Archives
Uncrowned Queens to hit the airwaves
By PATRICIA DONOVAN
Contributing Editor
Since 1999, the Uncrowned Queens Institute for Research and Education on Women has collected, preserved and presented the written and oral histories of hundreds of female African-American community builders across Western New York and Southern Ontario.
Now, with a $280,000 grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the institute, in partnership with WNED Corp., is preparing a series of 26 one-hour radio programs derived from its Uncrowned Queens archive that will begin broadcasting in May.
The institute was co-founded and is co-directed by Barbara Nevergold and Peggy Brooks-Bertram, senior education specialists in the Office of the Vice President for External Affairs. Click here to read a profile of Brooks-Bertram and Nevergold.
"If the first year of the project is successful," Brooks-Bertram says, "CPB will award up to $560,000 in additional grants to continue it through a second and third year. This will permit us to develop Uncrowned Queens radio projects in 10 to 15 communities throughout the country using the model we develop with WNED."
The series is tentatively titled "Uncrowned Queens: Voices from the Community." The programs, to be produced by Lorna C. Hill for WNED, will feature Hill's interviews with 78 of the Uncrowned Queens from Western New York-three per program.
Each program will end with a commentary by Nevergold and Brooks-Bertram, who say that WNED is working to identify national figures to introduce the programs.
Also in the first year, the Uncrowned Queens Web site (http://www. buffalo.edu/uncrownedqueens/) will be updated to permit Web broadcast of the on-air radio programs and to include other enhancements.
"This is the first step in our plan to move the collection from its static HTML-scripted architecture to a dynamic data-driven Web architecture," says Brooks-Bertram.
Adds Nevergold: "The new architecture could be replicated by Uncrowned Queens franchises anywhere in the world. It also will allow the institute to manage the digital assets—biographies, digital images, media files and oral histories—contributed by Uncrowned Queens honorees across the country and to establish an inter-operative relationship with related digital library projects."
The original digital archive was developed with funding from a grant from the UB Educational Technology Center, which now will provide the upgrade with a $28,000 sub-grant from the Uncrowned Queens project.
Brooks-Bertram says the institute plans to make UB the permanent repository for Uncrowned Queens digital projects produced in the U.S. and abroad, which will add a unique and valuable body of research materials to the UB archival collections.
"Many cities, regions or states, including Washington, D.C., cities in California, Michigan, New Jersey, the American South and Southwest, and elsewhere, already have expressed great interest in collecting histories of Uncrowned Queens in their areas and producing radio programs under this grant, so we're off to an encouraging start," she says. "It is very exciting."
She and Nevergold now are at work on the first of these projects in Oklahoma in connection with the Oklahoma Centennial Commission. They are collecting biographies and photos of Oklahoman women, many of which now appear on the UB Uncrowned Queens Web site. Between 100 and 200 of those women will be featured in a special volume, "Uncrowned Queens: African American Women Community Builders of Oklahoma, 1907-2007." Numerous African-American women's organizations in Oklahoma are working with Brooks-Bertram and Nevergold on this project.