Lillian Evans was born in Washington, DC to a cultured, well-educated, middle-class family. She was the first African American woman to sing opera with an organized European company. Her mother was Annie Lillian Brooks Evans, a music teacher in the DC public school system, and her father was Wilson Bruce Evans, organizer and first principal of Armstrong Technical High School in Washington, DC. Hiram Revels, the first black U.S. senator, was her great-uncle and two other family members are credited with taking part in John Borwn's raid on Harper's Ferry. She married Howard University music professor, Roy W. Tibbs in 1918. Her stage name, Madame Evanti, is a combination of her last name and her husband's. Evans had one child, Thurlow Tibbs Sr., and two grandchildren, Diane Elizabeth and Thurlow Evans Tibbs. Thurlow Jr., operated a museum, The Evans-Tibbs Collection, which centered around the life of Lillian Evans until 1996, a year before his death.
Restrictions:
Use of the materials requires an appointment. Please contact the archivist at acmarchives@si.edu.
Collection Rights:
Collection items available for reproduction, but the Archives makes no guarantees concerning copyright restrictions. Other intellectual property rights may apply. Archives cost-recovery and use fees may apply when requesting reproductions.
Genre/Form:
Scrapbooks
Photographs
Citation:
Evans-Tibbs collection, Anacostia Community Museum Archives, Smithsonian Institution, gift of the Estate of Thurlow E. Tibbs, Jr.
Researchers must handle unprotected photographs with gloves. Researchers must use reference copies of audio-visual materials. When no reference copy exists, the Archives Center staff will produce reference copies on an "as needed" basis, as resources allow.
Do not use original materials when available on reference video or audio tapes.
Series Rights:
Collection items available for reproduction, but the Archives Center makes no guarantees concerning copyright restrictions. Other intellectual property rights may apply. Archives Center cost-recovery and use fees may apply when requesting reproductions.
Series Citation:
Archives Center Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution
This collection is open for research. Access to original papers requires an appointment and is limited to the Archives' Washington, D.C. Research Center.
Researchers interested in accessing audiovisual recordings in this collection must use access copies. Contact References Services for more information.
Collection Rights:
The Archives of American Art makes its archival collections available for non-commercial, educational and personal use unless restricted by copyright and/or donor restrictions, including but not limited to access and publication restrictions. AAA makes no representations concerning such rights and restrictions and it is the user's responsibility to determine whether rights or restrictions exist and to obtain any necessary permission to access, use, reproduce and publish the collections. Please refer to the Smithsonian's Terms of Use for additional information.
Collection Citation:
Yasuo Kuniyoshi papers, 1906-2016, bulk 1920-1990. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Sponsor:
Funding for the processing and digitization of this collection was provided by Stephen Diamond, the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, and the Terra Foundation for American Art. Glass plate negatives in this collection were digitized in 2019 with funding provided by the Smithsonian Women's Committee.
1 Item (Photographs : ca 3100 prints and negatives)
1 Item (Maps and illustrations )
Type:
Collection descriptions
Archival materials
Place:
United States -- Archeology
Bc53, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico -- Archeology
Chaco Canyon (N.M.) -- Archeology
Colorado -- Archeology
Arizona -- Archeology
New Mexico -- Archeology
Agate Basin, Wyoming -- Archeology
Date:
undated
Scope and Contents:
This collection of Rober's papers and photographs is almost excluvely concerned with his scientific fieldwork and resulting publications. It is not complete; for example, there is little in the photographs concerning his work at Agate Basin in Wyoming (though some related site forms are part of the records of the River Basin Surveys). Apparently, some of the series that form the records of the RBS began as Roberts's own files and were simply continued once his interest turned to the administration of the RBS. For instance, there is correspondence concerning Robert's work in New Mexico among the RBS correspondence series. The file of correspondence in manuscript 4851 is a miscellany with few letters from any one correspondent.
