Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division
The Schomburg Center Research & Reference Division has extensively collected biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs by and about Black librarians.
To explore this area further search the catalog and try these subject headings:
African American librarians -- Biography.
African American librarians.
Minorities in library science.
Also explore the Schomburg Center Clipping Files
Biographies of Pioneering Black Librarians
Regina Anderson Andrews, Harlem Renaissance Librarian by
The first African American to head a branch of the New York Public Library (NYPL), Regina Andrews led an extraordinary life. Allied with W. E. B. Du Bois, Andrews fought for promotion and equal pay against entrenched sexism and racism and battled institutional restrictions confining African American librarians to only a few neighborhoods within New York City. Andrews also played a key role in the Harlem Renaissance, supporting writers and intellectuals with dedicated workspace at her 135th Street Branch Library. After hours she cohosted a legendary salon that drew the likes of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Her work as an actress and playwright helped establish the Harlem Experimental Theater, where she wrote plays about lynching, passing, and the Underground Railroad. Ethelene Whitmire's new biography offers the first full-length study of Andrews's activism and pioneering work with the NYPL. Whitmire's portrait of her sustained efforts to break down barriers reveals Andrews's legacy and places her within the NYPL's larger history.
Call Number: Sc E 14-843ISBN: 9780252038501Publication Date: 2014-05-01
Dorothy Porter Wesley at Howard University by
When Dorothy Burnett joined the library staff at Howard University in 1928, she was given a mandate to administer a library of Negro life and history. The school purchased the Arthur B. Spingarn Collection in 1946, along with other collections, and Burnett, who would later become Dorothy Porter Wesley, helped create a world-class archive known as the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center and cemented her place as an immensely important figure in the preservation of African American history. Wesley's zeal for unearthing materials related to African American history earned her the name of Shopping Bag Lady." Join author, historian and former Howard University librarian Janet Sims-Wood as she charts the award-winning and distinguished career of an iconic archivist."
Call Number: Sc E 15-629ISBN: 9781626196445Publication Date: 2014-09-02
E. J. Josey by
This work provides a comprehensive examination of the life and professional career of E.J Josey within the broader historical and political landscape of the civil rights movement. In the era of Jim Crow, Josey rose to prominence in the library profession by challenging the American Library Association (ALA) to live up to its creed of equality for all. This was not easy during the 1950s and 1960s, during segregation. Using interviews with Josey and his contemporaries, as well as several archival sources, library educator Renate Chancellor analyzes Josey's leadership, particularly within modern day racial currents. During his professional career, spanning over fifty years (1952-2002), Josey worked as a librarian (1953-1966), an administrator of library services (1966-1986), and as a professor of library science (1986-1995). He also served as President of the American Library Association and perhaps his most notable achievement, he successfully drafted a resolution that prevented state library associations from discriminating against African American librarians. This essentially ended segregation in the ALA. Josey's transformative leadership provides a model to tackle today's civil rights challenges both in and outside the library profession. This authoritative work copublished by the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) documents for the historical record a significant period of history that is underexplored in the scholarly literature. The target audience for this book are researchers, historians, LIS educators and students interested in understanding the complex struggle for civil and human rights in professional organizations.
Call Number: Sc E 21-63ISBN: 9781538121764Publication Date: 2020-02-07
The Original Black Elite by
In this outstanding cultural biography, the author of the New York Times bestseller A Slave in the White House chronicles a critical yet overlooked chapter in American history: the inspiring rise and calculated fall of the black elite, from Emancipation through Reconstruction to the Jim Crow Era--embodied in the experiences of an influential figure of the time, academic, entrepreneur, and political activist and black history pioneer Daniel Murray. In the wake of the Civil War, Daniel Murray, born free and educated in Baltimore, was in the vanguard of Washington, D.C.'s black upper class. Appointed Assistant Librarian at the Library of Congress--at a time when government appointments were the most prestigious positions available for blacks--Murray became wealthy through his business as a construction contractor and married a college-educated socialite. The Murrays' social circles included some of the first African-American U.S. Senators and Congressmen, and their children went to the best colleges--Harvard and Cornell. Though Murray and other black elite of his time were primed to assimilate into the cultural fabric as Americans first and people of color second, their prospects were crushed by Jim Crow segregation and the capitulation to white supremacist groups by the government, which turned a blind eye to their unlawful--often murderous--acts. Elizabeth Dowling Taylor traces the rise, fall, and disillusionment of upper-class African Americans, revealing that they were a representation not of hypothetical achievement but what could be realized by African Americans through education and equal opportunities. As she makes clear, these well-educated and wealthy elite were living proof that African Americans did not lack ability to fully participate in the social contract as white supremacists claimed, making their subsequent fall when Reconstruction was prematurely abandoned all the more tragic. Illuminating and powerful, her magnificent work brings to life a dark chapter of American history that too many Americans have yet to recognize.
