How the Obsidian Collection is Bringing Black Newspapers to Google

By Adrienne Samuels Gibbs, Chicago Magazine

This organization is busy digitizing papers like the Chicago Defender and the Baltimore Afro American and turning them into virtual exhibits on Google’s Arts & Culture platform.

Joe Louis and young fans, c. 1945 Photo: Courtesy of The Chicago Defender—Obsidian Collection

Digitizing legacy. That’s the job of the curators behind The Obsidian Collection – archivists for The Chicago Defender, Baltimore Afro American and other historically black newspapers in the United States. Their task is massive: digitize every image and article from newspapers that played a central role in the Great Migration, Civil Rights and Jim Crow eras. But they won’t have to do it all alone. Google Arts & Culture is working with the Obsidian group on creating digital exhibits that can be free and searchable by anyone around the world….

“More than just digitizing it for researchers, I’m passionate about the next generation seeing how awesome we are and in changing the narrative permeating the American conversation right now about African Americans,” says Angela Ford, who is helming the project and is excited about how it will add a more accurate variety of African American image metadata to the Google brain trust.

“What happens is a lot of these archive collections speak in an echo chamber of libraries and archives where it just doesn’t get out to the laypeople.  What I love about Google Arts and Culture is you could be standing in line at the grocery store and viewing our archives. We’ll keep rotating them in and out and keep pushing them through social media. We want everyone to see us….”

A lot of this work is already on microfilm, but moving it to an online space will make it easier to access via smartphone, which is the end goal.

Harold Washington and Charles Hayes with a young Carol Moseley Braun cropped from the original published image, 1983 Photo: Courtesy of The Chicago Defender—Obsidian Collection

Obsidian will slog through uploading everything to their own website and meanwhile, visitors will soon be able to head to Google Arts & Culture for a taste of what’s to come….

Read the full article here.

Read more Breaking News here.

View the Obsidian Collection here.

View more virtual galleries from the American Black Holocaust Museum here.