LHRT: The Importance of Our History

Abstract

Wayne Wiegand cited his 1974 attendance at the American Library Association convention, there listening to his predecessors Phyllis Dain and Michael Harris debate and connecting with Donald Davis, as the event that propelled him toward his career goals as a historian. He talks of his contributions to the Library History Round Table (LHRT), which were many. In one sense, my academic contributions and success—measured on a very different scale from his and Davis’s—could be seen as an extension of what they learned and shared with folks like me.And while I made some contributions to LHRT, serving as chair in 1997 and 1998 (with Cold War scholar Ellen Schrecker as my program keynoter), it could more appropriately be said that LHRT made many contributions to my success at UW–Madison. Looking at my activities reports (historical documents for sure), I am aware of how much my research life revolved around LHRT. My memory of my role as chair is rather murky, however, possibly because 1997–1998 was my tenure year and the year I became director of the school.In June 1998 I participated in a conference in Paris on “Books, Libraries, Reading and Publishing in the Cold War.” The work presented was wide-ranging and varied fare that revealed the many threads from which the practice of library history was woven and continues to be. It threw into relief both the promise and the challenge for historians of the cultural institution we call the library. A few weeks later, at the Library of Congress, LHRT celebrated its fiftieth birthday. I spoke there about that promise and challenge, about the turns writing about the history of libraries was taking—from histories focused on great men, institutions, and events to social, cultural, and intellectual histories focused on, as Christine Jenkins put it, “the strength of the inconspicuous,” women, Black people, queer people, small-town libraries, children’s reading. Significant work—that of Wiegand, Davis, Joanne Passet, Jim Carmichael, Cheryl Knott Malone, and Christine Pawley, to name only a few—has changed the face of library and print-culture history and broadened the view.A round table member reviewer spurred me to more deeply context and improve my dissertation, Censorship and the American Library: The American Library Association Responds to Threats to Intellectual Freedom, 1939–1969 (Greenwood, 1997)—prior to publication by looking at non-library-history-related research, but it was my tale of a Bartlesville, Oklahoma, librarian of no prominence that reflected the kind of scholarship fostered by immersion in the work of my LHRT colleagues, the broader historical context, and the very threads to which I earlier referred.After my dissertation, I needed that all-important second project, and I turned to my colleague and LHRT stalwart, Wayne Wiegand, who was familiar with my dissertation and knew of my Oklahoma background, which included being involved in political and civil rights activities. He suggested that I pick up and look more closely at the story of Ruth Brown, on which I had touched lightly in my dissertation. I thought perhaps I could get a good article out of it. To my surprise, uncovering the story involved mining archives in locations ranging from the Wisconsin Historical Society across the street from my office to the Library of Congress, the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming, and the Ruth Brown papers at Pittsburg State University, Kansas. It meant finding the scrapbooks of the Bartlesville YWCA; attending a triennial reunion of the Douglassaires, the graduates of Bartlesville’s segregated school; listening to former middle school students with History Day projects; and interviewing dozens of people. In foregrounding an “unimportant” woman librarian, my research inevitably took on a feminist stance as I circled back to the women who had been Brown’s friends and colleagues to check my understandings and make sure I was accurately representing Brown and her concerns. The article became a book.And I reaped the rewards of learning from my colleagues: The Dismissal of Miss Ruth Brown: Civil Rights, Censorship, and the American Library (Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 2000) was honored by both the LHRT Donald G. Davis Article Award and its first-ever Eliza Atkins Gleason Book Award. Since Dismissal drew on Gleason’s work on library services to Black people, it was especially gratifying that she was at the conference in 2004 when the award was given. The book also received the WILLA Award in nonfiction from Women Writing the West and was nominated for an Oklahoma Center for the Book Award in nonfiction.To my surprise, the Ruth Brown microhistory has had far more impact than I could possibly have imagined. Immediately upon its publication in 2000, I was invited to speak at the Bartlesville Public Library, where residents shared memories of Brown and Sunday school classes bought books to discuss as groups. In 2007 Ruth Brown was named one of one hundred “Oklahoma Library Legends” on the occasion of the centennial of the Oklahoma Library Association (OLA), and I slid in on her coattails, also included as one of the legends. OLA had earlier named their social responsibility award for her. Also in 2007, the Bartlesville Women’s Network commissioned a bust of Brown and “brought her back to the library” as a group sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the Black national anthem. Recently, a mural has been installed outside the Bartlesville Public Library depicting Brown engaged in reading to an ethnically diverse group of children.Unfortunately, the themes and issues of The Dismissal of Miss Ruth Brown are more pertinent now than ever, with racism and censorship raging. In August 2022 I spoke to a small audience in a small library in Minnesota—twenty-two years after the book’s publication—as part of an ALA-funded series called “Real People, Real History.” The book’s enduring value speaks to LHRT’s advocacy of choosing stories worth telling and telling them to the best of our ability—and with the support and feedback of our friends.The friendships forged through LHRT also provided me impetus for additional research. Carmichael got me interested in the purge of gays at the Library of Congress, yielding two articles. The late Rosalee McReynolds bequeathed to me a partially completed manuscript and boxes of FBI files (among other things); the task of completing The Librarian Spies took so long that some files from the KGB Archives had at long last been translated, necessitating a rewrite of parts of the manuscript just as it was about to be submitted. These stories, too—attacks on library employees believed to be gay and the manner in which suspected espionage was countered—are still pertinent, unfortunately, at least to some extent. I learned much more than I wanted to know about declassifying documents and the sources and methods of the FBI of the 1950s!The LHRT continues to provide developing scholars with a venue for finding mentors and evaluators, leads for great projects, and impetus to complete what we have started. The historical perspective we gain, and hopefully share, is more crucial than ever.