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Self-Publishing Made Viable by Serving the Community More than the Academy
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Self-Publishing Made Viable by Serving the Community More than the Academy

Let a Strategy from Our Past Be Our Future

In the 1930s, when the foundations that had been assisting Carter G. Woodson and the Association closed their purses, Carter G. Woodson turned directly to the community to support our efforts to get black history before the community.  Over the last four decades, ASALH has sold its journals to university and colleges, and while we did not get rich, we were satisfied enough with the revenue and now it dries up.  The University of Chicago contract is at best a temporary solution, because they have no means of increasing sales of product that the academy can no longer afford.  By staying an independent publisher, ASALH can look to the community, especially our branches, to sustain our publishing program and get our journals to teachers and students.

As the academic market for new scholarship continues to decline, JSTOR has just launched a new program that will allow to remain an independent publisher and increase our subscriber base and revenue by teaming with our branches and community organizations across the nation.  Working with them, we can get the digital Journal of African American History, Black History Bulletin and Fire!!! before students, teachers, and community members.  More than ever, Woodson’s journals will be in the hands of schools and civic organizations such as museums, community organizations, and public libraries.

Prior to now, we could not combine our new digital files and our century worth of back files into a single product.  We could not even bundle them together because they were on different delivery platforms. But with the JSTOR New Journals Program, we now can do so.  We can price the entire run of the Journal of African American History—over a century—and make them available to entire local school districts, local libraries, and museums.   We can get a grant to digitize and make available the entire run of the Black History Bulletin as well.

How would this unprecedented access to the community be paid for?  By relatively minor donations from local corporations raised by ASALH’s branches and other civic groups in our community.  Organizations such as the Links, the Prince Hall Masons, and the Greek Letter organizations can help.  They also understand that increasingly backwards voices in America are retreating from teaching the truth about slavery and Jim Crow.  They know our children are not learning about themselves and their ancestors’ accomplishments in the curriculum.  They know culturally inclusive education may be the goal of teachers but not the priority of those who control the budgets.  We can stop the movement backwards and increase our subscriber database and revenue by making our publishing program more in keeping with our original mission—to spread the truth about our past.

The Structure of the New Program

  • Local or regional corporations will be asked to donate approximately $2,000 to $2,5000 to the branch or civic organizations.
    • $500 of these funds will be used to buy a bundle subscription to the Black History Bulletin, the Journal of African American History, and Fire!!! respectively.
    • The remainder of the funds would be retained by the branch or civic organization to promote and sustain the program and other activites.
  • This will help build and promote our branches
    • It will expand our number of partners nationwide.
  • The local corporate sponsors would affirm the values we share with them
    • The importance of knowledge in a democratic society
    • The centrality of diversity to our country’s progress
    • That corporations must be good citizens of the community
  • ASALH will increase its revenues and its reach into the community
    • The subscription would take care of the $15 fee from JSTOR who would deliver the digital journal to the institutions in the same manner they currently do schools and colleges.
    • ASALH will be able to extend its subscriber base beyond where we have been since the late 1960s—when the journal were in local schools and public libraries before budgets were cut.

The New Self-Publishing Program versus the Chicago Proposal

While this program is not wholly conceivable with the University of Chicago Press.

  • They carry only one of our journals, so logistically it is much more cumbersome and expensive. We would have to run dual staffing.
  • Because they would be our publisher, they would claim a 50% chunk of the revenue that is assigned to JAAH. Indeed, they might even want as much as $200 of every bundle.  Yes, they would be owed this money even though we would have published more than 98% or more of it without them.

By staying with JSTOR and taking advantage of their New Journal Program, we will enjoy the following benefits.

  • JSTOR picks up the Black History Bulletin. This is itself a major advantage of the program, placing both of our journals on the same platform.
  • The BHB, Fire!!!, and JAAH will all be on the same platform—for the first time ever!
  • JSTOR reduces its fees on the hosting of new scholarship from 25% to $15 a customer, which on a $350 subscription is less than 4.2 percent.
  • In comparison with Chicago, it is a no brainer. Chicago’s 50% split on a $350 subscription would cost us $175.00 versus $15.00 with JSTOR.

The only other cost with JSTOR is a platform fee of $2,000 for each journal, which is the price of a high traffic, managed website.  One with IP address authentication, a necessary component, is thousands of dollars more.

