A History of NYPL’s 135th Street Branch: Reading and Archiving Against Censorship, Part 2

The New York Public Library’s Center for Educators and Schools provides curricular materials you can easily integrate into your teaching, in addition to other tools and programs. On the For Teachers blog channel, the Curriculum Development team spotlights primary sources from the Library’s collections and draws connections to the classroom.

This two-part series will draw from the Library’s archives to explore the history of Black resistance toward censorship and offer ways to teach this subject in the classroom. Part 2 considers the role that the branch played in the intellectual, cultural, and political life of the neighborhood’s adults. Explore Part 1 to learn about the way that librarians at the 135th Street Branch sought to combat racism in the city’s education system and censorship in textbooks and children’s books by collecting books and hosting programs to meet the needs of Black children.

Plus, learn about ways you can stand with the Library against book banning—and protect the freedom to read—all year long through Books for All.

“‘Here is the Evidence’... not only for the first true writing of Negro history, but for the rewriting and many important paragraphs of our common American history.”
-Arturo Schomburg, curator and scholar, 1925.1

In the early 20th century, as is true today, efforts to censor children’s books and what students learned in school were connected to broader political goals embraced by the advocates of censorship. Leading Black historians like Carter G. Woodson and Lawrence Reddick critiqued racist myths that permeated school curricula and explicated the political purposes that these myths served.

In a 1931 article, Woodson categorized these myths, which included “that slavery was a benevolent institution…that the Negroes were freed by interference of meddlers, for as slaves they were satisfied and in freedom have had difficulty in doing for themselves what their kind masters did for them…that the Negroes ruined the South during Reconstruction and because they failed ingloriously, it is inadvisable to extend them the rights of suffrage and office-holding, and they should be segregated for the preservation of civilization.”2 As Woodson’s last point illustrated, these racist interpretations of history were connected to the contemporary project of denying Black people political rights and equal citizenship.

The 135th Street Branch regularly hosted meetings discussing contemporary political issues and educational topics and collected and exhibited work by and about Black people for adult audiences. Woodson was one of many of the intellectual leaders featured in the branch’s programming. Librarian Regina Andrews played a central role organizing these events, which also included other community leaders like writer and activist James Weldon Johnson and famous Puerto Rican bibliophile and intellectual Arturo Schomburg.3

The branch staff made work by Black artists and authors available to a broad interracial audience and fostered new work by emerging creators. As Arturo Schomburg wrote of a 1924 exhibit at the 135th Street Branch, “Not long ago, the Public Library of Harlem housed a special exhibition of books, pamphlets, prints and old engravings that simply said, to skeptic and believer alike, to scholar and school-child, to proud black and astonished white ‘Here is the Evidence’...there were in these cases materials not only for the first true writing of Negro history, but for the rewriting and many important paragraphs of our common American history.”4

Building on this work, the 135th Street Branch staff compiled “The Negro; a selected bibliography,” an annotated bibliography of over 70 titles of books and magazines by and about Black people, which the Library first published in 1925. This bibliography became a regular tradition and was revised and expanded every five years until the 1950s. In 1945, Dorothy Hamer, the director of the branch, described the bibliography as, “a weapon to help defeat one phase of bigotry in American life, to inform those who do not know, to strive to convince those who will not believe, and to develop pride and self respect in those toward whom discrimination and prejudices are directed.”5

A list of 66 ways to use the bibliography of “Books about the Negro for Children” included “buying list for many N.Y. City public schools…N.Y. State College of Home Economics, Cornell University gives a copy of list to each student…list has been used as basic reading list for classes studying Negro History such as the lower East Side class that thought all Negroes were drunks…University of Wisconsin, Library School…Public Library, Flint, Michigan…Los Angeles City High School.”6

The branch’s work in collecting rare and irreplaceable items related to histories of Black people was formalized in 1925 with the creation of the Division of Negro Literature, History, and Prints, overseen by a citizens committee of interested and prominent intellectuals, including Arturo Schomburg, who lent materials to the division. In 1926, the Library purchased (for far less than its value) the collection of Arturo Schomburg’s over 2,000 volumes, over 1,000 pamphlets, and valuable prints and manuscripts. The collection was initially overseen by Catherine Latimer, but six years later after its creation, a grant provided the funding to establish Schomburg as the collection’s curator.7

