ARCHIV e: History revived

Continued from page 1 found guilty and given a lifelong sentence — a journey chronicled in many of the archives in her donation.

“The sheer volume of the material she gathered related to the trials of her husband Medgar’s assassin show her persistence in her quest for justice,” President Gabi Starr told TSL via email. “She was meticulous. She would not give up.”

After receiving her bachelor’s degree in sociology at Pomona, Evers-Williams ran for Congress, co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus and chaired the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Board of Directors from 1995 to 1998.

Starr highlighted photos of Evers-Williams on the campaign trail running for Congress in 1970, only two years after graduating from Pomona, as one of her favorite parts of the collection.

“Though she lost at that time, she helped blaze the trail for Black women in politics today,” Starr said.

Nick Payton PO ’25 said he is excited about parsing through Evers-Williams’s donation and comparing her social justice work at Pomona to contemporary movements taking place at the school. He added that his feelings on the collection itself would depend on whether the school actively uses the archives for outreach and education or keeps the donation as an academic resource.

“I don’t want [the celebration of this donation] to be a practice to make up for the historical lack of initiative in these areas,” Payton said. “I don’t want [Pomona] to try to make up for it by just parading the fact that we have access to these archives of this person that happened to go here.”

Starr said there is still much work to do in organizing and sorting the material, but that the archives will soon be available for students and eventually “a resource of intellectual depth and inspiration for the wider public.”

“[Myrlie Evers-Williams] has seen the worst of humanity and still she pushes ahead with the expectation that change for the better is coming,” Starr said. “We all stand to learn from the difficult path she has taken over so many decades.”

Speaking about her donation to the school, Evers-Williams told Pomona that she hopes people will come to learn about this particular part of the past.

“Hopefully someone who views this will grow to be another strong leader in our country,” Evers-Williams told Pomona. “ ... a leader for justice and equality.” effectively relieved of qualified immunity.

A public celebration of Myrlie Evers-Williams 90th birthday and her donation to the school will be held in Pomona’s Bridges Auditorium on March 22.

Ritchie also discredited the notion that increasing police spending leads to a reduction in violence or an improvement in safety.

“[Police] say they’ll produce more safety or stop being so violent if you give [them] more money,” she said. “If it was really about funding the police, the U.S. would be the safest country in the world because we spend $130 billion on police every year, and we instead continue to face high rates of violence, including police violence.”

Ritchie promoted a revolutionary imagination, which pushes beyond the carceral state to find new definitions of safety.

Abby Smith PO ’23 applauded Ritchie’s incorporation of abolitionist history with novel ways of approaching the nation-state.

“I was appreciative of the way that she balanced thinking about abolition as coming out of the tradition of Black radical thought, while at the same time experimenting [with] different ways to counter the carceral state,” Smith said.

Tess Gibbs SC ’23, a member of the Prison Abolition Collective, found the presentation to be enlightening for both newcomers and those familiar with abolition.

“I feel like her presentation was such that if you are relatively new to understanding abolition, there was a lot you could get out of it.” Gibbs said. “At the same time, as somebody who has been in conversations about [abolition] for a while ... I still feel like I got so much out of it in terms of the specificities about abolition, immigrant justice abolition and reproductive rights.”