With the help of a few other reporters, Campbell spent her weekends covering events and interviewing people she knew in communities across Acadiana, contacts she’d made through her more than six decades of teaching in schools in Iberia and St. Mary parishes. Then she typed up the reports at home and dropped them at the printer when she’d go to her second job. She published the newspaper for 20 years, retiring from journalism in 2005 before retiring from teaching four years later.

“I enjoyed all of it, but my hair was getting gray so I had to retire,” the 89-year-old said with a laugh.

Now the Iberia African American Historical Society is working in conjunction with archivist and digitization specialists from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Ernest Gaines Center and the UL Center for Louisiana Studies to preserve Campbell’s collection of The Ebony Journal.

“I’m grateful,” Campbell said. “It will help the paper to survive.”

The newspaper was the second of its kind in Iberia Parish. During Reconstruction, African American businessmen and political leaders, Samuel Wakefield and Louis Snaer, were co-editors and co-proprietors of the newspaper, Iberia Banner.

Campbell was born and raised in New Iberia. Shel graduated from high school in 1950 and moved to the West Coast to study political science at Los Angeles City College and San Francisco City College. Her hope was to eventually go to law school, but family urged her to return home.

“I wanted to go to UCLA but my mama dragged me home,” she said.

She returned in 1957 to a segregated south Louisiana, and her mother was afraid for their family if Campbell, a young Black woman, pursued law school close to home. So, she shifted her plans to teaching, completing degrees in education at Southern University and then UL. She went on to teach English and social studies at middle and high schools in Acadiana for 63 years. She even substituted a few years after retirement.

Campbell and her camera often could be seen at community events around the parish, covering news from local churches, schools, businesses and organizations and featuring members of the local Black community in The Ebony Journal. Copies of her newspaper were deteriorating, as newspaper print becomes fragile and unstable over time. The papers had been stored for decades in non-archival containers and exposed to moisture, dust and mold, the Iberia African American Historical Society said in a news release. The newsprint now is under the care of UL archivist and preservationist Cheylon Woods. In a slow, multi-step process to preserve the collection, Woods first froze the newspapers in small batches to arrest the mold growth, the release said.