Forgotten Vision: A Digital Library on Herman Hudson and the Black Studies Movement at Indiana University Bloomington

Abstract

This project serves as a springboard effort in seeking to foreground, through a digital library, the history that chronicles Herman C. Hudson’s role as Vice Chancellor of Afro-American Affairs, specifically, from the years 1970-1975, where he helped to create a unique and academically sound Black Studies department through administrative savvy and institution building. In this way it moves in much the same direction as this author’s dissertation and seeks to build upon it; yet the two research undertakings dovetail in that where the dissertation tells the story through discursive means, the digital library hopes to come to fruition in the form of a visual representation of that same history. On this background, and at present, this project seeks to provide a visual narrative of the ways in which Hudson became the first Vice Chancellor for Afro-American Affairs in 1970 while simultaneously becoming the founding chair of the then Afro-American Studies department. It is the author’s hope to preserve this important history through the digital sphere as an open educational resource which will make this history more accessible to those within and beyond the university walls. In providing this visual journey, the author places primary sources from different repositories in conversation with each other. For example, materials utilized were discovered at the Indiana University Archives, the Lilly Library, the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center Archives and more in an effort to provide a more robust story of the aforestated happenings.