“Will the Day Ever Come When We Will Be Judged on Our Merit and not on Our Blackness?” The Black Caucus of the American Library Association and the Long Freedom Struggle in the United States, 1970–1975

Abstract

This paper centers on the early years (1970–1975) of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. The Caucus sought to combat structural, professional, and personal racism, to achieve equity in library employment, services, and materials, and to imbue Black librarians and Black library users at all types of libraries and in all geographic locations with a sense of dignity, pride, agency, and self-determination. We engage with five literatures in this paper; each engagement shows the interpenetration of information and library science with larger currents of political, social, and cultural history. First, historian Stephen Tuck posits a “long freedom struggle” starting with Emancipation in 1863, not merely a narrow civil rights period embracing the late 1950s and first half of the 1960s. The Black Caucus’s work comprised a crucial part of this broader, longer, multifaceted Black protest agenda. Second, like Tuck we embrace an ecumenical definition of Black activism: both building and resisting proved essential. We explore Black Caucus activism in four cases of resistance and four of building. Third, following historian Darlene Clark Hine, we argue that Black middle-class professionals, in this case librarians, played a vital role in the freedom struggle. Fourth, we complicate the conventional periodization narrative in library and information science history that ends with the desegregation of state associations and public libraries by the end of 1966. The struggle for racial equality and equity in librarianship remained far from complete. Fifth, scholars have paid considerable attention to the desegregation of public libraries but have neglected other aspects of the freedom struggle in LIS. This paper contributes robustly to the 2023 iConference theme of inclusivity.