In her thought-provoking article ‘Historians and Ethics: Finding Anne Moody’, historian Françoise Hamlin discusses how she accessed – and unwittingly facilitated the destruction of – an American civil rights activist’s personal archive.
The story begins in 2012, when a US university acquired the unorganised papers of Anne Moody, onetime participant in a famous sit-in protest in Jackson, Mississippi in 1963.
![Anne Moody, sat stoically at violent Woolworth's sit-in, dies at 74 - Los Angeles Times Anne Moody, sat stoically at violent Woolworth's sit-in, dies at 74 - Los Angeles Times](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7142d1cc-44f5-45da-81a4-fed6e5045275_1200x997.jpeg)
The university acquired these boxes through serendipity. The boxes were found in a storage unit that was cleared out when the lessee defaulted on their payments. Eventually, they made their way to the university through an antiques dealer.
Yet Anne Moody, the deceased creator of these documents, had no intention of donating these papers. Legally speaking, everything was above board. But there was an open ethical question: how should historians approach personal material deposited in an archive without the person’s consent?
Françoise Hamlin discovered that the boxes contained little of value for historians of Anne Moody’s activism. Instead, they revealed ‘a chronically mentally ill woman attempting to write her way out of her confusion.’
Hamlin made this known to Moody’s family, who contacted the university to withdraw the material. A member of the family then unilaterally opted to destroy the material ‘unceremoniously in a huge bonfire.’
‘I felt that I had done my moral and ethical duty to Anne Moody, a woman who had suffered enough’, writes Hamlin, ‘but for a historian, the loss of any archive cuts deep.’ Nevertheless, Hamlin felt she had set her own ‘ethic of care.’
I was struck by Hamlin’s suggestion that historians should mark out our own ethical guiding lines.
Although historians think about these ethical dilemmas, our discipline has no defined principles on this issue. Precisely how archival material gets acquired and what this means for how we should use it is curiously under-discussed.
This idea that we should provide consideration for the privacy of the dead is something I have thought about often. My own research regularly involves working with family archives and sometimes includes encounters with deeply personal material.
‘Are we compelled to report everything, regardless of the effects?’ is a question Hamlin asks in her article.
It reminded me of the time I realised, through speaking with living descendants, that someone whose life I had researched was an alcoholic. The person excised this from their own account of their life.
When it came time to write something about this person, I did not describe their addiction. I felt myself guided by how this individual chose to define the shape of their own life. In any case, it mattered little to the story I was telling, which did not cross into the years when the addiction was most acute.
I feel as though I did right by this individual. But I still wonder if I did right by the historical record.
One place where I feel closer to a conclusion is on the question of private archives and access. I have settled on an idea of inherited consent: the person who inherits the documents also assumes control of what should be done with them. This includes going against the explicit request of the person who left the documents behind.
A famous case is that of Franz Kafka, who instructed his friend and literary executor Max Brod to burn his manuscripts upon his death. I recently visited the new Kafka exhibition in the Weston Library, Oxford, where visitors are asked if they would burn the material and invited to place their answers on the wall.
Brod did not burn Kafka’s material. Did Brod inherit the right to betray his friend’s wishes? I would argue yes.
As a historian approaching people who hold onto documents of their loved ones, inherited consent obliges me to always acknowledge that the inheritor has ultimate control over whether or not I can publish from the material.
Fortunately, I usually find an openness on the part of families to let me work with material. But I have also encountered people who have refused me access to privately held material. I simply have to accept that.
How we balance respect for the complexity of an individual life with a professional imperative to reflect the past accurately is a more open-ended question. I take it case by case.
That’s how I set my own ethic of care, to borrow Françoise Hamlin’s phrase.
P.S.
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