Remembering LHRT

Abstract

Summer, 1974, New York City. I was attending my first American Library Association (ALA) conference. That same summer I was finishing up my American history dissertation, at a time when there were very few jobs on the horizon for newly minted history PhDs. I was also finishing up my library degree, in the course of which I had come to realize how unexplored was the field of American library history. That realization led to a decision to pursue a faculty position in a university library school and focus my research on American library history. It was a decision I have never regretted.At that 1974 conference I attended a social gathering of American library historians that Mike Harris organized. I vividly remember sitting in a hotel room with stars whose works I had read in library school, including Sidney Ditzion, Jesse Shera, Phyllis Dain, Laurel Grotzinger, George Bobinski, and Ed Holley. Sitting in the background with me was Donald Davis, with whom I would subsequently forge a lifelong friendship. Harris and Dain had just published articles on American library history in Library Journal that subsequently became known as the “Harris-Dain debate,” and I was excited to hear their oral exchanges in that room. No question about it: I had to become a lifelong member of what was then called the American Library History Round Table. It represented the best vehicle in the library profession to help me carry out my career goals.Between 1974 and 2010 (when I retired) I participated actively in the round table. Art Young and I proposed the establishment of the Justin Winsor Library History Essay Award in the late 1970s and wrote the criteria for judging it. Years later I spearheaded the effort to establish the Donald G. Davis Article Award, named after the library historian who had dedicated his life to editing what was then library history’s premier scholarly journal. I also recommended to LHRT that it create a “best book” award, and when the round table was searching for a name I recommended that of Eliza Atkins Gleason, who at the time was still alive, because all the other LHRT awards were named after White people and Gleason’s book was the first in library literature to even address the issue of race in librarianship. I will never forget the look on Dr. Gleason’s face when she attended the LHRT session at which the award was first announced.Later, I was heavily involved with the effort to establish the Phyllis Dain Library History Dissertation Award. At the time it was drafted, Phyllis had mentored more library history dissertation students than anyone else in the country. Finally, I was also instrumental in establishing the Edward G. Holley lecture by challenging LHRT to match the $7,500 I donated from royalties for Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey1 in order to endow it. I advocated for naming the lecture after Holley because Ed had recently passed away, and he had been such a supporter of library history all of his adult professional life. I thought LHRT owed him the recognition. It took several years for the round table to make the match, but the endowment to establish the Holley lecture continues today.2In the 1987/1988 year I served as LHRT chair and in that position organized the summer program in New Orleans. At the time I was on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and through some good luck had managed to convince my colleague Gerda Lerner, one of the nation’s foremost feminist historians, to give the keynote LHRT address. Gerda had just published The Creation of Patriarchy,3 and I had brought a copy with me for her to sign. Before she arrived at the program, however, I handed my copy to my wife, Shirl, and busied myself with LHRT matters in preparation for Gerda’s presentation. Shortly thereafter Gerda entered the room and sat right next to Shirl. While I continued with program preparations Gerda turned to Shirl and said, “Would you like me to sign the book?” “Sure,” Shirl said, and handed her my copy. When I got it back later that day I opened it up to the title page to read, “To Shirley. For women’s emancipation. Gerda Lerner.” To this day my copy of Creation of Patriarchy sits on Shirl’s bookshelves.One of the things my history dissertation director pounded into my head was the need to research all of the primary sources that could shed light on any subject I chose to write about. Great advice that has served me well over the years. In 1974, consensus among American library historians was that you could write good history from the contents of a good research library. Not so, and I have addressed that issue at many LHRT panel discussions over the years. It has become my birdsong.In my own research life, examples of the need to consult all primary sources abound. I will never forget interviewing the former secretary-treasurer of the Lake Placid Club when researching Irrepressible Reformer in the 1980s about Dewey’s resignation as New York state librarian in 1905. I knew the resignation was forced because a number of prominent New York Jews had protested Dewey’s connection with the club, which excluded Jews as members. My interviewee reached into his files, pulled out a pamphlet he waved in front of me, and said no one could accurately recount the incident without seeing this document, then tucked it back into his files. Unbeknownst to him, I had already read the pamphlet—a collection of letters written to defend Dewey that the club published in 1905—in the Louis N. Marshall Papers at the American Jewish Archives at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. Marshall, a prominent New York attorney, had spearheaded the effort to fire Dewey as state librarian, and it was obvious from researching Marshall’s papers that the pamphlet I was reading had been one of the main reasons he undertook the effort. Unfortunately, I still see too many publications in American library history that are underresearched because their authors did not mine all the primary sources relevant to their project.After researching and writing American library history for nearly half a century, I’ve come to a conclusion about the limited relationship librarians have with their history. Generally, they like historical narratives of progress with happy endings. I have no problem with that and certainly have celebrated many of these happy endings in books and articles I’ve authored over a long academic career. At the same time, however, I observe that because librarians have often overlooked—even ignored—those parts of their history that don’t show them in a favorable light, they skew historical