Tag Archives: library history

The Librarian at the Nexus of the Harlem Renaissance

Three Harlem Women, ca. 1925
Three Harlem Women, ca. 1925
Check out this excellent article from Atlas Obscura! We are putting an excerpt below; but click through to admire their lovely photographs from the archives.

BY CARA GIAIMO

“You might not know about Regina Anderson, but you’ve probably heard of many of her friends. On a typical day in 1923 or 1924, Anderson might leave her desk at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library and drop a letter to W.E.B. Du Bois in the mailbox. She may go home to her apartment on St. Nicholas Avenue to check up on her couchsurfer, Zora Neale Hurston. Or she might hit the town with Countee Cullen, and then finish out the night cooking bacon and eggs for Langston Hughes.

Nearly a century after it began, the Harlem Renaissance remains one of the preeminent cultural movements in American history. And although Anderson doesn’t show up in many contemporary accounts of the period, she was there the whole time: lending out books, throwing parties, fighting for opportunities of her own, and enabling the spread of ideas that made the era what it was.

“She was that connection,” says historian Ethelene Whitmire, author of Regina Anderson Andrews, Harlem Renaissance Librarian, a biography that seeks to restore Anderson to her rightful place in the movement. “And she was there at the key time, when all the big names were arriving in Harlem.” As Anderson’s life story shows, if you’re trying to write a history book, it’s best not to forget the librarian.

Anderson never meant to come to Harlem at all. When she moved to New York City at age 21, in 1922, she posted up at a downtown YWCA, and applied for a job at the New York Public Library. As Whitmire details in her book, most libraries at that time had some form of segregation in place. Some cities, including Charleston and Dallas, barred African Americans from public libraries entirely. Others, like Atlanta and New Orleans, had separate branches for black clientele.

At the NYPL, all patrons were welcome at all branches, but when it came to employment, there was a certain amount of de facto segregation based on neighborhood demographics. Eastern European applicants were generally sent to the Webster Library on the Upper East Side, Russian-Jewish ones to the Seward Park Branch on the Lower East Side, and black applicants were habitually referred to the 135th Street Branch, in Harlem.

When Anderson was called in for her interview, she found this out firsthand. “Instead of focusing on her previous library experience”—at various institutions in and around her home city of Chicago—“the administrator was most concerned about her race,” Whitmire writes. On her application, Anderson (who had ancestors from Sweden, precolonial America, Madagascar, and India, among other places) had listed herself as “American.”

“I always considered myself an American. I don’t know what else I could be,” she explained to her interviewer. “To us you’re not an American,” he replied. “You’re not white.” And so, although Anderson had never been to Harlem, she, too, was sent to the 135th Street Branch.

At that time, the head of the branch was Ernestine Rose, a white woman who was determined to make the space as useful as possible to the neighborhood. “Rose was someone who was thinking outside the box during that time period, in terms of services for African Americans,” says Whitmire. “She really wanted to reach out to the community.” By the time Anderson started full-time as a junior clerk, in April of 1923, the branch had become a hotspot for many different groups. Over the course of a typical week, the library might host meetings of the local chapter of the NAACP, the Anti-Lynching Crusaders, and a high school boys’ club dedicated to the study of black history.

Anderson’s new post was eye-opening. As Onita Estes-Hicks put it in the African American National Biographyshe quickly realized that “she herself was a victim of an educational system that had disregarded black contributions to America,” and set about filling in her own gaps in knowledge. At the same time, she embraced the outreach aspects of her job. She helped to set up weekly talks by Hubert Harrison, a socialist and public intellectual known for his street-corner speeches. She also took over publicity efforts for the North Harlem Community Forum, a weekly lecture series focused on the issues of the day.

The speakers and topics were wide-ranging—one week, radical orator Hubert Harrison talked about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; another, Margaret Sanger spoke flanked by a police detail, in case she tried to distribute birth control literature—but many of these memorable evenings started thanks to a letter from Anderson. One she wrote in November of 1924, to W.E.B. Du Bois, is typical: it goes over recent highlights of the forum, asks when he will be available to speak there, and then requests an in with one of his friends, so she can send him a similar message.

Meanwhile, as Anderson actively built a network of established names, just being at the library brought her into contact with a number of up-and-comers. A lot of Harlem transplants made visiting the 135th Street Branch a top priority, Whitmire says: “After they got a place to live at the local YWCA or YMCA, they would often head to the library.”

When they arrived, Anderson made a point of securing space for them to work on their projects. This is how she met Langston Hughes, Eric Walrond, and Claude McKay. She also brought new books home—sometimes seven or eight a day—skim them, and put together notes, so that she could recommend these authors to her patrons and to each other. “She was reading everything new that was coming through,” says Whitmire.”

Read the rest of this article here!

Day Fifty Eight of the CMLE Summer Fun Library Tour!

 

Library staff are often doing great things! Sometimes it’s hard to see in our daily routines, because the things we do in libraries seem so ordinary to us – but still we touch lives and make our communities better places. Never doubt this is entirely true! Your community is a better place because you and your library are contributing to it. (Tell your funders and stakeholders, so they will know too!)

And sometimes it’s easy to see the contributions to a community that a library makes – even when it’s a secret in the moment!

The Librarian Who Guarded the Manhattan Project’s Secrets

While dodging accusations of communism, Charlotte Serber made the nuclear bomb possible.

