The “Mama’s Moan” Memoirs

It all started when…

Dr. Irma McLaurin, a Grinnell College Alum, ‘73, returned to her alma mater to begin her vision of creating Black Alumni Legacy Boxes for Special Collections. She was donating her papers to the College’s Burling Library. As a new emerging scholar and, as the Community & Cultural-based Digital Curator at Grinnell, I began to share my stories about my daughter, Kaiya, and how she and the ripples she had created made me the woman, the artist, the researcher I am today. The legacy of Kaiya so touched Dr. McLaurin that she invited me to contribute Kaiya’s work to the Black Feminist Archive at UMass-Amherst.

We are calling it The Kaiya “Soski” Smith “Mama’s Moan” Memoirs Collection. To kick off this effort, we will be putting together the “Being Kaiya’d” Campaign to gather all the materials, memories, and moments everyone would like to contribute to this endeavor. We will also look to place in Kaiya’s legacy box, testimonies from individuals who are continuing Kaiya’s dedication to women empowerment, community, and restorative justice.

The Irma McClaurin Black Feminist Archive (BFA) is an archival home for Black women and their allies. Founded by Dr. Irma McClaurin, Black feminist anthropologist, academic administrator, award-winning poet and author, past president of Shaw University, and leader in higher education, the BFA seeks to identify Black women from all walks of life who are artists, activists, and academics but may not be well known, and document their wide array of contributions at many levels: community, state, national, and global.

The BFA is an umbrella collection, made up of a growing and diverse group of collections documenting Black women, allies, movements, and organizations. Highlights include the papers of renown anthropologists Sheila Walker and Carolyn Martin Shaw; Belizean writer Zee Edgell; activist and educator Cheryl Evans, who founded the Black Pioneers Project documenting the experience of Black students at UMass Amherst during the late 1960s; Lawrence (Larry) Paros, a UMass alum and forerunner of the Alternative Education movement in America, past director of the 1968 Yale Summer High School (YSHS); and the papers of Dr. Irma McClaurin, BFA founder, which include her photographs of iconic Black figures.

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