Wyatt Houston Day, an historian and appraiser who has visited Ms. “That’s the purpose of my collection: to educate, heal, inspire and empower.” “This is a motherlode of information, with so many stories that have never been told,” she said. “The more I found, the more I wanted because the whole thing became a huge puzzle and I began obsessively trying to fill in the missing pieces.”Ī main goal was to educate people on forgotten Black stories. “I’ve struggled to tell a history that’s been either ignored or not told correctly, and it’s a history that’s directly related to me,” she said. Meaders’s ancestors, she said, include servants in abolitionists’ households in the 1700s and the last slave freed on Staten Island, in the mid-1800s. An image of Crispus Attucks, believed to be the first American killed in the American Revolution, sparked an interest in Black military items, “and little by little I just expanded, and it became a labor of love,” she said.
She began visiting sports memorabilia shows and then buying items honoring other Black athletes, like the boxer Joe Louis.
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Meaders, a history buff, said her collecting began with fan material related to her teenage idol, Jackie Robinson, who broke professional baseball’s color barrier when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Buffett Foundation in 2014 for a reported $4.5 million and donated to the Library of Congress. Often, he said, a philanthropist might buy such a collection to donate for the public good that happened with the Rosa Parks estate, which was bought through Guernsey’s by the Howard G. Ettinger said he had already been in discussions with potential buyers, including several universities, and that it was possible a deal could be struck before the auction. Meaders said she funded her acquisitions by working several jobs at a time, as well as buying items on installment plans and borrowing against the value of her house. “She raised money through bake sales and school raffles, all sorts of ways.” “She had to go toe-to-toe with some pretty impressive collectors to outbid them,” Ms. Ettinger, whose auction house has handled the estate sales of Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Rosa Parks and Joe Frazier, as well as some Apollo Theater material.ĭiane DeBlois, a co-owner of aGatherin’ ephemera sellers in West Sand Lake, N.Y., who appraised the collection at $10 million, said it was enhanced by the back story of a plucky schoolteacher who was resourceful enough to acquire items on a shoestring budget. “Crammed into this simple home is a collection that tells the whole saga of African American history, from the scourge of slavery to the struggle of civil rights, to Black soldiers in all of our wars from the Revolution through Vietnam,” said Mr. She has made long video segments detailing the collection. Many objects lack documented details on their provenance, authenticity and historical significance, leaving Ms.
Meaders, whose real wish is that the items become the basis of an African American museum in New York. “I hope the sale will give it a better life because it doesn’t belong in anybody’s house any longer - each piece needs a chance to sing its own song,” said Ms. Meaders said she was hoping to attract a buyer who would make the collection accessible to the public and to scholars, at a museum or university, for example. “I’m used up and the space is used up, so it has to be transferred into competent hands that can take it to the next level.” Meaders, whose two daughters are not interested in taking it over. “I can’t go any further - the collection is outgrowing the house and pushing me out,” said Ms. Meaders, a retired New York City schoolteacher, said she began collecting in her youth with mementos of Jackie Robinson and other Black athletes, then widened her collecting to “surround myself with things that lifted my spirits.”īut she is now 90, and with limited years and storage space left, she is finally selling her collection in one bulk offering on March 15 at Guernsey’s auction house in Manhattan.