In the fall of 2015 I processed, with a partner, an archival collection about Dr. Freddie B. Dixon, an east Austin civil rights leader and influential African American reverend in the Methodist church from the late 1960s to the present. Over the course of several months, we inventoried Dr. Dixon’s personal papers, applied preservation intervention when needed, and created a curated, arranged collection that made Reverend Dixon’s life and work available to researchers and community members.

Though my focus is not archives, I have an enormous amount of love and respect for the professionals who quietly and proudly spend their days crafting our shared history out of heaps of papers and photographs, hard drives and video tapes and all of the other detritus we leave for them to comb through–because if we aren’t our shared stories, then what are we?

To see our collection’s finding aid and to learn more about Reverend Dixon’s life, click here.