In a ceremony on Friday evening at the Estelle and Melvin Gelman Library, GW President Steven Knapp and National Education Association (NEA) President Dennis Van Roekel officially opened to the public and researchers more than 150 years’ worth of NEA documents and records. The collection, called the National Education Association Archive, becomes part of GW’s International Brotherhood of Teamsters Labor History Research Center.
The collection includes more than 3,000 boxes of material, including NEA publications, reports, pamphlets, presidential speeches and correspondence, legal documents, and badges, pins and posters from decades of NEA conferences and events.
“I am deeply grateful to the National Education Association for entrusting George Washington with this extraordinary collection," said Dr. Knapp. "The collection will be a tremendous resource for the study of labor history and education policy and will draw students and scholars from across this nation and beyond.”
Founded in 1857 as a professional association for public school educators, the NEA has grown to include more than 3.2 million members nationwide. “The NEA’s history is inextricably linked to America’s history,” Mr. Van Roekel said, emphasizing that the archive will help students and researchers better understand and appreciate the struggle for quality public education. “If history is not documented, the opportunity to learn from it is lost forever.”
The NEA Foundation, an independent public charity, was the lead contributor in bringing the archive to GW. The archive materials, which had been in off-site storage after outgrowing the storage space at the NEA’s D.C. headquarters, were transferred to GW in spring 2009. Former archivist Kyle Conner began the task of sorting, describing and preserving the materials, and current archivist Vakil Smallen has been continuing the process since fall 2010. Each item must be sorted according to its type, arranged with related materials in a series, and re-housed in acid-free folders and storage boxes to preserve delicate artifacts that date, in some cases, from before the Civil War.
Mr. Smallen and a student assistant are also creating an electronic “finding aid” that includes detailed descriptions of the archive materials so that researchers can determine which materials they need. Much of the material will eventually be housed off-site in a special temperature- and humidity-controlled facility of the Washington Research Library Consortium, and specific materials will be delivered to Gelman’s Special Collections Research Center at researchers’ request. All textual material in the collection has been processed already, but photos and audiovisual materials remain, Mr. Smallen said.
The archive includes many documents relating to NEA’s social justice and educational equality work, including documents commemorating NEA’s 1966 merger with the American Teachers Association (ATA), a predominantly black teachers’ organization, during the height of the civil rights movement.
The archive is special, Mr. Smallen explained, both because of the scope of its material and the significance of the NEA’s work for educational equality. “The NEA had such a role in promoting educational opportunity and advocating for legislation to bring us to our modern system of education,” he said. “For people who have any interest in the history of education, this is a gold mine.”
Among the materials Mr. Smallen has cataloged are an original signed letter from President Franklin Roosevelt to the NEA executive secretary dated 1942, and a photograph signed by President Harry Truman and inscribed, “to the teachers and pupils of America.” Also included are reports, pamphlets and memos that chronicle various issues for which the NEA advocated, such as lowering the voting age to 18 in the 1960s and combating the problems of “juvenile delinquency” in the 1950s. Though much of the archival material is more pedestrian, Mr. Smallen said, it all contributes to the story of the work the association has done since its founding to advocate for teachers, students and public education.
Meredith Evans Raiford, director of GW Special Collections Research Center, said she was pleased that GW was able to work with the NEA and NEA Foundation to make the archive a reality.
“The NEA recognized the need to preserve its historical files and create a storehouse that will maintain accurate documentation of the history of American education and education policy," Dr. Raiford said. “The NEA archives endowment will support an archivist, preservation and programming as it relates to the collection, and we are honored to keep the NEA legacy alive.”