Making books available: the role of early libraries, librarians, and booksellers in the promotion of African American children's literature

African American Review, Spring, 1998 by Nancy Tolson

Two of the main supporters of the children's book collection, Arthur Schomburg and James Weldon Johnson, died in June of 1938, several months prior to the Collection's completion. In 1939, it became the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection for Children. The Collection came very close in meeting all the criteria established earlier for children's books, even though very few books could fully meet those three requirements in the late 1930s, or even the early 1940s. Subsequently, the Negro Division on the third floor of the 135th Street Branch Library was renamed The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

By 1940, voices were being raised in favor of the production and publishing of books about black life - in spite of an economic boycott by most Southern booksellers and schools. Organizations such as the Child Study Association and the Bureau for Intercultural Education joined with the NAACP and the Urban League to protest the scarcity of good books about African Americans. Baker petitioned publishers, presenting them with the criteria so that publishers would know what African Americans wanted to see in children's books. At the same time Baker was not certain how African American children would react to such books if they were published. "Will they want to read more of them?" she wondered. And would "these books offset the distorted picture of black life in other children's books?" ("Changing" 82).

Baker's first bibliography, in 1938, established criteria that other librarians would be able to use in assisting young readers wishing to locate better books, including those with African American characters and with positive images and themes. Through the act of informing others about the dearth of appropriate books for African American children, Baker soon discovered that there were persons outside the 135th Street Branch Library who would listen to her and would be able to help fill the literary void:

One of my first allies in the fight for better children's books about black life was Frederick Melcher of the R. R. Bowker Company, the donor of the Newberry and Caldecott medals. It was he who literally took me before a gathering of children's editors and told me to "say my piece." Some listened, others resented my presence. (qtd. in Josey, Black 121)

About the same time, Charlemae Rollins, an African American librarian in charge of the Children's Department at the George C. Hall Branch of the Chicago Public Library from 1932 to 1963, was dealing with the same issues:

In the early forties there were very few books about Negroes for children that anybody could actually recommend or give to them, particularly Negro children, without having them feel embarrassed or insulted. As more and more mediocre books kept pouring off the press into the library and more and more parents came in indignant and more and more children came in and tossed them aside, I felt that something ought to be done. (71)

In 1941, as a result of a letter-writing campaign in which Rollins complained to various publishers about the lack of books appropriate for African American children, she was stimulated to write her first book, We Build Together. The National Council of Teachers of English responded to Rollins's letter of complaint by encouraging her to write about the problem. If she would include a list of appropriate books for the reading pleasure of African American children, they would publish her book. Rollins recalled in 1968 that, "at that time[,] there were only thirty books that we could recommend wholeheartedly without some little explanation and a long list of others that we couldn't" (71).