The papers of the Kendrick-Brooks family span the years 1831 to 2000, with the bulk of the collection concentrated in the period 1912-1989. The papers include correspondence, files related to the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC), transcripts of audiotapes, business records, photographs, scrapbooks, family papers, book drafts, genealogical charts and research, and printed matter. The collection is arranged in series named for four members of the two African-American families: Ruby Moyse Kendrick , Hattie Kendrick , Antoinette Brooks Mitchell , and Charlotte Kendrick Brooks . A final series consists of oversize photographs and posters.

Ruby Moyse Kendrick (1886-1986) taught in the public schools of Greenville, Mississippi, before World War I and was active in the black women's social club movement for more than fifty years after migrating to Washington, D.C., with her husband and fellow Mississippian Swan M. Kendrick (1885-1923). Hattie Kendrick (1894-1989), Swan M. Kendrick's sister, moved from Mississippi to Cairo, Illinois, where she had a long career as a teacher and as a civil rights and social activist. Antoinette Brooks Mitchell (1892-1974), daughter of Walter H. Brooks (1851-1945), pastor of the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., dropped out of college and eloped with actor and musician Louis A. Mitchell (1885-1957), eventually moving with her husband to England and France, where he pioneered jazz music during the World War I era and the 1920s. Some of the correspondence, contracts, and publicity material documenting Louis and Antoinette Mitchell's life in Europe is in French. Charlotte Kendrick Brooks , educator, writer, and daughter of Ruby Moyse and Swan M. Kendrick, married Walter H. Brooks (1916- ), nephew of Antoinette Brooks Mitchell and grandson of Walter H. Brooks (1851- 1945).

A file relating to the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, the largest in the Ruby Moyse Kendrick series, documents her activities with the organization from the 1920s through the 1970s. Over those years Kendrick was executive secretary, director of public relations, historian, and managing editor of the NACWC's official organ, National Notes . The bulk of the NACWC correspondence is concentrated in the 1950s, and correspondents include Irene McCoy Gaines, Rosa Gragg, Ruby Stutts Lyells, Mabel Neely, and Mamie B. Reese. The Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress holds a microfilm edition of the records of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs .

Other files in the Ruby Moyse Kendrick series include correspondence and family papers. Much of the correspondence consists of letters between Ruby Moyse Kendrick and her husband. The correspondence was at its most voluminous during the couple's long distance courtship and engagement between 1911 and their wedding in 1916, when Swan M. Kendrick was working as a typist-stenographer and supervisor for the War Department in Washington, D.C., and Ruby Moyse was teaching elementary school in Greenville, Mississippi. In his letters to Ruby, Swan shared his hopes, dreams, financial situation, and activities in Washington. He wrote of his government livelihood and his desire to be his own man by going into business or farming; of his search for a house for them and farmland in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia; and about his work as secretary of the Washington, D.C., branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), with the alumni association of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, and as a church choir director. Ruby Moyse wrote from Greenville about teaching school, church and civic activities, the black business and professional community, and what she termed “high colored society.” There is also a file related to this correspondence in the books file of the Charlotte Kendrick Brooks series, which includes a subject and date index of the letters. Some of Ruby Moyse Kendrick's other correspondents include her daughters Charlotte Kendrick Brooks and Martha Kendrick Cobb, her son, Webster M. Kendrick, her childhood friend and teaching colleague Addie Pickle, and businessmen she termed her “beaus,” Edward W. Brydie, Hervey A. Clemons, Charles A. Howard, F. D. Johnson, and T .S. Littlejohn.

General correspondence and material documenting Swan M. Kendrick's career as a clerk and supervisor with the War Department's office of the chief of ordnance and as an NAACP official can be found in the family papers file of the Ruby Moyse Kendrick series. The NAACP file includes correspondence and other material related to the East St. Louis, Illinois, race riot in 1917.

Swan Kendrick belonged to a correspondents club aimed at combating aspersions against African Americans in public forums, and letters related to the club constitutes the bulk of the letters in his general correspondence. Some of the correspondence focused on race and manpower issues in the army during the World War I era. Other correspondence, in letters to R. P. Andrews, Ray Stannard Baker, Samuel G. Blythe, Octavus Roy Cohen, Harrison Rhodes, and A. M. Trawick, dealt with the representation, good and bad, of African Americans in newspapers and other popular press.

