RICHMOND, Va.

When Ariel Brown was offered a chance to transcribe the correspondence of the first family of the Confederacy, the history major with a keen interest in the South seized the opportunity.

Then the student from historically Black North Carolina Central University in Durham let her colleagues know she would be doing her research at The Museum of the Confederacy.

“It was a stare of, 'Oh, wow, what is she doing there?'”

Brown, 25, said she understands the reaction from fellow African-Americans who are offended by the Confederacy.

Undaunted, Brown was one of three N.C. Central graduate students who sorted through 42 boxes of documents related to the family of Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy's lone president. In a museum that began as a memorial to the Confederate cause, this was scholarship tinged with irony.

The paid interns worked in a second-floor room overlooking the back portico and garden of the former Confederate White House, where Davis led the secessionist slave states during the Civil War.

Museum president and CEO S. Waite Rawls III acknowledged there is a “gee whiz”' element to students from an historically Black university working amid the nation's most extensive collection of Confederate artifacts.

“Normal thought would be, a Black university in a Confederate museum? That doesn't make sense,” Rawls said of the collaboration. “It's a great statement, I think, to people who look at everything through a political lens.”

Their work, he added, is consistent with the museum's growing mission to reflect the social history of the Civil War, including the roles of women and African-Americans, not just the generals, battles and weapons.

The door has not always been open to Black historians' working on the Confederacy and the South. The late Dr. John Hope Franklin wrote of the bigotry he encountered – in the South and elsewhere – during his distinguished career chronicling African-American history.