“[…]This collection documents Simmons’s deep commitment to a Black feminist approach to survivor-centered cultural work, especially in her years-long quest to make NO! The Rape Documentary.Researchers will find an array of information about the practical aspects of creating independent documentary films, from securing funding and managing logistics, to writing, filming, and editing.[…]”
Ren Bickel, Technical Services Archivist, Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, Duke University
The Aishah Shahidah Simmons Papers are now open for research at Duke University. It started with multiple conversations between two dear sister-friends. For years, I had been thinking about what would happen to my materials, especially the approximately 40 hours of footage connected to the making of NO! The Rape Documentary, which I have always understood as a Black feminist archive in and of itself. Beyond the footage, there were decades of correspondence, research, writing, photographs, filmmaking materials, records of activism and cultural work, and family documents dating back to the early 20th century.
All of it was living with me. Wherever I lived, my archives lived too, traveling in boxes from home to home and city to city. I used to say, quite literally, “I live in my archive.”
Conversations between sister-friends
My beloved sister-friend Dr. Tamura Lomax (Lomax Unhinged), co-founder and co-managing editor of The Feminist Wire, had recently been through an archival process herself, with The Feminist Wire archives deposited at Harvard University. When I shared my concerns about preserving my own materials, she did what sister-friends do. She opened doors. Tamura sent stellar introductory emails on my behalf to three institutions, and each expressed interest in acquiring my papers.
That left me with an extraordinary privilege and an enormous decision: Where did I want these materials, representing so much of my life, my family, my political commitments, my creative work, and the communities with whom I have been in relationship, to live?
I found myself leaning toward Duke University, drawn by the breadth of the collections at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. My work has never fit neatly into one category. It moves across Black studies, women’s studies, documentary film, Black feminist thought, sexual violence, survivor-centered cultural work, and activism. Duke’s collections cross those same boundaries through the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture, and the Archive of Documentary Arts. But choosing an archival home was not simply an intellectual decision. I needed to experience the place.
Going to Durham, North Carolina
My dear sibling-friend Lee Levingston Perine drove with me to Durham from Washington, D.C. My cherished siblings Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Sangodare Wallace generously hosted me in a hotel for several days while I visited Duke, explored the archives, asked questions, and sat with the magnitude of the decision I was making.
Alexis and Sangodare’s generosity was profound. It gave me the gift of time and space to make a decision of this magnitude without rushing and without worrying about the logistics. I am deeply grateful for their care and for the trust behind it. Laura Micham, Director of the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, was incredible. Over those days, I began to feel that Duke could become the home for materials that had lived alongside me for decades, and I decided to place my papers there.
Thirty-nine linear feet
There is another person without whom this story cannot be told: my beloved wife, Sheila Alexander-Reid, a trailblazer in her own right. She supported me throughout the archival process. Then, in 2024, we moved back home to Philadelphia, from a house into a condo. I had spent decades making room for my archives wherever I lived, but Sheila gently informed me that this time, my archives were not moving in with us.
She was right. There simply wasn’t room. So, for the first time, the materials that had followed me from home to home went into a storage facility while I prepared for their journey to Duke, all 39 linear feet of them.
In May 2024, I deposited my papers at Duke University. There is something about that timing that feels particularly poignant to me now. Shortly after the deposit, I received an invitation that would open another significant chapter of my life: to join the four-year joint Spirit Rock Meditation Center and Insight Meditation Society’s Dharma Residential Teacher Training Program.
I don’t experience this as the closing of one chapter and the beginning of another. Our lives rarely organize themselves that neatly. I experience it more as a transition between chapters, an honoring and preserving of decades that came before while making room for what was, and still is, emerging.
The archive is open
More than two years later, the “Aishah Shahidah Simmons Papers” are officially open for research. There is something surreal about writing those words. Materials that I packed and unpacked, carried between homes, worked beside, worried about, protected, and lived among for decades are now being cared for and preserved beyond the walls of my own home, and they are available for others to encounter.
I think about future students, Black feminist scholars, filmmakers, artists, survivors, cultural workers, and activists I think about people studying movements against sexual violence and people imagining ways of addressing harm beyond punishment and incarceration. I think about people I will never meet who may open one of those boxes decades from now and discover something that leads them toward a question I cannot yet imagine.
And I think about family. The archive doesn’t begin with my public work. Some of the materials reach back into my family history in the early decades of the 20th century. My own life and work did not emerge from nowhere. They are part of lineages, relationships, communities, struggles, contradictions, love, and histories and herstories that preceded me. I am their cumulative continuation. That matters deeply to me.
On July 30, Duke’s Rubenstein Library published a beautiful article about the collection, “Healing and Truth-Telling: Aishah Shahidah Simmons papers.” At the time of publication, I was moving through an extraordinarily full summer of travel, Buddhist residential meditation retreats and teaching, alongside deaths and serious illnesses of beloveds. I am only now seeing and sharing it. Perhaps there is something fitting about that too.
In the article, I shared what it means to me for this work to be held there:
“Placing my papers at Duke marks an important moment in my life and work. As a Black feminist lesbian survivor-healer whose cultural works, writings, and images are survivor-centered and rooted in non-carceral accountability, reaching communities globally, I am grateful that this work will be held with intention across the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture, and the Archive of Documentary Arts, accessible to generations who can learn from this work as ground to stand on and build beyond what I could imagine.” – Aishah Shahidah Simmons
For decades, I lived in my archive. Now the archive has a home of its own. And the journey continues.