By BARBARA BRYANT and LUCY SUDDRETH
Books on slavery and abolition that once belonged to Thomas Jefferson, illustrations and photographs of the "Buffalo Soldiers" who patrolled the Great Plains after 1865, the American Colonization Society's accounts of its campaign to recruit free black Americans for resettlement in Liberia, descriptions of the Negro baseball leagues in the papers of sportswriter Arthur William Mann and Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey, 288Duke Ellington, captured on film, in clippings, in photos and in 11,000 recordings of his work.
These are only a few examples of the wealth of Library of Congress material described for researchers in The African- American Mosaic: A Library of Congress Resource Guide for the Study of Black History and Culture.
This 301-page volume is designed to help researchers locate the thousands of items contained in the Library's collections of works by and about African-Americans. It is both a historical narrative -- offering a reflective overview of the African- American experience -- and a finding aid that will help researchers find the specific titles mentioned in the text while encouraging them to seek related material in the Library.
"For more than a century, the Library of Congress has systematically collected black history resources," said Debra Newman Ham, editor of The African-American Mosaic. "But even before this effort began, the Library amassed material relating to African-Americans as part of the its commitment to the larger study of American history.
"This guide provides titles of bibliographies, other guides, finding aids and individual items relating to black history and culture in the Library, many of which yield far more information than we could include here," she continued. "The result is a rich mosaic of African-American life that depicts scorn and admiration, defeat and triumph, tears and laughter."
Dr. Ham, a specialist in Afro-American history and culture in the Manuscript Division of the Library, compiled and edited the volume, incorporating information provided by seven other specialists who are familiar with the collections.
In autumn 1989 the group met to discuss the project and began preparing descriptions of items that would indicate the breadth of material on African-American culture and history available in each collection.
The contributors are: Beverly Brannan, curator of photography in the Prints and Photographs Division; Dena J. Epstein, consultant to the Library; Ronald Grim, head of the Reference and Bibliography Section in the Geography and Map Division; Ardie Myers, reference specialist, Humanities and Social Sciences Rooms Division; David L. Parker, assistant head of the curatorial section in the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division; Rosemary Plakas, specialist in American history in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division; and Brian Taves, specialist in the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division.
This collaboration by staff members who work daily with the Library's collections has produced a selective bibliography that also offers a panorama of African-American experience and achievements.
Early in Part 1, "African-Americans in the Antebellum Period," readers will discover first-person accounts of slavery contained in ship logs, slave auction account books and in published compilations such as Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade, edited by Philip Curtin.
Dr. Ham noted that the Library's collection of such vintage materials as autobiographies and letters written by slaves "documents the various ways that African-Americans resisted slavery, many by running away and becoming fugitives and others by shirking their [work] responsibilities or by diversionary activities."
Chattel slavery in the American South was referred to in the 19th century as a "peculiar institution," which, the guide explains, "arose in tandem with the Southern plantation economy [and] was unique in many ways. Involuntary immigrants from Africa and their heirs were rarely as industrious as their owners wanted them to be, yet their labor was coveted and used for over two hundred years."
Part 1 also offers chapters on "Free Blacks in the Antebellum Period" and "Abolitionists and Antislavery Movements and the Rise of the Sectional Controversy."
Part 2, "Forever Free -- Emancipation and Beyond," covers the Civil War, Reconstruction and the era of Booker T. Washington, who became prominent in 1895 and died in 1915. Readers will learn about the many roles African-Americans played during the Civil War, acting as "support workers, spies, scouts and soldiers. ... Yet, in the early years of the war, Union as well as Confederate leaders vacillated about the use of blacks in the military and pondered the postwar status of African- Americans."
Facing a shortage of soldiers in 1863, the War Department began recruiting blacks to fill the ranks. "By the end of the war, over 186,000 black men had enlisted, resulting in a ratio of one black soldier to every eight white soldiers." More than 38,000 died in the service of their country, and some would win the Medal of Honor and be celebrated as heroes.
The letters of Private Junius B. Roberts, 28th U.S. Colored Infantry offer a glimpse of history: "There is about three Ridgements of colerd in camp here. ... our camp is on gineral lees farm, write on the battle ground we drill write on the graves." Lee's plantation later became the site of Arlington National Cemetery.
Accounts of the antidraft movement waged by young white men who were too poor to buy exemption from military service and others who objected to fighting to free slaves who would later compete with them for jobs are detailed in the guide. The Library's Manuscripts Division holds letters and other eyewitness accounts of a weeklong New York "draft" riot in July 1863 in which many blacks were killed.
