How Asha Abdul-Mujeeb, a Black digital archivist, is preserving HBCU history – Reckon

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Flipping through old yearbooks in an HBCU library is when Asha Abdul-Mujeeb knew she wanted to document the present and preserve the past of historically Black institutions.
She quickly went from a fascination with black and white images to creating an HBCU digital archive where pictures and stories of the Black college experience exist.
“For me, archiving the history of HBCUs is a way to inform the larger masses that what we are doing here is not new. I feel like HBCUs are becoming an increasingly hot topic but if you look through archives, you’ll see that we’ve always been producing excellence,” Abdul-Mujeeb, a digital archivist and graduate student at George Washington University, said.
Abdul-Mujeeb created Everyday Aggies more than six years ago as a student of North Carolina A&T State University, an HBCU in Greensboro NC, using social media as a tool to share images, stories and testimonies of HBCU history.
Last year, she left her full-time job as a social media manager to enroll in the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design at George Washington University to better understand documenting and to continue building digital archives like Everyday Aggies.
Reckon spoke with Abdul-Mujeeb about the importance of preserving HBCU history and her journey into digital archiving.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What’s your favorite part of HBCU life to document?
It’s the mundane and everyday life of HBCU students. My work is really inspired by Gordon Parks and how he just captured Black people in their casual everyday life and now years later we look at his pictures like, ‘wow it’s so simple, but it just speaks volumes.’
I like documenting the normal day because it’s stunning and gorgeous. It’s just us doing us and us doing us is 10 times better than anybody else doing them on a normal day. So I just try to capture the mundane of it all.
Why did you want to go to an HBCU?
I originally went to Pasadena Community College because I’m from Los Angeles.
And I remember the exact moment I wanted to go to an HBCU. I walked into a class and the professor had a question written on the board for us to discuss, ‘Should African Americans receive reparations?’
While he always had questions on the board for the class to discuss, this one in particular made me sit down, look around the room and notice that I was the only Black person there. I wondered if people were going to look to me to answer the question first.
I just felt like I no longer wanted to be the spokesperson for an entire race and I didn’t want to be in an environment that felt like I had to be, so at that moment, I told myself, ‘I’m transferring to an HBCU.’
Why do you think it’s important to use social media as a tool to share HBCU history?
Coming from a low-income household, I didn’t have a phone until I was in high school. Then when I went to college and got a phone, I didn’t have a nice phone with a good camera.
I remember thinking, ‘all I want to do is put this HBCU history out there.’ And social media was the only tool that allowed me to communicate with a world full of people for free.
For me, social media serves as a tool to share information with everyone but especially for people who do not have access to a subscription for newspapers or blog posts. Social media is a unique place where you’re able to write your own narrative, maybe even one that’s different than what newspapers and mainstream media put out there.
Making posts from the Everyday Aggies social accounts feels like stories surrounding HBCUs have a place to live.
What’s one of the most interesting facts you’ve learned about HBCUs since getting into archival work?
Just the concept and connection that Black women have always paved the way for larger Black movements, whether that be a community movement or just a Black male figure. Specifically with Howard University, an HBCU in D.C.
There was an enslaved woman named Alethia “Lethe” Tanner in D.C., who freed herself by selling fruit in Lafayette Square, basically in front of the White House. She then went on to continue selling fruit and using the money to free her relatives.
One of the relatives she freed was a man by the name of John F. Cook, the first African American Presbyterian minister in D.C. who also taught at Smothers School in D.C. and later turned it into one of the first Black seminary schools in the area, Union Seminary.
Charles Hamilton Houston, known as the “The Man Who Killed Jim Crow,” attended the school as a child. Charles went on to be the first general counsel of the NAACP, led the charge in Brown v. Board of Education and grew Howard University School of Law, an HBCU in D.C., into the national center for training Black lawyers.
Many people say that Howard University School of Law was his brainchild.
I often think about how the opportunity for Charles to create such a long, glorious history at Howard University School of Law would have never happened without Althea freeing herself, freeing her nephew, John F. Cook, Cook running and creating a school, Houston attending that school to go on and make impactful waves in the civil rights movements.
It’s about making the connection to see how Black women have paved the way for Black men and how their efforts were overlooked or just not acknowledged.
I report on HBCUs and Blackness, working to introduce voices and perspectives of students, alumni and community members that amplify the experiences of Black life on and off campus.
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