A New Revenue Stream Made Possible by Self-Publishing

ASALH has been looking for a new revenue stream and this is it.  Rather than having come up with a new publication or a new national sponsor, we can take advantage of creating a new product from our existing publications!  We can build on our existing expertise and our treasure of black history.

If we are able to get a hundred new institutional subscribers for both the Black History Bulletin, the Journal of African American History, and Fire!!! This bundle of new subscriptions would bring in $50,000 in revenue.  The cost against this would be $4,500.  With the University of Chicago Press, the cost against the JAAH share it would be $25,000 or more and entail negotiations.

 

Oh Snap, JSTOR Cuts Fees and Enhances Our Self-Publishing Program
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Oh Snap, JSTOR Cuts Fees and Enhances Our Self-Publishing Program

Since this effort to sell out ASALH’s century of self-publishing began, I have urged members of the ASALH Executive Board to talk to JSTOR, our twenty-year business partner, to see what they can do to keep our business.   Imagine my consternation every time I’ve been told that the University of Chicago Press, the firm trying to win our business, is handling discussions with our existing partner! You think Chicago will inform you of what advantages JSTOR might hold for you?  Of course not, and for some this heresy was never about money–it was about love and status.  When the money was close, it was obscured, but now JSTOR has a new program that reduces our self-publishing cost dramatically and makes it much more profitable to stay independent publishers.  It is now Self-Love versus the Love of Status.

Well there is good news!  And I knew there would be.  JSTOR, which has greater revenue than the University of Chicago Press and is much more profitable, had to respond to the loss of business with the University of Chicago Press and the University of California Press in 2015.  That development had to cause a shake up since they constituted the bulk of the New Scholarship Program.   Small publisher (and in the world of publishing even Chicago is small) all hoped that JSTOR could save our declining subscriber base by growing our business globally.  That failed because the move towards STM globally has limited the appetite for the humanities and social sciences journals from the US in Asia and the Middle East.  (Chicago is now pretending it can have success even without its own sales representatives, smh).  Recognizing that global and domestic marketing did not result in hardly enough new customers, it is starting a new program that is a godsend to those independent publishers do not want or really need to sign up with a publisher who has not clue on which ways the winds of academic publishing are blowing.

JSTOR’s new journals program  does two major things.

  • It eliminates the 25% marketing fee.  Wow!   This reduces cost by more than $20,000 a year.
  • It charges a minimum platform fee–one-third the cost of firms Allen Street.    The price in line with a managed hosting wp-press site–but it comes on a stable platform with IP authentication.
  • It charges a fee per subscriber that is similar to a paypal transaction fee and much less than commercial alternatives for closed access.
  • It will allow publishers–that would be us and not Big Pappa–to offer its customers the entire back files of the journal in question.  In the past, back files revenues were dealt with as part of JSTOR’s Archive Program only.

At the same time, ASALH would be able to pivot from the academy as its primary source of new institutional subscribers and reach out to institutions and groups within the African American community.  This is what we have historically done when the university system was not our way of making it in the world.  We can enlist our branches and our members to reach out to various civic organizations charters schools to offer a century of black life, history, and culture not simply via the Journal of African American History, but all of our publications.  This is bigly!!!

With this decrease in cost and the ability to offer a new product, we can grow our customer base without a split if 50-50 with would-be Big Pappa Chicago.  If we are independent, we can go to a local foundation and get underwriting for the entire run of all of our journals, including the Journal of African American History, and not share a red cent with the University of Chicago Press, or anyone else.  We could reach out to the Urban League or NAACP Act and make Woodson’s independently published journal available to youth who are in writing programs on grants that they have.  In the age of austerity, we find a way through as we have for a century and remain the oldest independently published scholarly journal in the entire world!!

To bring the point home: this offers ASALH great advantages over Chicago.

  • Unlike with Chicago, we would not have a 50% split of new scholarship subscriptions with Chicago.
  • Unlike with Chicago, we would not have a 50% split 50% of our royalties.  Yes, Chicago wants reverse reparations for the century of intellectual property they had no role in publishing.
  • Unlike with Chicago, our back file sales would not be subjected to a 50% split.
  • Our new scholarship will continue to be part of the JSTOR Archive program.

