Archivists in Mississippi see a lot. We organize photographs of Civil Rights Movement marches. We touch flyers distributed by the Ku Klux Klan. We catalog books that defended slavery and books that condemned it. We digitize bills of sale for Black men, women, and children who were traded like livestock. We preserve Blues recordings by legendary Mississippi musicians. We manage an extensive, bipartisan body of records for public servants at every level of government. We process the collections of pioneering women in journalism and letters written by newly emancipated African Americans to their governor in the 1860s. We help researchers find the records of the first women and the first Black people to attend our universities. We preserve the stories of Chinese immigrants in the Mississippi Delta.

We are information scientists. We risk our health, safety, and wellness in this work. We are trained in tasks such as disaster prevention and conservation. We routinely handle highly flammable materials such as nitrate film. We handle molded, water-damaged, and smoke-damaged materials. We develop storage solutions to extend the life of every type of record imaginable, from moving image to thousands of linear feet of paper. We build boxes to protect the rarest and oldest publications. Our repositories contain, in some cases, the only copies or editions of certain media in the world. We are conservationists of the historical record.

For many years, Mississippi archives and written histories told only one side of the story. Many of our predecessors in the field of archival work did not value and did not seek to preserve materials like the ledgers of Black businessmen at the turn of the century or scrapbooks from Black civil, religious, and fraternal organizations. Our archives reflected the narrative we wanted to tell. They did not tell the truth, and Mississippi’s story was incomplete. 

The past few decades have seen increasing emphasis on acquiring documents and artifacts from groups that were and still are underrepresented in our collections, as well as creating more exhibits that tell these stories. In 2017, we celebrated as the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum opened its doors and invited visitors from across the nation and around the world to learn the true story. Future historians of our state, as well as future generations of students, will have a much more diverse – and therefore a much richer – body of primary sources for their research, cultural enrichment, and learning.

Now, we are at another crossroads. As we witness the dismantling of diversity programs at the state and national level, we share in the outrage and sadness of many Americans at the rejection of decades of progress. From our perspective as information scientists, the greatest threat to these records is time. The past support of our public leaders has allowed us to invest in technology, resources, and staff to better fight the uphill battle of time, and for that we are grateful. However, as exhibited by reductions in staff and services at the National Archives and Records Administration and the dismissal of National Park Service guides and educators at historical sites, we stand to lose the fight against time even faster, and records will be lost as these decisions are litigated. Additionally, attempts to erase certain people such as members of the LGBTQ+ community from federal historic monuments and spaces serve only to revive antiquated limitations on the wide, inclusive repositories of human and institutional histories that we have dedicated our careers to preserve. Limiting our ability to provide access to these records is a direct violation of the ideals of democratic freedom inherent to American experience.

The Society of Mississippi Archivists is a non-profit professional organization funded by individual memberships, which gives us the freedom and the privilege to reject this political push against diversity and inclusion. We call upon our membership to recommit without reservation to the necessary work of collecting the records, preserving the history, and telling the stories of all Mississippians, and we humbly ask the people of Mississippi for continued support of our mission. Our archives document American history at its ugliest and at its most heroic, and our job is to protect it all – to ensure that future generations have access to the truth regardless of ever-changing trends in political ideology that have no bearing on the existence or facts of our records or the basic rights of people to learn from them.

Signed,
The Board of the Society of Mississippi Archivists
February 21, 2025