Frederick L. Black Papers

About this project

The Frederick L. Black papers document a conspiracy theory and one man's attempt to test it. In 1920, Henry Ford sent his assistant Fred Black to investigate a claim that had circulated for decades: that John Wilkes Booth was not killed in 1865 but escaped and lived under assumed names. This project treats the digitized collection not as a set of separate documents but as evidence to be weighed — tracing individual claims to the materials that supported and contradicted them, and following how the rumor spread.

Each "Follow the Claim" page takes a single assertion, lays out the documents for and against it, and shows what Black concluded.

How the documents were read

The grouping on these pages reflects an interpretive layer added on top of the archive's descriptive catalog. For each claim, we tagged a representative set of documents with its stance — the position it takes toward the claim:

• Supports — asserts the claim is true, or offers something presented as proof of it
• Circulates — passes the claim along without endorsing or rejecting it
• Refutes — argues against the claim or provides evidence disproving it
• Investigates — examines or tests the claim without yet taking a side

These are editorial judgments, not neutral facts, and documents were selected to represent the full range of positions rather than to argue a predetermined conclusion. The aim is to make visible how a conspiracy theory was built, circulated, and contested — and, in doing so, to offer a method for reading an archival collection as evidence.