Restrictions to Access

Collection closed until 2025.

Copyright Notice

Copyright is retained by the authors of items in these papers, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.

Preferred Citation

[Identification of item], in the Alim Braxton Collection #70158, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Acquisitions Information

Received from Mark Katz in July 2023 (Acc. 20230717.5).

Sensitive Materials Statement

Manuscript collections and archival records may contain materials with sensitive or confidential information that is protected under federal or state right to privacy laws and regulations, the North Carolina Public Records Act (N.C.G.S. § 132 1 et seq.), and Article 7 of the North Carolina State Personnel Act (Privacy of State Employee Personnel Records, N.C.G.S. § 126-22 et seq.). Researchers are advised that the disclosure of certain information pertaining to identifiable living individuals represented in this collection without the consent of those individuals may have legal ramifications (e.g., a cause of action under common law for invasion of privacy may arise if facts concerning an individual's private life are published that would be deemed highly offensive to a reasonable person) for which the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill assumes no responsibility.

This summary description was created in August 2023 to provide information about unprocessed materials in Wilson Special Collections Library.

Encoded by: Dawne Howard Lucas, August 2023

Since August 2017, we have added ethnic and racial identities for individuals and families represented in collections. To determine identity, we rely on self-identification; other information supplied to the repository by collection creators or sources; public records, press accounts, and secondary sources; and contextual information in the collection materials. Omissions of ethnic and racial identities in finding aids created or updated after August 2017 are an indication of insufficient information to make an educated guess or an individual's preference for identity information to be excluded from description. When we have misidentified, please let us know at wilsonlibrary@unc.edu.

Alim Braxton (artist name is Rrome Alone) is a Black writer, rapper, and death row inmate who has been incarcerated since 1993. Born Michael Jerome Braxton, he took the name "Alim" when he accepted Islam while in prison. Braxton has been collaborating Mark Katz, a white professor in the Department of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, on an album,  Mercy on My Soul, and a book,  Rap and Redemption on Death Row.

Contains approximately 100 letters written by Alim Braxton to Mark Katz, dated August 2019 to April 2022.