Ruth Anna and the British Museum
This document received from the British Museum in London is dated 30 November 1928. The report from Mr. J. P. Gilson of the museum’s Department of Manuscripts contains Gilson’s appeal to the British Museum Trustees recommending that Ruth Anna Fisher receive a key to the establishment. This text highlights Fisher’s status within the museum as a highly regarded archivist and provides evidence of the statement that so many secondary sources love to cite that she was the “first woman to receive a key to the British Museum”--something spectacular on its own, and even more impressive given her race. Invoking Fisher’s frequent occupation of the museum’s basement, Gilson insists that she be rewarded a key for her diligent archival work. Gilson relays that in addition to the photostating room, Fisher was given her own room in the basement to organize the materials that she was working on for the Library of Congress, and, thus, it made sense for her to be granted this key to access it. This text bears testament to Fisher’s outstanding work as an archivist, which is even more notable given the contested nature of the archives themselves.
Historically, archives have been constructed and maintained by predominantly white men. The sources that were chosen to be remembered and organized were the sources that benefitted the status and privileges of these white men who controlled the political and social spheres as well as the world of the archives. As a result, many voices have been excluded from the narratives of history since the sources that contain them have been erased and suppressed in order to advance the agendas of those in charge. Black and female voices have especially been omitted from archives, thus presenting added barriers for women of color whose places in history have been frequently ignored. Subsequently, it is exceptional that Ruth Anna Fisher, as a black woman who largely focused her work on black history, would enter into this very white and male space and great success. It is ironic, however, that despite overcoming these obstacles and becoming the first woman to be given a key to the British Museum, her voice and works have fallen under the same political and social forces that excluded the very voices that she was trying to recover from the annals of history. As a result, she has, herself, been silenced.
Ruth Anna Fisher focused primarily on American history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries while she was working for the Carnegie Institute and the Library of Congress at the British Museum. This work included photostating around 100,000 documents annually pertaining to this time period. However, Fisher’s greatest work came from locating documents pertaining to the lives of black people during this period, largely via studying and uncovering sources from the Public Record Office in London concerning the official history of England. Fisher’s "Manuscript Materials Bearing on the Negro in British Archives." which was published in The Journal of Negro History in 1942 analyzes sources from the Royal African Company of Treasury 7 and the Colonial Office which included 1,692 volumes.[i] This article is a phenomenal work of historical writing that situates and explains the state of the British Archives in the mid-twentieth century, highlighting the wealth of largely ignored works pertaining to black history in these archives. Ruth Anna Fisher made incredible strides in the early study of black history through her archival and historical work with the Library of Congress, revolutionizing the field by making countless documents pertaining to this silenced history visible and publishing her own thoughts in regards to Pan-Africanism and more.
To put the spectacular nature of Fisher’s accomplished title of the first woman to hold a key to the British Museum into perspective, it is interesting to note that it was not until 2016 when the first woman and the first African American was appointed to the position of the Librarian of Congress. In September 2016, Carla Diane Hayden was appointed as the 14th Librarian of Congress by President Obama, becoming, similarly to Fisher, not only the first woman of color to earn the title, but both the first woman and the first African American respectively. This prestigious administrative position was created in 1802 and provides a title for the person in charge of all of the managerial, legal, budgetary, and logistic concerns of the Library. Of course, Fisher unlike Hayden was not in charge of the British Museum as a whole, but her earning the key to the museum and thus having unlimited access to the archives there was an especially significant moment in history. Fisher was given this access in order to conduct her critical archival work for the Library of Congress, an institution that has not itself granted high leadership positions to black women until very recently, making Fisher’s accomplishment that much more notable.
Thus, despite the incredible achievement of being the first woman to receive a key to the British Museum, it is not enough to merely cite this fact and move on; Ruth Anna Fisher warrants proper intellectual treatment and recognition as an archivist, historian, scholar, and activist. Fisher was able to not only enter into a contested space that has been a source of and contributing factor to white and male power for centuries as a black woman but worked tirelessly to make known the very sources that this system had traditionally been operating to suppress. In this regard, Fisher is a traditional race woman in that her entire life and work was inherently dedicated to the promotion of her race, which is incredibly commendable. Fisher’s intellectual work is inherently activism. Her very existence as a black woman archivist is a contested title and her operating and succeeding within a space that has existed historically to silence her is endlessly impressive.
[i] Ruth Anna Fisher. "Manuscript Materials Bearing on the Negro in British Archives." The Journal of Negro History 27, no. 1 (1942): 83-93. doi:10.2307/2715092.