Black Librarians & America’s Battles Over Books

In 1727, Benjamin Franklin and friends formed the Junto Club (from the Spanish junta or assembly) in Philadelphia, a debating society that probed questions of morality, politics and philosophy. The group was composed of twelve members drawn from diverse backgrounds, but they all shared a spirit of inquiry and a desire to improve society.

Access to books was limited at the time. Most of them were imported and expensive. There were no public libraries.

On July 1, 1731, Franklin and other Junto members drew up “Articles of Agreement” to form a Library Company with the aim of making “useful” books available at a subscription fee. In March 1732 the first book order was sent to London. The Company soon began lending books to non-shareholders at a small cost as collateral.

By 1770, the Library’s catalogue recorded over 20,000 entries and lack of space became an urgent problem. When the Carpenters’ Company opened their new headquarters on Chestnut Street, the Library entered into an arrangement to rent the second-floor space of the property.

On September 5, 1774, the First Continental Congress took place in the building. From the Revolutionary War until 1800, while the federal government met in Philadelphia, the Library Company served as the first de facto Library of Congress.

The “free public library” movement began in 1849 when the New Hampshire legislature authorized towns to levy taxes in support of public libraries. The initiative did not spread to the rest of the nation until after the Civil War when public libraries began spreading rapidly.

Benjamin Franklin was a role model. Librarians were seen as missionaries, opening the gateway to knowledge and learning. Initially, women supported libraries as volunteers. It was not until after 1900 that they became fully involved, pioneering change and reform.

Ernestine Rose & Ernestine Rose

Feminist and freethinker Ernestine Louise Potowski was born on January 13, 1810, in Piotrkow, Poland. As a rabbi’s daughter, she was well educated. After her mother’s death in 1826, her father arranged a marriage without her consent.

She refused and left for Berlin where she supported herself whilst seeking freedom from the constraints of religion. Ernestine spent time in Holland and France, before moving to London in 1830. There she became a follower of Robert Owen’s social philosophy.

Fluent in English and highly intelligent, she was a prominent public speaker on social issues. Having married silversmith William Rose in a civil ceremony, the couple left for the city of New York in 1836 where she became one of the first to speak publicly on women’s rights, often addressing an audience of immigrants in German or French. She stood in the forefront of early American feminism and emancipation, leaving a footprint in Black history too.

Ernestine Rose was born in 1880, the only child in an Anglo-American family at Bridgehampton, in the town of Southampton, on Long Island. She was named after Ernestine (Potowski) Rose.

A possible explanation for this naming was the participation in schooling on her mother’s side of the family (little is known about her father who – as has been suggested – may “have been absent”). Anna Chatfield Rose herself became Principal of Bridgehampton’s District Nine School. Her younger brother Henry Chatfield, a lawyer in Suffolk County, served as President of the Board of Education.

Having taken her bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University, Connecticut, Ernestine trained at the New York State Library School in Albany where she received her degree in 1904. (The school was established at Columbia University by Melvil Dewey and moved to Albany in 1889.)

Four years later she was appointed librarian at a branch of the New York Public Library (NYPL) which was located in a largely Chinese neighborhood on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She was instrumental in building a collection of (mainly scientific) books in Chinese there.

In 1917 Rose published a pamphlet entitled “Bridging the Gulf” in which she argued that a library should not try to “Americanize” different ethnic groups, but act as a vehicle for implementing a multicultural vision.

During the First World War Ernestine worked for the Library War Service which distributed books to soldiers in camps and hospitals. In 1919 she was in France organizing library services for segregated Black soldiers.

She then moved to Coblenz in the Rhine Valley where she was tasked with building a library for the American Army of Occupation in Germany. Upon her return from Europe in 1920, she accepted the offer to lead the 135th Street branch of the NYPL.

By the mid-1920s, the branch served a twenty-block area in central Harlem with a population of roughly 125,000 people. Ernestine promoted the idea that a community library should serve as a bridge between races and enhance mutual understanding.

As reading changes lives and books are a medium of betterment, a library should function as an open domain of dialogue and discussion. Librarians have a duty to create space and opportunity for people of all backgrounds.

Rose actively participated in acquiring books and documents that pertained to African-American culture. In 1926, she raised funds to purchase the collection of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg consisting of more than 4,000 books, manuscripts and other artifacts.

The latter had summarized his credo in the opening line of the 1925 essay “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” writing that the “American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.” Today the collection forms the core of the Schomburg Centre for Research in Black Culture.

Public libraries have played a role in the Black fight for equal rights. They were of crucial importance for collecting and recording accurate representations of this history (in all its manifestations). Libraries constitute a nation’s collective cultural memory and consciousness.

Harlem Branch & Renaissance

One of Rose’s protégés was Regina Anderson. Born and raised in Chicago, her mother was a ceramicist and her father an attorney. The parents were identified as mixed-race with Black heritage in the 1910 census.

Anderson studied at college of Ohio’s Wilberforce University (the first college to be run by African-Americans) and worked in its library. Having returned home in 1921, she started her career as a junior assistant at Chicago’s Public Library.

Shortly after, Regina settled in New York City. Living at a YWCA in downtown Manhattan, she applied to be a librarian at the Harlem branch and started work in 1923 under supervision of Ernestine Rose who was driven by the ambition that the library would reflect the district’s diversity. She had turned the 135th Street branch into a community hub of cultural connections.

