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Bibliophiles and
Collectors of African Americana
By
Charles L. Blockson
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Had it not been for these
men and a few women, hundreds of volumes
needed today for research would not be in
our major collections. Somewhere, there
should be a Hall of Fame for these incurable
bibliomaniacs.—Dr.
Dorothy Porter Wesley |
These encouraging,
thoughtful words were spoken many years ago by my late
mentor and friend,
Dr. Dorothy Porter Wesley, whom I call the Queen
Mother of African-American bibliophiles and collectors.
During a career at Howard University that spanned
forty-three years, including many years as curator of
the university’s
Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Dr.
Wesley transformed Howard’s collection of black culture
into an internationally known treasure. Probably because
she was a collector herself, she displayed a special
affection for collectors. She once told me that, “All
the collectors that I have known have indeed been
bibliophiles, since the term bibliophile means simply
'love of books.’ It seems to me that the two words,
collectors and bibliophiles, are interchangeable.”
I could not begin
to record my life as a collector without paying tribute
to these early pioneers. Many times throughout my long
career as a collector, whenever I became discouraged, I
would pick up a book or a magazine and read about the
dedication of these pioneers, and it would revive my
soul. Simply put their voices and example would not
allow me to rest.
Their lives became
the balm in my own personal Gilead. Their dedication in
the pursuit of the preservation of our heritage, bound
in cloth and vellum, inspired me. Their legacies deserve
to thrive and prosper along with the words that I am
writing about my life as a
bibliophile. In the final analysis, after all, I
must serve to inspire those who come after me in the
same fashion that those who came before me became the
wind beneath my wings. My job now is to convey some
small sense of the mind and spirit of the book collector
of African descent, so that the questions that arise in
the minds of newer and future generations of black
bibliophiles can be met in some small way with answers
from the mind of one of their elder fellow travelers.
Unlike many of
these early bibliophiles, my enchantment with the
collection of African history and culture began in my
early childhood. As I grew older, however, these
visionary collectors were there like intellectual
parents to guide my development as a bibliophile. The
old saying is true: “When the pupil is ready, the
master(s) will appear.” As I prepared myself, my
masters, sage-like, appeared to guide my path. As has
been the case with so many black bibliophiles, I did not
spring fully formed from the brow of some great
bibliophilic god, ready to go forth and collect. There
was a legion of African-American collectors before me
who spent their lives in often unrequited toil,
documenting and collecting evidence of the ideas and
achievements of people of African descent and the world
which defined them and which they in turn defined. It is
their soul force with which I identify the most closely;
it is their pain, feelings of triumph and tragedy and
satisfaction that I share
The first
substantial collections of black literature were
undoubtedly amassed in the fifteenth-century cultural
centers of
Alexandria,
Songhai, and the
University of Sankore. But because those
civilizations were destroyed, little is known of any
serious effort to collect black literature until the
German naturalist and anthropologist
Johann Fredrich Blumenbach began his work in
dividing mankind into five racial classifications. As a
result of this work he accumulated the first known
European private collection of black literature,
described in his De
generis humani varietate nativa liber, and
included poetry by Phillis Wheatley as an example of
distinguished Negro achievement.
While
Blumenbach’s motives were
classically academic in providing tools to improve the
understanding of differences within the human species,
little did he know that he was preparing a double-edged
sword that could be used for or against blacks.
Unfortunately, the attention he drew to racial
differences offered those with less noble purposes
discriminatory information that could then be twisted
and adulterated in order to malign other races.
Blumenbach gathered rare works of celebrated African
Americans such as
Phillis Wheatley,
Benjamin Banneker, and
Anthony Amo to support his belief that people of
African descent were indeed men and women of literature
and science.
Abbe Henri Gregoire, who became
Alexandre Dumas’ teacher, credits Blumenbach with
compiling the first European library of black
literature. It was, however, the priest himself who
wrote the first history of black literature, a research
project so complete that his reputation is based
primarily on that book.
Originally
published in 1808 in France and in 1810 in this country,
Gregoire’s book was entitled
Enquiry into the Moral and Intellectual Faculties of
Negroes. Since then, the treatise has become
more than just a prime tool in the research of early
black literature and is an outstanding forerunner of
Arthur Schomburg’s bibliographic checklist. It is
now a collector’s item. In 1968, I purchased a copy of
the translation for $75, but I have seen it offered more
recently for $3,000. I purchased a copy of the French
edition for $300 from a New England dealer in 1987.
In 1826, Alexander
Mott [Abigail
Mott, 1766-1851] published his
Biographical Sketches and Interesting Anecdotes of
Persons of Color.
This work served as a storehouse of slave
narratives, news items, and other literature pertaining
to early personalities of African descent. I have used
this book to familiarize myself with little-known
personalities whom Mott included in his book. Mott was
not the only white American compiling a collection of
literature on slavery at the time. In 1872,
Arthur and Lewis Tappan, two wealthy brothers from
New York State who were known for their dedication to
the abolitionist cause, donated over 2,000 anti-slavery
writings to Howard University in Washington, D.C.
A contemporary of
the Tappan brothers,
The Reverend Samuel May, Jr., enthusiastically
assembled a large collection of anti-slavery literature
during the period when he was speaking out against the
evils of slavery. Shortly before his death, he donated
his important collection to
Cornell University. The
May collection contains extensive materials relating
to foreign affairs, slave narratives, and many
controversial topics besides. It has been enhanced by
the publication of a catalog that consists of 4,500
pamphlets, 1,500 other publications, 729 newspapers, and
2,679 miscellaneous items. The catalog has become a
collector’s item.
I purchased my copy
in 1963 from a book dealer in Syracuse, New York. When
the American Anti-Slavery Society chose as its motto
“Immediate Emancipation,” it could not have chosen a
more dedicated, fiery spokesperson to promote its views
than
Theodore Dwight Weld. Through the efforts of the
well-known evangelist, teacher and lecturer, the crusade
to end enslavement was advanced. Weld’s most famous
hard-hitting and searing pamphlet,
American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand
Witnesses (1839), is a collection of sketches,
testimonies, reports and narratives. According to
Harriet Beecher Stowe, one of Weld’s converts, American
Slavery was the seed from which her novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) grew.
