Maeve: Thursday June 22nd

Today I continued going through the archives, this time with more help from the digital collections. I made folders in our Google drive folder corresponding to each folder in my box, so that I could track everything by donor. The folders I've explored are Ladislas Szecsi (1932), Charles Thomas (1892-1898), Talcott Williams "Morocco" (1897-8),  J. Noble White (1928-1931), Lena H. White (1928-1949), and Mrs. T. W. Woodside (1930). All of my notes from today are up in those folders, but my main experience today was frustration with Mr. and Mrs. Talcott Williams's handwritings. They sent long, detailed letters home from their Moroccan expedition (the museum commissioned them), but they both write in incredibly loose cursive that's almost impossible to read. It was very difficult to positively identify any relevant words. Two of the objects they collected are definitely going on display, but I couldn't figure out whether they were actually discussed anywhere in their writings, and wondered where their catalogues might be, as they both worked at the museum for a short period. I was able to find some very clear passages from J. Noble White talking about statue number 30-55-1 in the collections, but it doesn't look like Dr. Zuberi has selected that particular statue. Szecsi's objects also don't seem to have been selected for the exhibit, but I was able to find them in our collection and match at least one to some writings. I finished with the box around 3:30, and decided to do a bit of research from home, as I wasn't able to plug my computer in in the archives room and there was a Bryn Mawr class visiting which was distracting.

home research:
found charles f thomas, d.d. in a cemetery (he's the guy with the shackled statue)
searched rev dr durbin (the one who apparently collected the object) & the oldest methodist church in philadelphia--it's st. george's, which has a very interesting history, to say the least
durbin worked there--his name pops up in records of their sermons and finances. it also popped up in a transcript of an 1860 charles sumner speech "the barbarism of slavery: on the bill for the admission of kansas as a free state." dr durbin was listed among notable personalities who had been invited to sit up on the stage during the speech. the president & members of the cabinet were apparently in the audience!
when he died, they wrote an article about it, and it was so popular someone wrote a book about him. scrolling through the chapter titles alone is interesting enough--each one is a paragraph!

He was also chaplain to the U.S. Senate--the chapter after that announces "The persistent student in Baltimore and Washington--Fame does not impair his energy." He was the president of Dickinson College, so they might have more of his records. Durbin also apparently traveled in "the East" and Europe before becoming holding the missionary secretaryship mentioned in Charles Thomas's letter. The writer extolls Durbin's every virtue--the man was apparently perfect, and "if the world ever saw greater harmony than pervaded that board [of which Durbin was secretary], the writer has not lived long enough or gone far enough to see it." When he joined, the church already had two small missions in Liberia and "South America," but Durbin expanded it into China, India, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Bulgaria. The writer goes on a racist tangent about Rev. Dr. Durbin's work among "the red men" before delving into his passionate work in Africa and among black Philadelphians: "He saw the world lying in wickedness. He saw millions of his race "without God and without hope in the world." He saw peoples of every color and clime bowing down to gods of wood and stone. In human souls he saw no discriminating hues except those that are moral." Hopefully, the quotation is from a personal paper of Durbin's, so we can see his words without the character inflation this writer is doing. Dickinson College has a transcript of a speech Durbin gave to the Pennsylvania House & Senate on abolishing slavery in which he argues for "colonization, or removing the colored race from amidst the white race." He wants them to return to Africa to form a Christian republic, because he believes that God set different races down differently on purpose, and that we should all stay separate to avoid our "natural animosities". He thinks that all the freed slaves should just be sent to Liberia to convert West Africans to Christianity, because his freed African-American friends and acquaintances aren't "really free." His solution to their oppression is for them to leave. Durbin shared some of his experiences as the secretary of the mission: he received a report from Liberia and was shocked to discover that none of the church's employees there were white (he was shocked because of how high quality their work was). He hopes that "that dark and savage continent" will be transformed by his vision. Apparently, many states had colonies in Africa, and he wanted New Pennsylvania to be "adjoining the Maryland Colony on the South, and stretching down to the Bight of Benin." He sees "our colored people" as different from "the savages." This colonization move will also benefit America financially, he argues. An article on him from "The Ladies Repository" might as well have been trying to find him a wife for how gushingly it describes him.
It doesn't seem that Rev. Dr. Durbin ever set foot in Africa, so it's still unclear as to how he came across the statue, or how it got to Charles Thomas, who gave it to the museum. His papers might be at St. George's.