The joy of finding periodicals "Not in Danky"

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the seminal reference tool, African-American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), edited by James P. Danky. It provides background on the creation of this highly acclaimed volume and demonstrates its usefulness in building a research collection of rare periodical literature in African American history and culture. It also documents efforts to build such a collection at Emory University.

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I met James Danky first by reputation some thirty years ago. My wife, Nancy Burkett, was at the time a librarian at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, and AAS was intensively engaged in a nationwide effort funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to identify and microfilm every newspaper published throughout the country. This massive effort, the United States Newspaper Project, had decided to proceed on a state-by-state basis, and the Antiquarian Society, as the premiere repository for early American newspapers, was centrally involved. Their curator of newspapers served on the project's national advisory committee.

Word filtered back to me of a troublesome presence on that committee--a young, cantankerous fellow from Wisconsin who insisted the approach being taken would result in a final product that, if not fatally flawed, would fail significantly in its goal of comprehensiveness. A policy decision had been made not to search specifically for "genres" of newspapers, for example, Irish, German, African American, or other group-based papers, as the project was working from the top down, through state and national institutions. The Wisconsin fellow argued this approach would dramatically underrepresent African American newspapers if special efforts were not made to search out holdings at historically black colleges and universities. These often understaffed institutions would not be able to respond effectively to written surveys, and many of them did not participate in OCLC, the national online library database. Further, the "mainline" repositories, whether state libraries or others, would never have collected much of this material in the first place, so even the most extensive of searches would not be sufficient to the task.

I don't have access to the protests, appeals, and recommendations filed by this fellow, James Danky, but my understanding is that his nettlesome and well-thought-out critiques fell on deaf ears. "They" had a plan, and "they" had no intention of revising it. Naturally, I found this fellow to be quite interesting. I knew he was absolutely right about the difficulty of ferreting out such material. For the first fifteen years of my academic career, my primary interest was in the area of African American religious history. I had founded a newsletter to foster research in this field, and I knew how wide and deep one had to dig to secure the obscure pamphlets, periodicals, and newspapers published within and for the African American community since the early nineteenth century. Danky was soon one of my most faithful subscribers. He wasn't particularly interested in religious history itself, I later found out, but he was very interested in newsletters. He collected mine and thousands of others, for that great research repository for American history in all of its dimensions, the Wisconsin Historical Society.

I first met Jim in Madison while undertaking research for a rather wacky project my wife and I had hatched in the early 1970s to index every sketch found in any pre-1951 book or section of a book that provided biographical information on people of African descent in North America. Our task did not seem daunting at the outset. All we had to do was locate every book, be it African Methodists of Mississippi or A History of Colored Baptists of Nova Scotia or Cincinnati's Colored Citizen, that seemed to fit our criteria, then borrow or photocopy the biographical section, and create an index. For starters, we had not calculated just how difficult it would be to locate these volumes. Searching "Negroes--biography" in library catalogs would not identify all relevant items, and even the Moorland-Spingarn Research Library at Howard University and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Library catalogs would not be sufficient if we were to be thorough in our work. We decided we needed to go to as many repositories as possible, to search their catalogs and consult with their library staff, to see what obscure or otherwise neglected sources might be of help for our master list. Danky was intrigued by the project and immediately saw its potential. He not only helped identify volumes that, from their titles, would have appeared irrelevant, but he also gave us the names of key librarians around the country who were knowledgeable and would think imaginatively about potential sources. The result, some fifteen years later, was the multivolume Black Biography: 1790-1950, a cumulative index to biographical sketches and photographs of about 35,000 African Americans published in nearly 350 collective biographies.