the Entomological Society of America’s Founders’ Memorial Award (1967) and the John Burroughs Medal (1993) for nature writing.

Documenting his post-World War II career, Vincent Dethier’s correspondence relates to scientific organizations, publishing, travel, and speaking engagements, with somewhat sparser information on his research. There are also a handful of photographs, including a series of lantern slides from Dethier’s work in Africa, as well as a scrapbook, a complete set of his publishing scientific papers, and a sampling of short stories and creative writing.

Scholar, writer, editor of The Crisis and other journals, co-founder of the Niagara Movement, the NAACP, and the Pan African Congresses, international spokesperson for peace and for the rights of oppressed minorities, W.E.B. Du Bois was a son of Massachusetts who articulated the strivings of African Americans and developed a trenchant analysis of the problem of the color line in the twentieth century.

The Du Bois Papers contain almost 165 linear feet of the personal and professional papers of a remarkable social activist and intellectual. Touching on all aspects of his long life from his childhood during Reconstruction through the end of his life in 1963, the collection reflects the extraordinary breadth of his social and academic commitments from research in sociology to poetry and plays, from organizing for social change to organizing for Black consciousness.

Aldin Grout was among the first American missionaries to the Zulus. Experiencing a religious conversion in his early twenties, Grout dedicated his life to the ministry, studying at Amherst College (1831) and Andover Theological Seminary (1834) before accepting an overseas appointment through the American Board of Christian and Foreign Missions. In Nov. 1835, Grout and his new wife Hannah (Davis) sailed for South Africa, destined with two other missionary couples for the Natal Province. Even after Hannah died of a lingering illness following the birth of a daughter in December 1835, Grout pressed onward in the cause, not returning home until the end of 1837. Placing his daughter under the care of family, and remarrying to Charlotte (Bailey), he wasted little time in returning to South Africa, remaining there from June 1840 until retiring in 1870, primarily at Umvoti station. In his latter years in Springfield, Grout was active in ABCFM efforts to translate the Bible into Zulu (1883) and he wrote occasionally about his missionary experiences. Aldin Grout died in Springfield on 1894, followed by Charlotte in 1896.

The roughly 195 letters in the Grout collection provided a remarkable commentary on American missionary activities in colonial South Africa, Grout’s personal religious convictions, and the lives of the Zulus to whom he ministered. The collection also includes a handful of fragmentary autobiographical and historical sketches written after Grout’s retirement, a wealth of letters from Grout’s wives and fellow missionary workers, Hannah and Charlotte.

A specialist in higher education and comparative politics in the developing world, Fred Hayward earned a doctorate in Politics at Princeton in 1968 for his research on political organizations in West Africa. Following a 24 year career at the University of Wisconsin (1967-1991), where he became Dean of International Studies and Programs, Hayward has worked as a Senior Associate to the American Council on Education, a consultant to the World Bank, and since 2009, as a Senior Higher Education Consultant with UMass Amherst. Having worked in fifteen countries with ministries, universities, and NGOs, his scholarship runs the gamut from African politics to higher education in Afghanistan.

The papers document some of Fred Hayward’s activities, centered in Africa and Afghanistan. The bulk of the collection stems from his work in Sierra Leone during the 1960s through 1980s, in Ethiopia (2003), and it includes noteworthy material on a World Bank-funded project to support strategic planning for six Afghan Universities as well as a feasibility study on private section involvement in Afghan higher education.

John Edward Higginson retired from the Department of History, University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2024, where he taught since 1989. Higginson received a B.A. in Journalism from Northwestern in Chicago, where he was also a student activist alongside John Bracey (UMass W.E.B. Du Bois Department of African American Studies) in 1968. He went on to receive his Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan, with research focusing on the history of Southern Africa and comparative labor history. His publications include The Hidden Cost of Industrialization: State Violence and the Economic Transformation of Southern Africa, 1900-1980 (forthcoming), Collective Violence and the Agrarian Origins of South African Apartheid, 1900-1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and A Working Class in the Making: The Union Miniere du Haut-Katanga and the African Mineworkers, 1907-1949 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). In 1993-94, he was the recipient of the Research and Writing Fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation.

