Hasan Karayam

Dr. Rebecca Conard

June 16, 2012

Weekly Report

This is the first weekly report for my class at Albert Gore Research Center under the

supervision of Donna Baker, University Archivist at the center. My work at the center involves

processing unprocessed materials that are accessioned in the Tennessee Death Penalty

Collection. The collectionincludes36 unprocessed boxes, including papers, cassette tapes, t-

shirts, and an oral history collection.1The majority of the collection is a set of personal papers of

Harmon Wray, an activist who fought to abolish the death penalty in Tennessee in particular and

the United States in general within several organizations, including Tennesseans Against the

Death Penalty (TADP), the Death Penalty Resistance Project (DPRP), and the Tennessee

Coalition to Abolish State Killing (TCASK). The organization is now called Tennesseans for

Alternatives to the Death Penalty (TADP).Wray is one of the authors in Tennessee’s New

Abolitionists: the Fight to End the Death Penalty in the Volunteer State2 which is edited by Amy

L. Sayward and Margaret Vandiver.

Consequently, the first thing what I had to do is to read Tennessee’s New Abolitionists to

gain a good background about the collection and to help me in arranging and sorting the

collection in the best way. Indeed, I have read the first two chapters that are entitled “The

History of the Abolition Movement in Tennessee” and “Confronting Capital Punishment in the

Volunteer State,” which made me to be familiar with history behind this collection.

1 I thank Dr. Amy Sayward whoexplained the nature and categories of the collections to me. 2 Amy Saywrd and Margaret Vandiver, eds. Tennessee New Abolitionists: the Fight to End the Death

Penalty in the Volunteer State (University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, TN, 2010).

Through the first week at the center, I arranged and sorted the first three boxes of the

collections. I encountered a few challenges. They were very messy, and most of them were

without folders. Therefore, there is no original order that may help to sort them. Even those with

folders have not been maintained in their original order. I created new folders to sort them as

much as I could. Most of the collections that I did were articles in local newspapers published

during the 1980s and the 1990s: the Commercial Appeal, the Daily Helmsman, Tennessee

Register, and few local magazines.

I sorted the second box into five basic folders: newspapers articles 1987-1993(two

folders), photographs,Department of Correction, Juveniles and Death Penalty, and Execution

Alerts Network. The original order in this box was better than the previous one, but there were

many individual, handwritten pages that disturbed the official papers’ arrangement sometimes.

The third box I sorted into files depending on the original order. The first file (two

folders) contains correspondence to and from Harmon Wray. The second file presents email

messages that were sentto or from Wray. I created a new file for legal papers that contains

decisions and laws that were issued by the Supreme Court in Tennessee. The last file is named

“Journey of Hope” and presents Wray’s efforts with churches to abolish capital punishment

based on a religious perspective.