>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D C.
>> John Cole: Well, good
afternoon and welcome
to the Library of Congress.
I'm John Cole, I'm the Director
of the Center for the Book
in the Library of Congress,
which is the library's reading
and literacy promotion arm.
We're pleased to have you here today
for a program about a librarian
who had many special connections
to the Library of Congress,
but is better known for the
kind of work that she did
that you'll hear about
from our speaker.
The Center for the Book
itself is involved in a number
of promotion activities
related to the library.
We have a state network with
affiliates in every state.
We have reading promotion
partners with groups
with whom we have projects, and
we also play a very major role
in the National Book Festival
of the Library of Congress.
Here at the library we also have not
only this series of noontime talks
by authors of books that have a
special relationship to the library,
but we also are the administrator
for the Young Reader Center
at the library, the Poetry
and Literature Center,
and most recently, the
relatively new Library
of Congress Literacy
Awards, which are funded
by the benefactor David Rubinstein.
And it's a 5-year project, we're
now reaching the halfway point,
and hope very much that we can
prove the worthiness of this project
for continuation at the
Library of Congress.
The Books and Beyond Talks
are recorded and later put
on the Library of Congress's
website, so I do ask you
to turn off all electronic items.
I want to say a word
about our co-sponsor,
which is the Daniel Murrary,
Daniel A.P. Murray African
American Culture Association
of the Library of Congress.
It has just celebrated its
35th year and I wanted to point
out that I actually had a project
that was related before the Center
for the Book was created, which
was 1977, I actually worked
with Dorothy Porter in
1969 and 1970 on a project
that Janet mentions barely,
but it's in her book.
And that was looking at the Daniel
Murray collection and sorting it
out with duplicates being sent
to the Howard University Library.
And that was a wonderful
experience for me.
She was very knowledgeable, easy
to work with, but boy she wanted
as much as she could
get from our duplicates
from the Daniel Murray collection,
and I don't blame her one bit.
The result was an addition to the
Howard Library but also a sorting
out of the pamphlets
related to Mr. Murray.
Now, Mr. Murray was a
Library of Congress employee
who reached the title
of Assistant Librarian.
He was hired in 1871
and he didn't --
he worked at the library until
1922, which is a long period
through a number of librarians.
He was known as a bibliographer
of African American materials,
not only did he collect them, but he
represented the Library of Congress
in 1900, I think, Janet, at
the World's Paris Exposition,
where the Murray collection of books
on colored authors was on display,
and it also went to a
couple of other institutions
in the first decades
of the 20th century.
He was hired by the Librarian
of Congress named Ainsworth
Rand Spofford.
He was hired in 1872.
In the end he worked for
another famous Librarian
of Congress, Herbert Putnam.
Who actually was librarian
all the way until 1939.
So Mr. Murray is commemorated by the
association, which has his name now,
and has been really a principal
really Acquisitions Librarian
for the Library of Congress.
And is really his collection
is one of the basis
of our African American collections.
I also wanted to remind you that --
oh, I did remind you already
that we're turning off
all electronic things.
I would like to introduce our
speaker, who is Janet Sims-Wood,
and she is the former
Assistant Librarian
of the Moorland-Spingarn Research
Center at Howard University.
She currently serves as
an Associate Librarian
at Prince George's
Community College in Maryland.
Janet was the founding
associate editor of SAGE,
a Scholarly Journal on Black Women.
She currently serves as a National
Vice-President of the Association
for the Study of African
American Life and History.
And she has won numerous awards
and grants for her research
in African American history.
And she is the author of this
handsome book recently published
by History Press, which is a
biography of Dorothy Porter Wesley
at Howard University, "Building
a Legacy of Black History."
It's my pleasure now
to introduce Janet.
[ Applause ]
>> Janet Sims-Wood:
Thank you, Dr. Cole.
Good afternoon everyone.
I see so many friends in the
audience, as I was telling them,
I used to work at the library many
many moons ago back in the '60s
at the Navy Yard in
the card division.
So and then lots of friends
here through the years,
some with whom worked at
Moorland-Spingarn with me
and are now here at the library.
But this book is a labor of love.
