Most of my research days lately have been spent looking at historic newspapers. Piecing together the public story of The Berean League’s AIDS conference and also the larger picture of politics and public health that surrounds it. Once I established the founding facts of the Berean League itself as well as the basics of the conference (program, speakers etc.), I was ready to see how newspapers recorded and remembered the event.

I began with the St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch given that the event took place in St. Paul at the Civic Center and that I also knew there were subject indexes available for my initial scope (1983-1993). Subject indexes make this kind of research *so* much easier not abandoning me to the perils of key word search for digitized newspapers (trust me, searching AIDS is not the most useful) or the tediousness of scanning headlines via microfilm, waiting for something to catch one’s eye.

Using the print indexes, I eventually came up with a listing of 92 relevant articles after narrowing my scope to 1987 and also focusing on articles that weren’t just documenting the general progression of the disease (i.e. case counts), but rather anything that was referencing public/school education work, media campaigns, and legislation/politicians. Using that as a base, I could then launch into looking at smaller, more subject-specific newspapers–in this case the GLC Voice, Equal Time, Twin Cities Christian, and City Pages.

During that journey I realized a few things:

1. In terms of documenting Minnesota’s AIDS crisis, no paper comes close to the passion, regular coverage, and scope of coverage as that of the GLC Voice. Founder, publisher, and editor Tim Campbell was tireless in his advocacy and I’d honestly like to know more about him as a person in future research. He died in 2016.
2. Letters to the Editor introduced me to a host of recurring characters who cared deeply about how AIDS was being addressed in the larger society. Recognizing the names across publications (and even other manuscript collections) really made this era come to life.
3. Topically speaking, there are three themes to the listing of the 129 articles I have listed thus far: 1) Public education (both within and beyond K-12 public schools) 2) Media campaigns, and 3) Legislation (particularly the “quarantine bill” for recalcitrant HIV carriers–stay tuned for more on that. Of course, October-December of 1987 had coverage of the conference itself, lead up to it and follow up from it.

At the end of the day I find myself wondering what would have happened if some of these smaller community-based newspapers had not existed. What if they had not been preserved and made accessible? There is something simultaneously personal and communal about writings found here. To be able to see what journalists and others considered worthy of writing about and to also note public reaction to those writings can’t really be duplicated in other formats/collections. I’m grateful to the people who created these newspapers, those who preserve them, and ultimately those who make them accessible to researchers like me. There’s a lot of specialized work that goes into that–so an enormous thank you to those who do it.