5,000 letters
Daphne Muse’s collection reflects five decades of Black lives and cultures.
Most people my age wrote letters. I have a drawer full of them, spanning the 1950s to the early 2000s, when email took over. My letters are from family and friends, no one famous. Why I saved them and what I’m going to do with them, God only knows.
But few of us have held on to 5,000 letters received over a lifetime from figures such as Alice Walker, Angela Davis, and Michelle Obama – not to mention the FBI.
Daphne Muse is a family friend through her late husband, activist David Landes. Born in DC, she went to Fisk University in Nashville, graduating in 1967. She then worked for Drum and Spear, a DC bookstore founded by veterans of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. As an independent, progressive, Black-owned bookstore, Drum and Spear and its employees were in the crosshairs of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI – as Daphne relates below.
After spending two months in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Daphne moved to California in 1971 and served as a secretary for the Angela Davis legal defense team. She began teaching in 1972 at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1975 at Mills College. Her home in Oakland became a Black cultural center, and in 1980 she hosted the civil rights icon Rosa Parks for a week. Along the way, Daphne began sending and receiving letters. Her correspondents included civil rights activists Jennifer Lawson, Charlie Cobb, and Courtland Cox; author Shirley Graham DuBois, wife of W. E. B. Du Bois; poet Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize; Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple; Amy Jacques Garvey, wife of Black nationalist Marcus Garvey; Guyanese historian and activist Dr. Walter Rodney; writer June Jordan; poet Nikki Giovanni; comedian Richard Pryor; and Oprah Winfrey – and many more.
Today Daphne lives in Brentwood, California, where she’s cataloging her collection for eventual transfer to an archive. She is currently elder-in-residence at the Black Studies Collaboratory Abolition Democracy Fellows Program in the Department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley. Daphne spoke with me last week about how she got into letter writing, why she kept the letters, and – now well into her 70s – what she most appreciates looking back. The interview has been edited and shortened.
Learning from the master
CATHY: At Fisk University you worked with Harlem Renaissance poet Arna Bontemps.
DAPHNE: Yes, he hired me as his research assistant. Dr. Bontemps was the archivist and librarian at Fisk at the time. And he was a major voice – poet, author, children’s book writer – during the Harlem Renaissance. He was responsible for collecting and archiving the early papers of W. E. B. Du Bois, now held in the archive at Fisk. And he mentored me. He was a tremendous person to work with – brilliant, patient. He hired me to sort through letters and news clippings and manuscripts. There were Zora Neale Hurston materials. There was a newspaper clipping on Gwendolyn Brooks, who had just won the Pulitzer. I was responsible for taking these materials, which were in boxes and folders and just scattered, and organizing them. I love to organize things. It’s in my DNA, I guess.
It wasn’t until after I graduated from Fisk and started working at Drum and Spear bookstore that I realized who Arna Bontemps was. His books were being ordered, and I was reading them, and it was like, wow, that’s who I worked with? That’s who mentored me? And we remained connected until he died in 1973. He brought me into formation as an archivist and collector.
“Writing letters was normal to me”
CATHY: When did you start writing letters, and to whom? Did you know the letters would be important historically, or did you simply stash them in a drawer and then find them years later?
DAPHNE: I had a pen pal when I was in the Girl Scouts, around 1957, 1958. Her name was Saswati Ghose, and she was from Calcutta, India. I started corresponding with her, and I learned so much about somebody else’s culture, somebody else’s life.
I wrote my parents often when I was in college. Writing letters was normal to me. Long-distance phone calls cost hella money, and that stamp was cheap! And so I was habituated to writing letters and corresponding with people.
There are letters that are filled with joy. There are letters that are highly charged. There are letters that reflect the passion that people held and still hold for justice and liberation and human rights. And they tell so many stories. Every time I saw, witnessed, or heard something related to Black lives and cultures, I kept it.
G-men at the door
CATHY: Of the people you wrote to, who had the greatest impact on you?
DAPHNE: In 1968 or 1969 I was working at Drum and Spear, and Courtland Cox asked me to go down to work on a project in Quitman County, Mississippi, related to literacy and voter rights. That’s when I met Jennifer Lawson, who’s the person with whom I’ve corresponded the longest. She was an activist, very involved in SNCC. And she went on to become a vice president for public television and bring Black lives and cultures into the major media market.
I had extensive correspondence with a number of people who were incarcerated in the ’70s going forward. The Soledad Brothers. The San Quentin Six. Angela Davis. I corresponded with Gwendolyn Brooks and Shirley Graham Du Bois. I have a trove of correspondence related to the Pan African movement. I have a priceless letter from the FBI.
CATHY: I was going to ask you about that.
DAPHNE: I had my own agent. His name was Jim South. Mr. South would follow me home in the evening. Follow me back to work. The government spent a lot of taxpayers’ dollars unnecessarily. But I wouldn’t talk to the FBI. Ralph Featherstone, when I was hired at Drum and Spear, said never talk to the FBI. Because the first thing they’ll say to the next person is “I was talking to Daphne, and Daphne said…” I said, got it! Wouldn’t talk to them. So, one morning I’m getting ready to leave, to go open the bookstore, and comes this insistent rap on my door. And I open the door, and there is Jim South and one of his colleagues. And I slam that door so hard that the foundation of the apartment building shook. They knocked, and they knocked, and they knocked. And the harder they knocked, the louder I played my music. So, Jim South slides a note under my door, saying, “Dear Daphney Muse, please call the FBI” – and he misspelled my name. I was livid about that. I mean, you’re gonna surveil me? Could you spell my name correctly? And he leaves a number. And I said, a few years ago, I hope Jim South is still sitting by that phone, waiting for me to make that call.