I want to do something
to honor Dorothy Porter
because Moorland-Spingarn's
100th anniversary was coming up
and I really wanted to do something
to honor the lady whose
shoulders that we stood on.
A couple of things about the book.
First of all, with History
Press there's a word limit,
we can only do so many words.
History Press is a press that really
does press for the general public,
so they want it to be very not real
real scholarly, lots of pictures.
And as I said, there was a word
limit, so we had to work with that.
And I don't know if you
notice on the bottom
of the book there's a lady's
name there by the name
of Charlene Smith Supine,
who used to work here.
She was the lady that came in
and she became my copy editor,
became much more than
the copy editor.
She really really really help
me go through this document
to make it look good,
make it sound good.
You know, when you're an author and
somebody goes through your stuff
and says well we're
going to take this out,
we're going to move this
here, move that there.
So but by the time it got to History
Press, when they sent it back,
there were very very few
corrections we had to make,
because she was that meticulous.
We had 2 computers sitting
there fact checking,
we got to make sure this is right,
make sure this is spelled
right, make sure.
So Charlene really gave me a lot
of help, and I do appreciate that,
and I wanted to acknowledge her
because she is a former employee
here at the Library of Congress.
The other one of the
major problems I had
in doing the book was
her collection,
Dorothy Porter Wesley's
collection at Yale.
As you know, the collections
went to 3 different places.
Her first husband's collection,
James Porter's collection,
went to Emery.
The second husband's collection,
Charles Wesley, is with ALPHA,
ALPHA Fraternity, hopefully those
will come to Howard at some point
since we do have the
ALPHA papers there.
And then her collection
went to Yale.
Well, when I went to
Yale, I had a week there.
And there's 137 boxes of
unprocessed materials.
I got to go through 18 of those
boxes in that week's time.
So I know I missed a lot, and
the fact that it was unprocessed,
there were just things everywhere.
It was some of it was by year
or maybe by topic or something,
but then you'd find other stuff
there, photos in every collection.
So what I'm hoping, in fact I
even found some dental floss
in one of the boxes.
[Laughter] So what I'm hoping
that this book will generate is
that either a library student is
doing a dissertation, hopefully once
that collection is processed
at Yale, because that's the key
at this point is for that
collection to be processed.
Somebody maybe want to do a
doctoral dissertation on her,
or either another more scholarly
book, which she deserves;
she deserves a much more
scholarly book than we have here.
I'm hoping that once that collection
is processed and opened back
to the public again, that somebody
else will come along and update this
and really give her the
scholarly that she deserves.
So but that was the major
things that I had to deal with,
was that collection at Yale was
really really really something.
Now, as I say, this was a
labor of love because I wanted
to do something to honor the
lady whose shoulders I stood on.
She had retired the year before I
came, but of course, she was back
and forth in the collection.
I was at her home many times.
So I knew her very well.
And so this again, was
something I just really wanted
to do to honor her.
And what I'm going
to do the main focus
of the presentation is basically
her work at Howard University,
but I will tell you that
she was born in New Jersey,
Warrenton, New Jersey in 1905.
And then she came down to
Miner Teacher's College,
that's where she went
to college, in 1925.
After that, while she was at Miner,
her librarian there took a liking
to her, so she wanted
to become a librarian.
So she started Columbia
Library School
and she graduated from
there in 1932.
She came to Howard in the '20s,
late '20s, and was there she worked
on her degree there as well.
But during her time at New York,
when she was working there,
she met a young man by
the name of James Porter.
And so she had 2 reasons
for coming to Washington,
D C. So she had met James Porter and
then she was working at the library
in New York and James Reason
-- Joseph Reason, excuse me,
who was a librarian at Howard
also working there part-time,
asked her to come down
to Howard to work.
Because he knew they
were getting ready
to hire her full time
at the New York library.
So she told him, well, you haven't
told me about a job yet, she said,
you got a job, come down there.
So she had 2 reasons for
coming to Howard University.
So in 1929, she and James Porter
got married, because, you know,
the thing about students
and teachers not dating.
So they got married in 1929.
And in 1930, when she came there,
she was a cataloger, and in 1930,
she was made head of what was
called the Negro Division there.
