Firms build worlds. On this, historians and businesspeople agree. Corporations have always been among the greatest forces shaping American life. And the many corporations that hold private archives documenting their past activities have unique powers to disclose—or hide—their contributions to racial injustice in America. That’s why, if they truly want to advance the cause of social justice, companies should throw open their archives for researchers to use.
Let me make the case, using one example from my own experience as a historian. Harvey Firestone Jr., president of the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company, recognized the power of American industry in making history when he established the company’s archives in 1943. The records “not only of Firestone but of all American industry,” the rubber magnate believed, “represented vital source material as historically important as the records of Government and the military.” By 1952, the company had amassed what it described in a pamphlet as “560,000 documents, 150,000 photo negatives, thousands of feet of microfilm and 400 recordings.”
For years, those archives, which grew over time, were housed at a public institution, the University of Akron. For years—despite Harvey Firestone Jr.’s stated intentions—they remained inaccessible to historians, including me. On multiple occasions, as I researched my book Empire of Rubber: Firestone’s Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia, I was denied access to the Firestone Archives at the University of Akron’s Archives and Special Collections. I was told that it “was the long-standing policy” of what is now the Bridgestone-Firestone company “that no one is to be allowed access to the materials.” After a 2005 court case alleging labor abuses on Firestone’s rubber plantations in Liberia was dismissed in 2011, the archive was boxed, loaded onto a tractor-trailer, and removed from the university library in 2017. An archivist at the University of Akron library told me at the time that he believed the archive was taken to a company facility in Jacksonville, Florida, for review.
Archives are the stuff of the historian’s trade. Gaining access to private corporate records is essential to understanding the role corporations have played in shaping our public history. What we now know about how Big Tobacco covered up the health effects of smoking, or how oil companies sowed seeds of doubt about climate change science, only came through court cases that made company records public in the process of discovery.