Why is JSTOR doing this, not love but to protect its JSTOR  Archive business.  It is a $85,000,000 a year not-for-profit primarily because of the global reach of its archive.  Where it failed at selling new scholarship abroad, its archive is gold.  JSTOR has decided to create a program that sustains independent publishing because it depends on it.

If the regime had done due diligence and talked to our long-term business partner, they would have heard of this program long ago.  But it was not their desire to continue self-publishing.  They are bent on going for the supposed status of a university press as their publisher even though JSTOR continues to offer services that are at once more stable and sustainable.

 

President Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s Alternative Facts for ASALH Branch Presidents
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President Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s Alternative Facts for ASALH Branch Presidents

 

It is never becoming for historians to enter into the world of historical fiction, and it is wholly destructive for them enter the world of alternative facts.  Yet when we get caught in modern-day controversies and are actors as well as scholars, the need to defend untenable positions can lead even the best scholars astray.  This has happened in the case of Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham as she responded to my letter to the branches.  Her letter is filled with misrepresentations and even alternative facts to justify her position that the Executive Council still has the authority to make a decision on the future of the Journal of African American History.  Moreover, she wants to erase or soften the debacle of the 101st Business Session, where we were lied to and disenfranchised for the sake of selling out our history of publishing Woodson’s journal.  Mind you, she never explains why we have to cease our self-publishing after a century.  It is not money, so it must be status.

I Reassert, Revenue Was Represented Falsely as Profits

In my letter, I argued that Gilbert A. Smith flat-out lied about the University of Chicago Proposal.  He said repeatedly that the $100,000 promised by Chicago was profit,  not revenue.  How silly.  Just because someone says you can do what you want with money they give you does not make it profits.  You do not have to be a certified public accountant to know that if you have obligations to pay, it isn’t profits.   What alternative world is the President trying to construct?  As long as the journal has significant bills to pay–and there are tens of thousands of them to be paid from the $100,000, then the money is not profit.

Indeed, Evelyn and VP Franklin both say so themselves in post-meeting statements.  After the 101st Annual Meeting, VP Franklin sent out an email in which he said part of the $100,000 would be spent on Journal expenses.  In his words:  “In light of the proposals submitted to publish the JAAH, there was no need to continue to ‘self-publish’ since the university press would cover publication expenses and guarantee an annual income to ASALH to cover all of the editorial expenses in producing the JAAH.”  VP was utterly honest about this.  In the letter to the branch members, Evelyn states “It is not fair to V.P. Franklin, now on a retiree’s income, to spend his own money on the Journal.”  So, indeed, the money is not profit as Gilbert told everyone.

So profits were not profits, they were revenue.  Gilbert A. Smith is not only a Christian gentleman associated with the Shiloh Baptist Church in Washington, DC.  as Evelyn of Harvard states in her letter, he is also a Certified Public Accountant who had and has a fiduciary responsibility to report profits as profits and revenue as revenue.  To suggest he did otherwise in front of 250 witnesses is to promote an alternative fact.  When a CPA represents revenue as profit to a legislative body, he is lying about the business proposal.  Revenue reported as profit is an alternative fact.  The Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2003, which requires disclosure of financial information to decision makers does not allow alternative facts.  Rather than taking the treasurer to task for misleading the people, our president is painting him as a victim.  For reasons of status they are dedicated to ending a century of independent black publishing.

(And let us not lose sight of the fact that VP Franklin will only edit the journal one more year, so this should be a non-factor.  Others are willing to edit the journal  without compensation from ASALH.)

After Promising a Journal in Every Mailbox, the President Prepares to Renege or Go Broke

In my letter, I pointed out that the Gilbert A. Smith and Sharon Harley promised that if JAAH goes to the University of Chicago, the members of ASALH would all receive a hardcopy of the journal.  In her long response, Evelyn gives the impression that everyone will get a hardcopy of the journal, then suggests everyone read a letter from Sharon Harley written after the October 6th Business Session and sent out.  That letter silently breaks faith with the promise by saying in effect that everyone will not get a copy of the journal as she, Gilbert, and VP Franklin all promised in the meeting.  Instead only life members and branch members will get copies.  This may go over well with branch members, but what of the graduate students and the regular members who were sold a bill of goods by the president, the treasurer, the journal editor, and the publications committee chair?