Schomburg had, in the words of historian Winston James, dedicated his life to “a counter-struggle against racist ideology…entailing the assiduous documentation…of the achievements of people of African descent, past and present, around the world,” after being told by a teacher at a young age that Black people had “no history, no heroes, no great moments.”8 

This experience was formative for Schomburg, who argued that access to accurate and inspiring history and literature was essential for Black people in a society built on racist exploitation and hierarchy, contending in a 1925 essay that “history must restore what slavery took away.”9 Scholar Vanessa Valdés has written of Schomburg’s collection, “all were welcome in his archives, so that they could witness and testify to the multiplicity of the global African diasporic experience.”10

This collection dramatically expanded the Library’s archival holdings, and, in 1940, the division was renamed the Schomburg Collection of Negro Literature and History. In 1942, the 135th Street Branch’s success was reflected in its relocation to a new building, which houses the present-day Countee Cullen Branch Library.

As Dorothy R. Homer stated in a radio talk in 1942, the new building was “dedicated to the principles of Democracy which cherish books while Dictatorships burn them; it is dedicated to give the best book service to all the community, and to hold out to those in search of it the broader and deeper meaning of Negro history.”11 Access to researching on this broader and deeper meaning was further expanded in 1972 when the 135th Street Branch was designated a research library within the NYPL system and renamed the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Countee Cullen continued to operate as a branch library. 

Today, the Schomburg Center is one of NYPL’s three research libraries, and it continues to be an internationally-renowned center of research and scholarship about Black peoples’ histories and culture while serving as a community institution in Harlem. The branch’s history resisting censorship and racism is worth revisiting in the face of contemporary campaigns seeking to ban literature by Black authors, books about LGBTQ+ experiences, and Black studies and African American history.

Throughout this series, we explored the varied contests over intellectual freedom throughout history—with the hope that this history can inform debates over censorship today. Continue your research at #SchomburgSyllabus: Library & Information Science.

Draw on the history explored in this series for the following model classroom activity.

Now that you have explored this essay with your students, they can synthesize their learning by participating in the following activity to further develop their understanding of the key questions that opened this series.

Creating an Archive

Talk to your students about what an archive is and how it can be used to document a moment in time. Consider ways that different groups have access to archives.

Create an archive for your class. It can reflect a particular period of time, like a holiday break, or a season, or a few weeks, or for the entire year.

Have students contribute one or a few artifacts for the archive. These could be art, photographs, newspaper articles, flyers, pamphlets, books, or any type of item. Have students write a short description of their items and display them at the end of the period of assignment. 

Consider what is represented and not represented in your class archive and think about how people looking over the archive would understand this moment in time. What would loom large? What would seem unimportant?

Experiment with taking various objects out of the collection and see how that would change the interpretation. 

Coming soon! Check back in September 2024 for a digital exhibition and digital curriculum guide on censorship, book banning, and intellectual freedom will further explore the themes discussed in this essay through items in the Library’s collections.

References & Notes

1 Arturo Schomburg, “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” in Alain Locke, ed. The New Negro: An Interpretation. New York: Boni, 1925; reprint, New York: Arno, 1968, 61, as quoted in Anderson, “The Place to Go,” 413. 
2 Jarvis R. Givens, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021), 137.
3 Ethelene Whitmire, “Breaking the Color Barrier: Regina Andrews and the New York Public Library,” Libraries & the Cultural Record, 2007, Vol. 42 No. 4 (2007), 410.
4 Locke, the New Negro, 232, as quoted in Anderson, “The Place to Go,” 413.
5 Mrs. Homer, Branch report,  Folder 3 Box 4 135th Street Branch Records, New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. 
6 “Some uses of List-‘Books about the Negro for Children’” Folder 10, Box 6, 135th Street Branch Records, New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.
7 Anderson, “The Place to Go,” 415.
8 Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (London: Verso, 2020), 198.
9 Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (London: Verso, 2020), 199.
10 Vanessa Valdés , 107.
11 "Talk by Mrs. Dorothy R. Homer,” Wings Over Jordan Broadcast, July 5th 1942, 1-2. Folder 3 Box 4 135th Street Branch Records, New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.

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