In 1919, as his daughters were becoming toddlers, Swan Kendrick exchanged letters with the M. A. Donohue publishing company of Chicago objecting to the inclusion of the “Ten Little Niggers” rhyme in one of their Mother Goose books. He wrote the governor of Kentucky, Edwin P. Morrow, praising him for preventing a lynching. He excoriated J. M. Cox, president of Philander Smith College, and Joseph A. Booker, president of Arkansas Baptist College, both in Little Rock, Arkansas, in correspondence with these local black leaders for not protecting the interests of Robert L. Jackson, an African-American witness and defendant in a case growing out of the Elaine, Arkansas, riots.

Starting in 1973, Hattie Kendrick (1884-1989) used an audiotape recorder given to her by her niece Charlotte Kendrick Brooks to record her reflections on topics related to the early history of the Kendrick family, growing up in a cotton farming family on Howden Lake in Bolivar County, Mississippi, at the turn of the century, and her life and work in Cairo, Illinois. Hattie Kendrick told of racial violence against her father, Samuel R. Kendrick, and others in Bolivar County and of her role as a plaintiff in lawsuits in Cairo over such issues as pay equalization for African-American teachers in the 1940s and “at large” versus “ward” systems in municipal elections during the 1970s. Transcripts of these recordings are available in the collection. Notes on the Hattie Kendrick audiotapes and transcripts are available in the book file of the Charlotte Kendrick Brooks series. Most of the correspondence in the Hattie Kendrick series was exchanged with her nieces Charlotte Kendrick Brooks and Martha Kendrick Cobb, and is concentrated in the 1970s, a time of racial and civic discord in Cairo.

Most material in the Antoinette Brooks Mitchell series relates to her husband, musician, entertainer, and restaurateur Louis A. Mitchell (1885-1957), including two scrapbooks spanning the years 1908-1911 and 1910-1939. The first volume documents the earlier part of Mitchell's show business career, when he was touring the United States with Bob Cole (1868-1911) and J. Rosamond Johnson's (1873-1954) black vaudeville troupe as an actor and singer and managing his own acts and theaters in Washington, D.C., and other cities. The scrapbook for 1910-1939 covers Mitchell's career as musician and band leader in New York and as a musician, band leader, restaurateur, and nightclub owner in England and France during World War I and the 1920s. In New York before the war, Mitchell managed and played bandoline and drums for the Southern Symphony Quintette, mainly at Louis Bustanby's Beaux Arts Café. Groups led by Mitchell in Europe during the World War I era and the 1920s included the Seven Spades and the Jazz Kings. During this period, Louis Mitchell was billed as “the world's greatest trap drummer.” Louis Mitchell compiled the 1910-1939 scrapbook in part to establish his claim to be the first to introduce jazz music to Europe and to document his participation in the Military Hospital Baseball League in Great Britain as an ace pitcher in 1917 and his managing and play with the Clef Club team of the Paris-American Baseball League in France in 1918. The Clef Club was an organization of African-American musicians.

Both scrapbooks include newspaper clippings, photographs, programs, contracts, playbills, advertisements, and correspondence. Much of the unbound material relating to Louis A. Mitchell in business records, correspondence, newspaper and newspaper clippings, photographs, and programs files was once part of the scrapbooks but became detached over the years. Most correspondence related to Louis A. Mitchell's show business and nightclub career is in the scrapbooks or in business records. The correspondence file in the Antoinette Brooks Mitchell series contains correspondence of the entire Mitchell family, including Antoinette Brooks Mitchell, Louis A. Mitchell (1885-1957), and their son, “Jack,” another Louis A. Mitchell (1912-1972). “Jack” Mitchell compiled a scrapbook and a file of photographs that, besides including material on his parents, documents his childhood in France, family and community activities in France and the United States, and the nightclub and celebrity scene in Washington, D.C., and other cities.

Correspondents in various parts of the Antoinette Brooks Mitchell series include Walter H. Brooks (1851-1945), Louis Bustanoby, Vernon Castle, Victor Emmanuel, Leonard F. Guttridge, Bernie Harrison, Julian Jones, and Daniel Kildare.

The bulk of the Charlotte Kendrick Brooks series contains the research files she used in writing two family histories, A Brooks Chronicle: The Lives and Times of an African-American Family (1989), and The Kendrick Kin: An African-American Family Saga (1993). A Brooks Chronicle follows the family from the antebellum period in Richmond, Virginia, through the 1940s in Washington, D.C. Prominent in the research files are Albert R. Brooks, slave and entrepreneur, his wife Lucy Goode Brooks, and their son, Walter H. Brooks, the father of Antoinette Brooks Mitchell. The Kendrick Kin follows the Kendrick and related families as slaves in Alabama and Mississippi through their migration to Washington, D.C., Cairo, Illinois, and other northern cities.