In late December, a group of people recorded themselves breaking into Howard University’s Benjamin E Mays Hall, which holds some of the school’s archives. The video, posted on to TikTok, shows them rummaging through the building’s archives, handling books that date back to the 1800s and marveling at their access to the library.
Howard released a statement condemning the break-in, promising to increase existing patrols of the site and to reassess and secure the archives. But the group’s actions have shed a light on the precarious nature in which some archives that contain irreplaceable documents of Black American history are stored and preserved.