The materials which
Weld used to write the pamphlet were donated to Oberlin
College in Ohio, forming one of the foundations of what
has become a collection of anti-slavery propaganda.
Later, other abolitionists and collectors such as
William Dawes,
John
Keep,
Oliver Johnson, and
William Goodell strengthened the
Oberlin College collection with other anti-slavery
items. Another white collector, C. Fiske, [Caleb
Fiske Harris] better known for his poetry collection
at Brown University, assembled a good slavery collection
which was purchased by the
Providence, Rhode Island, Public Library in 1884.
No comprehensive
work dealing with early African-American collectors and
collections would be complete without chronicling the
work of
David Ruggles. Although his life and writings never
gained a niche in the annals of American literature, for
me his life was almost as exciting as Benjamin
Franklin’s. Ruggles was probably the first known
African-American book collector. He was born free in
1810 in Norwich, Connecticut, and was known for his
intimate knowledge of law as it related to cases of
formerly enslaved escapees on the Underground Railroad.
Ruggles was a major station keeper on the New York City
branch of the Railroad. A noted orator, Ruggles widely
circulated essays and pamphlets, which infuriated
pro-enslavement agitators and led to the burning of the
bookstore which he had worked to establish. His
magazine,
Mirror of Liberty, published in New York in
1838, was the first magazine produced in the United
States by an African American.
As a collector, I
was always fascinated with Ruggles as well as with his
friend
James W.C. Pennington (1807-1870) who was born on
the Eastern Shore of Maryland not too far from where my
ancestors lived. Aside from owning a small collection of
rare books, he was a teacher, a clergyman, author,
historian, and abolitionist. While a young man, he
learned blacksmithing and worked at the trade until he
ran away on the Underground Railroad. After a perilous
flight, he arrived in Pennsylvania, where he was
educated. Later, he taught school in Long Island, New
York, and New Haven, Connecticut. In 1850, Pennington
purchased his freedom and, in 1851, while in Europe, was
awarded the degree of Doctor of Divinity by the
University of Heidelberg. He also represented
Connecticut at the London Anti-Slavery Convention of
1843.
An almost wholly
neglected but indispensable category of institutions
which has to be associated with the history of book
collecting among people of African descent has been the
literary and historical societies.
Dr. Dorothy Porter Wesley compiled a list of these
early institutions and included the list in an article
entitled “Early American Negro Writings: A
Bibliographical Study,” published in
The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America
(1945). A dynamo of research and resourcefulness, Dr.
Wesley provided black bibliophiles and researchers with
invaluable information in this area, as well as in many
others, about the tradition in which we work. She
discovered that most of these societies were located in
Philadelphia. As early as 1828,
William Whipper, the wealthy and respected
abolitionist and book collector, organized the Reading
Room, which had as its express purpose “the mental
improvement of people of color in the neighborhood of
Philadelphia.”
By 1854, the
African-American community of Philadelphia served as a
nurturing soil for other ground-breaking, black cultural
organizations.
The
Banneker Institute was opened in that year, named
for the well-known African-American scientist and
astronomer from Maryland, Benjamin Banneker. The
Institute housed a large portion of Banneker’s
papers as well as an impressive library of books and
other documents related to the African Diaspora. This
organization was the forerunner of the
Afro-American Historical Society, established in
1897.
The outstanding
collection of the
Banneker Institute and some items from early
African-American bibliophiles were donated to the
Historical Society of Pennsylvania in the 1930s, due
largely to the fact that the African American community
of Philadelphia did not have a museum in which to
preserve their proud history. Since the 1970s, the
Historical Society of
Pennsylvania and the
Philadelphia
Library Company have shared their holdings of
African-American history, much of it having originally
belonged to the American Negro Historical Society.
Though small in
numbers, Philadelphia’s African-American community
included what would later be termed the “talented
tenth,” which had among its number some of the earliest
bibliophiles and collectors. Long before the present-day
Afro-centric and multi-cultural movements claimed credit
for galvanizing black pride and self-respect,
Robert Mara
Adger, furniture merchant, political activist,
bookseller, and pioneer black bibliophile, labored to
compile one of the finest collections of the 19th
century. I was able to obtain a copy of his
Catalogue of Rare Books and Pamphlets: Subjects Relating
to the Past Conditions of the Colored Race and the
Slavery in this Country, published in 1894. This
catalog describing rare works is itself considered “damn
rare.”
Adger was one of the original organizers of the
Banneker Institute. After his death, a major portion of
his collection was housed in the Home for Aged and
Infirm Colored Persons of Philadelphia, the former home
of Stephen Smith, a wealthy African-American
abolitionist and book collector. Other items in the
Adger
Collection were purchased by his book-collecting
friends
William C. Bolivar, Arthur Schomburg, and
Henry Proctor Slaughter. In 1993, I helped to
establish a
Pennsylvania State Historical Marker at Adger’s South
Street home in Philadelphia.
Foremost among
antebellum black collectors and bibliophiles were men
such as
Robert Purvis, Sr.,
William Still,
William Still,
Isaiah C.
Wears, and
John S. Durham. All of these men connected with the
anti-slavery movement were agents of the Underground
Railroad and wrote important “race books” and pamphlets
that had a profound effect on African Americans during
the periods before the Civil War and the turn of the
twentieth century.
William Whipper, abolitionist, entrepreneur, and
reformer, accumulated an extensive collection of books.
His grandson
Leigh Whipper also collected books on black culture,
though he is better known for his role in the classic
movie,
The Ox-Bow Incident (1939).
Most of their
collections were lost or given away by disinterested
relatives or by individuals with little interest in
black culture. Luckily, several of
William Still’s books found their way to the
Blockson Collection, having been donated by his
descendants. Nearly seventy years ago, the collection of
Robert Purvis, Sr., was donated to the University of
Pennsylvania, where it was largely ignored by the
librarian. A portion of the collection was relocated in
the University’s Special Collections Department in 1995.
