Welcome back to Wednesday. I am having issues with the WordPress editor, so hopefully this goes through.
February is Black History Month, and you can see the excellent artists Headphone Princess is sharing over here. I also wanted to highlight an article I came across about a Black librarian, Belle da Costa Greene.
Librarianship is a very white profession (90%!), but Greene made served as librarian for the Morgan Library, which propelled her into high society circles. Her history is somewhat complicated – she was able to achieve this by passing as white, but I thought it was still something worth sharing.
When banking magnate J.P. Morgan sought a librarian in 1905, his nephew Junius Morgan recommended Greene, who had been one of his co-workers at the Princeton Library.
Henceforth, Greene’s life didn’t just kick into a higher gear. It was supercharged. She became a lively fixture at social gatherings among America’s wealthiest families. Her world encompassed Gilded Age mansions, country retreats, rare book enclaves, auction houses, museums and art galleries. Bold, vivacious and glamorous, the keenly intelligent Greene attracted attention wherever she went.
I found myself drawn to the worlds Greene entered and the people she described in her lively letters to her lover, art scholar Bernard Berenson. In 2024, I published a book, “Becoming Belle Da Costa Greene,” which explores her voice, her self-invention, her love of art and literature, and her path-breaking work as a librarian.
Yet I’m often asked whether Greene mentions her passing as white in her writings. She did not. Greene was one of hundreds of thousands of light-skinned Black Americans who passed as white in the Jim Crow era. While speculation about Greene’s background circulated in her lifetime, nothing was confirmed until historian Jean Strouse revealed the identities of Greene’s parents in her 1999 biography, “Morgan: American Financier.” Until that point, only Greene’s mother and siblings knew the story of their Black heritage.
Read more at https://theconversation.com/the-black-librarian-who-rewrote-the-rules-of-power-gender-and-passing-as-white-246469
Be kind and thoughtful today. Cheers.