So that is where I'm going to
start with the presentation.
Kelly Miller was the person
that talked Jessie Moorland
into giving the collection in 1914.
And the paperwork was signed in 1915
to the Moorland-Spingarn Research
Center to Howard University.
And so he is really credited
with being the person
that really talked him into
giving that collection.
The next picture is
of Jessie Moorland.
Now, Jessie Moorland, as I say, we
received his collection in 1914.
It had about at that time it had
about 3000 books in the collection
and things of that nature.
So that was part of the collection.
We had a couple of
other collections there,
the cap collection and a few others.
So when Dorothy Porter came, the
first thing she did was to go
through the collections and start
pulling out, from the main library,
pulling out the materials that would
be part of this Negro Collection.
So Jessie Moorland's
collection's there.
The next picture is
of Mordecai Johnson,
who was Howard University's
first African American President.
So he came there a couple of
years before Dorothy got there.
And the next picture is
of Arthur B. Spingarn.
Now, Howard University purchased
Spingarn's collection in 1946.
So that's how you get the
Moorland-Spingarn part
of the collection.
So he had a very large
collection that came there as well.
All of these people were
biblio files and collected,
and Arthur Spingarn's collection
especially had lots of information,
lots of books in foreign languages.
He really collected on Negro
authors is what he was collecting
at that time.
So very very vast collection.
And this is the Howard
University Bulletin and this was
when they dedicated the
Spingarn collection there.
You'll see Dorothy Porter and
Joseph Reason sitting there.
Most people recognize Dorothy
Porter as an older lady.
Now, the picture that I have on the
cover, I really like that picture,
it was a younger picture of her,
but it also showed her working.
And one of the things I liked about
that cover picture was the fact
that on the side you
see the card catalog,
which most of us don't
know anything about today,
and so I wanted them
to see how we worked.
I have 2 card catalogs in my house.
But most students don't know
about card catalogs now,
because almost everything is
digitized not digitized but you go
to the Internet to get
to the collections,
what's in each collection.
So on the other side was, I don't
know if you saw on the other side,
on that picture there's a dial-up
telephone on the side, which again,
a lot of our students
don't know about.
And there was an inkwell
in front of her as well,
which a lot of our
students don't know about.
So I wanted to show a picture of a
time period that we could talk about
and what was going on
at that time period,
but I really wanted
to show her working.
Dorothy, this is one of her
in the spingarn collection,
which is in the main reading room.
The Spingarn collection is if
you go in the Moorland Room,
the Spingarn collection is
right there on that level,
and then the Moorland
collection is in the back
and upstairs on the second floor.
And this is Dorothy Porter
working in the stacks,
and that's where you
usually found her,
because somebody was always
coming in asking for information.
And she was very very
helpful to people.
She helped many many
scholars that came there.
She helped the students.
One of the things that she did to
help the students at Howard was
that she sent reading lists
out to the instructors,
like Benjamin Brolet, Elaine Lock,
so that they would know what she
had received in their sections
so that they could send their
students over to do research.
And then of course, as her name
got to be known, and scholars came
from all over the world to help her.
And this is her again in the
Reading Room, helping a student.
And you will see Jessie Moorland's
picture over the fireplace.
Again, as I was saying,
she helped so many people.
There were some young girls
that came from New Guinea,
they came to study
English in Washington,
D.C. So she was instrumental
in helping them get housing,
making sure that they
were fed and making sure
that everything was
going right for them.
So again, that's what she
did, she made an effort
to make sure that she helped people.
In the 1970s, Ford Foundation
started giving out a lot
of grant money to institutions.
So this is a group of
black history specialists,
most of them were black
history chairs.
You see Dorothy Porter
there and a few others,
they went out to a
conference in Aspen, Colorado,
because they were getting
ready to start writing grants
to try to get collections.
One of the librarians told
me that although, you know,
like many of the colleges,
especially the smaller schools,
did not have grant offices, so
the folks that didn't know how
to write grants, the librarians and
the teachers that didn't know how
to write those grants to get
them funded, what they would do,
they would have the smaller
schools send their grant application
to them first.
They would tweak it before it
went into the grant agency.