It is rather clear that the regime, feeling the pressure from the business meeting, went beyond what they had planned in giving away journals.  Indeed, in the handout to the membership, Sharon Harley stated that Chicago would pay for all eligible members to receive a hardcopy of the journal.  Mind you, the University of Chicago proposal makes no such promise, so any journals received would be paid for out of that $100,000.   Chicago charges members $20 for hardcopies.  Not knowing the facts, she puts it at 500, which would cost ASALH $10,000 out of the $100,000.  The cost to meet the current promise would be roughly $28,000.  And the cost to meet the big promise made in the Business Session would be $44,000.

 

Shortly after the meeting, having pandered to the unwashed, disenfranchised membership of ASALH–the legislative body–of our organization, the leadership of the sellout started to walk back the promises.  Here is a link to the Harley document, sent to all the members.  In her letter to the branch leadership, she attached that post-101st Annual Meeting letter. Here is an excerpt:

The Chicago Proposal makes no such promise of free journals to anyone, so all of these journals will be paid for will come from the $100,000 of revenue.  Mind you, ASALH now provides this to members as we self-publish.  This means that the financial advantage of selling out shrinks by $20 with each journal given away.  Indeed, if the promise made to the membership is kept, then there is no financial advantage of going to Chicago and we would make more money by continuing to self-publish.

The President Misrepresents My Seconded and Debated Motion to Deny It Is Controlling and that the Executive Board Must Now Yield to the Members on This Issue

At the 101st Business Session, the motion I put on the floor was the ASALH to cease and desist in any and all efforts to let any other firm publish our scholarly journals.  That motion was seconded and debated but a vote was refused.  The president did not say the motion was out of order–and that matters when you are following Roberts Rules of Order, and she had her paid parliamentarian there.  Here she is trying to construct an alternative fact by altering the motion I put forward.  By claiming that my motion was to break or end an existing contact, she trying to construct an alternative fact.  You see, if my motion concerned a non-existing contract then it could be ruled out by a point-of-fact violation of Roberts Rules of Order.  This is what she is suggesting happened.  By putting an alternative fact in my mouth for my motion, she is trying to change the narrative so she can say she ruled it out for good reason.  But, that, too requires another alternative fact–my motion was never objected to before it was seconded and discussed.  Indeed, we discussed it for more than thirty minutes before she pulled the plug for other reasons.  Below is her material alteration of the motion I made.

 

The Most Disturbing Part of These Misrepresentations

What I find most disturbing about the president’s response to my letter is that she writes as if no branch leaders witnessed the spectacle.    The presidents of the South Florida Branch, the Tampa Branch, the Jacksonville Branch, the Chicago Branch, the Detroit Branch, the Julian Branch, the Manasota Branch, and others were all there.  There were innumerable branch members and general members, numbering some 250 people.  Many of you and your members know that $100,000 in revenue was called profit.  Everyone heard the promise that all members–all members–were promised a hard copy.  And you saw the President of ASALH–after my “cease and desist motion” was properly read, seconded, and discussed for more than half an hour was refused a vote.  The motion was not called out of order.  No, we were told that the Executive Council, not the Business Meeting, could make this decision.  And not a mumbling word was heard about Associate Members–and if the president knew anything about ASALH she would know that there are less than a dozen associate members out of 2,200 or more members!  This is a scam on the scale of the Republican claims of a tainted voters pool.

The Petty Claims in President Higginbotham’s Letter

I won’t spend but a moment on the petty claims that act as filler in the President’s effort to deny that the members now legally own the outcome of the self-publishing issue.  Higginbotham is ultimately responsible for having the police sicced on me at the 101st Annual Meeting but she poses as a victim because I said she had done nothing worth talking about before becoming president.  She made no significant contribution and she nor anyone else would dare list one.  It would be another alternative fact.  Her lack of experience is why she does not understand that there will be mailing cost that ASALH has to pay if the journal goes to Chicago.  While Chicago will ship the journal, books and manuscripts in various stages of preparation are shipped, often by federal express, to and from the editorial office to headquarters.  This high-priced mailing costs about in the $2,000 range.  Had the president not rejected my offer to head the publications committee when I was president, she might know that.  Enough of the petty.

