EMMA’S POSTCARD ALBUM | A Busboys and Poets Books Presentation
Date and Time
Mar 5, 2024 6:00 pm
Location
Shirlington
4251 S. Campbell Ave, Arlington, Virginia, 22206
Mar 5, 2024 6:00 pm
Shirlington
The turn of the twentieth century was an extraordinarily difficult period for African- Americans, a time of unchecked lynchings, mob attacks, and rampant Jim Crow segregation. During these bleak years, Emma Crawford, a young African American woman living in Pennsylvania, corresponded by postcard with friends and family members and collected the cards she received from all over the country.
Her album—spanning from 1906 to 1910 and analyzed in Emma’s Postcard Album—becomes an entry point into a deeply textured understanding of the nuances and complexities of African American lives and the survival strategies that enabled people “to make a way from no way.”
As snippets of lived experience, eye-catching visual images, and reflections of historical moments, the cards in the collection become sources for understanding not only African American life, but also broader American history and culture.
In Emma’s Postcard Album, Faith Mitchell innovatively places the contents of this postcard collection into specific historic and biographical contexts and provides a new interpretation of postcards as life writings, a much- neglected aspect of scholarship. Through these techniques, a riveting world that is far too little known is revealed, and new insights are gained into the perspectives and experience of African Americans. Capping off these contributions, the text is a visual feast, illustrated with arresting images from the Golden Age of postcards as well as newspaper clippings and other archival material.
Dr. Faith Mitchell is joining us on the Busboys stage to share a microhistory of the African- American experience in the early twentieth- century America through the correspondence of one young woman. Copies of the book will be available for purchase during and after the event, and Dr. Faith Mitchell will be signing following the program.
This event is free and open to all. Our program begins at 6:00 pm, and will be followed by an audience Q&A. Copies of EMMA’S POSTCARD ALBUM will be available for purchase before and after the event. Please note that this event is IN PERSON and will NOT be livestreamed.
We ask that guests RSVP in order to receive direct updates about the event from Busboys and Poets Books.
Faith Mitchell is an Institute fellow at the Urban Institute working with the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy and the Health Policy Center. She oversees Urban’s American Transformation project, which looks at the implications—and possibilities—of this country’s racial and ethnic evolution. Over several decades, her career has bridged research, practice, and social and health policy.
Previously, Mitchell was president and CEO of Grantmakers In Health, a DC-based national organization that advises, informs, and supports the work of health foundations and corporate giving programs. Before that, she held leadership positions at the National Academies (National Research Council and Institute of Medicine), the US Department of State, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the San Francisco Foundation.
Mitchell has a doctorate in medical anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. She has written or edited numerous policy-related publications and is the author of Hoodoo Medicine, a groundbreaking study of Black folk medicine, The Book of Secrets, Part 1, a semifactual supernatural thriller, and Emma’s Postcard Album, Black Lives in the Early Twentieth Century, a memoir and social history. She cochairs the advisory group for the John A. Hartford Foundation and Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Age-Friendly Health Systems initiative, chairs the board of The Jacob & Valeria Langeloth Foundation, serves on advisory committees for the National Collaborative for Health Equity and the UCSF Institute for Health Policy Studies, and on the editorial board of Health Affairs.
