July 29th, 2021 - Jerri Norman - Blog Post #3
The most exciting thing I came across during my time looking at older documents in special collections was finding out about the Black Arts Festival. From my research, it looked like there was a Black Arts Festival created and run by ABC in the 1971, 1972, and 1973 for 4-5 days in the spring. There were photo copies of old news articles from the Lafayette and an Easton newspaper, old itineraries, letters, and communications too! During the first year of this program, there were multiples talks/seminars, parties, gatherings, and even a really cool concert where Kool & the Gang performed too! Also excitingly, we came across about 8 editions of Rapped in Black which helped us identify many of the photos we did not have any identifying informations about.
As we are about to wrap up the summer work, I look forward to exploring the Black Arts Festivals through the years as well as increase the number of digitized items we have in our inventory aside from submissions in the future!