“Nestled alongside the massive Los Alamos lab—which Lisa Bier in Atomic Wives and the Secret Library at Los Alamos described as emanating an “aura of utilitarian haste” with its unpaved streets and barbed wire gates manned by guards—the library appeared quite bleak. The photos that exist today show a small space crammed with books, shelves, file cabinets, and a Ditto machine (an early copier). Because the library was expected to be demolished after the war, everything was built from cheap wood.

The library had two sections: the main area, pictured at the top, and the document room—a locked vault containing reports and designs from Los Alamos and the other Manhattan Project sites. The library’s all-female staff—a mix of wives and Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps officers—needed to catalog, secure, and distribute thousands of books and manuscripts in a matter of months.

“But if library work was among the most tedious on the Hill, the award for the most unenviable job likely belonged to its head librarian: Charlotte Serber, a University of Pennsylvania graduate, statistician, and freelance journalist who at one point interviewed Frank Lloyd Wright for The Boston Globe.

“Here is a puzzle. You have no library experience, and you are tasked with a) heading a top secret facility, b) devising security protocols to ensure the U.S. military’s greatest secrets stay hidden, and c) importing thousands of documents to a site in the middle of nowhere—all in a vanishingly small window of time as World War II unfolds. How do you do it?

The answer, according to Serber: work over 75 hours per week.

Upon accepting the position, Serber taught herself the Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal classification systems,* and teamed up with Oppenheimer’s secretary to develop a pass system for accessing the library’s secure vault, requiring that each scientist present a “typewritten letter” bearing Oppenheimer’s signature rather than a badge.

Tasked with apprising all of the scientists of any new breakthroughs in the labs, Serber and her staff had to familiarize themselves with obscure science in order to accurately record and distribute news across the Hill.”

(Read the rest of this article here!)

Day Eleven of the CMLE Summer Fun Library Tour!

Wood photo.jpg

When we have some time, as we generally do over the summer, it’s good to take a moment to reflect back on our history and all the accomplishments we have made. This includes the advances we have made in our profession!

Today we look at an American woman who helped to create and modernize libraries in China: Mary Elizabeth Wood.

“Wood’s first major library project in China consisted of the establishment of the Boone School Library, and she acted as the chief advocate and director of this institution. Construction began on June 1, 1909, and was completed with the library’s opening in 1910.[2]The collection initially consisted of a mixture of secular and religious works, as well as photographs, with 3,000 volumes total in Chinese and English.[2] Under Wood’s leadership, the library rapidly developed, and within several years the collection had grown to 12,000 volumes total, with 5,000 in English and 7,000 in Chinese, as well as approximately 60 serial publications.[2]

Not content to serve only Boone School’s small academic community, Wood expanded her library outreach efforts by opening the library’s reading rooms to the general public and offering its auditorium as a venue for public lectures.[2] These lecture series, which covered “science, history, and current events,” were a major attraction, drawing hundreds of attendees in the area.[2] With the assistance of her student Shen Zhurong, who acted as interpreter,[3] Wood also started a set of traveling book collections of English works translated into Chinese for use in Chinese government schools.[2] Shen and Wood became focused on disseminating library resources as widely as possible; their “mobile libraries” expanded access to neighboring cities, serving a combined population of 1.3 million, and they even hired workers to carry books up to mountain resorts popular with missionary families.[3]

Despite these efforts, the general public reaction to library advocacy in China remained tepid, and Wood determined that the key to advancing the cause was the professionalization of librarians within China. Since there were no library schools in China at the time, in 1914 Wood sent Shen abroad to receive library training at the Library School of the New York Public Library.[3] Another of her students, Hu Qingsheng, was to follow Shen’s path in 1917.[3] Wood hoped that training Chinese students in Western principles of modern librarianship would spark a revolution of the profession in China, with American-educated professionals returning to share their experience and knowledge with their peers. Upon completing their degrees, both Shen and Hu joined Wood in her next endeavor: establishing a library school within China.”

(I have taught for many years at Simmons College in Boston, one of the library schools Wood attended; and her picture was hanging on a wall to commemorate her achievements!)

Day Eight of the CMLE Summer Fun Library Tour!

Library of Ashurbanipal The Flood Tablet
Tablet containing part of the Epic of Gilgamesh (Tablet 11 depicting the Deluge), now part of the holdings of the British Museum
When you look around you library and think about old technology and old books, you can get some perspective on it by looking at some REALLY old libraries!

The Royal Library of Ashurbanipal is just the library for you.

“The Royal Library of Ashurbanipal has sometimes been described as the ‘first library’ in the world, or the ‘oldest surviving royal library in the world’. The library was discovered by archaeologists who were excavating at the site of Nineveh, today known as Kuyunjik. As this was the imperial capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire during the reign of Ashurbanipal, the library has been attributed to this ruler. The Royal Library of Ashurbanipal contains over 30,000 clay tablets and fragments with texts written in the cuneiform script. The subjects of these texts range from governments records to works of literature and technical instructions.”

Every library person knows the importance of good organization and cataloging – but a British archeologist did not get this message (from Wikipedia):

“The library is an archaeological discovery credited to Austen Henry Layard; most tablets were taken to England and can now be found in the British Museum, but a first discovery was made in late 1849 in the so-called South-West Palace, which was the Royal Palace of king Sennacherib (705–681 BC).

Three years later, Hormuzd Rassam, Layard’s assistant, discovered a similar “library” in the palace of King Ashurbanipal (668–627 BC), on the opposite side of the mound. Unfortunately, no record was made of the findings, and soon after reaching Europe, the tablets appeared to have been irreparably mixed with each other and with tablets originating from other sites. Thus, it is almost impossible today to reconstruct the original contents of each of the two main “libraries”.”