San José State Associate Professor of Journalism Duane “Michael” Cheers said studying African
American history “has been part of my DNA since childhood.” The great-grandson of slaves became
immersed in the story of W.E.B. Du Bois, the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard
University and a co-founder of the NAACP, while Professor Cheers was studying for master’s degrees
in African American studies and journalism at Boston University. He is now digitally preserving
damaged photographs and personal documents belonging to the sociologist, civil rights activist and
historian.
“During my 1978 summer internship at Ebony and Jet magazines in Chicago, I shadowed the editors
who were finishing, ‘Du Bois: A Pictorial Biography’, [a book] by Shirley Graham Du Bois, his second
wife,” he said. “I’m also probably the only African American professor at San José State who owns
a first edition [of Du Bois’], ‘The Souls of Black Folk,’ first published in 1903.”
In 1993, he traveled to Senegal for National Geographic Television, filming his experience as a
descendant of slaves. “That experience was also rooted in my reading of Du Bois’ book ‘The World
and Africa: An Inquiry Into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History,’ where the father of
Pan-Africanism hauntedly discussed the horrors of the slave trade,” said Professor Cheers.
During a 2016 visit to the W.E.B. Du Bois Centre for Pan African Culture in Accra, Ghana, he noticed
ants and termites had eaten away at the materials Du Bois had brought to the home where he died
in 1963. The institute granted his request to digitize the materials and the project began.
Cheers is collaborating with SJSU’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library, and librarian Kathryn Blackmer
Reyes, director of the campus’s Africana, Asian American, Chicano and Native American Studies
Center, to add the Du Bois materials to the library’s digital Africana Collection archives. Dr. Tracy
Elliott, dean of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library, Elliott loaned him a high-resolution scanner,
and Cheers and his daughter, Imani, an assistant professor of media and public affairs at George
Washington University, have teamed up on the project.
“We scanned close to 1,000 documents in Ghana—photographs, papers, diaries—everything they
had,” Cheers said. He found some VHS tapes from the 1980s in a basement crawl space at the Du
Bois Centre and has been working with SJSU Media Producer Keith Sanders to digitize as many
videos as possible. To date, “two really important” videos—of Du Bois’ 1963 funeral and the 1985
opening of the center, when Maya Angelou was a keynote speaker—have been rescued. They are
expected to be part of a documentary examining the final two years of Du Bois’ life.
A memorandum of understanding between the Du Bois Centre and King Library to house the digital
archive at SJSU is in the works, “making it available, free to students, scholars and researchers
around the world,” he added.
In 2018, Cheers curated the 150th birthday tribute to Du Bois in King Library. “I was annoyed by
how few students knew of Du Bois and his contributions to African American history,” he said.
“I realized I could stand on the sidelines and complain or become a partner in educating this
generation of students.”
Harvard and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst have digital collections of Du Bois’ works, but
Cheers has scanned, digitized and archived photos and documents those universities don’t have.
“Hopefully, our campus library’s Africana Collection will become a repository of this material, and
professors at SJSU will include Du Bois in their lesson plans.”