(NewsNation) — Black librarians have played a vital role in preserving generations of Black literature and bringing modern resources and opportunities to libraries for decades.
Before emancipation, Black people in the South were punished for reading or teaching others to read. However, during the Harlem Renaissance, a movement emerged to provide access to reading material on Black history.
‘Women were the institution builders’
Many Black women who were the first to attend library school created their own methods after learning ones that weren’t suited to Black books and ideas.
“In many ways, it is these women who were the institution builders,” Joy Bivins, the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, told The New York Times.
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The outlet reported that while library services for Black citizens were unavailable in the South and restricted in the North, branches that did serve them often had few books geared to their interests and sometimes lacked card catalogs or reference collections.
This began to change in 1924 when Vivian Harsh became the first Black librarian to lead a public library branch in Chicago. In 1932, she led the city’s first branch in Bronzeville, a Black neighborhood, welcomed Black history study groups and established the nation’s second public library collection dedicated to Black life and literature, according to the Times.
However, according to the outlet, Harlem captured the transformations of the era more when, starting in 1920, a white librarian named Ernestine Rose hired four youthful Black librarians at the 135th Street library.
Improving faulty Dewey decimal categories
For Black librarians, cataloging often meant “countercataloguing,” per the Times.
As Black collections moved from private homes to institutions, quirky personal systems no longer sufficed, and the systems used in most libraries proved inadequate as they allowed restricted space for non-European subjects.
Dorothy Porter, a librarian at Howard University, and others adjusted the Library of Congress’ standard subject headings, adding ones for topics such as passing, Pan-Africanism and the blues. She also addressed the racism embedded in the Dewey decimal classification system.
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This system, created in the 1870s, categorized knowledge in ways that marginalized Black experiences, confining them to narrow numerical slots.
Despite warnings that she might face copyright infringement for her modified system, an unauthorized version was adopted at the Schomburg Center and other places.
Librarians are still mostly white
While Black librarians, such as Carla Hayden, the librarian of Congress, hold some of the top librarian jobs, the profession remains overwhelmingly white.
Only 69 of the 15,297 Americans who listed their profession as librarian were Black in the 1920 census, per the Times.
As of 2021, only 7.1% of librarians are Black, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is just below the 10-year average of 7.4%. Meanwhile, nearly 87% were white people, which has been the average since 2013.
In 2011, Black librarians accounted for 10.1% of the industry. In 2017, Hispanic librarians made up 10.4%.
