The most comprehensive private Black History collection in the world can be found at a home in Staten Island.
“I’m a prospector looking for the truth.” This is one of the reasons Elizabeth Meaders said she has been collecting African-American art for over 50 years, a collection that has now grown to over 50,000 pieces of historical items and memorabilia.
It’s not surprising that Meaders chose this path, she told 1010 WINS Anchor Larry Mullins. She can trace her families roots back to the 1700s. “We are in the history book of Staten Island and have the unique distinction of being the last slave that was freed on Staten Island during the Civil War era. The William A. Morris Junior High School is named in honor of my grandfather who was an activist on Staten Island, a school that I taught in for awhile, and my aunt, Evelyn King, wrote the history book for black history on Staten Island.”
How has she amassed all these items? “It’s a full-time job, because it’s not just found in one place. It's found in all kinds of exotic places and it calls for a lot of work to find the items, because the best items are in catalogs and none of them is cataloged just for black history, so I have to go through the catalogue and ferret out the gold, and the gold for me is black history.”
Meaders said so much of the African-American experience has been left out of the history books that as she began to find out facts that were new to her, she became more and more motivated to complete the story. She told Mullins: “It’s like a revelatory kind of an experience that I didn’t set out to have, but once I found out that this glorious history which has been cloaked in mystery was deserving of my time and effort, I just made it my life’s work, I just couldn’t help myself.”
Her collection includes artifacts from slavery, such as an overseer whip, a branding iron, chains and a list with the names and prices of slaves. You can also see busts, pictures, posters and artifacts from the civil rights era, as well as artifacts in a section she called “civil wrongs,” where you can see such items as KKK robes. Other rooms are filled with sports, music, religious memorabilia and so much more.
She told Mullins it is her hope that “someone, some angel or philanthropist, would be so motivated and rescue this collection so that the public can see it. That would be a gift to America!”