At a moment when public memory and historical truth are being contested, archives aren’t simply about the past — they’re tools for understanding the present.
I am an archivist by instinct, long before I ever claimed the title. I collect what was never meant to survive: old deeds, wills with Black names misspelled, faded church minutes, letters written carefully because paper itself was a risk. I document not because I love the past, but because I know what happens when records disappear. Silence is never neutral. It always benefits power.
That is why my recent book, “The Bequest of John T. Ward,” matters right now.
When moments like this arise, people ask why we keep digging into history. Why look backward when everything feels urgent in the present? My answer is simple: because what we are seeing is not new. It is familiar. And without documentation, familiarity becomes inevitability.
Long before emancipation, freedmen gathered and studied Revolutionary War records to learn how liberty had been fought for and how it might be claimed again. Knowledge was strategy. Archives were survival tools.
The Machinery of the State
As I researched nineteenth-century Black life in so-called “free states,” I kept returning to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. On paper, it was federal law. In practice, it deputized ordinary citizens, erased due process, overrode local protections, and turned entire regions into hunting grounds. Free states did not become safe because slavery was outlawed; they became compliant.
What struck me most was not only the violence, but the paperwork. Warrants issued without evidence. Affidavits signed by men who never met the people they condemned. Ledgers recording human beings as recoverable property. The machinery of the state moved efficiently, bureaucratically, and without moral pause. History makes this clear: oppression rarely announces itself as chaos. It presents as an order.
The Present Is Not New
When I watch modern footage of federal enforcement deployed into communities today, I feel the same chill I felt when opening those old files. The uniforms change, the language changes. The logic does not. Broad authority. Minimal accountability. A presumption that certain bodies are inherently suspect. When people say, “This isn’t America,” I hear what Black communities have always known: this is an America we have been documenting for centuries.
Archival work strips away the comfort of surprise.
A Family Archive Reveals Political Truth
My own family history taught me that lesson. I grew up knowing my great-great-grandfather, John T. Ward, as an Underground Railroad conductor, a landowner, a recipient of a Civil War contract, and the founder of what is now the oldest Black-owned business still operating in America, E.E. Ward Moving and Storage. Those facts alone felt extraordinary. What was missing, what had been buried, was the fact that his life was actually deliberately political.
Through archival fragments and scholarship such as “The Colored Conventions Movement,” I learned that John T. Ward was part of a national network of Black leaders who organized, debated law, built institutions, and asserted citizenship decades before emancipation. The records showed meetings, correspondence, and planning. These were not passive figures waiting for freedom. They were designing it.
The most haunting discovery was the will long buried in legal filings that granted manumission to members of my family. Not a legend. Not oral history. A document. Folded, filed, nearly erased. Proof that freedom, when it came, was fought for line by line, signature by signature.
Documentation as Resistance
Black Americans have long recognized that laws are not merely words. They are behaviours backed by force. We have lived through eras when being “in the wrong place” was a crime, when helping someone else was treated as treason, and when compliance did not guarantee safety. The records clearly show that, if you are willing to look.
But preservation is not only about trauma. It is about resistance. For every federal order, there was a margin note. For every ledger, a counter-record. A coded letter. A church registry. A will that refused erasure.
This book is not nostalgia. It is pattern recognition. It is a refusal to let the present pretend it arrived without precedent. Documentation is an act of care and a form of defence. It is how we warn the future.
History does not repeat because we forget dates. It repeats because records are buried or because we are taught not to read them.
Shanna Ward is a historian and cultural preservationist dedicated to documenting and protecting African American history through archival research and storytelling. She is the founder of The Bequest 1820 Project and the author of a forthcoming book that explores legacy, land, and the importance of preserving Black historical records for future generations.