Seattle’s Public Library annually engages the Seattle Reads program, encouraging the entire city to read the same book over the summer. It’s a pretty cool program made cooler by some of the selected reads which have included Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, and Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House, and this year we are all reading, or re-reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, published in 1993. It would be the end of just last week, July 20-21, 2024 that marked the beginning of Lauren Olamina’s “Earthseed” Journal in Sower. Prophetic is but one of the adjectives that describe Butler’s accuracy in predicting the dystopian set of present-day circumstances.
The ways in which public libraries play a vital role in expanding our horizons are evident in the Seattle Reads program and it got me to thinking about the people inside these literary institutions, and the particular role of Black librarians and partnerships with the Black community.
Such is the case with the Douglass-Truth Library in Seattle’s Central District. In 1965 members of Alpha Kappa Alpha Inc., the Delta Upsilon Omega Chapter, and numerous members of the Black community advocated for and not only saved the library branch from closure but built what has become the largest collection of African American literature and history on the West Coast with some 10,000 items. The prominent location of Douglass-Truth in Seattle situates it at similar distances between an elementary school, a middle school, and a high school, offering supplementary learning tools for children of all ages. The library was and remains a safe refuge for latchkey kids who have a place of quiet page-turning while awaiting the hour of parental pickup.
The award-winning playwright August Wilson received an honorary high school degree from the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh given that had been Wilson’s place of learning, replacing high school. Unbeknownst to his mother, Wilson had secretly dropped out of high school in his early teens. For several years, Wilson educated himself at the Carnegie Library during school hours.
Libraries and Black librarians have undergirded the literary achievements of Black writers, acting as havens for meet-ups and shared ideas, and repositories for Black literature. In 1924 Vivian Harsh became the first Black librarian to lead a public library in Chicago. She would later lead the first branch in a Black neighborhood, opened in Bronzeville in 1932, welcomed Black history study groups, and established the nation’s second public library collection dedicated to Black life and literature. The Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature recently received a $2 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to digitize and make the collection more widely accessible.
Not enough notice is given to the important place libraries and librarians occupy in our communities. A recent NY Times article, "New York’s First Black Librarians Changed the Way We Read," offers much insight into the way those women ran libraries during the Harlem Renaissance, and how they built collections and communities of writers and readers.
In coming issues, we have reserved this space to hear more from and about Black librarians, Black library collections, and the space they have and continue to hold for preservation and access to Black voices.
Learn more about Vivian G. Harsh in this episode of 77 Flavors of Chicago!
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