Booth became interested in archival work as an undergraduate at Morehouse College, where a music professor encouraged him to pursue a career in library science due to his interest in music history. Enrolling in a master’s program at Simmons College, he studied under Tywanna Whorley, the first Black archival educator in the country, who was dedicated to recruiting undergraduates from historically Black colleges and universities into the field. Booth’s internship, which would lead to his first job, involved cataloging the papers of a fellow Morehouse alum, Martin Luther King, Jr., at Boston University. In 2009 he started working for the National Archives in Washington D.C. By 2017, at the Obama library, Booth led the process of archiving the former president’s audiovisual collection—from Instagram slides to YouTube posts.
The objects Booth preserves range from official documents found in the archives of public figures like King and Obama to treasured family heirlooms—letters and diaries, a family Bible, an old dress, a concert flier, or even a text message. In addition to his role at Getty, Booth is a member of the Blackivists, a collective of Black memory workers dedicated to preserving Black cultural heritage. Knowing that the histories of marginalized people are underrepresented in big institutional archives, the Blackivists collaborate with communities to address these gaps in the record. To date, the collective has published informational how-tos about donating personal materials and documenting protest movements. In their most recent project, Diamond in the Back, the Blackivists are providing hands-on guidance, as well as funding, for communities to preserve their own stories. “The materials that are often kept by individuals, families, or communities—whether they are considered artifacts, objects, heirlooms, memorabilia, etc.—are no different from what mainstream collecting institutions such as Getty acquire and preserve,” says Booth.
When the JPC archive went up for sale after the company’s bankruptcy in 2019, many feared that such a rich repository would fall into private hands, and be inaccessible to both scholars and the general public alike. The potential loss of such an exceptional collection seemed to mirror the fates of other Black collections in the city. In response, Booth and a co-editor, fellow Blackivist Stacie Williams, produced the digital publication Loss/Capture, an exploration of the different Black archives in Chicago, such as the Center for Black Music Research, or the images by Black photojournalist John H. White from the 1970s DOCUMERICA project. As Booth and Williams write, Loss/Capture documents how Black history, so often threatened or undervalued, has always been creatively captured through music, memory, manuscripts, murals, and movements. As Black neighborhoods—and the histories and cultural traditions that exist within them—have been the subjects of violent erasure and neglect throughout American history, this type of preservation is crucial.
The GRI and NMAAHC want to ensure that the JPC archive is available to future generations. Booth is both organizing it for researchers and providing an opportunity for the general public to engage with the collection digitally. With a collection so massive, managed by multiple cultural institutions, he has had to invent the process as he goes along. He works with a team of 30 staffers, from both Getty and the Smithsonian, made up of administrators, archivists, curators, conservators, digitization specialists, and IT specialists. The work, he says, is collaborative and iterative—they are exploring machine learning technologies to help assign metadata to the images. With 15 percent of the collection still unidentified and unsorted, he is also developing an archival processing manual and a cataloging plan for the entirety of the collection. “We have left a lot of room for experimentation.”
Due to the great public interest in the collection, Booth and his team are processing and digitizing in intervals, making materials regularly accessible as they are completed. “There's just so much material that my first three months felt like sensory overload,” says Booth. “You grab a box, bring it back to the table, pull out a folder, go through the pictures, and you’re just like, ‘Oh my God, wow.’”
An X-ray of Muhammad Ali’s skull is by far Booth’s favorite item—because it’s so unexpected. He’s still trying to uncover the story behind it, and many more surprises most likely await. “I’m just excited for when everyone else will get to dig in and discover all the greatness that the collection has to offer.”
