Everyday Heroes: Morna Gerrard

And, like the Justice League or the Avengers, Gerrard’s work as a passionate, skilled archivist places her in a low-key but highly influential profession, one she believes is fighting for truth, justice and the American way.

“I go to work every day happy,” says Gerrard, who curates the Women’s Gender and Sexuality Collections at Georgia State, an extensive archive which sweeps in much of the South beyond Georgia. “I know I’m helping to make the world a better place in the work that I do. And that I am very, very lucky to do that.”

That work is gathering and organizing items -- official documents, books and letters as well as posters, photos, clothing and artwork -- that tell the stories of men and women fighting for recognition and equality.

“We have t-shirts and buttons and all sorts of different weird and wonderful things that people collect in their day-to-day life,” says Gerrard, a past vice president of the Georgia LGBTQ History Project. “A lot of our people I document are protesters, so there’s a lot of protest T-shirts. I have posters and stuff like that, and they’re very rich in telling you about what happened.”

Like many superheroes, Gerard’s origin story begins in a mystical land far away: specifically her hometown in Edinburg, Scotland. After graduating from college there, she followed her passion for history, crossed the Atlantic and enrolled in an archives teaching fellowship at Western Washington University. Her mentor, James B. Rhoads, was the 5th Archivist of the United States during the 1960s -- one of the most turbulent times in US history.

“He had been the archivist during the time of the Warren Commission” and during the Kennedy administration, Gerrard says. “And during Watergate, he was the archivist that forced Nixon to actually put his papers into the (national) archives.”

After that fellowship, “I was hooked,” Gerrard says. After a stint back in Scotland, she headed to the U.S. and, after a brief detour in Florida, landed at Georgia State University.

While her interests include the civil rights movement and women’s history -- anticipating the unprecedented scope of the 2017 Women’s March, she was on a team of archivists dispatched to collect artifacts and conduct interviews in real time -- Gerrard’s central focus has been documenting Southern queer history.

An educator, Gerrard has seen how items like a rain-soaked sign from an ACT-UP die-in from the 1980s, or a hand-painted T-shirt worn at a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention demonstration can bring history alive for people who often feel invisible.

During one Georgia State history class, when Gerrard displayed items from the collection, “one young woman just started crying, and it was tears of joy,” Gerrard says. “She’s a lesbian, and all of a sudden she felt seen. And hundreds of years from now, this stuff will still be here, and people can learn about it.”

That includes perhaps the most unusual artifact in her collection: “period paintings” from Maria Helena Dolan, a feminist artist who uses menstrual blood.

Upon receiving that donation, “I actually reached out to an archivist mentor friend at another women’s archive,” Gerrard says. “I’m like, ‘Have you got anything like it? What do you do?’ She said, ‘I’ve got none of that kind of stuff.’ So eventually, we figured out a way to protect it, and also protect people.”

Working at her university is ideal because “Atlanta is a very progressive city, a hub for queer life. It always has been,” she says. “And Georgia State is a very diverse university. So if you’re going to talk the talk, you have to walk the walk. I’ve never had to worry about collecting the materials that I do. And I’m glad for that.”

Still, “We look at our collections, and we think, ‘What’s missing? Who’s missing here?” says Gerrard, who is advising a team recording oral histories of the LGBT and trans community. “And I’ll tell you, we’re seeing people of color generally are missing, especially Asian people. Black people. Transgender people. And so I’ve worked hard to make sure that that’s addressed.”

Lately, as former President Donald Trump faces federal charges for allegedly hoarding his Oval Office papers, her profession can feel almost heroic, Gerrard says.

When the National Archives spearheaded the fight over those documents, “all of a sudden, out of nowhere, the archivists were being either honored or harangued for doing the work,” she says. “I feel like it’s never been more important for archivists to do their work. It is almost an act of activism.”

Although archivists are “a quiet profession, a mellow, funky profession,” it’s important to a functioning democracy, Gerrard says.

“If you don’t have archivists, you don’t record history.” she says. “And, at the end of the day, if you don’t collect this material, the people who win are the people who have the loudest voices.”