INQUIRING MINDS
Carli Lowe Brings History to Life
By Julia Halprin Jackson
By democratizing access to library and university resources through digital exhibitions, archives, events and programs, San José State University Archivist Carli Lowe is creating opportunities for Spartans to engage in history as a way to shape the future.
When Carli V. Lowe was seven years old, a white supremacist organization hosted a rally at a park near her San Francisco dance class — a fact she was unaware of until decades later, when she stumbled across a newsletter for the John Brown Anti Klan Committee (JBAKC) at the Freedom Archives. Then an elementary school teacher, Lowe had dedicated her spring break to interning with the Archives while pursuing her master’s degree in library and information science. The discovery awakened something deep within her.
“It was jarring to realize how my childhood in this liberal bubble in the San Francisco Bay Area had very closely bumped up against this kind of hate and violence,” she says. “It wasn’t so much that I was sitting there feeling sad, but rather I was realizing how much history people don’t know — whether it’s their personal history or the history of their communities.”
The epiphany sparked a critical realization: Suddenly, archives became not only living testaments to history, but benchmarks of where society could go from there.
“I remember saying to my supervisor, ‘I’m restraining myself from going out to the street and dragging people in here, giving them a box and saying, See what you can learn about yourself and your community!’” she recalls. “There’s so much out there to understand that you’re not going to find in books; you’re really only going to find it in archives. I see archives as an opportunity to take ownership of your own understanding of history and not rely on other people to interpret history for you, or tell you what’s important to you.”
Lowe has accomplished a lot since she was hired as university archivist in 2019. Six months after she arrived at San José State, COVID-19 upended the world, offering her a unique vantage point as keeper and curator of records. It didn’t take long for her to recognize the historic nature of the pandemic — or to take solace in the fact that SJSU had survived the Spanish flu epidemic a century prior.
In spring 2020, Lowe invited members of the SJSU community to participate in the Spartans Speak on COVID-19 project. Students, faculty and staff submitted essays, poetry, journal entries, photographs, presentations, social media, original artwork, audio and video recordings that documented the effects of social distancing and shelter-in-place orders on social lives, mental health, financial well-being and campus life.
The pandemic also inspired Lowe’s first major exhibit: Survival Mode, a virtual exhibit that explores how the university has responded to historic crises. Lowe organized photographs, news clippings, yearbooks and journals from SJSU Special Collections and Archives to offer insight into how Spartans have responded with empathy, creativity and resilience, sometimes in partnership with, and sometimes as a challenge to, university, city and world leaders.
“So much history has been written about not because people need to know it, but because it was something a specific historian was interested in writing at the time,” Lowe reflects. “Sometimes it’s because certain information is intentionally obscured in our education system or not valued in academia. A lot of things aren’t written about, and the only way to find out about them is by looking at these kinds of raw materials of history that exist in archives.”
Photo by Robert C. Bain.
Opening digital doors
Much of Lowe’s archival philosophy stems from considering who has had the power to collect, curate and effectively write history — and how archivists, librarians and information scientists can democratize access to resources, not only for scholars and researchers, but also for the greater community as well.
“For the entire history of archives, up until very recently, people who are in power have had their perspectives and experiences and accomplishments prioritized in the historical records,” she says. “So I’m always on the lookout for how I can shift those priorities. I prioritize spending my time on getting documentation preserved that tells stories that would otherwise be lost.”
Three recent examples of Lowe’s priorities include the Black Spartans exhibit, which Lowe launched in 2022 with Special Collections Librarian Kate Steffens, ’19 MLIS, and artist Yeab Kebede, ’22 BFA Graphic Design; the Body Politics exhibit, which she curated with Christine Nguyen, ’25 MLIS, and Eilene Lueck, ’23 MLIS, following the reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022; and BIPOC Become Librarians, a mentorship program she co-created with a team of King Library and San José Public Library colleagues to introduce Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) undergraduates to careers in library and information science. As a Black librarian herself, Lowe knows all too well what it feels like to be “the only one of your identity in a room or space.”
“Having an identity that is not well-represented in my profession, despite the struggles that come with [feeling alone], I can’t not do this,” Lowe says about launching the mentorship program.
“This is what I love to do. It’s work that fits me. So I see the importance of a program like this giving BIPOC students the chance to see if the work fits them, and if it does, they know they have advocates. A side effect of this, hopefully, might be that we can bring more diversity to the profession, meaning that the diverse people who use libraries will be able to benefit from people who look like them and who might understand where they’re coming from when they come to access information resources.”
“Knowing where we’ve come from aids in planning where we’re going, enabling us to avoid repeating the same mistakes. If we knew what mistakes were made in the past, then we can move forward from there. Archives also allow us to build on past successes.”
— Carli V. Lowe
Carli Lowe shared information from the King Library archives as part of the 2024 Day of Remembrance activities recognizing the anniversary of Executive Order 9066, which forced the incarceration of more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II. Photo by Jim Gensheimer.
“Carli is an outstanding archivist and her work in the university archives documents the varied stories of SJSU and the greater San José community. Without archival work much of history would just vanish and our understanding of history would be diminished,” says Michael Meth, dean of San José State’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library.
Lowe feels an added urgency to create physical and digital space to capture history in motion. When members of her family learned of her interest in archives, they began sending her heirlooms, records and mementos.
“My grandfather had the first Black-owned nursery and Black-owned service station in Austin, Texas, if not in the state as whole,” she reflects. “I don’t know that that’s documented anywhere except in our family documents, as proof that this is an accomplishment in our family.
“Knowing where we’ve come from aids in planning where we’re going, enabling us to avoid repeating the same mistakes. If we knew what mistakes were made in the past, then we can move forward from there. Archives also allow us to build on past successes.”
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Top photo: Robert C. Bain.
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