BMRC Announces Awardees of SAA Annual Meeting Scholarship

The Black Metropolis Research Consortium (BMRC) is pleased to introduce the three recipients of its scholarship award for Black/African American/African diaspora MLIS students to attend the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Society of American Archivists in Chicago, IL, in mid-August.

Dartricia Rollins (University of Alabama Tuscaloosa), Olamide Kolawole (San Jose State University), and Chanelle Davis (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) stood out in a strong pool of applicants.

Dartricia Rollins is a graduate student in MLIS at the University of Alabama Tuscaloosa and co-founder of Georgia Dusk: a Southern liberation oral history project that is part of the Southern Memory Workers Institute. Dartricia set out to become an archivist for social and political movements and wants to attend the SAA Annual meeting as a supplement to her education and to meet other archivists who are interested in radical change.

Olamide Kolawole is a graduate student in MLIS at San Jose State University and a library special projects assistant at the Huntington Library. Olamide’s interest in a career in LIS began during her first graduate degree in Theology. She is eager to connect with Black information professionals and be in contexts where Black experience and history defines professional practice. The SAA annual meeting is an opportunity to observe how Black professionals advocate for their work in the larger archival world.

Chanelle Davis is a graduate student in MLIS at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an intern at Northwestern University’s McCormick Library of Special Collections & University Archives. Recently selected as a BMRC Archie Motley Archival Intern, Chanelle will be hosted by the University of Chicago's Hannah Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center this summer. She will work with archivists on a web exhibit highlighting the Eva Overton Lewis and Julian Herman Lewis, MD, PhD Collection. Chanelle plans to leverage the power of local histories and community archives to inspire young people to be compassionate and empathetic change-makers. Attending SAA would allow her to network and learn about current issues in the field that might influence her professional trajectory and future projects.

The BMRC-SAA scholarship addresses the paucity and significant underrepresentation of Black/African American/African Diaspora archivists in the field and supports those who otherwise would not be able to attend the annual meeting. We hope to help in the process of placemaking for Black archivists to help retain them, their talents, and insights in the field.