Another
Philadelphia collector who gained acceptance was Adger’s
friend,
William C. Bolivar, known affectionately as “Uncle
Billy Bolivar.” He was named the “Pencil Pusher”
because, for twenty-two years, he wrote a column by that
name for the Philadelphia Tribune. Bolivar was an
intimate friends of
Arthur Schomburg, who often traveled to Philadelphia
from New York to exchange books and discuss acquisitions
with collectors and members of the
Philadelphia American Negro Historical Society. Both
belonged to that society; Bolivar was actually a
founding member.
Elinor Des Verney Sinette, Schomburg’s biographer,
told me that, when Bolivar visited Schomburg, he had
been truly impressed with what he saw, noting that,
“Schomburg’s collection is simply wonderful.” I own a
copy of the rare and slender catalog of Bolivar’s
collection that a group of his friends published as a
birthday gift to him in 1914 at the suggestion of
Dr. Nellie Bright. He died a few months later. On
the cover of the catalog is a photograph depicting
Bolivar as an elderly man with a cigar in his hand,
reading a book. What caught my attention immediately
were his very worn laced shoes. I smiled when I thought
to myself that dedicated collectors have similar traits,
i.e., “books before shoes.”
The city of
Philadelphia can claim many of the most important
African-American ministers of that period, from
Richard Allen and
Absalom Jones to
Bishop Richard Robert Wright and
Archdeacon Henry L. Phillips. A brilliant minister
and a passionate book collector, Phillips, Pastor of the
Church of the Crucifixion, was a friend of Bolivar’s who
lived to be 100. When Bolivar died, Archdeacon Phillips
delivered the funeral oration. In summing up the
oration, Phillips said, “As to knowledge concerning
race, what Bolivar did not know was not worth knowing.
He was a veritable walking encyclopedia.”
William H. Dorsey, a friend of Bolivar’s, was a
member of an old African-American family and the son of
the founder of the celebrated
Dorsey Caterers. He was an artist and a bibliophile
who devoted much of his time to assembling over four
hundred scrapbooks that document the history of
Philadelphia’s African-American community; together the
scrapbooks contain over nine hundred biographical files.
At one time, Dorsey possessed a private museum which
occupied three rooms in his large home. The museum was
described as being “without exception, the most
remarkable collection of books, data, clippings, and
curios concerning the Negro race in the world.” By 1903,
Dorsey’s collection represented over forty years of
labor. He was the custodian of the documents of the
American Negro Historical Society, and a large portion
of his collection was donated to
Cheyney State University in Pennsylvania, where it
lay hidden in storage for decades.
This a minor
disappointment in the larger tragedy of many private
collections of information with regard to African
people. Often, because our institutions do not have the
necessary funding to facilitate timely processing and
upkeep, donated items languish for months and even years
in storage. Some items deteriorate beyond reclamation.
At other times, the people placed in charge of the items
either do not have an idea of their significance or are
simply not interested. Fortunately, Cheyney State took
the William Dorsey collection from storage and took
active steps to preserve those records. I remember how
impressed I was with the scope and breadth of Dorsey’s
work when
Sulayman
Clark, Director of the Dorsey Collection Preservation
Committee, asked me to appraise the collection in
1979.
William Dorsey
found a dedicated comrade in Joseph W. H. Cathcart, a
janitor with a penchant to “preserve the good things he
read in newspapers about his race.” Cathcart began
assembling scrapbooks on African Americans in 1856, and
by 1882 he had one hundred of them. For his diligence
and persistence, he was affectionately called “the
great scrapbook maker.”
There were a few
other African Americans associated with collecting “race
books” in Philadelphia between the end of the 19th
century and the 1930s. Among them were
Theophilus Minton, Thomas H. Ringgold, William
Potter, Edward Harris, George Carrett, and
Bishop Richard R. Wright.
Leon Gardiner, a younger member of the American
Negro Historical Society and one of the last survivors
of the original group, kept the collection of the
above-mentioned men intact and donated them to the
Historical Society of Pennsylvania in the 1930s.
Reading about these
early Philadelphia collectors had an enormous influence
on me as a collector and led me to search for
information about their lives. Toward this end, I
learned that
William S. Scarborough, an
African-American scholar of classical Greek on the
faculty of Wilberforce College in Ohio, assembled a
small but important collection of books. He shared
information and traded books with his Philadelphia
bibliophile friends and with publisher and bibliophile
Wendell Dabney of Cincinnati, Ohio, one of the
leading collectors in the early twentieth century.
I am continually
amazed at the variety of celebrated African-American
personalities born before the turn of the century who
ere connected to books. For nearly fifty years, I have
treasured the book of
Bert Williams’ Son of Laughter (1923), a
biography of the great comedian’s life. I purchased that
book in 1963 for ten dollars. I did not know that
Williams was a great reader and collector of books
relating to black culture until I read his biography. I
envied him after reading that he had owned a copy of
John
Ogilby’s Africa, published in 1670 and one of
the few books extant from that period which trace the
history of many of the ethnic groups of Africa. Williams
once told a friend that, “I think that, with this
volume, I could prove that every Pullman Porter is the
descendant of a king.” I know the feeling that Williams
must have had. Often, when children visit the
collection, I gain their interest and attention by
telling them what ethnic group in Africa they resemble.
It never ceases to amaze me how they jump to attention
and, soon, every child in the room begins a passionate
query, “Who do I look like? Who do I look like?” And
some people dare say that African Americans have no
desire to look back at their past!
I was pleased to
learn that, although
Bert Williams made a fortune as a black-faced
minstrel showman, behind his painted face he deeply
loved preserving the history of his race. Who among us
could resist a natural attraction to a man like
Williams, whose library contained the works of
Muhammad,
Confucius,
Darwin,
Voltaire,
Kant,
Goethe,
Schopenhauer,
Paine,
Wilde,
Twain,
Wheatley, and
Douglass?
Williams’ library
contained an unexpurgated edition of The Arabian Nights.
A member of the Ziegfeld Follies, Williams reportedly in
1920 made more money that the President of the United
States. Besides sharing similar interests in collecting
and sports, Williams shared something else which I count
among my quiet diversions: an interest in astrology.
