Watch The Yard Announces Partnership with the AUC Robert W. Woodruff Library to Bring HBCU Archives to a New Generation

The photographs, programs, letters and yearbooks held in HBCU archives show how Black college culture was built, and a new partnership aims to put that history directly in front of the generation carrying it forward. Watch The Yard has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library, establishing an archival and media partnership focused on preserving, celebrating and expanding public access to Black college culture and the history of HBCUs.

Through the agreement, Watch The Yard will highlight the Library and its collections and launch an ongoing series sharing approved archival photographs, images and video with its audience of more than 2.2 million followers. The Library will provide cleared archival materials, historical context and credit lines so that every item is presented accurately and with the care it deserves.

Established in 1982, the AUC Robert W. Woodruff Library serves Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College and Spelman College, (and Morris Brown College?) and its holdings document the history of all three institutions. In July 2022, it became the 127th member of the Association of Research Libraries and only the second HBCU to earn that distinction.

Its Archives Research Center holds collections spanning a century of Black intellectual and civic life, including the Morehouse College Martin Luther King, Jr. Collection, the John Henrik Clarke Africana and African American Collection, the Joseph and Evelyn Lowery Collection, the Henry P. Slaughter and Countee Cullen Memorial Collection, the Black Women in Radio Historic Collection, the Southern Education Foundation Collection and the John R. Lewis Congressional Papers.

The Library also hosts the HBCU Library Alliance Digital Library portal and serves as the home base for the HBCU Digital Library Trust, a national effort to digitize and preserve African American history collections held at HBCUs. The Trust launched in 2023 as a partnership between the HBCU Library Alliance, Harvard Library and the AUC Woodruff Library, supported by $6 million designated through Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery initiative for a four-year project. In September 2025, the MacArthur Foundation awarded the Library an additional $500,000 to expand that work.

The portal now includes materials from more than 30 HBCUs, and more than 16,500 digitized items were added in 2024 alone. The goal is to reach all 107 HBCUs across 21 states, Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

That effort has already reached Black greekdom. On July 22, 2026, Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. announced a partnership with the HBCU Digital Library Trust and the AUC Woodruff Library, committing $125,000 to digitize the fraternity’s historical records and make them accessible through the HBCU Library Alliance Digital Collection.

For Watch The Yard, the partnership is a natural extension of the work the platform has done since its founding.

“Watch The Yard has always focused itself on preserving Black college culture in real time,” said Jonathan Rabb, founder of Watch The Yard. “Every probate, every yard show, every chapter service project we cover becomes part of the record. Partnering with the AUC Woodruff Library connects what we are documenting today to the archives that hold what came before us.”

“Our goal is to put this history in front of young people where they already are,” Rabb added, “so that a student scrolling on their phone can encounter a photograph from 1948 and understand that they are also part of the expanding history of this culture and these powerful institutions.”

Rabb said the agreement is part of a broader effort to build institutional partnerships around the collection and preservation of Black college history.

“Our archives hold the photographs, papers and records that document how Black college life was built, but preservation only matters if people can find what we protect,” Kimberley Bugg, Ph.D., CEO and Library Director, Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library stated. “Watch The Yard reaches millions of students, alumni and members of the Divine Nine every month, and this partnership puts our collections directly in front of the very community whose history these materials tell. We are excited to work with a platform that understands the culture it covers.”

The story of Black colleges is still being written, and this partnership exists to make sure the people writing it can see where it began.

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Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library