Charles Butler, a businessman, wrote to his daughter: "In the afternoon at 3 o'clock I witnessed the progress of the riot down 5th Avenue at the corner of 37th St. They had just set the colored orphan asylum on fire."
The Geography and Map Division has approximately 24,000 maps and 76 atlases relating to the Civil War, including military maps and others showing land ownership, topography and other details, some of which indicate black settlements at the time. Numerous photographs, lithographs, engravings and woodcuts are housed in the Prints and Photographs Division, and the Music Division has recordings of popular minstrel songs.
Researchers interested in the Reconstruction period will find the papers and speeches of several black Reconstruction congressmen in the Manuscripts Division, including those of John Mercer Langston, son of a freed slave woman and her former master, who served as U.S. representative from Virginia, became dean of Howard University Law School and later its vice president, before accepting diplomatic assignments to Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
The Prints and Photographs Division has portraits and commemorative prints of these congressmen and other postwar images. Information about the Freedmen's Bureau, which was established by the War Department and operated from 1865 until 1872, is chronicled in a variety of sources.
The guide cites several books on the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan in 1866, along with a 13-volume House of Representatives report on the group's atrocities, The Testimony Taken by the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States.
Other resources track the migration of blacks to the Midwest, the Northern and Southern states and to Liberia. White Mississippi minister Charles K. Marshall commented in The Exodus, Its Effect Upon the People of the South that, after emancipation, blacks had "learned their multiplication tables and forgotten their prayers and were consequently hindering the development of the South by departing to other regions."
Other sources chronicle the exploits of the "Buffalo Soldiers," a name coined by the Plains Indians to identify the black cavalry regiments and infantry units formed in 1866 as well as black troops in Texas, the Dakotas and Montana. In The Colored Cadet at West Point, Henry Ossian Flipper describes surviving four years of ostracism at West Point.
Part 2 ends with a discussion of Booker T. Washington's impact on African-American history and culture. The Manuscript Division has more than 300,000 items that document the Washington's career as a preeminent educator and presidential adviser as well as the operations of the Tuskegee Institute. Various public roles that blacks filled in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are documented in correspondence with John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois.
The division also has memorabilia, writings and correspondence of George Washington Carver, famous for his agricultural research on the peanut and sweet potato. Additional information about the Tuskegee Institute and other educational institutions of the period are located in several formats (ranging from manuscripts to photographs and maps) in the Library's collections.
The guide describes resources on other notable figures who made their mark after the turn of the century; among them, Nannie Helen Burroughs, who founded the National Training School of Women and Girls (later called the National Trade and Professional School for Women and Girls in Washington, D.C.); two black Ohio political leaders, George A. Myers and John Paterson Green; and Mary McLeod Bethune, educator and advocate of civil and women's rights, whose legacy is described in Part 3 of the guide.
Researchers can also examine collections of W.E.B. Du Bois's writings and accomplishments; among them, his involvement in "the Niagara Movement," whose adherents aggressively sought citizenship rights for blacks and rejected Tuskegee's emphasis on accommodation and vocational training. This movement eventually led to the establishment of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was incorporated in 1910.
An impressive historical compilation of materials on this organization and on the National Urban League, also established in the early 1900s, will be of interest to many scholars.
More than 3,000 manuscripts and published plays dating from 1870 to the early 20th century received by the Library of Congress for copyright registration sometimes provide insight into the racial attitudes of the period. Readers will also learn about the brief reemergence of the "coon songs" of the 1880s that, according to the guide, "mirrored white ideas of African-American life in the post-Civil War era."
These were followed by new musical forms: ragtime and early jazz. A special collection of Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton's copyright deposits, some written by the composer, are available on microfilm. The Library's Archive of American Folk Song also recorded the artist's surprising account of his life and work, during his visit to LC's Coolidge Auditorium in 1938. "What emerged was a distinctly "Mortoncentric" view of the evolution of jazz, blues and ragtime, in which Jelly Roll was the inventor of every important style of black American music later than the spiritual and earlier than soul," the guide explains.
By World War I the blues era had begun. The Library has books, periodicals, musical transcriptions and recordings of many representative works.
The guide's section on the pre-World War I era ends with a discussion of African-Americans' growing participation in the cinema, which was still in its infancy. For many years, the movie industry offered demeaning depictions of blacks in such films as the "Watermelon Contest" (1900) and "Who Said Chicken" (1903), which features a black chicken thief hiding in a coal bin.
Minstrel routines showing performers in blackface abounded, while "Uncle Tom's Cabin" cast a white performer in the lead role. In 1910 William Foster became the first African-American producer to cast blacks in films. According to the guide, many of the films that followed were made to counter the "overtly racist sentiments conveyed in the Hollywood industry."