The
Moorland
Foundation at Howard University in Washington, D.C.,
was established in
Jesse Moorland’s name with the expectation that
research would be continued in the areas that Moorland’s
collection represented. During the same time period that
Moorland donated some 3,000 books of his collection to
Howard, another
black Washingtonian, Daniel Murray, became well
known as a bibliographer. In 1900, Murray, an employee
of the Library of Congress under the direction of Head
Librarian
Herbert Putnam, organized a presentation of 500
titles culled from a list of more than 1,100 books,
articles, and pamphlets representing African-American
authors for exhibition in the Negro authorship section
of the
Paris World Exposition of 1900.
The Spingarn name has become
associated with wealth, literature, law and civil
rights. Both
Joel Spingarn and his brother
Arthur, members of a prominent Jewish family, were
founding members of the NAACP.
Arthur Spingarn was wealthy enough to support his
desire to “collect books written by Negro authors.”
In 1948, Spingarn
donated his entire collection of rare books and
paintings to
Howard University; its special collections
department has since been renamed the
Moorland-Spingarn Collection.
Dorothy Porter Wesley told me that, when she was
packing up Spingarn’s books in his New York City
apartment on an extremely hot day, she removed her dress
and worked in her slip as her husband, James, assisted
her. She was startled at one point to learn her only
child, Connie, was stuck in the apartment building’s
elevator. Having become so engrossed in her work, she
forgot to check on her own daughter! After Dr. Wesley’s
death in 1996, I
appraised her library, an extensive collection of
books, pamphlets, prints, posters, stamps, ephemera, and
sculpture.
Another collector,
Alain Locke, was born in Philadelphia and graduated
from the
University of Pennsylvania and the
University of Berlin. Although Locke was not a
bibliophile, he collected books by and about the people
of the African Diaspora. Dr. Wesley told me that it took
her several days to unpack the several collections of
books, manuscripts, artifacts, paintings, and oddities
that Locke bequeathed to the Moorland-Spingarn
Collection. Locke was a
prodigious collector, saving even the ephemeral
slips of paper that he collected over a lifetime of
activities. Some people would call him—and any other
bibliophile, for that matter—a “pack rat.”
Although I have
seen the time-consuming process of cataloging firsthand
and have participated in it myself, I must admit that I
have probably made it only nominally easier for those
who will catalog my personal holding to do so. One of my
collecting idiosyncrasies is to save all of my
Christmas, birthday, and greeting cards, airplane, train
and theater tickets, and business cards. I was pleased
to join the ranks of such writers and collectors as
Locke and Wesley in this regard.
Locke’s former
student
Glenn Carrington began collecting while still a
student at Howard in the 1920s. He had a passion for
Alexander Pushkin, the father of Russian literature and
a Russian of African descent, and also owned a
substantial collection of literature related to gay men.
He collected books, manuscripts, music, and many other
items relating to the Harlem Renaissance, including the
work of the poet and writer Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi
Jones). After his death in 1975,
Carrington’s collection, containing more than 2,200
books in fifteen languages, five hundred recordings, and
a variety of other items were acquired by the Moorland-Springarn
Research Center at Howard University. In honor of
Carrington’s commitment, the Center published an
attractive catalog.
No history of
African-American collectors and bibliophiles would be
complete without giving some attention to the career of
Henry Proctor Slaughter. He earned a law degree from
Howard University in 1900 and remained in Washington,
D.C., for the rest of his life. When he was not
collecting, Slaughter worked in the Government Printing
Office. As one of former slaves, Slaughter is reported
to have had a house filled with literature relating to
black culture that included 10,000 books, 100,000
newspaper clippings, and 3,000 pamphlets. In addition,
Slaughter assembled a complete collection of information
on African-American prizefighters from
Bill Richmond to Joe Louis. After his death, a large
portion of Slaughter’s collection was purchased by
Atlanta University in Georgia. I am indebted to Dr.
Wesley for giving me Slaughter’s copy of the rare and
highly-sought-after book, Sketches of Higher Classes of
Colored Society in Philadelphia (1841), which was
published anonymously and identified as the work of
Joseph Wilson, “a man of color.”
Most serious
collectors enjoy comparing holdings with other
collectors. During the period between 1900 and 1920 when
wealthy collectors such as
J. Pierpont Morgan,
Henry
Huntington, and
Jerome Kern
were building their fabulous
collections of
Americana, several of
Henry Slaughter’s
African-American collecting friends occasionally
gathered at his Washington, D.C., home to smoke good
Cuban cigars, drink bourbon, and share their Negro book
stories. Sometimes, the group focused on an erotic book
that someone had added to their collection, often
resulting in risqué discussions.
John Wesley
Cromwell, Sr.,
Carter G. Woodson,
Arthur Schomburg,
Henry Proctor Slaughter,
Alain Locke,
Charles Wesley,
and
William C. Bolivar were among the collectors and
bibliophiles who gathered in Washington, D.C., from time
to time to discuss their work. Cromwell organized the
Negro Book Collectors Exchange in 1915, frequented by
himself and Schomburg. These two men corresponded and
exchanged books with Wendell Phillips Dabney. He,
Schomburg, and Woodson were all members of the American
Negro Academy, an organization founded by Alexander
Crummell, another bibliophile and African-American
intellectual in 1897.
One of the greatest honors that I
have received is to be called the “modern day Schomburg.”
Schomburg was the greatest bibliophile and collector of
his time. He was born in 1874 in San Juan, Puerto Rico,
a year after slavery had been abolished on the island.
Looking back, we seem to share parallel lives in many
ways.
Schomburg, too, was told by his teachers that
blacks were inferior and had no history. Both of us
resolved to dedicate our lives to defending African
people against charges of racial inferiority and acts of
social oppression by collecting and preserving our
history. Like
Schomburg, I entrusted my cherished
collection to a major institutional repository and, like
him, I guide people in search of black history along
their paths of truth.
A “race man” to the core,
Schomburg
channeled his race feeling by collecting books,
pamphlets, prints, manuscripts, and other sources
relating to the history of African people throughout the
world. Although he had to support a family and was not a
wealthy man, he traveled in Europe in 1924 to do
research and collect more material.
Like most African-American
collectors,
Schomburg endured innumerable personal
sacrifices to make his incredible collection a reality.
One of his often-repeated quotes was that, “The American
Negro must remake his path in order to make his future.”
