JCSU STUDENT SCRAPBOOK FROM 1921
While digging around the Inez Moore Parker Archives recently, staff discovered an old scrapbook buried under some items in an overlooked corner. What a pleasant surprise to find that it was a scrapbook kept by a student at Johnson C. Smith University in 1921! The school was known as Biddle University at that time, and it was a male-only institution. The student’s name was DeWitt Talmadge Murray from Mooresville, NC, who graduated with a B.S. from Biddle in 1922. The scrapbook shows that he played baseball for Biddle (yes, the university had a baseball team until the early 1930s!) and was in the Omega Psi Phi fraternity. He was also president of the YMCA student group at the university. Many of the amazing photos in the book are of early campus scenes, including the stone entrance gate, Carnegie Hall (then the campus library), and the dormitories. It is pretty amazing to see the campus experience through the eyes of someone a hundred years ago, and you can almost get a feel for what kind of person DeWitt was just by seeing the stories of his time here that he chose for the book. We hope that students still keep the story of their journey through JCSU and this time in their lives, even if it may not be in a physical book that archivists stumble upon a century later.
Thank you Daijai Williams, Digitization and Serial Control Technician, who digitized this entire book for the library and assembled it in its original form as an online scrapbook with Canva! Daijai recreated all of the words that DeWitt wrote beside all of the pictures that he placed in the book.