The Organization of American Historians has alerted members that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) plans to close two regional branches in Chicago and San Bruno, California.

I agree entirely with the OAH that this would be a disastrous decision, one “driven by chronic underfunding, not archival need.” And I also can attest personally to the value of staff expertise at regional branches. Losing archivists and narrowing access to these libraries would represent a terrible loss for historians and the general public.

Let me explain why.

I first visited the National Archives at Chicago on September 28, 2015, while beginning the research for my book, Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America. At the time, though, I wasn’t sure there would be a book, much less one that would receive the distinctions of a Pulitzer Prize and an OAH award.

I had just started to trace the story of Henrietta Wood, a formerly enslaved woman who managed to sue a former enslaver (Zebulon Ward) for restitution after the Civil War. I knew that in 1878 a federal court had awarded Wood $2,500, which represented the largest known sum ever awarded by a U.S. court in reparations for slavery. But key questions remained unanswered. In 2015 I didn’t know, for instance, whether Wood had ever actually received the money.

To answer that question, I needed to find the original case file in Wood v. Ward.

I managed to determine that the case likely resided at the Chicago branch of the National Archives, which holds the Records of the U.S. Circuit Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division (Cincinnati). When I showed up at the reading room in Chicago, I quickly found docket books that documented the case. But as I detail in the Epilogue to Sweet Taste of Liberty, the case file itself seemed to be lost.

The eventual discovery of the missing file was, for me, a dramatic moment, and my recounting of it comes near the end of the book.

The archivists at the reading room made several more attempts to locate Case 1431. Eventually, though, they turned to the director of the branch, Douglas Bicknese, who told me he would try again, one last time. He did not sound optimistic.

Finally, Bicknese returned from the stacks with his hands coated in dust and a cautious smile on his face. At some point long ago, perhaps even in the nineteenth century, Wood’s case had been misfiled in the records of the federal District Court in Ohio. Bicknese had looked in those long undisturbed boxes and caught a glimpse of the names Wood and Ward. He ran a vacuum cleaner over the soiled files, clearing away decades of dust and flakes of brittle paper. The name ‘Henrietta’ materialized before our eyes. …

The case file, as I go on to explain, was bursting with new clues about Wood’s story. And most critically, it included a filing labeled Satisfaction, which showed that Wood had finally been paid the money that she won, money that made a real difference in the lives of her son and descendants.

(Below is a peek at our first look through the file that Bicknese found that day.)

Today, the file for Wood v. Ward is emphasized as one of the highlights of the Chicago branch’s collections, and thanks to Bicknese and his team, the case file has been digitized and made available to all. I had a chance to thank these archivists again when I returned to Chicago to film a short documentary at the archive with a journalist from WGN. The video contains a glimpse of the hard work that archivists there do to preserve historic documents and make them available to the public.

I sincerely hope that NARA officials will reconsider their precipitous decision to close this vital institution. With digitization and all the current discourse about AI transforming research, it is all too easy for the uninformed to take for granted that historical documents are already accessible enough.

But my experience at the Chicago branch shows what it actually takes to uncover the many, many stories about the nation’s past that are not yet known. It requires researchers to go in person to archives whose managers are not always aware of all the treasures they hold. And it requires expert, professional staff who understand those archives better than anyone and can troubleshoot problems when a researcher requests a file.

As the OAH notes:

Archivists at Chicago and San Bruno have built careers around institutional knowledge that exists nowhere in a finding aid—about, for example, which record group actually contains a given case, what is in the records that have yet to be catalogued, how collections at their facility connect to related holdings at partner institutions, and more. Researchers who have relied on these facilities for decades characterize this staff expertise as inseparable from the collections. The loss of the staff and their deep institutional knowledge is a recurring, specific worry raised by working historians, genealogists, and tribal researchers.

The OAH is absolutely right. The NARA’s plans to close these gigantic archives will only make it harder for stories like Henrietta Wood’s to be found. It is tempting to see this closure as part of a wider war on history waged by the current presidential administration. But access to archives is and should be a bipartisan imperative. Historians and all friends of history need to act now to let our representatives know why regional branches of the NARA matter.

For many years, I have shared with my U.S. history students the letters of Hawkins Wilson.

Born into slavery, Wilson had been sold away from his family in Virginia as a child, eventually ending up in Texas. It was from there, on May 11, 1867, in Galveston, that Wilson composed a moving letter to an agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau, seeking information about his long-lost relatives in Caroline County, Virginia.

He enclosed a letter that he intended for his sisters to read.

A recent Ancestry documentary used the names in this letter to build out Wilson’s genealogy and reunite descendants of the Texas and Virginia branches. The film is moving and beautifully made, and I highly recommend it.

I teach this letter because it helps students contemplate the horrors of the domestic slave trade, the strength of African American families, and the meaning of emancipation. These are the themes that scholars who have noticed the letter also focus on. (The letters are reproduced in Ira Berlin and Leslie S. Rowland, Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era (New York: New Press, 1997).)

But less attention has been paid, both by scholars and in my own teaching, to what Wilson shares with his sisters about his experience in Reconstruction Galveston.

