Disrupting Power Dynamics in the Archives: The Digital PV Panther Project, Gatekeeping, and the Texas Black Cooperative Extension & Home Demonstration Collection

Authors

T. DeWayne Moore
Evelyn Todd

Abstract

This article examines the Texas Black Cooperative Extension & Home Demonstration Collection at Prairie View A&M University as both a major recovery of twentieth-century Black rural history and a contemporary intervention into archival power. Funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, the Digital PV Panther Project employed undergraduate and graduate students to process sixty-three county-level finding aids, 163 archival boxes, and more than 3,200 folders documenting segregated Black Extension work from 1923 to 1963. Beyond preservation, the project challenges long-standing regimes of archival gatekeeping. Drawing on critical archival studies and Black Digital Humanities scholarship, the authors argue that student-led processing at an HBCU constitutes archival justice: it re-centers Black knowledge production, disrupts institutional silences, and restores community authority over historical interpretation. In doing so, the archive becomes not merely a repository of documents, but a site of reclamation, intellectual labor, and Black institutional power.

First Page

77

Last Page

85

Recommended Citation

T. DeWayne Moore, , and Evelyn Todd. 2026. "Disrupting Power Dynamics in the Archives: The Digital PV Panther Project, Gatekeeping, and the Texas Black Cooperative Extension & Home Demonstration Collection." The Griot - Southern Conference on African American Studies, Inc. 43, (1):77-85. https://digitalcommons.pvamu.edu/griot/vol43/iss1/13