I have correspondence with former President Barack Obama. I wrote to him, questioning him about his policies on Cuba, Israel, and Palestine. Somebody in his office wrote me back. And then a curious thing happened. Michelle Obama started writing to me. I have a couple of cards from her. And I wrote Bill Clinton when he was president, challenging him on the same policies.
I knew I had letters. I didn’t realize how many I had until I moved to Brentwood and started unpacking boxes. And I said, whoa, this is a lot of letters! Wonder how many I’ve thrown away. Oh my God! But I’ve kept enough; it’s 5,000 and growing, because I still get letters. And I have what I call historical receipts. Every time I would go to an event on Black lives and cultures, I would save any ephemera related to it: the invitation, the poster, sometimes the recording of the event. So I have about 22 portfolios of ephemera.
Some of my correspondence is in collections at Emory University, at UC Berkeley, and at Mills, along with books and ephemera. But the 5,000, I’m working on in my home. I have the tremendous support of a friend, Ilene Abrams, and an advisory board that includes University of Baltimore historian and author Josh Davis. Ilene and I have organized the letters into folders and categories.
A week with Rosa Parks
CATHY: In May 1980, Rosa Parks spent a week in your home. What was that like?
DAPHNE: Herb Kohl, the educator and writer, Cynthia Brown, the historian and writer, and I decided to honor the founder of the Highlander civil rights center and Mrs. Parks and Septima Clark for their work as civil rights activists. So I get a call from Mrs. Parks’s assistant and travel companion, who says, Mrs. Parks does not like to stay in hotels. Might she stay in somebody’s home? And I said I’d be delighted for her to stay at our home. So they came. My daughter was over the moon. She knew who Rosa Parks was. She was seven at the time. At one point Anya puts on a dress that my mother made her, and the button pops off. And Mrs. Parks sews the button back on, and I just burst into tears.
The second morning I made salmon croquettes, and she was in heaven. “Oh, God, I love salmon croquettes! Nobody makes salmon croquettes anymore.” She played with Anya a lot. I kept the jazz station on, KJAZZ, and she loved that. And it was just the most delightful time, and it was easy. It wasn’t like I was dealing with a celebrity. They were just regular people. I have a beautiful photograph of Anya and Mrs. Parks, and another of myself and Mrs. Parks, and that photograph of Anya and Mrs. Parks still has a prominent place in my home.
The importance of community
CATHY: What has your lifetime of collecting come to mean to you? Does it change how you think about what you’ve accomplished, and what you still are going to accomplish?
DAPHNE: I think of my life not as what I’ve accomplished but as what I’ve lived. I’ve lived long enough to have a great-grandchild and to watch him grow into a world that I had hoped would be different, that so many of us work so hard to make different. And I’ve started writing letters to my three-year-old great-grandson, so that he will know what a letter is.
I have a cadre of friends with whom I’ve lived this life wonderfully and gratefully. I could not have led the life I lived without community, having good neighbors that I trusted, having rock-solid friends that have stood with me. I’m also at a point where I understand much more about my parents and the decisions they had to make in their lives, the trauma they had to navigate. And they did so without the tools and support that we have in our lives.
I’ve seen the world through the lens of other people – in South Africa, in Mozambique, in Italy, in the Caribbean, and in the Deep South, which was not new to me because I started going to the Deep South when I was three years old, my parents taking me back to Georgia to visit relatives there. I’ve seen the expansiveness of the Black world, not just the Black world of the United States and Africa, but across the globe. And to bear witness to that has been remarkable.
We are all collectors
CATHY: What would you say to those of us who haven’t had contact with well-known people, yet we may have something in our drawers that’s worth preserving? What kinds of materials might be of interest to future generations?
DAPHNE: Definitely family photos. Quilts – there are so many backstories related to quilts. Or you may be going through a grandmother’s or grandfather’s things, and there are stories that they wrote down. I have a ream of manuscripts, unpublished, that I’ve held on to, and I don’t think I’m unique. Record relatives, record friends.
CATHY: What do you think will be the value of your collection to future activists?
DAPHNE: I think it will provide a lens into how people managed to survive the challenges of being an activist, of having FBI surveillance bear down into your lives. The absolute care that we shared for one another. And the challenges of friendships being disrupted, marriages being disrupted. How people survived catastrophes. Racism is a catastrophe. Sexism is a catastrophe. Misogyny is a catastrophe. How people managed to survive those.
CATHY: And that is something future activists need to understand.
DAPHNE: Yes, as we had to understand how the activists before us survived – the Delilah Beasleys, the Ida B. Wellses, the Harriet Tubmans, the Nat Turners, the John Browns. Their historical records have been important to our lives.
For more about Daphne Muse’s life and letters, see:
The FBI’s War on Black-Owned Bookstores
The Art of Black Letter-Writing: A Conversation with Daphne Muse
150 Years of Women at Berkeley: Daphne Muse
Daphne Muse Papers at Emory Libraries
Bringing Black Activist History into the Present with Daphne Muse
Loved reading this! You must appreciate her efforts as you and Bill are downsizing and deciding which papers go where . Hope that continues to go well
Kathy, really loved reading this. So many of us have tons of letters. Daphne is an inspiration, in so many ways.