Serendipity, Discovery and a Civil Rights Treasure Trove

Historians are all well aware of the phenomenon: You are sifting through archival collections, on a lark decide to ask for a box that does not look likely to hold a lot of useful material, and as you quickly flip through the folders therein just to cover your bases, there it is -- a magical piece of evidence that becomes the telling anecdote, or that pulls together disparate strains. Or maybe you have been in the stacks, looking for a certain book, and when you get there you find six others that all prove to be even more significant. It's one of the best-known trade secrets, but we tend not to talk about these particular "Eureka" moments because we are trained professionals with PhDs and expertise both in our fields and in the craft of research, and so no one wants to admit what a huge role luck plays in this process of discovery that is more art than science.

I could not help but think about the barely acknowledged role that serendipity plays in historical scholarship when I first found out about the mother of all capricious discoveries. In 2004 Alexander Cohn, a photo intern at the Birmingham News, stumbled upon a cardboard box in an equipment closet labelled "Keep. Do Not Sell." Whoever wrote that command had an eye for value in a pre-E-Bay age, as within the box sat thousands of photo negatives of pictures from the civil rights era, a period in which Birmingham figured both prominently and ignominiously and during which the News did not exactly shine. This past Sunday, the paper produced a special eight-page section, "Unseen. Unforgotten." Cohn interviewed many of the people who appear in the pictures, and the section contains more than thirty of the photographs, with dozens more available online. The paper also addresses its own complicity and difficulties in covering the movement.

The Birmingham News has uncovered a treasure trove and done a service to hsitory. And it was all the function of luck. Fancy that.