Because what we wanted to do
was to make sure that people
across the country, libraries across
the country, not just Moorland,
not just Johnsburg, would have
black history collections.
And that was one of the things that
they really worked on to try to get,
to help the other schools to
get their collections as well.
This is Dorothy Porter
over in Africa.
She went to Africa and
this was a picture of her,
she was there on a Ford
Foundation grant from '62 to '64.
And she helped them set up the
National Library of Nigeria.
And this is she with the staff.
This is she's at a Negro too
conference in the car in 1971.
Again, she traveled the world.
As she became more popular, she
got more and more invitations
to do things of this nature.
So she was more than
just a librarian.
And this is she and her
first husband, James Porter,
and they are at a cocktail
party in Nigeria.
This is Joseph Reason and
he at that time Moorland was
under the main library,
so he was her boss.
So this was at his
retirement party in 1973.
Dorothy also received lots and
lots and lots of plaques, again,
for helping so many people.
This is from Howard's Institute
for Arts and the Humanities.
So she got all kinds of
awards that came into her.
And when we went to her house, she
had most of those awards sitting,
she had a wall, special wall,
just for to show the plaques
and things that she had gotten.
Now, Dorothy retired in 1973,
and as I was telling folks,
the next few pictures are
of her retirement party.
But she didn't just retire
and go home, she worked.
In fact, she was working on
a book when she died at 90.
So she worked until she passed away.
These are some of the pictures at
Howard from her retirement party.
I'm going to go through
these fairly fast
so that we'll have a little
time for questions and answers.
And when Dorothy retired, the main
Reading Room was also named the
Dorothy P. Porter Room in her honor.
So right behind them,
you see Sterling Brown standing
there beside her, and then you go
into the main Reading Room.
This is a couple of other pictures
of her at her retirement party.
She was also part of the
Schlesinger Library's Art History.
They had a black women's
art history project,
and she was on the
committee to help them.
Again, she was on so many
different committees and things
of that nature, working with
so many different people
to help them get their projects
off the ground and running.
So she was extremely
helpful in that way.
This is Dorothy Porter
after she retired
from Howard, here she comes back.
She worked with all of
us, there she's working
in the Manuscript division
with the manuscript staff.
And of course, you know, we had a
large black newspaper collection.
In fact, for our newspapers
collections,
we got a lot of newspapers from
Africa and from the Caribbean,
so that students could come in
and they could read their
home papers when they came in.
So the newspapers got
a lot of attention.
And of course, she also
received some grants
to also put these newspapers
on microfilm, because you know,
after a while, they start
yellowing and falling apart.
So she was instrumental
in getting several grants
to put microfilm those collections.
This is Dorothy Porter getting
an award as an alumni award
from Howard University in 1974,
because she did graduate
from Howard as well.
For all you Delta's out there,
she was a Delta, and this is one
of the awards that they gave her.
So again, she received so
many plaques and awards.
This is from a book
party for Sharon Harley,
"African American Women's
Struggles and Images."
They really credit Dorothy
Porter with doing so much
to help them get this
book published.
So they really -- and then
when they redid the book,
they also dedicated it to her.
So again, especially all of us
that were in black women's history,
and in the '70s was when we
started doing teaching the classes
in black women's history
and things of that nature.
So most of us that were librarians,
we were the ones that were trying
to make sure that we got them let
them know where the materials were
that they could use
in their classes.
So she was very very instrumental
in helping us to make sure
that we got the materials
on black women's history
to all those teachers that were
teaching black women's history.
Even though she wasn't with us
wasn't employed with us at the time,
but she made sure that we --
and make sure that the
librarians came there
and that we were all helping
people to get their information.
This is she with her second
husband, Charles Wesley.
They got married later in
life, in the late '70s,
'80s I think it was
when they got married.
She married in 1979
to Charles Wesley.
And of course she was married to
2 famous men, so James Porter,
who ended up being [inaudible],
and Charles Wesley was president
of 2 different black
universities, and he was a mason.
So very very prominent
people that she married.
This is a dedication of the Howard
University Museum on the far end
of when you go into the library
on that left-hand side all the way
down to the end is the
Howard University Museum.
The person that was
instrumental in starting
that action, again,
was Kelly Miller.
