In Elizabeth Meaders’s dining room, the horrors of slavery are displayed on the table: reward posters for the capture of people fleeing enslavement and the tools — a branding iron, wooden hobbles and a bullwhip — for punishing them.
In the room by her front door, an exhibit of military items used by Black soldiers includes headgear worn by Tuskegee Airmen in World War II and a parade helmet used by the famed buffalo soldiers in the 1800s.
In the living room, the couch is flanked by a life-size wax figure of the baseball slugger Hank Aaron and shelves of items honoring Black athletes, including a pair of Muhammad Ali’s tall white boxing shoes.
From the outside, Ms. Meaders’s home on Staten Island is unremarkable — a narrow, three-story box in the working-class neighborhood of Mariners Harbor. But to step inside, with her as your guide, is to journey through the Black American experience, from the horrors of slavery and the dream of the civil rights movement to the glory of stars like James Brown and Cab Calloway.
The collection of roughly 20,000 items that Ms. Meaders, a retired New York City schoolteacher, has been building for more than six decades is one of the largest collections of African American historical artifacts in the country.
Hundreds of items are arranged thematically throughout the house, turning it into something of a museum, if one that few people have ever seen in person.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Ms. Meaders said recently while walking through the exhibits. Most of the collection, she added, is kept in storage crates in closets, the basement and the garage.
Ms. Meaders, a retired New York City schoolteacher, said she began collecting in her youth with mementos of Jackie Robinson and other Black athletes, then widened her collecting to “surround myself with things that lifted my spirits.”
But she is now 90, and with limited years and storage space left, she is finally selling her collection in one bulk offering on March 15 at Guernsey’s auction house in Manhattan.
“I can’t go any further — the collection is outgrowing the house and pushing me out,” said Ms. Meaders, whose two daughters are not interested in taking it over. “I’m used up and the space is used up, so it has to be transferred into competent hands that can take it to the next level.”
Ms. Meaders said she was hoping to attract a buyer who would make the collection accessible to the public and to scholars, at a museum or university, for example.
“I hope the sale will give it a better life because it doesn’t belong in anybody’s house any longer — each piece needs a chance to sing its own song,” said Ms. Meaders, whose real wish is that the items become the basis of an African American museum in New York.
Many objects lack documented details on their provenance, authenticity and historical significance, leaving Ms. Meaders herself as the sole authority. She has made long video segments detailing the collection.
Arlan Ettinger, president of Guernsey’s, said he knew of “no other collection of this size focusing on Black history ever coming up for sale at auction before.”
“Crammed into this simple home is a collection that tells the whole saga of African American history, from the scourge of slavery to the struggle of civil rights, to Black soldiers in all of our wars from the Revolution through Vietnam,” said Mr. Ettinger, whose auction house has handled the estate sales of Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Rosa Parks and Joe Frazier, as well as some Apollo Theater material.
Diane DeBlois, a co-owner of aGatherin’ ephemera sellers in West Sand Lake, N.Y., who appraised the collection at $10 million, said it was enhanced by the back story of a plucky schoolteacher who was resourceful enough to acquire items on a shoestring budget.
“She had to go toe-to-toe with some pretty impressive collectors to outbid them,” Ms. DeBlois said. “She raised money through bake sales and school raffles, all sorts of ways.”
Ms. Meaders said she funded her acquisitions by working several jobs at a time, as well as buying items on installment plans and borrowing against the value of her house.
“I’ve never been wealthy, but I refinanced my house a few times and ran up quite a bit of debt,” she said.
Randy F. Weinstein, founder of the W.E.B. Du Bois Center in Great Barrington, Mass., appraised the collection at $7.5 million in 2009.
“I’ve seen great collections, but this was something in my wildest dreams I could never imagine, the vastness and depth of it,” he said.
Tour a House Full of Black History
Corey Kilgannon📍Reporting from Staten Island
Tour a House Full of Black History
Corey Kilgannon📍Reporting from Staten Island
A walk with Elizabeth Meaders, 90, through her home — which houses one of the largest collections of Black historical artifacts in the country — is a riveting master class in African American history.