He also said that, “History must restore what slavery
took away.”
In 1926, the Carnegie Corporation
bought
Schomburg’s collection of more that 10,000 items
for $10,000 (approximately one fifth of its estimated
value at that time) and placed it in the New York Public
Library’s Harlem branch. A short time later, the Harlem
Branch of the New York Public Library was named for him.
By this time,
Schomburg was on a leave of absence to
serve as the curator of the Fisk University Library
where he established an excellent collection of rare
black books. Many of the rare items that Schomburg
purchased in the 1930s after his departure from Fish
were placed on the library’s open shelves. In 1973,
while I was lecturing at Fisk, the Head Librarian,
Jessie
Carney Smith, asked me to identify the rare items so
that she could place them in the Fisk Special Collection
Department.
In 1995, the 70th anniversary of
the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the
Center presented a year-long exhibition and a series of
programs. I was honored when Howard Dodson, the director
of the Schomburg
Center, asked me to serve as
co-chairmen of the event. Like most dedicated
bibliophiles who acquire a vast amount of knowledge
after years of collecting, Schomburg shared his
knowledge through his writing. His own bibliography
includes The Works of Placido (1905) and
A
Bibliographical Checklist of American Negro Poetry
(1916). A copy of the latter gem that I purchased in
1970 has a particular place in my heart: It bears an
inscription from Schomburg to William Gable, the
well-known American book man. Later, he sold the copy to
A. Edward Newton, one of America’s leading bibliophiles
of that era. This book, then, has been touched by the
hands of three distinguished book men. It is a
coincidence that thrills the heart and soul as it does
the mind. This book also bears one of Schomburg’s
bookplates, depicting the image of a kneeling slave with
the inscription, “Am I not a man and a brother?” I had
selected the same image for my collection long before I
ever acquired one of Schomburg’s books. Was it
coincidence or was it fate?
My bibliophile connection with
Schomburg completed the circle.
Howard Dodson asked me
to write a comment for the book jacket of Dr. Elinor Des
Verney Sinette’ biography of Schomburg,
Arthur Alfonso Schomburg, Black Bibliophile & Collector (1989). I was
honored to have known as a friend every director of the Schomburg Research Center, beginning with Dr. Lawrence
D. Reddick, who had replaced the great collector after
his death. Jean Blackwell Hutson, Wendell Wray, and
Howard Dodson followed him. To have been referred to as
“the second Schomburg” is an honor to which I would
never have aspired. Arthur Schomburg’s work lives on in
place of the man: I only hope that I have been a worthy
successor to him in my small part of the black
book-collecting world.
A number of other black collectors
appeared on the scene in New York City and its suburban
areas who where also associated with Schomburg. The
Reverend Charles Douglass Martin,
James Edward Bruce
(“Bruce Grit”), Edward T. Garrett, and
Charles S.
Seifert were known as being among the bibliophiles
building great collections. These men with
Schomburg ,
would fire the imagination of countless African-American
speakers, writers and politicians, as well as the
average person on the street.
Edward T. Garrett, born in 1905 in
New York City, was a well-known etcher and engraver who
began collecting as a young boy after his mother took
him to the New York Public Library. A “race man” to the
core, Garrett only collected books by black authors and
once removed an essay by the Haitian liberator Toussaint
L’Overture from a volume and had it rebound as a
separate publication. Today, this book is a welcome
addition to the rare-book shelves of the Blockson
Collection. I bought it seven years ago from the
University Place Bookshop in Greenwich Village.
An added attraction to this slender
volume is Garrett’s bookplate that bears his image. He
collected nearly fifteen hundred volumes over his
lifetime, many of which bear this distinctive bookplate.
The majority of his collection is housed in the
Schomburg Collection. A true bibliophile, Garrett found
time to write a Negro encyclopedia of some 4,000 entries
and compiled a Negro bibliography of 3,380 citations,
neither of which was ever published.
Along with Schomburg, Charles S.
Seifert would become one of the profound influences on
young
John Henrik Clarke through his work with the
Harlem YMCA History Club, which would later be renamed
the Edward Blyden Society in honor of the late
Pan-African intellectual. This institution would count
among its participants such people as
John G. Jackson,
Willis N. Huggins,
Kwame Nkrumah, and
Joel A. Rogers.
I cannot resist mentioning a
fascinating anecdote in the world of books. It is
somewhat a coincidence that during the time Arthur
Schomburg became the curator of the Harlem branch of the
New York Public Library,
Belle da Costa Greene was
serving as curator of the collection of wealthy banker
J. Pierpont Morgan in the same city.
I first became acquainted with
Greene’s name in 1969. I had been invited as one of the
honored guests of Edwin Wolfe to view an imposing
exhibition entitled, “Negro History, 1553-1903,” at
The Library Company of Philadelphia.
In the course of our conversation that evening, Wolfe
told me that one of the most guarded secrets among
knowledgeable bibliophiles and collectors was the fact
that Belle da Costa Greene
was of African descent. She was towering figure in the
rare-book world from the 1920s to the 1950s. Wolfe
related what he knew of her:
“In all my years as an antiquarian
bookman, I never met a woman like her. I met Belle as a
young man, while I was working for my relative,
Abraham
S. Rosenbach. She was born in Virginia, a product of a
broken marriage and grew up in Princeton, New Jersey,
where she was employed as a librarian at Princeton
University. By 1909, she was the librarian for
J. P. Morgan, at twenty-six years old. She was an attractive,
slim-waisted woman of bright yellow complexion, with a
sensual, husky voice and green eyes.”
Wolfe added that
Rosenbach told him
that, after returning from dinner one night, a friend
noticed that the sleeve of Bella’s dress was torn,
revealing her skin beneath. Greene is reported to have
said, “The nigger blood shows through, doesn’t it?”
Wolfe concluded that Greene passed herself off as
Portuguese.
Like Schomburg, she had a great wit
and knowledge of rare books and documents that few
people could match during their time. After J.P.
Morgan’s death, she became the director of his library
to which she had been fiercely devoted for forty years.
Probably because of fear of exposure, Greene never
associated herself with contemporary African-American
bibliophiles and collectors such as Schomburg.
