Librarianship as a Field for Negroes

Abstract

In discussing the subject I have limited this article to the field for Negro librarians in the section where my work has lain for the past nine years, of opportunities in the great cities farther North and West, I cannot speak with authority; reports from a questionnaire sent to these cities show that professional positions there are still comparatively few, not more than a dozen colored assistants are now employed, many of whom have been prepared in the training classes formerly maintained by these larger libraries. Those not professionally trained are employed as pages, book repairers, clerical workers, and janitors. The development of librarianship as a field for professionally-trained Negroes necessarily awaited an improvement in the economic and educational conditions of the institutions which might command their services. This advance came in the years following 1920, when endowments and grants increased, campus buildings were erected or enlarged, larger faculties employed, and curricula extended and improved. There were many factors responsible for this acceleration, I name a few of the most outstanding: the stimulus of the state and county boards of education, and their special agents for Negro education; the study of the Negro educational institutions made in cooperation by the U. S. Bureau of Education and the PhelpsStokes Fund; the support and interest of the church boards. In addition, a few colleges and cities had received Carnegie grants for library buildings, though in few instances had they been manned by professionally-trained librarians. Not least in its influence was the General Education Board, which not only financed in large measure the work of the state and county agents for Negro education, but granted scholarships which brought teachers into close contact with well organized libraries and gave them the vision of a better type of library service than they had known. Later came the 1928 survey of the colleges by the U. S. Bureau of Education, which stressed the library as a major department of every college; the founding of the Library School at Hampton Institute, on a grant from the Carnegie Corporation; the scholarships for prospective librarians, granted by the General Education Board and later the Julius Rosenwald Fund; the building policy of the latter Fund and, in particular its generous book aid to elementary, secondary, and college libraries, which has stimulated larger book funds to meet the terms of the gift. A recent report shows that $61,350 has been given by the Rosenwald Fund and, in return, $135,950 has been raised by other means, thus providing $197,300 for book aid to the colleges. Four of the Negro colleges have shared in a large book-grant made by the Carnegie Corporation, the sum given to these four has amounted to $114,000. The books purchased through the interest of these Foundations have meant a real