Jacqui Love Thornell and her husband Kwasi Thornell have made the largest ever photography donation to Broward’s County’s African American Research Library Cultural Center (ARLCC) in Fort Lauderdale.

They gifted more than 1,300 photographs, documenting African American life from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries, to the ARLCC Special Collections and Archives Department’s “Frozen in Time: Selections from the Love-Thornell Collection.”

Love Thornell, a human resource executive for several major media companies said she had retired when she found herself wanting to do more.

“I started out on ancestry.com looking for family photos, (and) realized we had none,” she said. “I expanded my search. I started looking up photos from the 1800s to the 1950s. I found everyday people. I started looking up albums and started learning about forms of photographs.”

The scholar with an Ed. M. from Harvard University, also an avid reader, traveler and writer, said she envisioned the expansive collection, donated, in November 2021, as an educational tool. “I thought it would be great for teachers for Black history.”

With numerous worldwide options for sharing the fruits of her labor, the Miami native chose South Florida, and entered talks with the Broward research library, which now is the collection’s home. The exhibition also is digitized, so it can be viewed from anywhere around the globe.

You can read more in an article in the South Florida Times web site at: https://www.sfltimes.com/news/love-thornell-collection-largest-photography-gift-to-aarlcc.