Call Number: Sc E 17-924ISBN: 9780062346094Publication Date: 2017-01-31
Illuminated Life by
The secret life of the sensational woman behind the Morgan masterpieces, who lit up New York society. What would you give up to achieve your dream? When J. P. Morgan hired Belle da Costa Greene in 1905 to organize his rare book and manuscript collection, she had only her personality and a few years of experience to recommend her. Ten years later, she had shaped the famous Pierpont Morgan Library collection and was a proto-celebrity in New York and the art world, renowned for her self-made expertise, her acerbic wit, and her flirtatious relationships. Born to a family of free people of color, Greene changed her name and invented a Portuguese grandmother to enter white society. In her new world, she dined both at the tables of the highest society and with bohemian artists and activists. She also engaged in a decades-long affair with art critic Bernard Berenson. Greene is pure fascination--the buyer of illuminated manuscripts who attracted others to her like moths to a flame.
Call Number: Sc E 07-893ISBN: 0393051048Publication Date: 2007-06-17
Roots and Flowers by
This book introduces North Americans and other general readers to 1) the role of Afro-Cubans in Cuban history and culture, particularly in the 20th century, and 2) librarianship in the context of the Cuban revolution. Considering these two related subjects through the life and work of Marta Terry, Cuba will serve as an example for other Africans in the Americas and for all library workers in times of social change. Marta Terry directed three centrally important Cuban libraries. Beginning in 1961 she was Che Guevara's librarian when he organized the National Planning Board (JUCEPLAN) that set the post-1958 course for Cuba's development. From 1967-1987, she was library director at the Casa de Las Americas, the organization built and led by Haydee Santamaria that published and connected writers and their readers from across Latin America and set a model for combining liberation politics and innovative cultural production. From 1987-1997, she was director of the Jos Mart National Library, at which time the library was assigned responsibility for all public library development on the Island and then managed through the collapse of the Soviet Union, then Cuba's #1 trading partner and source of hard currency. A participant in international library gatherings since the 1950s, Marta Terry was also the point person in establishing Cuba's international library reputation and connections through IFLA, bringing their annual meeting to Latin America for the first time in Havana in 1994. She was then also point person in defending Cuba from the US-government sponsored attack that followed, under the guise of the so-called "independent libraries."
Call Number: Sc E 15-1202ISBN: 9781936117642Publication Date: 2015-01-10
Reclaiming the American Library Past by
This solid anthology makes a fine start at the effort in its title, ^IReclaiming the American Library Past: Writing the Women In^R. Like most good beginnings, it succeeds first by clarifying the status of the field and then by raising questions for subsequent scholars to ponder and pursue. -^IHistory of Education Quarterly ^RThe essays in this book contribute along several dimensions to the new scholarship on a profession and public service of vital importance for well over a century to American literacy, culture and invention. Their authors add to the individual and collective biographies of women who have founded and administered diverse institutions and taught succeeding generations of librarians. The worksites of influential women such as Anne Carroll Moore, Josephine Rathbone, and Grace Hebard, like the nameless paid and volunteer staff who have served as unrecognized catalogers and children's librarians, have varied. They range from the pioneering libraries and library schools of the settled East- including Brooklyn and the Harlem, Times Square, and Morningside Heights neighborhoods of Manhattan- the historically Black Howard University to the numberless small towns of the West. They include the raw A&M colleges of Arkansas, Utah, New Mexico, and similarly neglected centers of local and regional enlightenment.
Call Number: Sc E 98-450 c.2ISBN: 1567502334Publication Date: 1996-01-01
The Stories I Read to the Children by Call Number: Sc E 15-849ISBN: 1878483803Publication Date: 2013-01-01
Confessions of a Lapsed Librarian by
Benge's entertaining and provocative essays on his life as librarian, lecturer, and writer in Britain, the West Indies, and Africa.
Call Number: Sc D 85-688ISBN: 0810816768Publication Date: 1984-06-01
Newspaper Articles
You can also search for articles about these librarians in the African American historical newspaper databases: ProQuest Historical African American Newspapers and African American Newspapers, 1827-1998 (Readex).
New York Amsterdam News (1938-1941), City edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 24 Sep 1938: 1.
New Journal and Guide, Norfolk, Va. 03 Sep 1966: A15.