It was here that Regina developed a lifelong belief in boosting interracial relationships at both a personal and professional level. She hosted meetings by groups such as the NAACP and organized lectures by Margaret Sanger or Hubert Harrison.

Anderson shared an apartment at 580 Saint Nicholas Avenue in Harlem’s Sugar Hill district with Ethel Ray and Louella Tucker who both worked at Opportunity, a magazine that aimed to capture the creative ferment bubbling up in Harlem.

The women opened their space to locals, hosting salons frequented by the likes of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes.

Their dwelling became known as the “580” or “Dream Haven.” It was there that Alain Locke planned a special issue of the Survey Graphic magazine that later grew into his landmark 1925 anthology The New Negro.

Regina befriended many writers and artists living in Sugar Hill. The name dates back to the 1920s. During the Harlem Renaissance prominent African-Americans grouped together here, from W. E. B. Dubois to Duke Ellington and Arturo Schomburg. The musical legacy of the district is linked to the jazz traditions that emerged there around the 1930s and 1940s.

Anderson was involved in the preparations for a dinner on March 21, 1924, at the Civic Club in East 34th Street where more than a hundred publishers, magazine editors and writers gathered to celebrate Jessie Fauset’s debut novel There is Confusion and acknowledge the emerging abundance of Black creative talent. Organizers Charles S. Johnson (editor of the Opportunity magazine) and Alain Locke (who acted as the master of ceremonies) hoped that such an event might inspire a creative movement.

The Harlem Renaissance was set in motion. The 135th Street branch of the NYPL enabled the movement to flourish.

Singer and actress Ethel Waters lived just across the hall from Anderson’s apartment at St. Nicholas Avenue. Regina’s friendships in the Renaissance circle sparked her ambition to develop her own play-writing and acting skills.

She joined the CRIGWA Players (founded by W. E. B. Du Bois: later KRIGWA) offering opportunities to young Black playwrights and actors. The group was given permission by Ernestine Rose to perform in basement of the 135th Street library, before transferring to St Philip’s Church Parish House on 134th Street.

After it disbanded, Anderson co-founded the Harlem Experimental Theatre. She performed in its productions and wrote plays under the pen name Ursula Trelling, two of which were produced by the group: Climbing Jacob’s Ladder (1931) and Underground (1932)

Freedom Libraries

Rose and Anderson turned the Harlem branch into a center of communal activity and cultural exchange at a time when white supremacists used racist depictions to justify Black political exclusion.

By collecting, preserving and cataloguing works that refuted stereotypes, by encouraging debate and resisting censorship, these librarians fought back against white campaigns that tried to block or restrict access to information.

Librarianship to them was about creating an intellectual infrastructure that made Black materials visible and findable. What is not catalogued, does not exist.

Creating catalogues and making indexes opened up a wealth of accessible documents, creating an “information explosion.” They transformed 135th Street into an intellectual and creative center for African-Americans.

Their pioneering work did not end the nation’s grievous history of political conflict over access to information and freedom to read. By 1920, less than 150 years after Franklin and friends founded the Library Company, there were more than 3,500 public libraries in the United States.

Half of those had been funded by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, nicknamed the “Patron Saint of Libraries.” In spite of that, many public libraries remained segregated deep into the 1960s.

In the 1920 census, only sixty-nine of the 15,297 Americans who were listed as “librarian” were Black professionals. Some Carnegie libraries were opened specifically for African-American communities, thus perpetuating discriminatory policies.

Many cities in the segregated South had no library services for Black citizens. These conditions created the Freedom Libraries, staffed by civil rights workers.

For many African-Americans that was their first encounter with a library. Access to printed documents led to violent attacks on these libraries. Members of staff risked their lives so others could access books.

In times of conflict or repression, libraries and archives are vulnerable. Knowledge is power and thus a threat. Books are hated and feared.

On August 24, 1814, vengeful British troops took control of Washington D.C. and torched the Capitol which held the congressional library (Library of Congress) in its north wing.

In 1992, Serbian forces singled out the libraries and archives of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, and destroyed an irreplaceable collection of manuscripts and books.

In Ukraine, Russian bombardments have been targeting public and university libraries. Blast a nation by burning books and destroy its heritage for future generations.

Today, in a climate of rising book bans in the United States, books that are decreed unsuitable by legislators or school board officials are taken off library shelves. Works dealing with “divisive” subjects are earmarked; contentious novels banned or binned.

In a war on education, textbooks are edited or replaced; schools required to teach from the Bible. The First Amendment gives citizens the right to hear all sides of every issue and make their own judgments without government interference.

Book bans signify intolerance and exclusion, attitudes that betray the spirit of Benjamin Franklin and the American Revolution.

Illustrations, from above: Subscription note of the Library Company, 1801; Ernestine Louise Potowski; Ernestine Rose, about 1898, possibly a graduation picture (Hampton Library, Bridgehampton, NY); the 135th Street Branch of the NYPL, 1930s; Regina Anderson, Harlem Renaissance librarian and playwright; and the interior of NYPL’s 135th Street branch, ca. 1925 (New York Public Library); and an anti-book ban display at a library, 2022 (UMBC).