Beyond a wall of glass and just off the elevator on the tenth floor of the J. Murray Atkins Library at UNC Charlotte, you will find the Dalton Reading Room, a semi-circular space lined with rare books and study tables. The space is open to the public, although appointments are recommended, and it is where Qnotes went recently to view items from the university’s special collection and archives, specifically those that document Charlotte’s Black LGBTQ+ community.
Since 2013, the collection at UNC Charlotte has included the King Henry Brockington LGBTQ+ Archive, a community project designed to collect, preserve, and protect the LGBTQ+ community history of Charlotte. Named after Don King, Sue Henry and Blake Brockington, the collection covers primarily the 1970s-present, with personal papers, oral histories, organizational records, ephemera and the full archive of Qnotes. While named after Brockington, it includes no items from his life beyond the past issues of Qnotes. That absence is indicative of a problem archives face when trying to document Black LGBTQ+ history. Discrimination in both communities has limited the stories that are often recorded.
Brockington, a transgender youth activist passed away as a result of suicide in 2015. He made national headlines the year prior when he was crowned homecoming king at East Mecklenburg High School and was a student at UNC Charlotte at the time of his death. The university says there were a lot of issues around trying to collect anything from his life for a variety of reasons, however, including the fact that his family of origin was not supportive.
Like other archival collections, UNC Charlotte has little in terms of local Black LGBTQ+ history. Dawn Schmitz, the Associate Dean for Special Collections & University Archives at UNC Charlotte, says they hope to increase the diversity of its LGBTQ+ collections.
“We want to, in general, just increase the diversity of the archives of the LGBTQ community and we want to work with folks in any way they see they could use support, encouragement, or for us to share what we know and learn from the community at the same time,” said Schmitz.
Other university collections and LGBTQ+-specific archives have initiated projects to grow the diversity of their collections over the past decade and projects like the Black Lesbian Archives or Black/queer Kansas City (B/qKC) explicitly focus on creating collections that document the contributions of Black queer people.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture has included LGBTQ+ objects and history since opening in 2016. New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture includes LGBTQ+ items spanning from the early 1920s to about 2014.
In an op-ed for Time Magazine last year, Myeshia Price wrote about the importance of Black queer history. “Growing up and exploring my identity further, I never once saw a Black LGBTQIA+ person like me represented in my history books,” she wrote.
“As a matter of fact, I rarely learned about Black historical figures outside of the common heavy hitters such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Sojourner Truth, or Harriet Tubman. While they are monumentally important to our history as Black Americans, they also represent very specific factions of our struggle for justice and liberation.”
Price is the director of research science at The Trevor Project whose work focuses on reducing LGBTQ+ mental health disparities and the role of supportive and affirming schools, LGBTQ+ role models and representation.
Pride and Politics
The collection at UNC Charlotte includes a historic timeline of Charlotte Black Pride, a poster showing the first event’s sponsors and the very first campaign t-shirt from Charlotte city councilwoman LaWana Mayfield, who made history in 2011 as Charlotte’s first openly LGBTQ+ elected official.
Mayfield spoke with Qnotes about the t-shirt that she donated just months before our visit to view the collection.
Hear Charlotte City Councilwoman LaWana Mayfield’s story.
Mayfield’s first campaign team consisted of only five people that year. “When we first ran, I had no idea, like a lot of people running for office,” she said. She and Charlotte attorney and activist Connie Vetter were part of the Mecklenburg Political Action Committee, or MeckPAC, in 2011 when they started trying to identify someone in the LGBTQ+ community to run for office.
After that meeting, the group decided that Mayfield was the person who needed to run, approaching her later with the idea. She describes the months that followed as true grassroots work, and the t-shirt is a prime example of that historic campaign.
When Mayfield showed up at a planning meeting one evening at the home of friend and campaign committee member Yvette Wilson, she was presented with this stark white t-shirt that read simply “Mayfield for City Council.”
According to Mayfield, Vetter and Wilson had gone to Wal-Mart the night before to get iron-ons and a shirt for her to wear when knocking on doors.
That t-shirt represents not only this important moment in Charlotte history but tells the story of how the community came together to change the trajectory of local government and LGBTQ+ representation. Now, that item and its story will live on for generations.
Archiving a community
Schmitz says they are always willing to speak with people about how to donate their personal archives or launch community archiving projects.
Community-based archiving, sometimes referred to as memory projects, are based upon the collective effort of a group of people organizing to preserve and share their history. These projects celebrate and share once-hidden histories of our past and create meaningful connections between the public and historic collections. Schmitz says they are happy to support such projects.
The Charlotte Queer Oral History Project was established as a community-based project to capture oral histories of LGBTQ+ people in Charlotte and its surrounding counties. The project was initiated in 2015, and has recorded 68 interviews. In 2022, Tina Wright and Linda Lawyer launched a new effort to capture oral histories from LGBTQ+ older adults in the area. Wright, who is an oral history interviewer at UNC Charlotte, is now capturing the oral histories of local drag queens.
The current collection also includes additional Black LGBTQ+ oral histories. In one interview, Kris Davis describes growing up in the Charlotte neighborhood of Grier Heights, a predominantly Black community, and what it was like coming out as she got older. In another, Reverend Sonja Lee, pastor of Unity Fellowship Church Charlotte, discusses her formative years understanding her identity and her work coordinating the first Black Gay Pride in Charlotte.