We Are Not Deterred, the Decision Legally Belongs to the Business Session in Cincinnati

We will stick to our guns.  Gilbert A. Smith should be recalled for lying to the membership gathered in the Business Session for representing revenue and profits, and thereby grossly misrepresenting the financial advantage of going to the University of Chicago.  And we note for the record that Gilbert A. Smith did not speak up to refute my claim.  He knows he is in deep.  More importantly, the decision on the Chicago Proposal and any proposal from a publisher cannot be acted on until that 102 Business Session meets in Cincinnati.  We will remain strong and firm, and yes we will go to court if necessary.  We will not be disenfranchised, and unless it is the will of the membership in session, we will not break faith with our founder.  And there is certainly no financial reason to do so.  Under separate cover, I will show how the journal can be more profitable self-published rather than published by Chicago.

Aren’t You Gonna Vet Your Prospective Big Poppa?
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Aren’t You Gonna Vet Your Prospective Big Poppa?

Executive Council members who take due diligence seriously need to vet the University of Chicago Press’s Journals Program.  As part of this, the journals manager at the University of Chicago Press should be engaged in a face-to-face meeting before the board.  This is a no-brainer for an organization that has been independently publishing its own journal for just more than a century.  Ending one’s independence in publishing sends ASALH on a new trajectory that could result in our never publishing our journal again–if this proposal succeeds or the executed contract fails.  (Getting back into a business would be neither simple nor cheap and hence not probable.)  Chicago itself has made a decision that changes their much out their journals operation.  The move was not obvious to anyone.  Choosing to build its own platform to service fewer than a hundred journals in the humanities and social sciences seems on the face of it a losing proposition in a world where economy to scale is measured in the thousands.   JSTOR and Project Muse entered this business a generation earlier with massive funding from the foundations, and now Chicago, along with the University of Chicago Press, has left JSTOR’s New Scholarship Program in 2015.  Few would recommend this course of action unless a new revolutionary business model is being pursued.  This, however is not likely, and so the question is whether there is a viable business model.  Though Chicago has published journals for nearly a century and a half, they are new to publishing on their own digital platform. Success is far from a given.  Because of this, ASALH needs to put hard questions to them.

And of the things that have stunned me in this process is the candid admission that ASALH has not spoken to JSTOR about how they could retain our business, but rather have allowed our prospective business partner speak to them in lieu of us for the purposes of undoing our generation-long relationship!

  1. Were you experiencing declining institutional subscriptions and revenue when you left JSTOR’s New Scholarship Program?
    1. If yes, what was your perception of the problem?  Have you rectified it in your own program?
    2. If not, was there any economic factors involved with leaving?
    3. What role did back file revenue have in your decision to leave JSTOR?
  2. Why are you competing with JSTOR Archive in selling your back files?   Did you plan on doing this originally?
  3. Your publishing house is now in the second year of having its own journal platform thru Atypon and you have the bulk of two cycles of subscription sales and revenue in hand.  How goes your revenue?
    1. Compared with the last year that you were with the University of Chicago’s New Scholarship Program, please share with us the data on the number of institutional subscribers for your journals.   What was the increase or decrease on average per title?
    2. What was the revenue increase or decrease on average per title?
    3. Based on two year’s experience what are the changes you are considering for your program?
  4. How does your overseas sales program differ from that JSTOR had?
    1. How many overseas sales representatives does Chicago have?
    2. What success have your overseas sales people have?
  5. Atypon has recently been purchased by John Wiley & Sons, which is a major commercial publisher of journals with over 9,000 titles.  When JSTOR elected to create its own platform, Chicago opted to stay and get its own relationship with Atypon, and so now it in on the platform of a major commercial competitor that is more than a hundred times larger than it is.  This could adversely affect the long-term prospect of ASALH’s business.
    1. What changes have taken place under Wiley?
    2. How has these changes affected your bottom line?
    3. If increases incur in your platform fees, how will these be absorbed?  Will they be passed along as cost?
  6. What is your business model for increasing the revenue of the Journal of African American History that allows you to more than double the total revenue of the journal.  $200,000 more than doubles our current revenue and we do not split it 50% with anyone.
    1. Our journals are priced competitively already among history journals, so do you plan to increase those prices significantly?  If so, how much?
    2. Do you expect to double the number of institutional subscribers?  If so, this would go against the trend for humanities and social science journals, so
    3. Does Chicago have its own sales representatives, and if so, how will you do better than JSTOR has been doing.  If not, how do you plan to outdo the overseas sales that JSTOR experiences in the New Scholarship Program?
    4. Given your pricing of back files, it appears to be the major way you mean to increase the revenue stream.
      1. Yet, since our back files will remain on the platforms of Cengage, EBSCO Host, ProQuest, and JSTOR platform and they sell a bundle of over 2000 journals, how do you plan to compete with these firms for back file sales?
      2. What percentage of the $200,000 plus in annual revenue do you anticipate coming from back file sales?
      3. Given that the century of back files were published by us, it stands to reason that we would get 100 of the sales by others named above.  Do you agree?
      4. Given that the back file sales that you were also published by us, it does not seem reasonable that you ask for a 50% share of those sales.   How much do you think you would increase back file that come only from your sales effort?  Would you be willing to waive all revenue from back files that others raise from pre-existing contracts with ASALH?
      5. Would you be willing to accept 25% on the sales of back files you sale to new customers?
  7. I am to understand that you have been talking to JSTOR on behalf of ASALH.  If this is true, what has been the broadest scope of those conversations?
    1. Has it been limited to ascertaining the cost of terminating the existing contract?
    2. Has it included any negotiating the removal of the back files from JSTOR’s platform, which would require amending the existing contract ASALH has with JSTOR?
    3. What has been the substance of all conversations on ASALH’s behalf for both JSTOR’s Archival and New Scholarship Programs?
      1. If you have asked JSTOR to take the back files out of our archive have they agreed?
      2. Would there be any financial consequence for you or ASALH in relationship to either of those two contracts?
How ASALH Treasures Ended Up in the Dumpster and Now Ebay
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How ASALH Treasures Ended Up in the Dumpster and Now Ebay