We visited her home on Staten Island, where she showed us some of her most prized items →
Mr. Ettinger said he had already been in discussions with potential buyers, including several universities, and that it was possible a deal could be struck before the auction.
Often, he said, a philanthropist might buy such a collection to donate for the public good; that happened with the Rosa Parks estate, which was bought through Guernsey’s by the Howard G. Buffett Foundation in 2014 for a reported $4.5 million and donated to the Library of Congress.
Ms. Meaders, a history buff, said her collecting began with fan material related to her teenage idol, Jackie Robinson, who broke professional baseball’s color barrier when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.
She began visiting sports memorabilia shows and then buying items honoring other Black athletes, like the boxer Joe Louis. An image of Crispus Attucks, believed to be the first American killed in the American Revolution, sparked an interest in Black military items, “and little by little I just expanded, and it became a labor of love,” she said.
Ms. Meaders’s ancestors, she said, include servants in abolitionists’ households in the 1700s and the last slave freed on Staten Island, in the mid-1800s.
Her grandfather, William A. Morris, owned an auction house on Staten Island and founded the island’s N.A.A.C.P. branch, she said. He later had a middle school named after him where Ms. Meaders taught history.
“I’ve struggled to tell a history that’s been either ignored or not told correctly, and it’s a history that’s directly related to me,” she said. “The more I found, the more I wanted because the whole thing became a huge puzzle and I began obsessively trying to fill in the missing pieces.”
A main goal was to educate people on forgotten Black stories.
“This is a motherlode of information, with so many stories that have never been told,” she said. “That’s the purpose of my collection: to educate, heal, inspire and empower.”
Wyatt Houston Day, an historian and appraiser who has visited Ms. Meaders’s home, agrees.
“The thing that makes her collection so unique,” said Mr. Day, who is also a former specialist in African-Americana sales at Swann Auction Galleries in Manhattan, “is that she has a lot of the connective tissue that fill in the gaps in other accounts, small things you won’t find in other collections but that add the important details.”
For example, he said, “people talk about African Americans in the military, but she has an actual musket that would have been carried from a Black Civil War soldier.”
Ms. Meaders said she did very little buying online since the specialized items she was seeking were best found by looking through sale catalogs at auctions and constantly calling dealers.
She was also a regular at shows for antique vendors and sellers of historical, military, sports and other memorabilia.
At many sales, she said, “I was often the only Black woman there, and I was considered an oddball.”
Ms. Meaders has devoted her life to the collection, Mr. Day said: “When she started, no one knew who she was, and now she’s legendary in collecting circles — everybody knows Elizabeth.”
There were some items that her limited budget made out of reach. For example, when bidding by phone on one of the pens used to sign the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Ms. Meaders reluctantly withdrew when the bid went up to $8,000 with no installment plan available.
She still regrets it. “That would have been the highlight of my civil rights collection,” she said.
Down a narrow, creaky stairway to her basement is an exhibit that she calls “Civil Rights and Civil Wrongs.”
There is a Ku Klux Klan grand dragon robe and a K.K.K. brand water pistol for children. Next to the boiler are posters from Harlem’s famous Apollo Theater and a rocking chair that belonged to the pitcher Satchel Paige. Nearby is a golf bag that belonged to the pioneer Black golfer Charlie Sifford.
A treasured piece is an Army of the James Medal given by the white Civil War general Benjamin Butler to one of his Black soldiers.
Asked about the possibility of fire or burglars, she shrugged. “I hate to tell you,” she added, “but there aren’t too many people who would even know what they were looking at.”
Many items are one-of-a-kind, such as the hand-carved wooden mantelpiece depicting the abolitionist John Brown. One item Ms. Meaders holds dear is a medal honoring Crispus Attucks that she said she acquired from a “top dealer who’s well known as a crank.”
“I had to go through hell to get it, but it was worth it,” she said.
Selling her collection will finally get Ms. Meaders some living space, but she admitted that it might not completely halt her collecting.
When a desired item came up at auction recently — a Ku Klux Klan robe made for a child — she resisted and instead implored a fellow collector to buy it.
“I think that even when I’m in my coffin and something comes up for auction,” she said, “I’ll probably toss a bid out.”
