About
The Born in Flames Living Archive was launched in the immediate aftermath of the arson attack on the headquarters of Women With A Vision (WWAV), in New Orleans, on May 24, 2012. Knowing that the arsonists who firebombed and destroyed WWAV intended to erase our work once and for all, we began collecting every life-giving ember we could find. That included the handfuls of photographs, posters, and documents that had not gone up in flames, which are now preserved at our offices on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard. It also extended to our research as survival to record our presence with one another and with our communities in new ways: life history interviews, collective storytelling sessions, and more.
Being present in these ways changed our understanding of what the Born in Flames Living Archive was and needed to be. We use the term “living archive” to center the relational practices through which our communities have shaped and passed down for generations what living freedom means amid constant surveillance. Our relationships hold all that we have imagined for ourselves and the world. Building this living archive, thus, has not simply been a matter of reconstructing the paper record that was destroyed by the fire. It has also meant honoring the relational caverns in which our thoughts, actions, and dreams have been kept safe for centuries. And it has meant organizing to ensure that all of us at WWAV have a place that can never be erased—neither from the geography of New Orleans, nor from history.
We welcome contributions to this growing archive from all who have participated in our work or been touched by it.
The labor of building this online home for the Born in Flames Living Archive has been undertaken collectively, just like everything we do at WWAV. We are grateful to our executive director, Deon Haywood; our longtime board member and researcher, Laura McTighe; and our communications director, Camille Roane –– who together led the process of making the vision for this site reality. We also want to thank the team at Red Cypress who brought that vision into digital space, building the infrastructure to care for our stories and all they hold.
Support for the Born in Flames Living Archive has been made possible through “The Callie House Project,” which is co-directed by Laura McTighe and funded through a major grant from the Henry Luce Foundation’s Religion and Theology Program. Named after a Tennessee washerwoman who organized formerly enslaved people in churches across the South to build mutual-aid societies and campaign for reparations at the turn of the 20th century, “The Callie House Project” centers the long and unbroken history of Black women’s political activism and religious experience in matters of health and reproductive justice. By working in partnership with activists to document these untold histories of racial justice organizing histories in our region, this project aims to alter public discourse and build greater health equity across the South.