An oft-cited film that reflects those attitudes is D.W. Griffith's 1915 film "The Birth of a Nation," which portrays the mores of the Old South in a favorable light, disparages blacks' roles in Reconstruction and casts the Ku Klux Klansmen as heroes.
In Part 3, "And the Pursuit of Happiness," attention again is given to the role of African-Americans in the nation's military. Reference books such as A Pictorial History of Black Soldiers (1619-1960) in Peace and War and Black Americans in Defense of Our Nation: The Military Heritage of Black Americans describe African-Americans' contributions in World War I.
Firsthand narratives tell a mixed story. Florette Henri's Bitter Victor: A History of Black Soldiers in World War I describes Woodrow Wilson's segregation policies, while Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights offers examples such as the Navy's policy of assigning black sailors to serve among whites -- but as messboys and stewards.
Ironically, the most famous collection of photographs that reveal these practices was furnished by Gen. John Pershing as a record of his career. Some show black soldiers in training while others depict them performing menial tasks ranging from serving as porters and waiters to unloading supply ships. Others show white men in black face.
The Manuscript Division holds collections of black World War I veterans' personal papers, information relating to bands that accompanied black regiments and their reception in America and France. "The most famous was the band of the 369th Infantry, led by James Reese Europe ... whose syncopated style animated the dancing of Vernon and Irene Castle, creating a craze for social dancing. ... At the war's end, the 369th, with Europe's band in the lead, paraded triumphantly down New York's Fifth Avenue. Although the musicians played martial songs when they were downtown, they broke into jubilant jazz when they arrived in Harlem."
The Motion Picture Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division has documentaries celebrating black soldiers' accomplishments, such as "From Harlem to the Rhine" (1918) and "Our Hell Fighters Return" (1919). Other films of the period chronicle the migration of blacks to the North and other urban areas in search of employment.
When the soldiers returned home after World War I, continued discrimination against those in and out of uniform sparked riots; among them, the "Red Summer" of 1919, which spread to 25 American cities. Numerous studies have been published about the strife, including Arthur Waskow's From Race Riot to Sit-in in 1919 and the 1960s. The Microform Reading Room holds published guides and material on this subject from a variety of sources, including the National Archives. The Prints and Photographs Division offers hundreds of images from the NAACP files on riots, lynchings, juvenile crime and criminal defense.
Marcus Garvey's "back-to-Africa" movement of the 1920s is described in biographies of leading black activists such as Garvey and bibliographies on black nationalism. Federal documents compiled by the Justice Department and the FBI in their efforts to pursue black (as well as white) Communist sympathizers and radical activists are also available. Microfilmed documents of organizations committed to seeking justice for African- Americans, such as the Commission on Interracial Cooperation and the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, are available in the Manuscript Division.
This portion of the guide also celebrates the accomplishments of artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Accounts of similar cultural manifestations in Chicago, Philadelphia and Memphis at the time are also available.
Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Toomer are only a few of the writers who flourished during this period. Many books, authors' personal papers, diaries and documents are spread among several university and prominent public libraries. The Manuscript Division holds several drafts of a Langston Hughes poem on Booker T. Washington:
"Booker T./Was a practical man/He said, Till the soil/And learn from the land./Let down your bucket/Where you are./Your fate is here/And not afar. ..."
Other sources of information about Hughes's life and work during this period may be found in the NAACP collection, its magazines and those published by the National Urban League and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which are listed in Black Journals: Periodical Resources for Afro-American and African Studies and Miscellaneous Collection of Radical Newspapers and Periodicals, 1917-1921 in the Microform Reading Room.
After World War I, African-Americans entered the concert field as well. Among them was Roland Hayes, who spent 50 years performing classical songs and arrangements of spirituals. His success helped Marian Anderson and other artists win acceptance in the classical music world.
As the nation's largest film archive, the Library of Congress has collaborated with the American Film Institute to collect and preserve early black films, many of which might otherwise be lost. In addition to several bibliographies that list films by and about African-Americans, the Library holds prints of many 10-minute comedies produced by the Ebony Motion Picture Co. of Chicago. Targeted at interracial audiences, these short films with names such as "A Black Sherlock Holmes," "Mercy the Mummy Mumbled" and "Two Knights of Vaudeville" were released monthly during 1918. The collection also includes "The Very Last Laugh," a four-part documentary about the Ebony Co.
Dr. Ham noted that "despite the intentions of their makers, these films invoke many of the time-worn comical stereotypes, such as frantic fear resulting from superstition."
This chapter also offers a detailed description of Oscar Micheaux, "perhaps the single most prolific black filmmaker" of the early postwar period. An author who once sold his books door- to-door, Micheaux broke many barriers. "The Homesteader," which he produced in 1918, was the first feature film to employ an all black cast.
