African American women’s garden clubs played a significant yet understudied role in the civic, environmental, and cultural life of Black communities throughout the Jim Crow South. While historians have documented the importance of Black women’s club movements in education, mutual aid, and political activism, garden clubs have often been reduced to organizations concerned primarily with beautification and leisure. This article argues that Black women’s garden clubs functioned as institutions of environmental stewardship, civic leadership, historical preservation, and community care. Recovering these histories presents a methodological challenge because documentation survives not within centralized repositories but across newspapers, scrapbooks, oral histories, family collections, photographs, and community memory.
Drawing on digital humanities research into the North Carolina Federation of Negro Garden Clubs, the leadership of Mrs. Madie Hall Xuma, local garden club records, oral histories, and community-generated collections, this article examines how digital methods can reconstruct fragmented histories while revealing the limitations of traditional archival systems. Using newspapers, oral history, relational metadata, spatial mapping, and Omeka S, the project proposes the concept of the neo-archive, a framework that expands understandings of historical evidence by recognizing gardens, landscapes, beauty practices, oral knowledge, and memory as legitimate archival forms. In doing so, it contributes to scholarship on Black women’s civic leadership, Black environmental history, community archives, and how digital humanities can recover overlooked histories while challenging assumptions about where historical knowledge resides and how it is preserved.