Before she died in 1950, Greene
burned her personal letters and diaries. Fascinated by
the respect and book knowledge that this mysterious
woman possessed, I began collecting articles, catalogs,
and other publications that she had written. It was
largely because of the knowledge of Greene’s mixed
African ancestry that I began collecting the works of
other writers of African descent, such as
Alexander Pushkin,
Alexander Dumas,
Robert Browning,
Frederick
Douglass, W. Adolph Roberts, and Harlem Renaissance
writer
Nella Larsen. People who knew of Frank Yerby, the
author of the best-selling novel
The Foxes of Harrow,
were surprised to learn that he was of African descent.
Even the text on the dust jacket failed to identify Yerby as an African American.
Special attention must be given to
several other collectors of the 1940s and 1950s.
Although their collections were small, nevertheless they
were significant in helping to restore our history book
by book.
Alexander Gumby, who rarely missed a theater
opening for nearly thirty years, donated over three
hundred scrapbooks of clippings, playbills, and ephemera
to Columbia University in 1950. Gumby was described by
those who knew him as a colorful personality. He also
developed a passion for rare and first-edition books.
His friends called his second-floor Fifth Avenue
apartment “Gumby’s Bookstore,” where many of the Harlem
literati gathered.
One of Gumby’s friends of the
period, the artist and writer
Richard Bruce Nugent, told
me when we were introduced in 1975, “Charles, you would
have enjoyed talking to Gumby. Man, he shared the same
passion for books as Schomburg. They spend hours
together, talking about their collections.” Both Gumby
and Nugent were friends of junior high school teacher
Harold Jackman, an inveterate collector of books
relating to black culture.
Jackman’s more lasting contribution
to his race was a collector. When his friend, poet
Countee Cullen, died in 1947, he established the
Countee
Cullen Memorial Collection, housed in a Harlem library
today. A tall and handsome man, Jackman was the physical
model for the writer and collector
Carl Van
Vechten’s
Nigger Heaven
(1926) and appeared in his friend
Wallace Thurman’s
Infants of the Spring (1932).
Hubert Harrison was known
throughout New York City and in various parts of the
nation as a man of immense intellectual gifts. He was
born in 1883 in St. Croix, Virgin Islands, and was
reputed to be a soapbox orator, an important
spokesperson for the
Harlem Renaissance, and one of the
great intellectual lights of the period. Although he did
not attend college, his quest for knowledge and love of
books pertaining to black culture never waned. He was
the person responsible for securing
Marcus Garvey’s
first speaking engagement before
Bethel A.M.E. Church in
Harlem. He also had a profound influence on
Garvey’s
Pan-African philosophy. Like so many other black
collectors and lay-intellectuals, Harrison’s passing
went largely unnoticed, although he was undoubtedly one
of the great minds produced by Africans in the Diaspora.
I might also add that, in my time,
few people who are now collecting books by and about
people of African descent have ever heard of our
dedicated black collectors. The
Negroana collection of
Ernest R. Alexander went to Fisk University.
Bishop
Benjamin Arnett’s collection was dispersed into the
holdings of Wilberforce University.
Henry Baker’s collection of over two thousand invention patents and
certificates by African Americans was donated to Howard
University, while the thousand-volume collection of
Tucker A. Malone was bought for Hampton Institute by
George Foster Peabody.
Charles Bentley, an activist
friend of both W.E.B. DuBois and
William Monroe Trotter
during the Niagara Movement years, donated one hundred
books to the
Special Negro Collection of the George
Cleveland Hall Branch of the Chicago Public Library in
1929. The vast collection completed by
A.M.E. Zion
Bishop William J. Walls is preserved at
Livingstone
College in North Carolina.
Reprinted (p.227-241), by kind permission of Charles L.
Blockson, from: “Damn Rare”: the memoirs of an
African-American bibliophile / by Charles L. Blockson. –
Tracy, CA: Quantum Leap Publisher, Inc., 1998. – xviii,
334 p.
Source:
Broward Library
* * *
* *
 |
Damn Rare: The Memoirs of an
African-American Bibliophile
By
Charles L. Blockson
The
subtitle of the book:
The Memoirs of an African-American
Bibliophile, is like a sign that
warns to be prepared for the unexpected. The
three hundred and fifty-two pages book is
more than a memoir. It is an authoritative
panoramic story of an African-American man
growning up in America. Nearly every aspect
of African-American life is covered that
also include "the numbers," and
superstition. ". . . everybody played the
numbers including some ministers. . . . The
numbers racket was as popular in many
communities as lotteries are today, and it
was more profitable for black people." Those
who buy the book will also meet and come to
know major personalities in his life: W.E.B.
Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson,
Lessing J. Rosenwald, Jackie Robinson,
Malcolm X, Alex Haley, Alice Walker, and
many other personalities known and unknown.
The dynamics of Mr. Blockson's story hinges
on an uncommon look into an African-American
bibliophile's life—Quantum
Leap Publisher, CA 1998 |
* * *
* *
|
Jessie Carney Smith
In 1964 Smith became
the first African American to earn a Ph.D.
in library science from the University of
Illinois. Beyond the confines of academia
where she found her niche, she is widely
known for her written collections that
document the culture and achievements of
African Americans and of Black people
worldwide. Smith has lectured widely and
served in a variety of international
assignments.
After completing her doctorate at the
University of Illinois, she joined Fisk
University in 1965. |
 |
Born Jessie Carney on September 24,
1930, Smith grew up outside of
Greensboro, North Carolina. She had two older
siblings and a twin brother. Her parents, James and
Versona (Bigelow) Carney, graduates of North Carolina
A&T, ran James's small business. The whole family would
often help in the store. Smith's maternal grandparents
lived only yards from the Carney home. . . .
Smith has further plans for the
library and her writing career. "I find this is a very
exciting time to be in library and information sciences
and to become involved in the constant changes that
technology brings," she told CBB. Given the low funding
usually allocated to libraries, Smith admitted that she
could have enjoyed her position much more if funds and
been available to make Fisk's library high-tech. Outside
the library, Smith's newest projects included a third
volume of Notable Black American Women, set to be
published in 2002.
