Faculty Seminar – Harlan Greene

The Holloways: Legacy of an American Family

Faculty Seminar Series: Harlan Greene, Archivist, Special Collections

Friday, January 21, 2011
3:15 PM
Addlestone Library, Room 227, 205 Calhoun Street

“The Holloways: Legacy of an American Family.” Free people of color have always occupied an intriguing place in Southern and Charleston history. Locally, the Holloway family was one of the most pre-eminent free people of color clans. Although the brick and stone memorials they erected to their family and their class have been destroyed, a fragile paper scrapbook survives. Housed at the Avery Research Center and recently restored, the volume created in the early 20th century not only documents their social, legal, cultural and slave owning activities before the civil war, but dramatically shows how the family’s status declined in the Jim Crow era. The scrapbook, an attempt to shape historical memory, is not only a memorial but a plea sent out to future historians to not erase the Holloways and their class from history, something they saw happening – and which inspired the scrapbook’s creation. Harlan Greene, former Director of Archival and Reference services at Avery, now Senior Manuscript and Reference Archivist at Addlestone Library, will share his observations regarding the scrapbook and the article based on it in a forthcoming in the This entry was posted in Faculty Seminar Series by Anne Bennett. Bookmark the permalink.

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