African Activist Archive Project

The African Activist Archive Project has been at work for 16 years preserving the history of activists who organized in communities and campuses across the United States in solidarity with southern African liberation struggles. The motivation for the project was to keep this history from being lost and to bring together materials that people had saved in shoeboxes and file folders so as to make this history accessible to scholars of this movement as well as contemporary activists.

The project’s digital archive now contains more than 11,600 images, documents, and audio and video recordings, and it is still growing. Jennifer, along with Richard Knight, had a vision of this project, and she recognized that it needed to have an institutional home in order to be taken care of capably and built sustainably.

It was Jennifer who reached out to the African Studies Center at Michigan State University to sponsor the African Activist Archive. Jennifer remained on the project’s Advisory Committee, always pushing us to keep building connections with people who would make creative use of the evidence and stories from this historic international movement.