Once upon a time in the 1990s, ASALH was in a financial crisis, running deficits with seemingly no way out.  It had a real estate portfolio that included a building on Fourteenth Street in Washington, DC.  One of the leaders of the board decided that the national headquarters, already worth a million dollars in the nation’s gentrifying capital, embodied an all-in-one solution, a permanent fix.  ASALH would sell the building, move the headquarters into a smaller and cheaper rental space in Silver Spring, Maryland, and run the organization in part off the return on the invested money.  For some reason, it was believed that the principle would yield $70,000, or 7%.  The plan was bullish, and ASALH would be lean and mean and stable.  A simple, easy-to-grasp solution.

Part of what sold the argument was the condition of the building and the neighborhood.  While the city had begun to gentrify, Fourteenth Street had the look and feel of being crime ridden.  And the building had seen better days.  Its huge basement that housed much material tended to flood, and why not be some where smaller, higher, and drier.

While the plan was simple, executing it had to be hard for many involved.  Fourteenth Street was the project of Charles Wesley, one of the great institution builders in African American History.  It was part of his late 1960s renaissance of the Association, when Woodson’s co-worker returned to Washington and became the executive director.  Wesley raised money to buy the building but the lion’s share came from the Ford Foundation.  History can be kind. Wesley passed away well before the sell became part of the board conversation.  History is also rife with bitter irony, and this move must have been hard for Samuel DuBois Cook.  An institutionalist in his own right, Cook was the Ford program director that Wesley worked with to get the funds for the property.  Now, less an a generation later, he was president of ASALH when the board sold the building.  The effort to convince him must have been great, or at least painful.  And the influence on the Ford may have been even greater.

Unlike the founder, who would through himself into every project performing mental and physical work, most of those who have served on the board have done their work from a distance, and have seldom volunteered their professional skills and even less often their brawn.  They have tended to be policy makers, or day-to-day bosses of the staff.  Being disproportionately people of thought and direction rather than action, lacking much practical experience, the board overlooked the details and expenses of making a move.   No one in the brain trust of the board, not even the leaders on the project, had made the calculation of what would become of the things in the headquarters. The things included more than eighty years of the records of the ASALH and the Associated Publishers.  And it included priceless artifacts and documents from both.  While Woodson had given many papers collections to the Library of Congress, there were still small collections in our possession.  There were Woodson’s papers, too.  Indeed, I found what became known as Carter G. Woodson’s Appeal among those papers.  And then there were the artifacts from the Associated Publishers, Woodson’s personal business, and it included photographs, original manuscripts, printer’s plates and engravings, and more I’ll never know.  The engraving plates included images of Nannie Burroughs, Henry Highland Garnett, and Henry McNeal Turner.

