African American Studies at Beinecke Library

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

  • Martin Luther King Jr. helped to change America, with poet Langston Hughes’ help (Sedona Red Rock News)

    January 13, 2024

    King and Hughes maintained a friendship until Hughes’ death in May 1967, even traveling together to Nigeria in November 1960. Hughes wrote about King’s civil rights efforts in at least 40 articles in the Chicago Defender and penned several poems about King’s activities. King quoted or paraphrased at least seven Hughes poems in various speeches before he was assassinated in April 1968, according to W. Jason Miller’s book, “Origins of the Dream: Hughes’s Poetry and King’s Rhetoric.” Hughes had written his poem “Harlem” in 1951, which begins, “What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?”

  • Writing and Resistance: 2024 Black History Month Display

    January 8, 2024

    Materials related to a temporary display on the Beinecke Library mezzanine, January 8 - March 18, 2024, for the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, Black History Month, and in conjunction with the publication of Yale and Slavery: A History (Yale University Press, 2024) and the exhibition Shining Light on Truth: New Haven, Yale, and Slavery, on view from mid-February at the New Haven Museum.

  • A civil rights champion

    January 1, 2024

    A scrapbook that McGuinn kept, now part of the Yale University Archives, documents his law career and his outspoken support for civil rights. He argued against state and local Jim Crow laws that were being proposed in the early twentieth century, including segregation measures and a voting bill that had a “grandfather clause” designed to exclude Black people. He is credited with helping to get a residential segregation law overturned in Baltimore in 1917. He also spoke out in favor of women’s suffrage. He served twice as a city councilman, from 1919 to 1923 and from 1927 to 1931, fighting Democrats who tried to bar Black people from city patronage jobs.

  • Poem: I look at the world (New York Times)

    November 30, 2023

    This poem by Langston Hughes was discovered by a rare-books cataloger in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It was scrawled in the pages of a book called “An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry.” The poem itself could be an entry. The speaker, a Black person, sees the world as a “fenced-off narrow space,” an unnecessarily walled place, and resolves to obliterate cruel boundaries. It’s a timeless sort of gesture, at home in the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement — or now.

  • Office Hours with… Nana Adusei-Poku

    November 13, 2023

    Who is an artist who particularly interests you for this project? Adusei-Poku: Augusta Savage, a sculptress from the Harlem Renaissance who was very active in the early 20th century. The reason why I’m so fascinated by her is that not only can you see in her biography how anti-Blackness consistently made it impossible for her to work, but also we don’t have many of her works left. They are only represented through photographs and yet she was a formative figure of a modernist movement. One reason why I’m so happy to be here at Yale is that we have this incredible archive in the Beinecke [Rare Book & Manuscript Library] and the Yale Art Gallery Collection that’s like a treasure for people who are interested in Black artists from New York in the early 20th century.

  • Beinecke event highlights failed effort to make New Haven the site of America’s first HBCU (Yale Daily News)

    September 12, 2023

    Yale’s Beinecke Library hosted an event reflecting on the unsuccessful effort to establish the United States’ first Historically Black College/University in New Haven. The event, which was called “New Haven 1831: What Was and What Could Have Been,” was held on the 192nd anniversary of the very town meeting in 1831 where the proposal for the college was struck down in a 700-4 vote.

  • Beinecke Readings Examine Freedom From All Angles (New Haven Independentt)

    July 6, 2023

    The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library holds one of 26 known surviving copies of the first printing of the Declaration of Independence. The document, printed by John Dunlap in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, has a single typographical error, an indication that the founders issued it in a hurry to declare independence from England. On Wednesday, a few dozen New Haveners got to hear the words of that revolutionary broadside read aloud — along with that of Frederick Douglass’s 1852 oration ​“What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” — as part of an annual primary-source-focused tradition to celebrate the 247th anniversary of Independence Day.

  • Bill Lowe Keeps The Renaissance Alive (New Haven Independent)

    June 14, 2023

    The group’s first number, ​“Us,” was part of Signifyin’ Natives, a suite of searching, excoriating, and invigorating music from composer and musician Bill Lowe that uses as its text passages from a Harlem Renaissance classic that, it turns out, has as much to say about the present as it did to its own time, a century ago. Lowe’s presentation of Signifyin’ Natives — at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library on Yale’s campus Tuesday afternoon — was a collaboration between the library and the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, running now through June 25.