He was writing letters all over
the places to people trying to set
up a Howard University
Black History Museum.
And of course he died
before that came to be.
And it did not come to fruition
until 1979, but it was his dream
for a national Negro
library and museum.
So this is she with
President James Porter --
James Cheek opening up the
museum cutting the ribbon.
And this is she on the inside.
Now, what the museum did, we
had lots of different artifacts
and things, so you know, we
had the book collection there,
but you can't put the artifacts
and things that we got.
Like we had Frederick
Douglas's eyeglasses
and skull caps, for instance.
We had African goal weights.
So we had sculpture pieces.
So those we wanted to show some
of those pieces that were part
of the collection as well.
So the Howard University
Museum would do
that so we would have
different exhibits in there,
showing off what we
had in our collection.
This is Dorothy Porter at
one of the author book signs,
so she was up again, she
always went to book signs
and most times she was looking
at books from almost all
over the country, everybody
had to come there.
Her name was in most of those
books because she was instrumental
in helping everybody, I mean, she
helped everybody, John Blassingame.
She helped John Holt Franklin, for
instance, when he wrote his book
on George Washington
Williams, she was instrumental
in helping him get
that off the ground.
He came in there one day, he told
her he was working on this man,
he couldn't find any
information, 2 or 3 days later,
here comes Dorothy
Porter with a letter
from George Washington
Williams to Mordecai Johnson,
wanting to come to school there.
He said that was the spark that
really got that book off the ground,
because that letter told a lot
about his family and their travels
and things of that nature and
why he wanted to come to college.
So again, she helped
pretty much everybody.
And one of the things I tried to do
in the book was to talk to people
and let them tell some stories
about -- since I'm an old historian,
I couldn't talk to her, so
I wanted to talk to people
that she had helped and so
they could tell little stories
about their encounters with her.
And there's some interesting
things in there that she --
people that she helped
and how she helped them.
This is she had one daughter,
one child, and that's Connie.
And that's she and
Connie at the piano.
Now, Dorothy Porter had been playing
the piano since a little girl,
and that is how as a little girl,
that's how she earned money.
She used to teach in New Jersey, she
used to teach music, piano lessons,
to the other students there.
I think it was $1 a
lesson, something like that.
So that's how she made
her little spending money.
So she as a very accomplished
cook as well.
This is Dorothy Porter and as you
see, Betty Kohl, there you are.
This is at the Black
Biblio Files Conference
at Howard University in 1989.
One of the things that we wanted
to do was to profile people
that were collecting
in black history.
So what we wanted to do, we brought
some of those biblio files there
that was still living, like
Charles Blockson, for instance.
And of course Dorothy Porter
was still living and collecting,
so we wanted to bring some of
those people there and then some
of the people gave papers on the
ones that were no longer with us.
To talk about how they
collected materials and one thing
that you found out was that
they kind of worked together,
like if one person found out that
you were looking for something
and they knew where it was,
they would let you know, okay,
you can find this particular book
at, you know, this particular place.
So they kind of helped each
other try to find materials,
because all of them,
again, were collecting.
And of course Dorothy had a
big collection at her house
as well, not just at Moorland.
She collected a lot of materials.
I understand that when she moved
to Florida, they had a house
and an apartment, and both were
filled with Dorothy's materials.
Now, this is one of the many
honorary degrees that she got,
she got this from Syracuse
University in 1989.
This is Dorothy at Harvard
University W.E. Dubois Institute,
she went there in 1989
as a scholar that year.
And one of the things that a woman
told me was that she as afraid
because she was an older because
that she was going to be there
with all those young people,
and she was kind of, you know,
afraid that she wouldn't fit in.
Well, at the first meeting, the
director told me, said, well,
they were talking about their
projects, so Dorothy got up
and said, well, she says, you
know, I've only written 18 pages.
And everybody's standing there
looking at her because they said,
we haven't even finished unpacking,
we haven't written a thing.
But then when everybody started
talking about their projects,
of course she knew something about
every project that they were talking
about and told them where
to find the information.
So she became the bell
of the ball that year
at the Harvard, the boys institute.
This is Dorothy signing one of
her books early in her writing.
