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.