Hawkins Wilson writes:

My reputation is good before white and black. I am chief of all the turnouts of the colored people of Galveston— Last July 1866, I had the chief command of four thousand colored people of Galveston— So you may know that I am much better off, than I used to be when I was a little shaver in Caroline, running about in my shirt tail picking up chips— Now, if you were to see me in my fine suit of broadcloth, white kid gloves and long red sash, you would suppose it was Gen. Schofield marching in parade uniform into Richmond— The 1st day of May, 1867, I had 500 colored people, big and little, again under my command— We had a complete success and were complimented by Gen. Griffin and Mr. Wheelock the superintendent of the colored schools of Texas— We expect to have a picnic for the Sunday School soon. …

The sorts of “turnouts of the colored people” that Wilson describes here were widespread among African American communities in the post-emancipation South.

As historians like Elsa Barkley Brown, Kathleen Ann Clark, and others have shown, Black Southerners used parades, picnics, and public holidays to lay claim to urban space and assert new rights.

Springtime Sunday School picnics and processions were also common, and post-emancipation processions in Black communities across the south often featured marshals at the head of the parades, wearing ceremonial, quasi-military dress of the sort that Wilson describes.

In this case, the day of the July 1866 parade Wilson remembered was also especially significant.

When Wilson described himself at the head of 4,000 people in a parade during the summer of 1866, he was talking about an event that took place on the Fourth of July.

A little digging in digitized newspapers turns up more about the July 1866 event that Wilson is remembering in May 1867.

From the Galveston Daily News on July 4, 1866, for example, we learn about the arrival of many Black Houstonians in Galveston on July 3 in preparation for the day:

A procession of colored citizens passed our office yesterday evening. They had banners flying, and were on horseback and on foot. It was a stylish turnout, having a band in front of drum and fife. We learn that a portion of them composed the delegation sent down from Houston to participate in the celebration to-day.

The next day, the Daily News had an even longer report of the “turnout,” which allows us to imagine Hawkins Wilson at its head with his suit, gloves, and “long red sash”:

The freedmen’s procession yesterday was conducted through the principal streets in an orderly manner. There was a profusion of banners and flags in the hands of the horsemen, and each of the schools had a banner with mottoes upon them. There appeared to be, from the sashes and other insignia, at least two companies or societies of males and three of females. We suppose one to be a benevolent association, and another to be a debating society.

There is also a report in Flake’s Bulletin from July 6, 1866:

… In pursuance of previous arrangements, a [illegible] procession of freedmen and women, [illegible] on the Public Square, at 11 A.M., and [..] marching through the principal streets [..] repaired to Smith’s garden, where [..] enjoyed themselves during this day. [..] displayed flags and banners with appropriate mottoes and devices. The column halted and gave three rousing cheers, in […] of Department and Bureau headquarters. The pupils of the colored schools, accompanied by the teachers, tidily dressed, and [holding] a banner on which was inscribed, “Education is our Motto,” formed a noticeable feature of the procession. The affair was conducted throughout with perfect order, and […] credit upon the freedmen of Galveston.

Finally, a newly digitized newspaper from Houston, the Daily Evening Star, included a July 5 letter about the event from its Galveston correspondent (whose pseudonym was “Comanche”), which further describes the uniforms, route, and music at the procession:

About ten o’clock A. M., the soul stiring [sic] music of the drum and fife saluted the ears of sojourners upon the Strand, and a squad of horsemen with the American flag were seen to turn from Tremont street, headed by a freedman mounted upon a clay bank horse, wearing up on his (the freedman’s not the horse’s) shoulders a huge pair of epaulettes. Brandishing like Marmion, a blade about his head, shouting something, from the distance I could not discern whether it was “victory” or “file right.” Something, however, was shouted by him in an authoritative and commanding manner, and the freedmen seemed to obey. They proceeded down the Strand. …

I read these articles recently while working on my new article for the Journal of Texas History on the first Juneteenth anniversary, which took place in Houston on June 19, 1866.

When I revisit Wilson’s letter in light of the evidence presented there, it strikes me as additional evidence that Houston, rather than Galveston, was the site of the first June 19 celebration to be held on June 19 itself. Hawkins Wilson remembers a procession 4,000-strong on July 4, 1866, in Galveston, but neither he nor any the newspapers cited above mentions the occurrence of any similar event in Galveston a few weeks before on June 19.

The articles and the size of the “turnout” on July 4 also gives insight into the relationships between Black communities and churches in Houston and Galveston at the time.

The Daily Evening Star had earlier reported that freedpeople from Galveston came up to Houston for the events held there on June 19. The fact that the Daily News later reported, in turn, that Houston sent a delegation “down” to Galveston for the July 4, 1866, suggests that the conjoined communities of “colored people” in the two sister cities had likely celebrated June 19 in Houston that year, and July 4 in Galveston.

Most of all, however, reading more about the scale of the Fourth of July observance in Galveston in July 1866 makes clear why Hawkins Wilson was so proud of his role in the day’s festivities as “chief of all the turnouts.”

Indeed, as I now read the details from the Daily Evening Star about “a freedman mounted upon a clay bank horse,” shouting orders and brandishing a sword on the Strand, it is impossible for me not to imagine that this was Hawkins Wilson himself—celebrating freedom on the Fourth of July.

The celebration was tinged, even a year later, by his grief from the loss of his family. But if he found them, he wanted them to know about the sashes, the gloves, and the epaulettes.

About the victory.

And on the eve of the nation’s 250th birthday, that part of Wilson’s letter is worth remembering and celebrating too.