African American Studies at Beinecke Library

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

  • Beinecke Library unites past and present in spring exhibit (Yale Daily News)

    February 8, 2023

    On Jan. 27, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library unveiled its spring exhibit “Revisiting the Past — Imagining the Future.” Featuring artifacts spanning centuries and cultures, the exhibit is intended to add new perspectives to popular readings of history. The process for building the exhibit began about a year ago when Timothy Young, curator of modern books and manuscripts at the Beinecke, reached out to his colleagues at Sterling Memorial Library, sparking a new collaboration between the Beinecke and other collections at Yale.

  • A COMPOSITIONAL COLLABORATION(?) BETWEEN MARGARET BONDS AND FLORENCE PRICE: “Sleep Song” (Medium)

    January 20, 2023

    And it’s how we know that Florence B. Price had a hand in producing the only surviving exemplar of Margaret Bonds’s earliest surviving choral work: the Sleep Song for women’s chorus and piano, recently published by Hildegard Publishing Company as part of their ongoing Margaret Bonds Signature Series. That undated manuscript is held among the Margaret Bonds Papers in the James Weldon Johnson Collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University (shelfmark JWJ MSS 151 Box 8, folder 41), as are the three autographs for the solo version of Sleep Song. The latter all identify Margaret Bonds as a member of ASCAP, which Bonds joined as a non-participating member in 1952, and of which she became a full member in 1955.

  • Campus events honor the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.

    January 10, 2023

    The Yale and New Haven communities will commemorate the life and legacy of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. during a series of campus events, including a keynote address by his eldest son, Martin Luther King III. The campus celebrations, which also will include library exhibits highlighting King’s contributions, a poetry slam, an exploration of King’s influence on environmental justice, and a love march, are part of the university’s annual campus commemoration of the famed civil rights activist and preacher.

  • New Haven Black history ready to be explored at Yale's Beinecke library (New Haven Register)

    November 14, 2022

    If there's one thing New Haven has plenty of, it's history — and for as long as there have been African Americans in New Haven, that history has been recorded along with the stories of all the ethnicities that call or have called New Haven home. Much of it has been recorded, catalogued and preserved by historical societies and libraries, including the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University which will provide an opportunity Sunday in conjunction with The Greater New Haven African American Historical Society for people to come in an explore.

  • Celebrating Black New Haven & Dixwell Congregational UCC History

    October 17, 2022

    The Beinecke Library recognizes Black New Haven and one of the city’s most revered African American communities, the Dixwell Avenue Congregational United Church of Christ (UCC). The Dixwell Church was founded at 105 Temple Street in 1820. It is the oldest African American Congregational UCC church in the world and among the oldest African American churches of any denomination in New Haven. It has a long social justice tradition with early congregants aiding escaped slaves seeking freedom through the underground railroad. While others supported the Amistad captives jailed in New Haven during their groundbreaking trial. Delayed by the global pandemic, the Dixwell Church celebrates its Bicentennial Plus Two anniversary this year. Its thriving congregation continues to be a center of the historic Dixwell neighborhood to this day. The Beinecke Library had the opportunity to share historically relevant items from the collection through a public viewing on September 17, 2022.

  • American Literature: Collection Histories

    September 25, 2022

    Articles about archives in the Yale Collection of American Literature and the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection from the Yale University Library Gazette...

  • Digital project supports ‘bibliographic turn’ in Black literary studies

    August 11, 2022

    Digital project supports ‘bibliographic turn’ in Black literary studies By Allison Bensinger August 11, 2022 Share this with Facebook Share this with Twitter Share this with LinkedIn Share this with Email Print this A selection of books by Black authors (Photo by Tubyez Cropper) Yale’s Jacqueline Goldsby and Meredith McGill of Rutgers University recently received a $1.7 million grant from The Mellon Foundation to support the development of The Black Bibliography Project (BBP), an initiative that aims to revive and transform descriptive bibliography for African American and Black Diaspora literary studies.