oct12_b2.indd


C&RL News October 2012 566

Ed. note: Send your news to: Grants & Acquisitions, 
C&RL News, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611-2795; 
e-mail: agalloway@ala.org.

University of Florida (UF) and Duke Univer-
sity researchers and librarians have spear-
headed a collaborative partnership project 
that has been awarded $240,804 from the 
National Endowment for the Humanities. 
The Archive of Haitian Religion and Culture: 
Collaborative Research and Scholarship on 
Haiti and the Haitian Diaspora grant, led 
by project director Benjamin Hebblethwaite 
(UF) and codirector Laurent Dubois (Duke 
University), will improve the understanding 
of a central Haitian and Haitian-American 
spiritual tradition, the Vodou religion, by 
gathering audiovisual and textual sources of 
communities, interpreting collected materi-
als, expanding holdings through a self-sub-
mission tool, and diffusing knowledge via 
an open access digital library hosted within 
the existing Digital Library of the Caribbean 
(dLOC, www.dloc.com). Partnering with the 
researchers are the UF George A. Smathers 
Libraries, the technical host for dLOC. 

The University of Florida (UF) Isser and Rae  
Price Library of Judaica at the George A. 
Smathers Libraries, in partnership with the 
Jewish Museum of Florida and three Florida 
county public libraries’ systems (Miami-Dade 
County, Broward County, and Palm Beach 
County), will broaden access to the Florida 
Digital Newspaper Library (FDNL) through an 
award of $21,753 from the State Archives of 
Florida. FDNL is a key resource for research, 
comprising 730 Florida newspaper titles and 
more than 1 million pages of information. 
Primarily, project funds will support the con-
version of 127 reels of The Jewish Floridian 
from microfilm to digital format, and these 
will become accessible through the FDNL, 
hosted by the UF Digital Collections.

A c q u i s i t i o n s

The Special Collections and Archives of  
the Coates Library at Trinity University re-
cently acquired the Claude and ZerNona 
Black Papers, donated in October 2011 by 
Taj I. Matthews, the Blacks’ grandson. Rev-
erend Claude William Black Jr. and his wife 
ZerNona Stewart Black played key roles in 
the civil rights movement in San Antonio, 
Texas. The 100-cubic-foot collection docu-
ments their tireless community action in the 
arenas of church, social programs, munici-
pal government, and in the eventual deseg-
regation and integration of the City of San 
Antonio. The collection is an important con-
tribution to the generally few African Ameri-
can civil rights collections of its size in the 
Southwest United States. Black preached 
many years as minister of Mount Zion First 
Baptist Church, and served as a City of San 
Antonio city councilman and the first African 
American mayor pro tem. Reverend Black 
was a correspondent with Martin Luther King 
Jr., and A. Philip Randolph, and was sought 
out for participation on a national level by 
Presidents Lyndon Baines Johnson and Wil-
liam Jefferson Clinton. ZerNona Black was 
assigned in 1943 to run the San Antonio USO 
for African Americans. The collection reveals 
ZerNona Black’s leading roles in the various 
church missions, eldercare programs, educa-
tion, and as “First Lady” of the church. The 
collection, in the initial stages of process-
ing, includes writings, records of church and 
service organizations, audiovisual media, 
scrapbooks, photographs, ephemera, cor-
respondence, and local African American 
newspapers document the lesser-known his-
tory of African Americans in San Antonio. An 
initial glimpse into the collection can be seen 
by visiting the Special Collections and Ar-
chives blog at http://archivestrinity.blogspot.
com/. 

G r a n t s  a n d  A c q u i s i t i o n sAnn-Christe Galloway