Mark R. Stoneman

 "How Black Librarians Helped Create Generations of Black Literature" by Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times, June 19, 2024.

This is a fascinating short history that references the scholars whose work the cultural reporter draws on.

Teaser: “Recent scholarship is uncovering the role of the women who ran libraries during the Harlem Renaissance where they built collections and, just as important, communities of writers and readers.”

Agents of change: The necessary activism required of librarians in oppressive contexts will sound familiar to people today in the context of bans related to race and sexuality. For example, the only significant collection in the Jim Crow South was in Roanoke, Virginia. When the librarian there, Virginia Lee, was eventually told to get rid of the books, she moved them to the basement instead and continued to discretely circulate them.

Knowledge formation: The seemingly banal work of collection, classification, and organization required the creation of new knowledge. For instance, cataloging using the Dewey scheme required the addition of new subjects because that system only foresaw shelving Black-authored and Black-themed books in two limited spaces: under the headings of “slavery” and “the Negro question,” the latter a subset of “colonization and migration.” Dorothy Porter added entirely new categories, including for slave insurrections, the blues, and passing. She also reorganized American political history by situating presidents in topics important to Black readers. Andrew Johnson’s tenure was filed under “emancipation” and Rutherford B. Hayes under “Ku Klux Klan”.

Knowledge, culture, and sociability: This article has some wonderful photographs, including of the women in groups.

Addendum: The New York Public Library and, within it, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture have digitized some of their materials. That’s where I found a powerful pastel by Morris Schulman titled “The Writing Lesson”.