The process of leaving Fourteenth Street came without planning, less a move than a scramble.  No money was made available for professional movers.  Over the years, I have not identified a single board member who rolled up their sleeves to help.  Most lived out of town, some were too old, and others too grand.  Most were professors, after all.  Graduate students and local friends of ASALH pitched in to help the staff move from the city.  Worse still, no decision and provisions had been made to deal with the records and artifacts and trash of over eighty years.  Decision were made pell mell:   Volunteers moved stuff to several different self-storage facilities in Washington, DC.  Frantically and unwittingly, they placed thousands, yes thousands, of boxes of worthless materials in permanent storage facilities where it cost $5 to look into them and twice that to remove or destroy.  Bowie State University gave permission for ASALH to move material to their library temporarily, and that stretched over a decade.  It was a vast mountain of stuff–much of it unboxed–that covered more than six-hundred square feet and stood over six-feet tall, as high as middle-aged men could stack it.  Years later when I first saw it, I almost cried as I looked at rare black history photographs and Woodson correspondence crunched up by moldy, water-logged books and thousands of copies of the same flyers.   Over the years, ASALH’s board had included a number of leading archivists, and but none had taken the time to separate the wheat from the tons of chaff.  The total volume of the materials in the headquarters  was massive, and anyone who had been to the headquarters should have known it.   Years later, the material removed from one storage unit alone weighed over 55,000 tons, and I know because I signed to take it out and sort through it with graduate students such as Kamal McClarin and Anton House.  (Moreover, it cost ASALH over $25,000 a year to store what was mostly trash and excess publishing inventory, and it took nearly seven years to convince the board to allow me to stops the bleeding and clean up our mess.)

This was not the worse of Executive Council’s failure to plan the move.  Tragically, without rhyme or reason, the materials that could not be moved to storage units, permanent storage, or Bowie State room, had a much worse fate. With a need to turn over the keys and limited resources, decisions had to be made.  Locals would later recall that dumpsters appeared in the street outside of the headquarters, and material tossed into them.  Over the years, I have talked to integrationists, black nationalists, socialists, and those who simply love black people who spoke of the tragedy that unfolded and wondered how it could happen to an institution that allegedly believed in history.  How could they let it happen to Woodson’s legacy?

For days, cars pulled up, and conscious black people of all walks of life went dumpster diving.  This included professors who were members of ASALH, people who could have helped in the move.  From learned people you would here about manuscripts, Woodson documents, and rare books and photographs and other material.  All this sound apocryphal until you meet people who confess the treasurers in their possession and how they got them.

Collectors collect until they need money or die.  And now ebay is how many things change hands.  Yesterday, I received a notice on Facebook from a friend that some Associated Publishers engravings were for sale.  There it was, our history, on ebay.  I bought the engraving plate of Henry Highland Garnet, and alerted other friends.  This sell off of thrown-away ASALH assets is evidence of how a board can botch a decision by not doing due diligence.

The money from the sale of Fourteen Street did not get used as planned.  When outstanding debts were paid off, there was only $800,000 or so I’ve been told.  And then the Ford withdrew its support, something probably not understood by those making the decision.  Why would Ford continue to support an association that had squandered an asset appreciating rapidly in gentrifying Washington, DC, especially when they had underwritten it?  When I joined the board, ASALH was bleeding $120,00 to $150,000 of that money each year.  The simple solution proved to be a failure, a massive failure.  It cost on average $25,000 a year for a decade to store the material, and nearly $20,000 to remove it from permanent storage to decide what to keep and what to destroy.

The single, brilliant solution to ASALH’s problems proved to be an embarrassing, expensive, and tragic blunder, but one of the prime movers on this solution probably little understands what was lost and the total cost.  He has not lived in the city where people still talk about it.  No one has ever forced him to confront the cost of his plan.  Yet this person is a big booster of allowing  the University of Chicago to become the publishers of the Journal of African American History. This one has not learned of Gilbert Smith’s Big Lie on the University of Chicago Press proposal to become the publisher of the Journal of African American History.  He has not been disabused of the notion that Chicago will provide us a profit of $100,000 a year to buy and do for ASALH, or that our journal now profits us nothing.  Even though he erred, he is honorable and takes people at their word.