The Southern Historical Collection at UNC has received a grant of $500,000 to help preserve African American history.

The grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities requires the Southern Historical Collection to raise an additional 1.5 million to establish a permanent position of an African American Collections and Outreach archivist.

Chaitra Powell, who already works to archive African American history with the collection, said the new position would help to portray African Americans as they saw themselves throughout history.

“African-Americans are represented in the collection to an extent, in our antebellum records, in our Civil War records and civil rights but sometimes they are seen through the lens of the donors of the collection, which are not always African American,” said Powell.

The new position would focus on community outreach, connecting with everyday people to capture their place in time.

“If you don’t have first person experience on what it was like to be in the South during the 20th and 21st centuries, you kind of always wonder what did people really think, what was the situation really like if I just have this second person analysis?” said Powell.

The work of the new archivist would include bringing artifacts back to Wilson Library for display but also to help people preserve their things at home or in their local library.

“It’s really an innovative position that strives to meet people where they are at, rather than just traditional collecting of materials,” said Powell.

Powell said the new position will expand the collection to include not just typical historical documents like letters and pictures, but more personal items.

“We’ve collected some coal mining materials for a community of African American coal miners. We have collected a prom dress from someone who went to an integrated high school in Kentucky,” said Powell.

Powell said the purpose of the collection is for everyone to remember the history of the South.

“We are really wide open in terms of stretching the imagination of what an archive can be and essentially who it’s for. It’s for all of us,” said Powell.

The Southern Historical Collection contains more than 15 million items organized in over 4,000 collections.

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