Visible and Heard
An Investment to Preserve the Past Also Shapes the Future
James Baldwin and Irma McClaurin at his 60th birthday celebration. Gary Michael Tartakov. ©Irma McClaurin, Black Feminist Archive, Special Collections, the UMass Amherst Foundation Libraries
As a three-time graduate of UMass Amherst with an MFA in English and an MA and PhD in Anthropology, Irma McClaurin ’76 MFA, ’89 MA, ’93 PhD knows a thing or two about research.
“When students use primary materials and navigate archives, they go through a powerful process of discovery,” says McClaurin. “They can see how notes become a published manuscript, or how correspondence and personal journals reveal a backstory of important moments, enhancing historical analyses and interpretations.”
But, says McClaurin, “In my own experience conducting research in archives, I often found that Black women were poorly represented.”
To counter this problem, she established the Irma McClaurin Black Feminist Archive (BFA) in collaboration with the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center (SCUA) at UMass Amherst. She funded the BFA through her own giving, donations from family and friends, social media outreach, and grants, including a Historical Archives Grant and a Global Initiatives Grant from the Wenner Gren Foundation.
But McClaurin knew in order to tell a more inclusive version of American history the BFA needed to live beyond her own endeavors. To secure that vision, she made the BFA a beneficiary of her life insurance policy. This simple, yet effective, method of giving has provided McClaurin assurance that the BFA’s efforts will continue far into the future.
Through this work, she hopes to realize an important goal: building an archival “home” for Black women.
“History is written and documentaries are made from archival materials,” she says. “They allow us to tell the story of this country’s development. An authentic American narrative has to include diverse voices. If Black women are not represented in archives, we will not appear as main characters in the story of this nation.”
McClaurin hopes to inspire others to support the BFA through their giving as well.
“SCUA’s emphasis on archiving social change is the perfect repository,” she says. “I hope others will understand the value of such preservation efforts and support the BFA.”
There are many impactful ways to create your legacy at UMass Amherst. To learn more, contact Joseph K. Jayne ’21MPP at 413-577-1418 or giftplanning@uma-foundation.org.