Biographical / Historical:
Frank H.H. Roberts, Jr. studied history and English at the University of Denver and after receiving his B.A.worked briefly as a journalist. Entering graduate school at Denver he was influenced by Etienne Bernadeau Renaud and, later, Jean Allard Jeacon. Although his studies toward a master's degree were in political science, he carried out archeological work among ruins in the Piedra-Pagosa region of the San Juan River valley in southwestern Colorado and became an instructor in archeology at the University of Denver. In 1923, he became an assistant curator at the Colorado State Museum.
Robert's formal training in archeology came through subsequent studies at Harvard University, where he received a Ph.D. in 1927. While a student, he worked during the summers of 1925 and 1926 for Neil Merton Judd on expeditions to Chaco Canyon. Judd offered him the opportunity to study pottery sequences, expanding upon work already carried out successfully for the Piedra region. From his work under Judd, Roberts produced his dissertation. The work also led to a permanent appointment as an archeologist with the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology in 1926.
For some time after this, Roberts continued to work primarily among ruins in the Southwest. In 1927, he conducted excavations at Shabik'esche Village in Chaco Canyon and carried on excavations at Kiathuthlunna on the Long H Ranch in eastern Arizona. In 1930, he excavated in the Village of the Great Kivas on the Zuni reservation and, in 1931-1933, worked along the Whitewater River in eastern Arizona and at a site near Allantown, Arizona. For the University of New Mexico Field School in 1940-1941, Roberts directed expeditions to the Bc-53 site in Chaco Canyon.
Throughout this work Roberts's primary interest was "the early structure and sequences of Southwestern culture." This led to Roberts's ultimate interest in the problem of early man in America. He was asked to inspect the discoveries at the original Fosom site in 1927, and over time became convinced of an error in contemporary thinking about the relatively recent arrival of humans in the New World. He was increasingly drawn to study the problem and particuarly after 1933, devoted most of his field work to it. Between 1934 and 1940, he worked at Lindenmeier, a Folsom campsite in northern Colorado. In 1941, he excavated the Mons site near the Peaks of Otter in Virginia, though failing to find expected remains of early man. In the same year, he worked at a Folsom site at San Jon, New Mexico, and, in 1942, another Folsom site in the Agate Basin in Wyoming. In 1943--again in connection with this interest in early man--he carried out a reconnaissance of the Clear Fork of the Brazos River in Texas. In addition, Roberts inspected other sites in Colorado, Arizona, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Saskatchewan.
Roberts also worked briefly with other interests. In 1932, he served as an advisor to the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., in its excavation at Chichen Itza and Uxmal in the Yucatan. In 1933-1934, he conducted a Civil Works Administration expedition to excavate mounds in the Shiloh National Military Park in Tennessee. In 1956-1960, he was on the advisory council for the National Park Service's Wetherill Mesa Project.
In the administration of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Roberts became the assistant chief under Matthew Williams Stirling in 1944. In 1946, he became, in addition, the director of the BAE's River Basin Surveys, a salvage archeological program concerned with areas where the federal government was planning dams and reservoirs. In 1947, he became the associate director of the BAE and, in 1958, its director. In addition to these duties and his scientific work, Roberts served as American representative to the League of Nations' International Conference of Archeologists at Cairo in 1937 and as representative on the International Commission for Sites and Monuments in 1939-1942. During World War II, he was involved with the Ethnogeographic Board, an organization that provided liaison between federal war agencies and the scientific community. For the board, Roberts prepared a survival manual and a volume on Egypt and the Suez Canal that was issued as one of the Smithsonian's War Background Studies. For several years later in his life, Roberts was also on the National Council for Historical Sites and Buildings. He also served the Smithsonian on committees concerned primarily with personnel.
Outside official duties, Roberts represented the American Anthropological Association on the National Research Council in 1935-1949. In 1936, he was president of the Anthropological Society of Washington and, in 1944, vice president of the AAA. In 1949, he became president of the Washington Academy of Sciences. A founding member of the Society for American Archaeology and a member of the committee that drafts its constitution and bylaws, Roberts served that organization as president in 1950. In 1952, he became a vice president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Local Numbers:
MS 4851
Restrictions:
The photographic negatives are in special storage and require advance notice to view.
