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image of a membership card for the Friends of Equal Justice Council.
Rosa Parks Papers: Miscellany, Membership cards and dues, 1961-1975

Connections at the Heart of Knowledge and Creativity

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This post is by Lee Ann Potter of the Library of Congress.

At the November 2024 National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Annual Convention in Boston, Massachusetts, I was fortunate to present one of the Prime Time talks. In my remarks, I described the Library of Congress as an amazing assembly of human knowledge and creativity. Then I spent my remaining time sharing digital scans of primary sources from the Library’s collections and describing connections between them—connections over space, time, and fellowship that I believe are at the heart of all that creativity and knowledge.

I intentionally chose sources related to associations (I was, after all, at an association’s conference) and began by sharing a few membership cards and receipts from the papers of Rosa Parks. Ones related to her church membership, her support for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and even her 1995 membership card in the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) captured my audience’s attention. But it was her 1985 fellow’s membership card in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) that provided the point of connection I wished to share.

Image of Rosa Park's membership card with the National Association of Colored People, expiration date 1985
Rosa Parks Papers: Miscellany, 1934-2005; Membership cards and dues.

Image of a card with the six purposes of the National Association of Colored People (NAACP)

It reminded me of another NAACP membership card that I had seen in the collections—one from 60 years earlier that belonged to Mary Church Terrell. Terrell was a lecturer and educator who championed racial equality and women’s suffrage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She was one of the first African American women to earn a college degree; she taught in the Latin Department at the first African American public high school in the nation, in Washington, DC; and she was the first woman of color to serve on a school board. She was also one of the founders of the NAACP.

Image of a membership card for the National Association of Colored People, from 1920.
Mary Church Terrell Papers: Miscellany, 1851-1954; Printed matter; Calling cards and membership cards, 1900-1953

During my remarks, I shared her 1920 membership card in the Washington, DC, branch of the organization. I pointed out that the name of the organization’s president, A.H. Grimké, was included on it. Archibald Henry Grimké was also a founding member of the NAACP in 1909. But decades earlier, in the 1880s, he served as president of the Massachusetts Women Suffrage Association and his aunts were the Grimké sisters, Sarah and Angelina, noted abolitionists and feminists, who inspired Susan B. Anthony.

Anthony’s papers and those of Elizabeth Cady Stanton contain more association-related materials. The two women led the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), and in my remarks, I showed Stanton’s lifetime membership certificate in the association. It was dated January 25, 1889, and signed by Susan B. Anthony, who was then the organization’s Vice President.

I also shared Stanton’s 1885 certificate announcing her unanimous election to the Kansas State Historical Society as a corresponding member and then showed a nearly identical certificate from the papers of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, along with a certificate dated March 20, 1896, indicating that Olmsted had been elected as a corresponding member of the National Geographic Society. The certificate was signed by Everett Hayden, who helped co-found the society “for the increase and diffusion of geographic knowledge” in 1888.

One of the other founders of National Geographic was Alexander Graham Bell.

From the Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers, I shared a receipt from the Boston Society of Natural History for his initiation fee as a resident member in June 1876, three months after he was granted a patent for the telephone.

Image of a membership receipt from the Boston Society of Natural History, from 1876.
Receipt, June 12, 1876

After World War II, the Society changed its name to the Boston Museum of Science. That happened to be where the next speaker in the NCTE Prime Time event, Dr. Joy Buolamwini, was going to be presenting the next day, about two and a half miles from where we were.

I concluded my remarks at this point by quoting from the 1835 publication, Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat, diplomat, and sociologist. In Chapter V, “Of the Use Which the Americans Make of Public Associations in Civil Life,” he shared his fascination with the spirit of association that he experienced when he traveled to the United States and Canada for nearly 10 months in 1831–32.

Democracy in America

The spirit of association that he observed is alive and well in the collections of the Library of Congress. Countless cards, receipts, and certificates in the collections are tangible evidence of associations and of individual association membership. But they also illustrate shared, collective commitment to causes and passions, and they suggest less-tangible threads linking seemingly un-connected individuals in our nation’s past to one another—and to us.

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Comments

  1. I appreciate this wonderful path you have led us through on the importance of associations. The artifacts are amazing and are ones I’ll certainly point to as evidence of the power of connections in our democracy.

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