Listening to Dr. Margaret Burroughs

Note: This post by Skyla Hearn, the Archivist and Special Collections Librarian at DuSable Museum of African American History, was commissioned on the occasion of Damon Locks’s essay, “Digging Culture” (Poetry, March 2018). Locks—a Chicago-based visual artist, educator, vocalist, and deejay—writes about finding Sound-A-Rama Presents Mrs. Margaret Burroughs, the Founder and Director of the DuSable Museum of African American History (Arkie Music, BMI) at Beverly Records in Chicago. We’ve made a recording of the album available on our SoundCloud, which you can download here. 

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The omnipotent presence and power of an unfurling.

On the eve of the “Bearthday” of my favorite aunt—my mother’s older sister, who we affectionately called “Sista”—I decided to honor her in sound by listening to The Impressions, Lonnie Liston Smith’s “Loveland,” Melvin Van Peebles’s “Sweetback’s Theme,” and Terence Trent D’Arby. I am not entirely sure how she would have felt about Terence Trent D'Arby, but being of the overt honest sort as well as a lover of music, I am sure she would have either unabashedly objected or unapologetically moved some part of her body to signal her approval.

My world is surrounded by matriarchs. I blame and love my mother for this.

At times a sullen feeling overcomes me while I “do this work” because I recognize, like so many of my colleagues, the limitations we face primarily due to the most natural of reasons—that people do not live forever—and that the job of archivists primarily falls within the realm of safekeeping matter that's left behind. I once found myself crying (bawling out of control is more accurate) while evaluating an oral history interview of Dr. Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs—for a conference call with one of the premier African American digital repositories in the country—because I had never met her. I became so engrossed in her words, movement, and imagining of the world she once occupied that I completely forgot about the pressure to produce the evaluation summary I had set out to complete. Instead, I became committed to learning everything I could about Dr. Burroughs and how to maintain the seeds she and others like her had sprinkled along the way.

In opposition to surrendering to the sunken shoulders and sporadic moments of sadness, I draw on the strength and sage advice of my grandmother who consistently advises me to “work smart, not hard.” My grandmother Rosie is from the era when Black women were relegated to the hard and smart work of domestics, sharecroppers, and caregivers for the children of others. I say this to say that she worked really hard and smart her whole life. Dr. Burroughs, too, is of that same era, but unlike my grandmother, she benefited from a completely different set of life experiences. I like to think that I am still that little girl who Rosie walked to school, helped put through the “good” schools, and who is currently making her proud. I not only represent her legacy, but also that of Dr. Burroughs—both women with purpose and poise.

I grew up in Bronzeville, the first historical hub for Blacks in Chicago. From the middle of the block, on 44th and Vincennes Avenue, I could see Carter G. Woodson Elementary School directly up the street. I could see Irvin C. Mollison Elementary School from my back window. I was not afforded the pleasures of attending either of these schools but my cousins and neighborhood friends were. All of whom experienced meeting and receiving books from “women poets,” as they called them. In my school I read about those same “women poets.” At home I jealously fingered through my cousins’ books while wishing that these women would visit my school as well. As much as I can remember, those visits never happened. I never met them. Who would know then that I would be the one to preserve the contributions and legacy of one of those “women poets,” Dr. Margaret Burroughs, some multiple decades later? That through the archives I would be able to link my childhood home (formerly the Home for Aged and Infirm Colored People), my elementary school (Holy Angels), and neighborhood (Bronzeville) to the multifaceted “force of a woman” that Dr. Burroughs was.

Being a legacy holder.

As the Chief Archivist for the DuSable Museum of African American History, I often encounter and engage with materials that once belonged to, represent, or speak to actions of the past. At times, dealing with this truth can be overwhelmingly heartbreaking, especially when there’s a longing to pose questions that can’t be answered, conduct interviews with persons who have passed on, and locate the missing “pieces” that have been lost forever.

I first encountered Dr. Burroughs while researching her work as an activist and artist in the 1930s. She was a driven person determined to collect enough dimes to secure the building that would be a safe haven for Black artists—the South Side Community Art Center. The backstory here is that she and her colleagues were angry and frustrated over the fact that they did not have a space to exhibit, critique, and further develop their skills as a collective. Burroughs often coordinated the meetings with other Black artists, which took place at various venues including high school classrooms, personal residences, and store fronts. These meetings became ad hoc, peer-lead art classes—some of the collective were enrolled in art school or had recently graduated.

The next time Burroughs and I “met,” she was working hard to establish Black American history in her art classes at DuSable High School. Later, she found herself traveling out of the U.S. and into Mexico with her husband, Charles, and two young family members to join her friend, Elizabeth Catlett, and other artists in Mexico during the 1950s. Upon returning to the U.S., Margaret and Charles began to host visitors in their home, which became a place for discourse related to the Black American experience, including the relationship of Blacks to Africa. The combination of regular meetings, active collecting of artifacts and materials relating to Black and African people, and persistent requests from visitors resulted in the establishment of the Ebony Museum of Negro History and Art in the 1960s, which later relocated during the following decade and became the DuSable Museum of African American History.

The list of Dr. Burroughs’s accomplishments by far outweigh what I’m able to say here—not to mention the perpetual unfurling of her legacy as I continue to learn about her some six years since I found her through my computer screen.