Answers
* * *
* *
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William Cooper Nell
Nineteenth-century
Abolitionist, Historian, Integrationist
Selected Writings, 1832-1874
Edited by Constance
Porter Uzelac and Dorothy Porter Wesley
William
Cooper Nell—one of the most important,
prolific, and understudied African-American
activists in the struggle against
slavery—has finally found his voice. This is
due to the recent publication of
William Cooper Nell: Selected Writings,
1832-1874 (Black Classic Press), the
product of several decades of passionate and
painstaking work by editors Constance Porter
Uzelac and her late mother, Dorothy Porter
Wesley, a renowned pioneer in
African-American history and bibliography.
The volume reprints 519
Nell documents, telling his documentary tale
from the beginning of his public career in
the American antislavery movement until his
death during Reconstruction. |
A wide variety of
documents appear in the edition, including speeches,
editorials, and letters to and from other important
figures such as Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd
Garrison, and Wendell Phillips, as well as more obscure
persons. Thanks to the hard work of the editors, a
lengthy introduction, a chronology of Nell's life,
illustrations, and an index enhance the usefulness of
the volume. Furthermore, the editors have corrected
numerous dating errors introduced into the documents by
archivists of an earlier time.
Having so many of Nell's writings together in one place
for the first time, and in such an easily-accessible
format, should spur a good deal of scholarly work on his
contributions to the cause of nineteenth-century reform.
After reading the volume, it is hard not to take
seriously Uzelac's claim that "completion of this
publication has been a labor of love" (xxix).—Roy
E. Finkenbine, Professor of History & Director of the
Black Abolitionist Archives, University of Detroit
Mercy, co-editor,
Back Abolitionist Papers, 1830-1865
* * *
* *
|
Dorothy Porter Wesley (1905-1995)
Afro-American Librarian and
Bibliophile: an Exhibition
By
Constance Porter Uzelac and James A. Findlay
Preface
For the
second year in a row, Broward County
Library's Bienes Center for the Literary
Arts is proud to present an exhibition in
celebration of Black History Month. This
year's display honors the memory of one the
most prominent African-American librarians
and bibliophiles of the twentieth century:
Dorothy Porter Wesley (1905-1995). It does
so by showcasing sixty-nine books,
pamphlets, post cards, photographs,
drawings, ephemera, awards and memorabilia
from her vast personal collection.1 Also
included are a selection of books and art
works by James A. Porter (1905-1970), her
first husband, and a selection of books by
Charles Harris Wesley (1891-1987), her
second husband. |
 |
Dorothy Porter
Wesley was born in Virginia in 1905, went to high school
in Montclair, NJ, graduated in 1928 with an A.B. degree
from Howard University, Washington, D.C., and in 1932,
became the first African American woman to receive a
Master of Library Science degree from Columbia
University, New York City.
For forty-three years, from 1930 to 1973, she was the
curator of Howard University's Moorland-Spingarn
Collection, and was almost single handedly responsible
for building the library into a world-class research
facility relating to the history and culture of people
of African descent. She was a prolific author and
bibliographer yet only a very small selection of her
work is included in the exhibition. . . .
Broward Library
* * *
* *
 |
Notable
American Women, Book III
Edited by Jessie Carney Smith
New York: Thomson Gale, 2003. 881p. photos.
index.
This is the third in a series that began in
1992 of excellent biographical dictionaries
of prominent historical and contemporary
African American women. For each volume,
women were eligible for inclusion if they
met one or more of the following criteria:
pioneer in a particular endeavor, important
entrepreneur, leading businesswoman,
literary or creative figure of stature,
leader of social or human justice, major
governmental or organizational official, or
distinguished scholar or educator. In the
second volume, in many cases women's names
surfaced from research published since the
prior volume. |
In the current volume, editor Carney Smith thanks those
who published "biographical accounts of obscure women on
the Internet so that more readers might know their work"
(Introduction). As the number of notables has mushroomed
from an original 500 in Book I to a total of 1100 in
Books I through III, the need for specialized,
cumulative indexing to all three volumes has grown, too.
Wisely, Book III offers cumulative occupational,
geographic, and subject indexes. With increased
attention to the histories of states and regions (not to
mention email requests from schoolchildren working on
African American women's history in their state), the
geographic index is a particular boon. (Book I had no
geographic index, and II's only indexed the women in
that volume.)
Goliath
* * *
* *
|
The Negro in the United States: A Selected
Bibliography
By
Dorothy Porter Wesley (1905-1995)
This selected bibliography (with brief
annotations) on the Negro in the United
States is based mainly on sources in the
Library of Congress. Among the topics
covered are the urban Negro, relations
between the races, discriminatory practices
in all areas, and efforts to obtain
political and economic freedom, as well as
the education and cultural history of the
Negro, his religious life, the social
conditions under which he lives, and his
historical past. Included are works
depicting the lives of outstanding
Negroes—abolitionists, fugitive slaves,
educators, civil rights leaders, scientists,
journalists, religious leaders, artists,
athletes, and literary figures.
The selection of many of the titles,
especially in the fields of literature and
history, was based on the frequency of
requests for particular works in large
library collections on the Negro, and on
their inclusion in the numerous
bibliographies and reading lists now being
compiled for use in colleges. While some
books written especially for children and
young people are included, and some of the
other publications cited are well adapted to
their use. |
 |
* * *
* *
 |
Constance Porter Uzelac, formerly a
medical librarian, is the guardian and
keeper of the numerous books, papers and art
works that once belonged to her parents and
is now devoting her life to organizing and
managing the
Dorothy Porter Wesley Research Center
(incorporated as a not-for-profit
corporation in 1995), an archive of items
from the estates of her parents, James Amos
and Dorothy Louis Burnett Porter, and
step-father, Charles Harris Wesley.
Her publications include
William Cooper Nell: Nineteenth-century
Abolitionist, Historian, Integrationist;
Selected Writings, 1832-1874.
BlackPast
|
* * *
* *
|
Dorothy Porter Wesley (1905-1995), a
scholar-librarian and bibliographer was born
in Warrenton, Virginia in 1905, to her
father, Hayes Joseph Burnett, a physician,
and her mother, Bertha Ball Burnett, a
tennis champion. After receiving her A.B.,
from Howard University in 1928, she became
the first African American woman to complete
her graduate studies at Columbia University
receiving a Bachelors (1931) and a Masters
(1932) of Science in Library Science.
