The Black Ordinary

The Black Ordinary is an online publication, digital archive, and national database dedicated to preserving the collective memories of Black-American communities.

Scheduled to premiere in the Summer of 2025, the website will feature oral histories, interviews with artists using familial or community archives as source material, and essays by Black archivists and historians on the importance of embodied cultural practices and community-based archives.

A large component of The Black Ordinary will be the development of a national database of community-based archives and archival projects that are not directly affiliated with an academic institution or public library.

Currently, a collective database of this type and scale does not exist.

The Black Ordinary project aims to fill this resource gap by amplifying the collective efforts of community-based Black archives and archival projects through its Collective Memory Database. As the project and national database grows, The Black Ordinary will serve as a collaborative resource that encourages people to participate in the active documentation and preservation of Black-American communal history.