Now, that book was republished
by the Black Classic
Press with Paul Coves.
And he also published the last
book that she did as well.
This is her with Camille Billops.
Because her husband was an artist,
she also had lots of friends
that were artists, so Camille had
her to come up and do a presentation
at the Hatch Billops
Gallery in New York.
So again, Dorothy Porter
traveled all over the place,
she knew pretty much everybody.
So again, if you were doing research
in black history, you absolutely had
to come to Moorland-Spingarn,
you almost did not have
a choice in that matter.
So again, she knew everybody.
The next few pictures are we started
having what we call a Dorothy Porter
Wesley Lecture Series.
And what Thomas Battle wanted to
do was to bring librarians in from
across the country every
year to talk about the field
that they were in, and one of the
things he said was that Dorothy --
all of them gave Dorothy
Porter Wesley credit
because she had been
instrumental in helping all
of them get their materials
and get the jobs that they had,
because she would write
reference letters for you
and things of that nature.
And that's she and her
daughter and son-in-law
in the audience at
one of the programs.
This one here I need to move
this around a little bit,
this was at Mordecai Johnson's
100th anniversary dedication,
and she appeared on that as well.
Again, she was on almost all
panels and things of that nature,
dealing with black history.
If you named it, she
was pretty much there.
And I'm going back now
to the lecture series.
This is she with Clara Stanton
Jones sitting next to her.
Clara Stanton Jones was the
first African American director
of the Detroit Public Library and
the first black president of ALA.
So again, just helping
all kinds of people.
This is E.J. Josey, Dr. E.J. Josey.
Now, he had been a
student at Howard.
He told me in one of his letter that
she was instrumental in him going
to library school and then E.J.
Josey went on to do the Black Caucus
of the American Library Association.
And this book just won an honor
book award from the Black Caucus
of the American Library Association.
I just got my letter a couple
weeks ago, so it's won an award.
This is Hardy Franklin who
was one of the directors
of the D.C. Public Library.
So she had people from all over
the country to come in and talk.
This is Mary Lennox who
was Dean of the University
of Missouri Library School.
So these are just a
few of the people
that she had that they had come in.
As I said, Dr. Battle wanted
people that were very prominent,
he also had the librarian
Major Owens,
who was a librarian,
was a Congress person.
So he had him come one year.
So we had all kinds of people coming
in that were in the library field,
Jessie Carney Smith
from Fisk University.
So to talk about their
field and also to talk
about how Dorothy Porter
Wesley had helped them.
In 1995, right before she died,
she was our guest lecturer.
And one thing that she talked about
was the fact that she didn't want
to talk about her, she said,
you know enough about me.
What she wanted to do was
to update the last history
of Howard University.
She wanted to do a Howard
University encyclopedia.
So of course that never came to be,
but that was really what her aim was
in her latter years was
to get that started.
This is Dorothy Porter at one
of the Asila [assumed
spelling] Conferences.
Dorothy Porter was very very active
in the Association for the Study
of African American
Life and History.
She served on the executive
council for many many many years,
and thereafter came to almost every
conference up until around '93
or '94; I think that might
have been her last conference.
But she was at every conference and
people would just flock around her
because most of those scholars that
had come there had written books
and things, had come to
Dorothy Porter for help.
So everybody came there
to talk to Dorothy Porter.
That's her with Lerone Bennett.
And the last picture I'm
going to show you is in 1994,
the Humanities Council NEH gives
out the Charles Franklin Award,
and that year, 1994, she received
the award and it was given to her
at the White House
by President Clinton.
So I'm going to stop there.
Let me read one thing to sum
up what a couple of people have
to say about Dorothy Porter.
Thomas Battle, of course,
who's the retired director
of Moorland-Spingarn, said,
Thomas Battle commenting
on Porter's influence on the
staff said, "The MSRC staff,
the patron was not just a patron,
there was so much shared interest.
There was always a
staff member interested
in the subject area
of a visiting patron.
Staff did not just point
the patron to a book,
but became a part of their research.
Dorothy advised the patron
by sharing her own intellect
and this continued on with
the staff that came after her.
