A digital story about Regina Andrews

I completed a digital story about an incident in the life of Regina Andrews last week at the Center for Digital Storytelling. I intend to make a full-length documentary about Regina. I had a wonderful and productive experience at the Center and I would highly recommend the program. All eight of the participants completed a digital story in just three days.

Berkeley, California

Last week I was in Berkeley, California, staying at the Bancroft Hotel and taking a course at the Center for Digital Storytelling. I also had the opportunity to search the archives of Regina's Harlem Renaissance roommate, Ethel Ray Nance at the University of California - Berkeley's Bancroft Library. Numerous letters in Nance's papers indicated that she had a very close friendship with W.E.B. Du Bois. They used pet names, Marielle and Andre, in much of their correspondence. Nance also offered some insight into the third woman who lived with them, the little-known Louella Tucker. Ethel said, "My third roommate was a good time girl, but we needed her for the rent." Tucker also worked, as a typist, at the offices of Opportunity (the house organ for the National Urban League) with Nance.

The picture shows Nance (far right), then Ethel Ray, in 1922, before moving to New York City in 1923 or 1924. She's from Duluth, Minnesota and was the offspring of a Swedish immigrant woman and an African American man from North Carolina.

Documentary Films

On Friday I met a woman, Lucie Faulknor, who makes documentary films at a conference for my department's Center for History of Print Culture. Co-producer Faulknor is part of a team working on a documentary, Free for All: Stories of the American Public Library (see their wonderful web site). On Saturday I was interviewed by the project director Dawn Logsdon. Who knows if I will end up in the final film but it was both exciting and informative to be a part of a real documentary film with an acclaimed group of filmmakers as I think about the documentary I want to make about Regina Andrews. Logsdon was the director of the recent film, Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans, and Faulknor co-produced the film--I film I saw a few months ago.

In a few weeks I will attend a workshop at the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, California where I will make a short three-minute documentary film about Regina Andrews that I will post on this blog--like a trailer for the final documentary.

Re: Libraries in Botswana

I just returned from a week in Botswana where I visited three of our students who are doing internships in public libraries. Rachel and Ashley interned and lived with a chief in Molepolole and are pictured with me and Dr. Angelina Totolo from the University of Botswana library school program. I think the head librarian, Max Muzunga, took the picture so he is not shown. Student Cara lived in Mmangkodi and is pictured with me and head librarian Lucia. We also got to meet the newly appointed head of the Botswana National Library System.

The whole trip was very inspiring and made me excited to get back to revising the chapter on Regina's travels to libraries in Western Africa.

Going to Botswana

I am off to Botswana to visit three students from my department, the School of Library & Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. The students are doing internships in Botswana. Regina was very interested in libraries throughout the world and visited libraries in the African nations of: Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Liberia, Ghana, Senegal and the Ivory Coast in the 1960s.

Re: Writing Group Presentation

On Monday, July 19, 2010, I was invited to discuss my Regina Andrews' project with an African American Genealogy Writing Group in Madison, WI. Besides describing my project, I discussed sources I used to tell Regina's story. The women in the writing group shared some of their stories too as they researched their own stories about their families. It was a very inspiring morning.

A presentation

I gave a talk about Regina Andrews on 23 June 2010 in the Royal Library (The Black Diamond) in Copenhagen, Denmark. The presentation was organized by Dr. Laura Skouvig of the Royal School of Library and Information Science in Copenhagen. The audience included a mix of faculty, archivists and the director of the Danish Center for Information on Women and Gender.