African American Studies at Beinecke Library

Collections, events, and news from the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters.

  • Preserving Your Personal Treasures

    April 24, 2020

    Join Christine McCarthy, Director of Preservation & Conservation Services, for an online lecture about how individuals can preserve their personal treasures, familly heirlooms and historical records, and private collections.

  • Frederick Douglass Railed Against Economic Inequality (Jacobin)

    February 20, 2020

    No single document, of course, can solve the riddle of Douglass’s complex political ideas. But while doing research at Yale’s Beinecke Library, I came across two articles in the 1856 Frederick Douglass’ Paper that have not, to my knowledge, been reprinted or digitized since. (Most of Douglass’s journalistic writing remains unpublished, though a forthcoming volume in the Frederick Douglass Papers should help address that problem.) Nor have they been excerpted, quoted, or discussed at length in the extensive scholarship on Douglass.

  • The Best New Novel Was Written 90 Years Ago (Vulture)

    February 6, 2020

    McKay left a longer, 172-page draft in possession of his only child, who eventually donated it to the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The shorter one wound up at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The two have now been reconciled for the first time to yield the book as published. Romance in Marseille, in other words, was never actually a lost or forgotten novel; it was just peculiarly hard to track down.

  • A Book So Far Ahead of Its Time, It Took 87 Years to Find a Publisher (New York Times)

    February 5, 2020

    More may be coming. Cloutier stumbled on the forgotten manuscript of “Amiable With Big Teeth” while studying at Columbia in 2009. The two manuscripts of “Romance in Marseille,” held by Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and Yale’s Beinecke Library — the Penguin Classics edition is based on the later Schomburg manuscript — have long been known to scholars, but copyright conflicts and a lack of market interest prevented the book’s publication. As archival research accelerates and 1920s-era writing is freed from copyright restrictions — this year, works from 1924 came into the public domain — it’s likely that more rediscovered works are on the way. Cloutier recently worked with the Beinecke to locate an uncataloged collection of manuscripts by Petry.

  • Professor Crystal Feimster on the Long Civil Rights Movement (podcast)

    January 20, 2020

    In recognition of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, President Salovey and Professor Feimster discuss the “long” civil rights movement, the contributions of civil rights activist Pauli Murray, and how Yale students are using the university’s archival and museum collections in their classes.

  • Celebrating the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.

    January 16, 2020

    King and the African American Freedom Movement Jan. 20, noon-4 p.m. Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, 121 Wall St. Highlights from the Beinecke Library’s collections related to King and to the African American freedom movement will be on public view in the courtyard-level reading room.