On April 29, 2025, Lydia Beal, CRRJ’s Research Associate, and Joy Zanghi, CRRJ’s Project Archivist, presented the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive (BNDA) at Digital Commonwealth’s 19th Annual Conference.
Their presentation spoke to the title of this year’s conference, Ethics and Access: Treating Users and Collections with Care. Beal and Zanghi identified how Northeastern University archivists intentionally developed policies during the creation of the BNDA that upheld the humanity of the victims within the Archive, and were informed by key tenets of restorative justice.
“The sources in the BNDA are products of a culture that knowingly produced violence and harm, which adds to the challenge of how to present the information in the BNDA,” said Zanghi.
We’re faced with the question; how does one build a digital repository that holds these historical narratives without perpetuating harm to the victims of this violence, while centering the life of the victim as a human being beyond the violent act that ended their life?”
To this aim, they discussed the implementation of the Archive’s unique hierarchy for sourcing project metadata, a system designed to center victims’ stories and help present cases as more than data points. Zanghi explained how BNDA archivists are trained to prioritize family member accounts, drawing details from these, before examining posthumously created sources, such as the death certificates and newspaper articles.
The creation of the Archive’s Data Dictionary, which currently contains over 50 elements, is another tool used by the team to mitigate dehumanization and the reproduction of harm.
“The Data Dictionary standardizes everything from occupational categories and carceral locations, to patterns of legal impunity, allowing users to uncover not only what happened, but where, how, and why,” said Beal.
The pair addressed the complexities of developing responsible access, while maintaining the privacy of the victims and their descendants in the Archive. Beal, who is also CRRJ’s main liaison with victims’ descendants, highlighted the case of Pfc. Booker T. Spicely, killed by a bus driver in North Carolina in 1944. Beal used this case as an example of the ways in which the Archive can support claims for restorative justice by making these stories accessible and better known. Following CRRJ’s investigations and subsequent efforts to uncover the truth by local activists, Spicely’s story has been reported in national newspapers and a historical marker has been erected to mark the site of his death.
“The Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive, by furthering the CRRJ’s mission of restorative justice, demonstrates how digital projects and archival records can honor families and communities who have endured racial violence through ethical policies of access and outreach,” said Zanghi. “The work of the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive team is centered on record-keeping as accountability for past racial violence and its ongoing effects today.”
In summary, Zanghi said that, given the political, social and economic climates society is facing, “it is imperative to be active and ask how digital humanities projects and archives can continue to facilitate restorative justice. As the stewards of the past, we must consider the impacts our decisions have, and strive to make choices that give agency, power, and voice to those who need it most.”
Read more about Hill’s death on the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive
About the Archive
The Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive houses case files and documents for more than 1,000 cases of racial homicides in the Jim Crow South. Co-founded by Melissa Nobles, professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Margaret Burnham, CRRJ director and professor of law at Northeastern, these uncovered stories highlight how violence affected lives, defined legal rights and shaped politics between 1930 and 1954.
The Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive houses case files and documents for more than 1,000 cases of racial homicides in the Jim Crow South. Co-founded by Melissa Nobles, professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Margaret Burnham, CRRJ director and professor of law at Northeastern University, the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive allows users to identify patterns in racial terror and serves as the evidentiary record for advocacy and demands for redress.
Digital Commonwealth is a non-profit collaborative organization that was founded in 2006 in partnership with the Boston Public Library. It provides resources and services to support the creation, management, and dissemination of cultural heritage materials held by Massachusetts libraries, museums, historical societies, archives, and other cultural institutions.
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