Untold Stories: : Civil Rights, Libraries and Black Librarians

Citation

Gerard, D. (1999), "Untold Stories: : Civil Rights, Libraries and Black Librarians", Library Review, Vol. 48 No. 6, pp. 53-54. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.1999.48.6.53.14

As we say farewell to the 20th century we do so amidst a rising chorus of demands for, recognition of, and devotion to Civil Rights, Citizens′ Charters, Freedom From Want, and a hundred other praiseworthy initiatives. Everyone ‐‐ even the Conservative Party ‐‐ appears to be on the side of the angels of light. Nowhere is the clamour louder for reappraisal of our history in the glow of this new dispensation than in the USA. It was in the land of liberty, indeed, that civil rights according to our contemporary definition were first asserted: the new America in the late 18th century committed such ideals to print in their Constitution and a Bill of Rights inspired by the French Revolutionary droits de l′homme. Absent from any such eloquent declarations of intent was the African‐American, at that time still literally enslaved. Today that omission is being rectified.

Since the incidents at Montgomery, Alabama and the struggle for desegregation in the 1960s there has been research in all fields designed to establish the importance of the black American as a factor in the nation′s political evolution. The present book seeks to identify the black American contribution to librarianship and related culture; to those of us ignorant of such history the 15 essays which constitute this volume will be a revelation. The approach is historical, reaching back to the earliest attempts to offer education to black American females in the Sunday schools, which date from 1799, and the corresponding growth of ancillary book collections. Rosie Albritton documents, with abundant citations and references, the black involvement in early subscription, circulating and mechanics′ libraries ‐‐ what she terms “social libraries” ‐‐ the gatekeepers of black history, collections, and literature. A provocative essay by James Hooper explores the rise of black colleges and universities and the influence of private benefaction on black academic libraries: it was news to this reviewer that hated symbolic figures of the classic capitalist kind like Rockefeller of Standard Oil helped finance black colleges in the South, but as the essayist points out, the power structure in the South approved such benefactions when it was clear that the philanthropists had no interest in establishing racial equality or upsetting white supremacy.

The middle section of the book, under the title “Chronicles From The Civil Rights Movement”, exposes segregation in library services from 1900 to 1950, a subject of much sensitivity, and records that no exhaustive study of libraries and segregation has ever been published. Klaus Mussmann′s essay, “The Ugly Side of Librarianship”, concludes bleakly that the American Library Association made few attempts to enforce equal treatment for African‐American members “treated as a permanent American underclass”. One of the virtues of library history not sufficiently emphasised is its capacity to reveal examples of past professional culpability, hence the examples here published deserve credit. And most potent of all evidence is personal testimony: the reader can instantly engage with an individual case history where abstract summaries of history leave us numb. Thus the accounts of Edward Holley, Director of Libraries, Houston University, and his Assistant Director, Charles Churchwell, a black American, the first such senior appointment, portray vividly the effects of integration in professional/human terms.

The final section includes essays on “Black Women, Civil Rights and Libraries”, “Black Librarians as Book Publishers”, and once more a personal experience which as always arrests the attention: the auction of the Alex Haley estate in 1992, a massive manuscript collection accumulated during the preparation of his celebrated Roots. Through lack of collective black purchasing power the entire collection was dispersed at derisory cost. Where were the university archivists, the heritage collectors, the African‐American scholars? A special fund from a handful of celebrities could have kept the priceless materials intact for preservation in one centre. There appears to be a threat also to the Martin Luther King Centre Library, one of the largest African‐American archives in the USA, again through lack of financial support.

In our era of rapid social evolution it is salutary to be reminded of society′s past errors whether American or British. As we accelerate towards the age of “global miscegenation” optimistically forecast by Norman Mailer for the year 2000, we need enlightened documents like this book, if only to feed speculations about the century to come.