Although the original version of this film was lost, two remakes were made. The Library has a copy of the first remake, "The Exile" (1931), the story of a man who flees the city for urban life and falls in love with a woman whom he believes is white and, therefore, unavailable to him. "The Exile" is the first black-produced feature with sound.
Approximately 80 black films were made during the 1920s; few, however, survive today. (It is also important to note that many films with all black casts were made by white filmmakers and many did not deal with the controversial themes that Micheaux and other pioneering black artists tackled.)
Later, films featuring Josephine Baker, "Stepin Fetchit" (Lincoln Perry) and "Sleep 'n' Eat" (Willie Best) are represented in the collection, along with more recent films produced by major studios that feature products of the black star system that began to emerge during the 1950s. With more influential and accepted actors came more influential roles and storylines, found in "The Blackboard Jungle" (1955), "A Man Called Adam (1966) and "The Lilies of the Field" (1963) for which Sidney Poitier won the first Best Actor Oscar ever awarded to a black actor.
Earlier, the Great Depression, heralded by the stock market crash of 1929, brought hardships to many, especially the thousands of blacks who had migrated to urban centers looking for work. These were the days of Father Divine's "heavens," which fed the needy in Harlem while seeking to feed their souls.
With FDR's New Deal came intellectual and cultural nourishment: The Works Project Administration's Federal Writers' Project supported Negro studies --including the drive to collect slave narratives and oral interviews with former bondsmen, all of which are contained in the 100,000-item U.S. Works Project Administration Collection in the Manuscript Division.
The Library also has copies of works by journalists, novelists and chroniclers of this period, such as Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves. Other divisions house guidebooks, fine prints, plays, posters, photographs and architectural histories. To learn more about the period, researchers may refer to films of materials held at the National Archives that contain information about federal agencies and programs including the National Youth Administration, the papers of New Deal Interior Secretary Harold Ickes (who authorized Marian Anderson's 1939 performance at the Lincoln Memorial after the Daughters of the American Revolution blocked her from singing at Constitution Hall) and the Civilian Conservation Corps.
Collections of photographs taken by well-known artists also capture key figures of the period. The Library has numerous photos of black celebrities taken by Carl Van Vechten between 1932 and 1965 and others from the NAACP. Major sports figures such as Joe Louis are preserved in scrapbooks, available on microfilm.
The work of many other artists may be found in a variety of formats: The manuscript of Florence Price's Rhapsodie Negre, Margaret Bonds' Three Dream Portraits (musical arrangements of poems by Langston Hughes) and recordings of Paul Robeson's performance for the Emancipation Day Celebration in 1944, among others, are available as well.
The Library also has amassed thousands of documents, books, photographs and other material on the struggle for civil rights that emerged full-blown in the 1960s. Researchers may study the papers of activist Justice Thurgood Marshall (1961-1991) which document his extensive judicial career, culminating in his 24- year tenure as Supreme Court justice. Extensive records on the NAACP, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights are also available as are documents by and about other important civil rights organizations.
Microfilmed records of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, which was launched in 1960 by students who refused to leave a segregated lunch counter in North Carolina, may be of particular interest to young scholars. Correspondence, clippings, field reports and other documentation on this organization, which spearheaded the 1960s student protest movement are available in the Manuscript Division.
The number of items on African-American culture and history that the Library of Congress holds and continues to acquire are too numerous to record in a single article. This account offers a brief look at some of the 75 specific sources listed in The African-American Mosaic. Dr. Ham stressed that these citations, which include call numbers to help the researcher locate the items quickly, represent only a small percentage of the huge amount of material the Library is committed to collecting.
"In weaving together the work of the eight contributors, I have tried to highlight for researchers and laypersons a variety of sources relating to African-American history and culture that the Library holds in its general and special collections," she said. "The guide is not intended to be comprehensive. The authors hope that it will alert users to the richness of our collections and encourage users to look for and use many of our lesser-known materials."
The guide which will be available for purchase on Feb. 23, contains 126 illustrations, many of which will be featured in an exhibition, "Selections from the African-American Mosaic," on view in the Library's Madison Building beginning Feb. 7. The Library presented a symposium Feb. 23 to mark the publication of the book. Two panels of distinguished scholars discussed the Library's African-American resources, covering history, film, music and culture.
The African-American Mosaic is $24 per copy and may be purchased from Superintendent of Documents, P.O. Box 37194, Pittsburgh, PA 15250-7954; or by fax at (202) 512-2250. Specify stock number 030-000-00254-7 when ordering.