In honoring her contribution,"
Thomas Battle said,
"those of us who know
how difficult the task is
of documenting peoples'
history, realize
and appreciate the extraordinary
success Dorothy Porter Wesley
achieved in times far more
difficult than those we face today.
She built a house and
we are its caretakers.
And we're trying our best to deserve
the wonderful legacy she left
for us and future generations."
And John Bracey who became head
of the Boys Institute at Harvard,
used to be a student at
he grew up in Washington.
So as a child, his mother worked
on the campus, she he would come
over to the library
and go to sleep in one
of those big brown leather
chairs that was in there
and he would do his homework.
And he said a lot of the faculty
members would check his homework.
And he said Dorothy Porter
would often take him to the back
and show him pictures and documents
dealing with black history, because,
you know, he kept saying, I don't
believe that we've done that much.
And he said she would
always take him to the back
so that he could see
all what we had done.
And he says that and I think
he mainly expresses it best
about her work and about her
support for peoples' projects.
He says, "Dorothy Porter,
without much deserved support
financial art institutional
but with much love inside and
energy, nurtured, maintained,
and expanded one of the world's
greatest collections of manuscripts
and print materials on the
African American experience.
We as scholars and guardians
of that experience owe Dorothy
Porter a debt we can never
fully repay.
We owe to her memory the obligation
to try to carry on her work
and legacy to the best
of our abilities."
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
So if there are any questions,
I'd be happy to see
hopefully answer them for you.
Yes.
>> I have a question.
This is a detail that I'm curious.
How did the bulk of her
papers end up at Yale?
>> Janet Sims-Wood: It
was asked how the bulk
of her papers end up at Yale.
Her daughter had access to
all the collection, you know,
once Dorothy died, and both her
father and stepfather had passed,
so she owned those collections.
So what she did, she put them up for
auction, and that was how they ended
up at 3 different places.
They were purchased, yes.
Yes.
>> I think you said she was
working on a book when she died.
>> Janet Sims-Wood: Yes.
>> What was the focus of the book?
>> Janet Sims-Wood: It was a
book that it was on William Nell.
Her husband had been working
on that, and so she wanted
to finish his book, Charles
Wesley was working on that.
So she wanted to finish it up,
but she passed before it finished,
and her daughter ended
up finishing it for her.
And it's published by
Black Classic Press.
Okay.
>> Do you want to say a word
or two about her personality
and how she was so successful?
>> Janet Sims-Wood: Yes, I can.
Dorothy had a very
outgoing personality.
And it's only been these last couple
of years I guess since I worked
on the book that I can
actually now call her Dorothy.
She used to tell me all the
time, Please call me Dorothy.
And I couldn't do it.
So Paul Coates said he still can't.
But she was, again, she
was so helpful to people.
But the only thing that most people
would tell you, Thomas Battle,
Deborah Newman Helm that used
to work here, they always said
that she didn't suffer fools.
You had to prove to her that
you were a serious researcher.
So she made sure that
when you came there
that you knew what you
were doing and that --
so she would give you
the help that you needed.
Again, she gave so many people help.
One lady told me that she
was working on a project
and Dorothy Porter called her
one day and said, this place,
this government agency's
going to call you.
And she said, now, since
you're doing research,
I'm going to tell you one thing, you
don't have to tell them everything,
save something for your book.
And she said that was
the best advice
that a young scholar
could have received.
Because you know, she was
going to tell them everything.
But she said, no, you save it for
-- save some of it for your book.
And the same lady also told me that
she came down to Washington to --
as I say, Dorothy Porter had so
much materials at her own house.
So she invited her over to the
house to look at some materials
on some 19th century
black women that she had.
And she said Dorothy kept
going, oh, I have something
under the bed upstairs, and
she'd run and grab that.
And she said that later on in
the afternoon, Dorothy came
and told her, she says, Charles and
I are getting ready to have dinner,
would you like to join us.
And she said, I was
in researcher heaven
and she said I was leaving the
next day, she said, I wanted to get
as much done as I could, so
I apologized and said no.
and she said, so Dorothy
left the room,
and she said all the sudden she
got this swipe from her parents
who had long ago passed away,
said, daughter, you don't do things
like that, if someone
invites you to dinner, you go.
