The Harlem Renaissance Librarians Who Changed American History (Virtual)

Please join us as Laura E. Helton, Assistant Professor of English and History at the University of Delaware, presents on the Harlem renaissance librarians who changed American history during the first half of the twentieth century. This presentation is a collaboration between Bloomfield Public Library and The Wintonbury Historical Society.

In the 1920s and 1930s, an emerging cohort of Black women librarians began building collections documenting African American history and culture at branch libraries across the South and in all the major receiving cities of the Great Migration. From the most famous of these collections in New York and Chicago, to the smallest archive in the Jim Crow South, the collections built by these women served as vital community centers that fueled the intellectual and political movements of the Harlem Renaissance era. In the century since their founding, their collections have continued to shape the questions readers and researchers can ask about the Black past. Vivian Harsh; Catherine Latimer; Dorothy Porter; Virginia Lee: Who were these women, and what role—often overlooked—did they play in the history of American thought?