An archive can become a haunted place when people are depicted in photos, but their words, narratives, and self-reflections are missing. Within a single archival collection like the Penn School Papers, a collection named to index a single place, the efforts of countless named and unnamed contributors are contained. Penn School Papers contain thousands of manuscripts authored by white administrators and educators, and hundreds of photographs depicting black Gullah and Geechee people. As a present-day audience, how are we to reconcile this negation of black thought in manuscripts with an abundance of black depictions in photographs?
ERASURE examines this precarious intersection at which black experiences are documented and described almost exclusively by white authors within Penn School Papers. The concepts of the Negro Problem and the New Negro are often present within Penn Normal Industrial and Agricultural photographs and fund-raising materials. Among the following primary sources, an imagery pattern of a conveyor belt emerges. Prior to or without philanthropic funds, the black Gullah and Geechee majority on St. Helena Island is minoritized and depicted as a homogenized collective of the Negro Problem; with philanthropic funds and the direction of Penn Normal Industrial and Agricultural School, white intervention—veiled as morality and character building—is depicted as developing Gullah and Geechee students into fully assimilated New Negros.