Social Justice and What It Means to be an Archivist
Two events this week have called into question what the role of archivists should look like. First was the revelation of audio recordings of President Ronald Reagan saying vilely racist things about delegates to the United Nations. Second was the cancellation of a session at the Society of American Archivists (SAA) annual meeting covering a forthcoming article in the Fall/Winter 2019 issue of The American Archivist by Frank J. Boles entitled “For Everything There is a Season” (more on that in a bit).
Tim Naftali’s article exposing to the public Reagan’s comments notes, “When the National Archives originally released the tape of this conversation, in 2000, the racist portion was apparently withheld to protect Reagan’s privacy.” A value judgment was made to avoid the news coverage we saw this week in order to preserve the image of a public figure. Perhaps the then-California governor thought the phone call was private and the archivists made the decision with that possibility in mind. That is irrelevant in the face of President Nixon’s habit of generating records for everything. Though the Presidential Records Act (PRA) did not go into effect until 1981, it did spell out that only the president to whom the records are related (in this case Richard Nixon) may restrict public access to certain records. I would argue that even though the Nixon administration…
