Iberia Parish native and longtime teacher Elaine Campbell wasn’t seeing positive news about her community being reported by local news media in the 1980s, so she did something to fix that.

Campbell founded The Ebony Journal in 1985, a monthly newspaper reporting about the Black community both in Iberia Parish and around the area. Now the Iberia African American Historical Society is working with archivists and digitization specialists from the University of Louisiana to preserve the newspaper, which was printed until 2005. Each issue was sold for $1.

“We were doing some spectacular things (in the community),” said Campbell, 89, who lives in the Lil Brooklyn neighborhood. “I enjoyed it. I went everywhere interviewing (people). I wrote about anything positive because The Daily Iberian wasn’t really covering that stuff. But I enjoyed it because Black people were doing great things.”

The Journal was the first Black-owned newspaper in Iberia Parish since Reconstruction when African American businessmen and political leaders Samuel Wakefield and Louis Snaer were co-editors and owners of the Iberia Banner.

Campbell was a teacher for 63 years in St. Mary and Iberia parishes. After studying at Los Angeles City College — she had hopes of attending UCLA afterward — and then transferring to San Francisco City College, Campbell returned to Louisiana at her mother’s prompting and finished her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education at Southern University and a Masters Plus 30 at UL.

Campbell said she went to school in California, planning to become a lawyer, but her mother said she would not allow that because of the social and political climate at the time in Louisiana.

“These times are different from the times I grew up,” she said.

Campbell began teaching as a substitute at Willow Street High in Franklin, and principal J.A. Hernandez secured a job for her in Patterson with principal J.S. Ball of St. Martinville. After four years in Patterson, she spent 10 years at Jonas Henderson High under principal J.B. Henderson, then moved to New Iberia Senior High after integration, where she primarily taught English, as well as social studies.

“I taught there for 36 glorious years,” said Campbell. “I enjoyed all of that, too.”

Campbell, who had two sons, Stevenson Benjamin Polk and Felton Guy, said she enjoyed taking her students on school trips to expose them to the world outside of New Iberia.

“I used to take those children at NISH all around the United States of America because I wanted them to know there is life outside of New Iberia and Louisiana,” she said. “I took them to Washington, D.C., three times. I took them to Los Angeles so they could put their feet in the water (of the Pacific Ocean). I took them to Paris, France — of course, that gave me a chance to go, too. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. Oh, I enjoyed it. Because it changes you. I let those children know there’s more to life than just here in New Iberia, running up and down this street — Hopkins Street, Bank Avenue. I wanted them to go to college so they could grasp opportunities for themselves.”

After a year of retirement, she went back to work teaching English at Anderson Middle School, where she stayed for another 26 years.

While teaching at NISH, Campbell also worked for 10 years at Northgate Mall after school hours.

At the same time, she wanted to spread all the positive news that she saw about the African American community, which she did through The Ebony Journal, which was printed in Eunice.

“I would go to the different schools in Acadiana, Black schools, and find out what they were doing, and when they had something that I could cover, I’d cover it,” she said. “I covered sports, I covered religion, I covered outstanding things that people had done.”

Anything being done to help young people got covered, she said, from Franklin to St. Martinville to Lafayette in addition to Iberia Parish — anything to keep readers’ minds off what was going on that wasn’t enjoyable, she said.

“I covered all the nice things about Blacks in Acadiana,” she said. Campbell retired in 2009, having stopped printing the newspaper four years earlier.

The idea to preserve the newspaper as part of the cultural history of Iberia Parish was suggested to Campbell by Anne Darrah of the Lil Brooklyn Initiative. Darrah contacted Iberia African American Historical Society founder and president Dr. Phebe Hayes about the project.

“Dr. Hayes’ mother taught with me at Henderson,” Campbell said.

Archivist and preservationist Cheylon Woods of the Ernest J. Gaines Center at UL is preserving the printed newspapers that Campbell had stored for years in her home. Many are in bad shape as they were not in archival-quality storage bins and had been exposed to heat and moisture and had been deteriorating over time.

Woods began the process of preserving the newspaper by freezing them in small batches to halt the growth of mold. The next step is to thaw the newspapers intravenously, she said, and then attempt to repair damage where possible.

The newspapers will then be transferred to the UL Center for Louisiana Studies’ Digitization Services to make high-resolution scans of each page of the newspaper.

Once the newspapers are preserved, they will be returned to Campbell in archival storage boxes, along with digital copies.

The Iberia African American Historical Society Center at The Shadows also will house digital copies of The Ebony Journal on the second floor of The Shadows Visitors Center, which will be available for the public to view, Hayes said.