The John Higginson Papers include documents collected from the South African National Archives, the Historical Papers of the University of Witwatersrand, the Sterling Library at Yale University, Archives africaine in Brussels, Belgium, and Arquivó Historico Ultramarino in Lisbon, Portugal. The papers also include published articles by Professor Higginson and the manuscript versions of his monographs A Working Class in the Making: Belgian Colonial Labor Policy, Private Enterprise and the African Worker, 1900-1947 (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) and Collective Violence and the Agrarian Origins of South African Apartheid, 1900-1948 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). It includes correspondence, class material, readings, lecture notes, course syllabi and materials for his teaching in the History Department, copies of research materials from South African and Congo archives, journal articles on South Africa and Katanga, WPA slave narratives, and minutes and notes from Goodwin AME Zion Church 1993-2005. It also contains William Burr’s dissertation on the Cold War and the Marshall Plan in Europe. These papers were a gift of John Higginson, 2024.

The International Oil Working Group (IOWG) is one of a number of organizations that worked to implement an oil embargo initiated by the United Nations General Assembly against South Africa to protest the country’s policies of apartheid. The IOWG grew out of the Sanctions Working Group established in 1979. Although the nature and timing of the change in names is unclear, it appears that Dr. Teresa Turner was instrumental in the formation of both groups and was primarily responsible for their organization and administration. Other directors included Luis Prado, Arnold Baker and Kassahun Checole. While the group was loosely organized, it maintained the basic structure of a special advisory board with a pool of research associates. Primary activities involved researching topics related to the oil embargo; writing papers for regional, national, and international conferences; giving testimony at UN meetings; providing information to governments, unions and other groups committed to aiding in the implementation of the oil embargo; lecturing to students and members of the community on the subject of sanctions against South Africa; and collaborating with the UN Center Against Apartheid. Research topics included tanker monitoring to detect and expose those shipping companies that broke the embargo; the energy needs in those countries in southern Africa which depend upon South Africa to meet some of their energy demands; ways to effectively implement and enforce the oil embargo; trade union action by oil transport workers; Namibian independence and decolonization; and underground oil storage in South Africa.

Collection consists of administrative papers including financial records, minutes and association history materials; correspondence; printed materials produced by the IOWG; conference files; UN documents relating to South Africa and sanctions; and reference materials, including published reports, news clippings, newsletters and journals, related to oil shipping, tanker information and South African economic and political activity generally.

The Irma McClaurin Black Feminist Archive (BFA) is an archival home for Black women and their allies. Founded by Dr. Irma McClaurin, Black feminist anthropologist, academic administrator, award-winning poet and author, past president of Shaw University and leader in higher education, the BFA seeks to identify Black women from all walks of life who are artists, activists, and academics but may not be well known, and document their wide array of contributions at many levels: community, state, national, and global. In addition to being an ongoing resource for academic and community researchers, the BFA also aims to be a training center, where Black archivists can actively participate in their own history and uplift and protect the endangered legacy of Black women. Articles about Dr. McClaurin and the BFA have appeared in the Massachusetts Daily Collegian, UMass Magazine and on the the Black Presence website. Her article, “Black Women, Visible and Heard,” published in UMass Magazine was highlighted when the publication received the Gold level CASE award in 2022.

The BFA is an umbrella collection, made up of a growing and diverse group of collections documenting Black women, allies, movements, and organizations. Highlights include the papers of renown anthropologists Sheila Walker and Carolyn Martin Shaw; Belizean writer Zee Edgell; activist and educator Cheryl Evans, who founded the Black Pioneers Project documenting the experience of Black students at UMass Amherst during the late 1960s; Lawrence (Larry) Paros, a UMass alum and forerunner of the Alternative Education movement in America, past director of the 1968 Yale Summer High School (YSHS); and the papers of Dr. Irma McClaurin, BFA founder, which include her photographs of iconic Black figures. The development of the BFA has been supported by two grants from the Wenner Gren Foundation: The Historical Archive Grant and The Global Initiative Grant (GIG) for “The Black Feminist Archive Pandemic Preservation Project of Black Women Practicing Anthropologists” project

Collections include:

• Zee Edgell Papers
• Cheryl Evans Papers
• Irma McClaurin Collection
• Lawrence Paros Papers
• Carolyn Martin Shaw Papers
• Audrey Smedley Papers
• Sheila Walker Papers
• Mae Upperman Collection