K'mari GreeneDuring the 2025 spring semester at N.C. Central University, I took a class that focused on uplifting and preserving a forgotten group of voices that helped create this country: Black women.
WGST 3610: Digital Archival Research is a class developed in 2023 by associate professor of English Rachelle Gold, who received a hefty four-year grant from the Mellon Foundation. This grant funded field trips, compensated interviewees and provided a $1,600 stipend for students.
The archive where the interviews are housed is called the Collected Lady Eagle Oral History Project and Training Research Acumen or C.L.E.O.P.A.T.R.A.
Gold said that her short-term goals for each student who takes the class was to leave with enhanced digital storytelling skills, a sense of sisterhood with their classmates and networking with NCCU alumni.
She also said she wants students to feel gratitude towards our female ancestors and understand that a Black woman’s narrative is not only struggle and pain.
“Yes, we’ve struggled and we’ve endured, but look at what we have achieved,” Gold said.
I learned about this class when Vergil Demery, my previous graduate hall coordinator, recommended me to Gold because he knew I was interested in research and writing.
She then emailed me herself to say she was impressed with my resume, GPA and portfolio. I was so excited when I saw an invite to make $1,600 just for taking a class, but I truly did not know what I was getting into.
It didn’t dawn on me until I was writing a 730-word commitment essay at midnight on Jan. 6, promising to commit my full time and effort to the class.
To take the class, students must have a sophomore status, 2.8 GPA and no more than 15 credit hours. The class has two components: academics and stipend-supported extracurricular work.
On the academic side, I knew that 15 credit hours was my maximum, but I did not want anything to stop me from graduating on time. So, I advocated for myself to take 18 credits to stay on track with the requirements for my major.
Gold hesitantly agreed, but once she saw I was such a determined student, her worries disappeared.
WGST 3610 is taught in three different sections, and I had the pleasure of being taught by an assistant professor of humanities, Dr. Erica-Brittany Horhn.
“The work we do in the classroom isn’t hard, but it’s tedious,” Hornh said.
And she was right. It’s not hard to read a few chapters from the novels we were given and think deeply about what we read, then regurgitate that process on paper. It was just time-consuming. However, that’s what grant foundations want: quantifiable data.
The novels we read were “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” by Harriet Jacobs, “Having Our Say” by Amy Hill Hearth, Elizabeth Delany, and Sarah Delany, and “Hope and Dignity” by Susan Mullany.
“My biggest contribution is helping facilitate the discussion with the books,” Horhn said. “But because I also do a lot of work with qualitative research, I get to tag team as a scholar and a researcher.”
My favorite novel was “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” because it is an autobiography. Jacobs was an enslaved woman who escaped. In great detail, she described her story which included instances of sexual abuse and how she didn’t realize the small privilege she held as a light-skinned Black woman.
Jacobs was a huge inspiration to me as I look forward to becoming a professional journalist myself.
This class showed me where Black women started and where we are now. If it wasn’t for her and other important figures like Ida B. Wells, Sojourner Truth, or Audre Lorde, I wouldn’t be here to tell this story.
The field trips also corresponded with the novels we were reading at the time. We took a trip to the house where Elizabeth Hobbs Keckly, another enslaved woman, stayed while helping Abraham Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, gain political prowess during her husband’s term in office.
Our second field trip was to the James E. Shepherd library archives. Though it was on campus, we got to see history unfold in real time and see what our interviewees were like back in the day.
The last field trip was to the Museum of Durham history, where we saw how Durham has developed from the Reconstruction era until now and where Black women fit in the story.
Outside of field trips and traditional class work, students conducted a 90-minute interview with an NCCU alumna of their choice. The interviewee must have a career focused on social justice and graduated from NCCU as an undergrad or from one of the graduate programs.
This class required long hours of planning, coordinating, interviewing and video work, but that’s where the monetary motivation kicked in. The stipend is broken down into three equal payments received at the end of each month to help with bills and other small living expenses.
“It helped a lot in being able to pay for groceries and having money to do fun things,” said Jatu McCray, a broadcast media senior. “It’s nice that we get paid for all the work we’re putting in.”
The Mellon Foundation usually doesn’t pay undergraduates, but Gold said that she fought hard for each cohort in the four years to get their fair share.
“I wanted students to be paid because you are becoming a scholar, you are becoming a researcher,” Gold said. “And I wanted students to be honored for their time that I knew would be outside of the classroom.”
For our interview, my partner, Jatu McCray and I selected Judge Shamieka Rhinehart as our subject.
Judge Rhinehart is a very lively woman who always smiles and brings joy to those she comes into contact with.
During our interview, she let her quirky personality shine and didn’t put on a façade for the camera. She finds the humor in everything, even her work, which extends far beyond the courtroom.
She is a 1997 UNC-Chapel Hill graduate, but she became an adopted Eagle when she entered NCCU’s School of Law in 1998. She grew up in Rocky Mount, NC, and after passing her bar exam in 2005, she went on to gain more than 18 years of legal experience.
In November 2024, she won the general election for the District 16A judge of the N.C 1st Superior Court Division.
We filmed the interview on March 22, in NCCU’s Farrison-Newton Communications Building at 8:00 a.m. The interview lasted roughly an hour and 11 minutes, though we were short on time, we got everything we needed to make sure Judge Rhinehart’s legacy lived forever.
While the grant only lasts for four years, I think this class should stay forever. NCCU is the first HBCU to have a digital archive, but I don’t think we’ll be the last. This is just the tip of the iceberg for a brighter future in America.
I hope the work my class and past cohorts have done motivates students to preserve the narratives of Black women in America. And I hope that the story of my life will go down in history books one day as well.