Dorothy Bennett joined the library staff at
Howard University in 1928, and on December
29, 1929 married James Amos Porter. In 1930
University President W. Mordecai Johnson
appointed her to organize and administer a
Library of Negro Life and History
incorporating the 3,000 titles presented in
1914 by Jesse Moorland. |
 |
The library opened in 1933 as the Moorland
Foundation. In 1946 Howard University purchased the
Arthur Spingarn Collection. By the time Porter retired
in 1973 the library, which was now called the Moorland-Spingarn
Research Center, had over 180,000 books, pamphlets,
manuscripts and other primary sources. Over 43 years,
Porter had successfully created a leading modern
research library that served an international community
of scholars. . . .
Black Past
* * *
* *
 |
Routes of Passage: Rethinking the African
Diaspora, Volume 1, Part 2
By
Ruth Simms Hamilton
Routes of Passage
provides a conceptual, substantive, and
empirical orientation to the study of
African people worldwide.
Routes of Passage
addresses issues of geographical mobility
and geosocial displacement; changing
cultural, political, and economic
relationships between Africa and its
Diaspora; interdiaspora relations; political
and economic agency and social mobilization,
including cultural production and
psychocultural transformation; existence in
hostile and oppressive political and
territorial space; and confronting
interconnected relations of social
inequality, especially class, gender,
nationality, and race.
Ruth Simms Hamilton was a teacher and
researcher at Michigan State University for
35 years, having won many awards for her
work. |
|
Ruth taught courses on international
inequality and development, comparative race
relations, international migration and
diasporas, Third World urbanization and
change, and sociological theory. She was
Professor of Sociology and Urban Affairs,
Director of the African Diaspora Research
Project, and a core faculty member of the
African Studies Center and Center for Latin
American and Caribbean Studies at Michigan
State University. At the time of her death,
in November 2003, Ruth was finalizing an 11
volume series on the African Diaspora,
Routes of Passage. TIAA-CREF, a national
financial services leader, created the
Hamilton Research Scholarship in 2004, in
honor of Hamilton's work in minority and
urban issues. |
 |
Ruth Simms Hamilton.
Creating a Paradigm and Research Agenda for Comparative
Studies of the Worldwide Dispersion of African People.
Michigan State, 1990
* * *
* *
 |
Arthur Alfonso Schomburg, Black
Bibliophile & Collector: A Biography
By Elinor Des Verney Sinnette
This book is a bibliophile's dream! The
life of
Arthur A. Schomburg is wonderfully
described as a biracial immigrant from
the Caribbean who gets involved with
radical politics in New York and goes on
to become a primer collector of African
and African American literature! This
book also introduces the reader to other
black bibliophiles during the Harlem
Renaissance. Book lovers will delight in
this biography!
*
* * *
*
The
first full biography of the pioneering
black collector whose search for the
hidden records of the black experience
led to the development of a research
collection which laid the foundation for
the study of black history and culture. |
Sinnette's book
began at the school of Library Science at Columbia
University as a doctoral dissertation and shares the
strengths and weaknesses of that genre. It is primarily
an account of Schomburg's life and career in New York
City, especially his last three decades. Although
Sinnette describes in considerable detail the efforts by
Schomburg to collect materials on black life and
letters, she does not delve very deeply into his
motivation for such collecting, nor does she explain how
he was able to afford his acquisitions. The chapters,
although chronologically organized, jump back and forth
in time and the author misses few opportunities to
digress with short biographies of Schomburg's friends
and acquaintances. Both these characteristics make the
book difficult to follow. Despite this problem, the
biographical and bibliographical data contained in this
work make it a useful resource for those wishing to know
more about Schomburg and about black life and the
literary renaissance in New York City in the first years
of the 20th century.—D.
W. Hoover Ball State University
* * *
* *
|
Black Bibliophiles and Collectors:
Preservers of Black History
Edited by W. Paul Coates, Elinor Des Verney
Sinnette, and Thomas C. Battle
The
Moorland-Spingarn Research Center (MSRC)
Series was developed in conjunction with the
Howard University Press in 1989 as part of
the 75th Anniversary activities. The first
title,
Black Bibliophiles and Collectors:
Preservers of Black History was
published in 1990. The series was designed
to maximize the vast library, manuscript,
archival and graphic resources of the MSRC
in order to substantially impact upon Howard
University’s contributions to the scholarly
study and interpretation of the Black
experience. This would be achieved by
developing a program of sponsored research,
including interns and research fellows, and
developing a publications program to exploit
the vast and rich resources of the MSRC’s
various collections. Publications were
intended to include reprints, conference
proceedings, edited works and original
research. |
 |
*
* * * *
The State of African Education
(April 200)
Attack On Africans Writing Their Own
History Part 1 of 7
Dr Asa Hilliard III speaks on the assault of academia on
Africans writing and accounting for their own history.
Dr Hilliard is A
teacher, psychologist, and historian.
Part 2 of 7
/
Part
3 of 7 /
Part 4 of 7
/
Part 5 of 7 /
Part 6 of 7 /
Part 7 of 7
* * * *
*
Men
We Love, Men We Hate /
Ways of
Laughing (Kalamu ya Salaam)
Marcus Rediker
is professor of maritime history at the University of
Pittsburgh and the author of
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (1987),
The Many-Headed Hydra (2000), and
Villains of All Nations (2005), books that
explore seafaring, piracy, and the origins of
globalization. In The Slave Ship, Rediker
combines exhaustive research with an astute and highly
readable synthesis of the material, balancing
documentary snapshots with an ear for gripping
narrative. Critics compare the impact of Rediker’s
history, unique for its ship-deck perspective, to
similarly compelling fictional accounts of slavery in
Toni Morrison’s
Beloved and Charles Johnson’s
Middle Passage. Even scholars who have written
on the subject defer to Rediker’s vast knowledge of the
subject. Bottom line:
The Slave Ship is sure to become a
classic of its subject.— Bookmarks
Magazine
* *
* * *
posted 13 August 2010
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