Following the erasure of thousands of federal government websites, students and faculty supported Kari Bassett’s `98 latest project for Preserving Black History, an event hosted by the Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies and Digital Studies Student Educational Policy Committees (SEPCs).
Bassett’s project involves archiving The Iowa Bystander, the first Black-owned newspaper west of the Mississippi. Students and faculty accessed currently archived material of The Iowa Bystander through the Library of Congress website, working in tandem to download years of copies.
Due to President Donald Trump’s executive order on Jan. 20th, “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” U.S. federally-owned websites with any reference to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) are being forcibly taken down.
Whether existing archives of The Iowa Bystander on the Library of Congress website will be taken down are unknown. Nonetheless, Bassett said that she was interested in archiving this material given its possible vulnerability of being taken down, citing its importance in Black history.
“Things are disappearing from government websites and things are being removed and deleted,” Bassett said. “The Iowa State Bystander is a really important part of Iowa’s Black history and losing that would just be a tremendous loss.”
Some students said that The Iowa Bystander has played an integral role in academic research they have completed at Grinnell. “A few summers ago I was doing research with Dr. Tamara Beauboeuf, we used a lot of the digital newspaper archives to support our research,” Libby Eggert `25, GWSS SEPC member, said. “So, it is being put to good use and I really appreciate [Bassett] being here today.”
Bassett said the process to archive The Iowa Bystander was easy — downloading archives from the Library of Congress website and uploading them to a Google Drive owned by Bassett. The process of preserving the history of the newspaper was easy, relaxing and a way to cope, Bassett said.
“[Downloading archives] has been something that’s easy to do,” Bassett said. “It’s not too much of a heavy lift mentally. I found it’s kind of a good coping skill just to be able to do something that’s a little bit mindless, but that’s really impactful.”
Bassett said the process of downloading archives and saving them to her own personal hard drive for use in a publicly-accessible website was inspired by a Black genealogist, Walt Way. Way is the founder of the Brister English Project, a Black non-profit who works to archive Black American history.
“[Walt Way] had been working on recreating the entire Freedmen’s Bureau site on his local machine because that’s a site that goes down, even during friendly administrations,” Bassett said.
Bassett reflected on her experience at Grinnell, saying that she could not recall any work being done to archive Black history as a student. Bassett is now the founder of the Iowa Black History Research Collective, where she dedicates her time to making Black history in Iowa accessible.
“Being able to create safe spaces for people to thrive is the reason why I created the nonprofit,” Bassett said. “It’s to have an environment where someone like me could feel like they were contributing.”
