Black Librarianship and the Legacy of Belle da Costa Greene

The following excerpt is drawn from an essay by Rhonda Evans published in “Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy,”  the catalogue accompanying the Morgan’s exhibition on Greene.

Belle da Costa Greene achieved unparalleled status as a library director, collector, and curator during her lifetime. As scholars continue to uncover the complex layers of Greene’s life, two main aspects have risen to the forefront of her legacy—her position as the personal librarian of financier J. Pierpont Morgan, along with the luxuries and challenges this position provided, and her Black ancestry, complicated as it was by her decision to pass as white. Although these two points of interest have been the subject of scholarship and literature, there has hardly been any discussion of how these parts of her life intersected. A major obstacle in this regard is the limited documentation of Greene’s specific views on race and racial equality. This essay endeavors to reach a fuller understanding of Greene’s position by looking beyond the Morgan Library at the broader context of Black librarianship in the United States. Her career building Morgan’s collection flourished in the early twentieth century, overlapping with the careers of Black librarians who were curating and stewarding important collections for the purpose of racial equality and Black liberation. How does the legacy of Belle da Costa Greene—a Black woman living as white and working as the director of one of the most revered research libraries in the world—fit into the history of the sociocultural work of pioneering Black librarians who were her contemporaries?

Librarianship in the United States has always been a predominately white profession. Even today, despite visible efforts to increase diversity and inclusivity within the profession, including having a Black woman as the executive director of the American Library Association and a Black woman as the fourteenth Librarian of Congress, 82 percent of librarians in the United States identify as white.¹ American libraries have a fraught racial past. Not only has the profession been an extremely difficult one for people of color to enter, significant obstacles have prevented Black people from accessing libraries—public and private—as patrons. In fact, one of the very first sit-in demonstrations in the United States was held for the purpose of integrating a public library (figure 1).² Due to these inequities, the Black librarians of Greene’s generation held the struggles of Black people as the foundation of their work. Therefore, the question arises, where does Belle da Costa Greene fit within the legacy of Black librarianship? To answer this question, it is necessary to understand what defines Black librarianship, specifically during the time frame of Greene’s career at the Morgan Library. Also, who were some of Greene’s Black contemporaries? What motivated them to join a profession that held so many barriers to entry? And how was the work of Black librarians unique within the larger field of librarianship?

Vindicating Evidences

To understand Greene’s place in early Black librarianship, it is important to look at her career in conversation with a few of the pioneering Black librarians who were her contemporaries, specifically Catherine Latimer, Vivian G. Harsh (figure 2), and Daniel Murray (figure 3).³ Greene’s place in early Black librarianship can be examined through the lens of two important aspects of library work—collecting and access.

In 1925 Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (figure 4), the famed bibliophile and historian, published an essay in Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro titled “The Negro Digs Up His Past.”⁴ Of African descent and born in Puerto Rico, Schomburg dedicated his life to collecting an array of materials that documented the history of Black people globally.⁵ Schomburg used the term “vindicating evidences” to describe how the collecting and sharing of this history could counteract consistent negative stereotypes and correct the erasure of the historical contributions of Black people while instilling pride and curiosity in those who were exploring these concepts for the first time. Schomburg writes,

The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future. Though it is orthodox to think of America as the one country where it is unnecessary to have a past, what is a luxury for the nation as a whole becomes a prime social necessity for the Negro. For him, a group tradition must supply compensation for persecution, and pride of race the antidote for prejudice.⁶

One of the key tenets of Black librarianship in the early twentieth century was to collect and provide resources—historical and current—by and about Black people that demonstrated their place in the world from outside of the lens of whiteness.

In 1925, a year after Greene was officially named director of the Pierpont Morgan Library, Catherine Latimer (hired in 1920 as the New York Public Library’s first Black librarian) was appointed as the head librarian of NYPL’s Division of Negro Literature, History and Prints (figure 5). This special division of the 135th Street Branch was established to house rare books, manuscripts, and other special collection items by and about people from the African diaspora. In 1926 the library purchased the impressive collection of Arturo Schomburg, which included thousands of rare books, manuscripts, pamphlets, and art—the “vindicating evidences” collected over his lifetime. Latimer served as the steward of this collection for twenty-five years and worked closely with Schomburg, who later became curator of the division.⁷

The parallel professional relationships between Belle Greene and J. Pierpont Morgan and between Latimer and Schomburg are compelling. Coincidentally, in 1934 the New York Public Library held two concurrent exhibitions from the collections of Morgan’s son, Jack (an exhibition of his medieval manuscripts curated by Greene), and Schomburg. An article on the exhibitions published in the Pittsburgh Courier described the two collectors: “The first is J. Pierpont Morgan; and the other is Arthur Schomburg. One is white, the other colored. Yet immense as was the social and financial distance between them, both had in common a taste that is as rare as it is beneficial, namely, the preserving of records, written and pictorial, for the guidance and advancement of mankind. Without men of the type of Morgan and Schomburg, humanity would retrograde until it again reached cannibalism.”⁸

While both Greene and Latimer worked under the shadow of these two titans, they carefully curated and developed the collections they managed while also forging their own professional connections and practices, leaving lasting legacies at their respective institutions.

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Rhonda Evans
Director of the LuEsther Mertz Library
New York Botanical Garden

Notes

1. Tracie Hall led the American Library Association from 2020 until 2023. On her appointment, see American Library Association, “ALA Appoints Tracie D. Hall as Executive Director,” press release, January 15, 2020; Dr. Carla Hayden began her appointment as Librarian of Congress in 2016. For details of her confirmation, see Library of Congress, “Senate Confirms Carla Hayden as 14th Librarian of Congress,” press release, July 12, 2016; Department for Professional Employees AFL-CIO, “Library Professionals: Facts and Figures, 2023 Fact Sheet,” April 16, 2023.
2. See Brenda Mitchell-Powell, Public in Name Only: The 1930 Alexandria Library Sit-In Demonstration (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2022).
3. There were a number of trailblazing Black librarians who made significant contributions to the field of librarianship during the time that Greene was working, for example, Dorothy Porter Wesley at Howard University, and many who worked with Latimer at the New York Public Library’s 135th Street Branch such as Regina Anderson Andrews and Augusta Baker. However, space prohibits an extensive discussion of the many pioneering Black librarians working in the early twentieth century.
4. Arthur A. Schomburg, “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” in The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 231–38.
5. Vanessa K. Valdés, Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018).
6. Schomburg, “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” 231.
7. Rhonda Evans, “Catherine A. Latimer: Librarian of the Harlem Renaissance,” Libraries: Culture, History, and Society 6, no. 1 (March 2022): 21–27.
8. J. A. Rogers, “Rogers Compares Lives of Morgan and Schomberg [sic] Whose Portraits Hang Side by Side,” Pittsburgh Courier, January 1934.

The above excerpt has been edited for length. For the full essay, see Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy, edited by Erica Ciallela and Philip S. Palmer, published by the Morgan Library & Museum in association with DelMonico Books · D.A.P., October 2024. Available for purchase at the Morgan Shop.