perspective informing the present. Examples of this also abound.As I write this essay I have just finished a book-length manuscript I’ve tentatively entitled In Silence or Indifference: Librarianship’s Willful Blindness towards Segregated Public School Libraries in the Jim Crow South, 1954–1974. Between 1954 and 1968 Library Literature, the profession’s main index published since 1933 by the H. W. Wilson Company, has no entries for Brown v. Board of Education (1954), arguably the Supreme Court’s most important twentieth-century decision and one that obviously had an impact on public school libraries. Yet, as a subject heading, “Segregation and the Library” did not appear until the 1958–1960 edition; its ten entries included none addressing racially segregated school libraries.Before 1969, under the subject heading “Negro and the Library” Library Literature had a subheading “School Libraries (Negro)” and beneath it listed the forty-two theses on school libraries authored by library school students at the historically Black Atlanta (now Clark Atlanta) University, where School of Library Service Dean Virginia Lacy Jones had encouraged many of her master’s degree students to survey Black libraries of all types against the standards each sector of the library profession had crafted and revised. During this entire period Library Literature had no entry for “segregated schools” or “segregated school libraries” listed under the “American Association of School Librarians” (AASL). Thus, except for Atlanta University students, librarianship and its professional associations—including ALA and AASL—almost entirely ignored the subject of racially segregated school libraries in its literature during the civil rights movement, in the midst of which AASL passed in 1956 (and revised in 1968) a School Library Bill of Rights with only oblique references to “race.”Not only was the integration of public school libraries in the Jim Crow South invisible at library association conferences and in the library press at the time it was occurring, it has also been invisible in the essays and books written to document this period in American library history. The best examples to illustrate this are the essays Marilyn Miller edited in the 2003 publication Pioneers and Leaders in Library Services to Youth: A Biographical Dictionary.4 The book contains ninety-seven biographical sketches of individuals who died before 2002, including essays on Black youth services librarians such as Augusta Baker and Charlemae Hill Rollins. Fifty-seven of the ninety-seven sketches were reprinted from the Dictionary of American Library Biography and its supplements,5 including essays on school library leaders such as Mary Peacock Douglas and Mary Francis Kennon Johnson of North Carolina and Virginia McJenkin and Lucile Nix of Georgia—all serving the school library communities in states in the former Confederacy. But of the essays on school library leaders in the South, only those on Nix and Inez Mae Graham take into consideration the issue of race. To all other biographers, the segregated Jim Crow public school libraries that the White women mentioned above managed or supervised were invisible. I also found six reviews of the book; none commented on the near total absence of any discussion of race in the lives of southern school library leaders between 1954 and 1974.Another telling example: in 1977 ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom (OIF) released The Speaker, a film that depicted a fictitious high school group’s contested decision to invite as a speaker a controversial eugenicist (based on the real-life Stanford University scientist William Shockley) who believed Black people were genetically inferior to Whites. When ALA executive board members previewed the film at the annual conference “not a person moved,” recalled Robert Wedgeworth, ALA’s first Black executive director. Reaction was so intense it “pitted friend against friend; colleague against colleague,”6 he recalled, and it nearly split the ALA into two groups, each of which developed long memories of the incident.Those memories were evident thirty-seven years later, when OIF hosted an ALA conference program on The Speaker (cosponsored by our own LHRT) that not only showed the film but also organized a panel to analyze librarianship’s reaction to it.7 Several old ALA hands objected even to hosting the program, however. One council member argued there was no point in showing a film that “so few of the current members of ALA were even involved with.” Others called the program “sensationalism.” Still others argued it would only “stir up unnecessary controversy” and “reopen old wounds.”8 To their credit, LHRT developed a statement in response, noting that “we must expose and educate members about these matters precisely because many of today’s librarians have no knowledge of them.” The program moved forward largely as planned and was attended by an intergenerational audience representing various sides of the debate.9One of my goals with In Silence or Indifference is to generate more historically informed discussion within the profession about issues of race in librarianship, especially given the current controversy involving critical race theory in public education that is also affecting public school libraries. So, when I finished the manuscript in August 2022, I queried ALA’s Publishing Division if it would be interested in publishing the book. Without even reading the book proposal I had prepared, however, an official responded, “I’m sorry to say that your project doesn’t fit our current publishing needs.”10I fully realize that “publishing needs” are determined by a book’s estimated marketability, and I strongly suspect that it was ALA’s estimation of this book’s potential marketability that grounded this response. But that, in itself, is a telling comment on American librarianship’s lack of interest in its own history, especially the kind of history that forces self-reflection by showing both warts and the halos. As AASL prepares to celebrate its 75th anniversary in 2025, and as ALA prepares for its 150th anniversary in 2026, will the information In Silence or Indifference contains become part of the printed, electronic, and oral discussions these celebrations will generate? Or will those discussions reflect the same kind of willful blindness that was evident in the profession’s treatment of segregated school libraries in the Jim Crow South between 1954 and 1974, and that library historians have replicated ever since? I am hopeful it will be the former, and that LHRT members will be prominent in the mix of these discussions.