Access and Agency: Black Librarians and a New “Epoch” in the Diffusion of Knowledge

In the early 1900s, Thomas Fountain Blue, a pioneer within the field of Black librarianship, repeatedly called the emergence of Black public libraries a new “epoch” in Black education. Blue meant that African Americans were slowly gaining access to books, periodicals, encyclopedias, and other resources, which they could peruse at their own discretion. Professionally trained Black librarians built Black libraries to be places where people could ask and answer their own self-determined questions. This new “epoch” of access and intellectual agency marked a critical, though underappreciated, new stage in the fight against White supremacy.

In this paper, I argue that Black librarians’ subtle encouragement of autonomous Black thinking was a foundational step towards the revisionist work later associated with institutionalized Black archives. For example, by the early twentieth century, many leaders within the library profession often described the library as a “laboratory” or “workshop”—meaning the library was intended to be a space where people experimented with their ideas. Many officials, including Blue himself, touted the benefits of the newly popularized open shelving system. Open shelves encouraged patrons to explore their own interests and curiosities even when many librarians tried to push patrons towards more “serious” literature. My paper also rethinks the role of the librarian herself (usually a woman). Rather than cultural gatekeepers or moral reformers, these women worked as interlocutors with the public—or people who asked questions, found resources, offered suggestions, and helped to foster breakthroughs.

Institutionalized Black archives emerged during this new era of access and agency as trained librarians, not archivists, managed these early twentieth-century Black collections. Students, scholars, and lay intellectuals used Black archives to reject racist hierarchies, histories, and epistemologies. In doing so, they challenged White supremacy as the organizing principle of the modern world.