Happy Wednesday. As February winds down, I wanted to give one final shout out to Black librarians. As mentioned in a previous header, the profession is 90% white, and Black librarians have often been invisible in the profession. A new documentary seeks to showcase the stories of Black librarians, so I thought that’s what I’d close out the month with.
With funding almost entirely from a GoFundMe campaign, the members of the team have traveled to Nashville; Atlanta; New York; Washington, DC; Baltimore; Cleveland; Austin, TX; and Las Vegas for interviews and have plans to go to Philadelphia; Boston; Providence, RI; Chicago; Los Angeles; and Washington State as they seek to shed light on the past and spotlight the present state of Black librarianship.
One of those earlier interviews was with Meredith Evans, past president of the Society of American Archivists and director of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum.
“If we take it all the way back, there were Black librarians in the late 1800s,” Evans says in a clip on the documentary’s website. “We had school librarians, and we had libraries in people’s homes, because we had to educate our own.”
The documentary plans to discuss the history, which Freeman says isn’t “well-documented,” but also hasn’t been completely ignored. There are books about the freedom libraries (community libraries created to serve African Americans during the civil rights movement) and the desegregation of public libraries. But this history is not taught and is not well-known.
The majority of the film will cover public libraries and librarians, but it will also touch on school libraries and HBCU (historically Black colleges and universities) libraries.
It promises to be a fascinating piece! I am fortunate enough to know the director of the documentary, Rodney Freeman, and he is truly an incredible person. I hope you’ll consider looking out for it when it releases later this year.
Also I’m gonna be on vacation Friday through next Wednesday. Anyone want to sub in for the Wednesday PT next week? Tag me and let me know @thesosogatsby:disqus!
Be kind and thoughtful today. Cheers.