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The person in charge of preserving memories from St. Paul's historic Rondo neighborhood is a 27-year-old Black woman who handles decades-old photos with white cotton gloves. In a room organized with shelves of black archival storage boxes, Kayla Jackson can be overheard talking to a sepia-toned heirloom, calling the relic in her hands "my friend."
Jackson may not be from Minnesota, but as the steward of the Hallie Q. Brown Community Archives, she cares for artifacts in a way that feels both personal and sacred. Her mission carries particular heft because Rondo, once the heart of the city's Black community, was gutted to make way for a freeway. Hundreds of homes and businesses in the neighborhood were lost.
"These are people's most precious memories, and they're more valuable than money in some cases," she says of the images, handwritten letters and other materials she's preserved. "I can be the person who can try to reconstruct this moment and make it so that people remember."
A one-person, formally trained archivist team, Jackson is what some in her field call a "Lone Arranger." But she's unique in other ways.
"To be a young Black woman in this field, that is the piece that is so phenomenal," said Jonathan Palmer, executive director of Hallie Q. Brown Community Center, a 94-year-old African American social service agency. "The work she is doing is groundbreaking. If you google 'unknown Negro,' you will come up with thousands of people who nobody knows who they are. Kayla is giving people their names back. We're giving people their history back."
About 4.5% of people who work with archival materials identify as Black, according to a national survey of the profession released last year. The lack of diversity in the field raises questions about whose stories are being honored and passed down to future generations. Jackson, the first dedicated professional archivist to oversee the Hallie Q. trove, protects this history and keeps treasures out of landfills.
What is it like being an archivist?
"Normally people think it's like an Indiana Jones thing," Jackson told me, "but most of my work is done at the computer."
She spends the bulk of her days processing and cataloging the materials, recording detailed notes that can identify faces and the years and places in which the pictures were snapped.
But there's also the art of collecting the materials in the first place. Communities that might not trust their keepsakes with a large, white-run museum have come to know Jackson as a neighbor. "I show up," she says.
That's why you may sometimes find her at coffee shops cozying up to elders with the Magnificent Golden Agers, a group of women involved with the Hallie Q. Brown center who like to say that "membership begins at the speed limit" (55 and older).
"My absolute delight is when I'm showing the senior groups these things and they can identify their friend," she said. Last month Jackson visited the center's Retired Men's Club with the image taken from a slide taken around 1965. She asked if the men knew any of the four boys pictured in the center's auditorium. "Hey, that one's me!" one of the men exclaimed.
Some of her collections are permanent donations. But others are loans — think family scrapbooks or boxes of old photos gathering dust in closets — that families entrust to Jackson. She returns them to the families after she's digitized them.
After all, if she were to hoard these relics in her meticulously organized office, "that's just glorified storage — who cares?" she said. So Jackson has taken pains to upload many of the images and film clips to an online repository at hqbca.contentdm.oclc.org. She's always on the lookout for more items for safekeeping.
Jackson majored in museum studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, the state where she spent the most time growing up. "I was trained to be an archivist by white people and to manage white collections. Now I'm a Black archivist working with predominantly Black materials in a predominantly Black community."
When she took over the community archive in 2021, the center's historical documents and photos were in disarray. One box unearthed in a closet by a colleague doing spring cleaning contained old films that Jackson sent to a service to be digitized.
When community center officials hosted its gala last year, they premiered the lost films of Rondo. Those in attendance got to see what their community looked like before the bulldozers came, in some cases a glimpse of their distant childhoods, Palmer recalled.
"You should have seen the look on people's faces," he said. "Kayla has restored a piece of the soul of Rondo with her work. She is a hero fighting for history."
