There was a time when Randall Burkett thought he’d become a religious scholar. But the tumult of the 1960s captured him, particularly the transition from the nonviolent approach to social change — the hallmark of the civil rights movement — to the more militant response of the black power movement. Since 1997, Burkett has been a curator of African American Collections at the Manuscript, Archive and Rare Book Library at Emory University. When a famous person wants to leave his or her papers to Emory, Burkett usually has a hand in the negotiation. He was one of the key people who helped convince novelist Alice Walker to sell her papers to Emory. Here, Burkett talks about collecting, responsibility and Dumpster-diving.
Q: What drew you do collecting African-American artifacts?
A: My feeling is any institution that’s collecting anything related to some aspect of American history and culture needs to find the African-American participation in whatever it is, whether it’s religion, politics, music, dance, art. So you want to collect the whole. We have a responsibility to enable folks to tell the full story of American history and literature and art.
Q: What else do you collect that is just for your own enjoyment?
A: My father thought that since I was an academic I should have a collection of fountain pens, so he started a small collection for me. I come from a long line of collectors. My father collected antique pocket knives and tools and fishing lures. My mother collected paper weights and china. I collected coins. It’s in the blood to hunt and gather and assemble.
Q: Paperweights and coins are a far cry from collecting black power literature.
A: My folks noticed that. But as long as I was collecting they were perfectly happy.
Q: What’s one of the most prized possessions in your personal collection?
A: I have a signed first edition of Phillis Wheatley’s “Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral,” published in 1773. That was a pretty cool thing to get.
Q: As for the collection at Emory, I’m assuming your most prized gets were the Alice Walker papers?
A: It’s a wonderful collection that has garnered a great deal of research and interest. Scholars come from all over to use that collection.
Q: I’m told you’re not above Dumpster-diving to get material for the Emory collection.
A: I don’t Dumpster-dive myself, but we did acquire an amazing collection of work from Father Divine, a popular religious leader of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. When one of the hotels that [his] Peace Mission Movement owned closed, a dealer heard that they were going to be throwing out a whole range of materials. So he had Dumpster-divers who rushed in, and now we’ve got 15 or 20 boxes of typed sermon notes, manuscript letters and thousands of photographs and flyers.
Q: But some of these collections come at a cost.
A: Last year the value of the collections donated to us was more than twice, nearly three times, the amount we paid for collections. So we’re getting a substantial amount of collections that come as gifts.
Q: How are you adapting to digital age because people now are recording their achievements through Tweets and on Facebook rather than scrapbooks?
A: Emory is really on the forefront of archiving what we call “born digital” materials, which is really the future of 21st century archives. For example, the papers of Salman Rushdie. When we acquired his papers we acquired all of his computers. We have all of his emails, so one can sit in the reading room and read all of his emails.
Q: What’s the one collection you’d love to have or are about to get?
A: There are between 40 and 50 that are under consideration at the moment. I’d like to have all of them. But I can’t enumerate right now. Let’s just say the wish list is long and exciting.
Sunday conversation is edited for length and clarity.
About the Author