So the next time when Dorothy
came back and said, Charles
and I are getting ready to
have dinner now, she said,
would you like to join
us, she says, yes, ma'am.
But that was just the way she
was, she was just outgoing.
An excellent cook, excellent cook.
I've been to her house.
We had a lady down from the
Schaumburg Library came down for --
I used to do a program called At
Home, and we would invite people
in to talk about their lives.
And of course, Dorothy was the one
that helped us get
those people there,
and I think she might
have paid their way there,
because we couldn't pay them.
So we had a lady that came in and
so Dorothy invited us to her house
for dinner, and lord how mercy, you
talking about a scrumptious meal.
Dorothy was a good -- and
they tell me she could sew.
So she was a good homemaker as well
as an excellent librarian
and professional woman.
She had lots of different skills.
Just someone that I
admire very very deeply.
And again, this was a labor of love.
And on the back of the book
you'll see that also she was known
as the shopping bag lady.
And of course, the story goes
that whenever the undertaker was
taking a body out of the house,
she was going in as
they were coming out,
she was going in with her
shopping bags to get the materials.
[Laughter] And that was one
of her staff that said that.
I'm thinking it's probably true.
She did get a lot of materials.
Dorothy, and she knew about the
things like posters and things
that people didn't think were
important other than the books,
she knew that those kinds of
things would be important as well,
so she collected all
kinds of materials
like that for the collection.
So that again is why a lot of people
come there, because of the fact
that not just the printed
information
but also familiar information that's
there that they can look at as well.
So she was an excellent
curator and librarian.
Yes.
>> Did you in your research
get a sense of how she saw sort
of the collection of
African American history
and Africana studies,
how she saw it playing
into empowerment and activism?
Did you get a sense --
because certainly her interests
went beyond collecting.
She saw this material as necessary
for empowering black people.
So could you say something
about was she a pen Africanus?
Did she believe --
would she go on the left
in terms of protest politics?
Just some sense of how does
this material get activated
in the black experiment?
>> Janet Sims-Wood: Well, I
don't know, one thing she does,
she was a member of the
African Studies Association,
so she did do a lot of
African history materials
and things of that nature.
She encouraged you.
She didn't come out -- I
can't say she's left or right.
But she was very active and she
encouraged people to protest
and to be active in whatever
it was they were doing.
So she wanted you to succeed and
she wanted to see us succeed.
So she was definitely
a part of all of that.
Not actually in the forefront as
much, but she was actually there.
She did more I think
encouraging, and her thing was
to get you the information.
And that's basically
what we as librarians do,
we're the information people.
So we make the information
accessible to you so that you can go
on and do what it is you need to do.
[Laughter].
Okay.
[ Applause ]
>> John Cole: Let me
speak for just a second.
One of the thoughts I had
was what she would think
of the new African American
Museum that's finally being built,
because it seems to me that in
many ways she really was kind
of the bibliographic librarian
kind of piece of that history,
promotion of the history, of African
Americans and would get great pride
and probably been behind
in some ways of this.
>> Janet Sims-Wood: She would have.
>> John Cole: Library.
I know a little bit about it, I
know that when that museum opens
for the very first time, the
Smithsonian Library has a library
in every one of the museums, but
they don't normally advertise it
as being open to the public.
And this is the plan now is for
that museum library to be announced
as being open to the public,
which, you know, is again,
kind of a step forward in something
that I'm sure she would
have encouraged.
>> Janet Sims-Wood: Definitely, yes.
>> John Cole: If she
were involved in that.
Well, I would like Janet to
commend you on a couple of things.
One is, I'm glad to know
that Yale has huge backlogs
of unprocessed materials.
>> Janet Sims-Wood: And plus they
are closing I think 15th and 16th,
I guess to hopefully process
some of those collections.
So they do have a backlog.
>> John Cole: Secondly, I like
what you did in the book by talking
about the important -- I mean,
you are gathering together a lot
of material for future work.
And I went through the
list in the back and I came
up with several names
of people I know
and that I remembered,
one is Hiram Davis.
I don't know how many people
here remember Hiram, Fern does.
Who came out to speak at Howard.
He worked at the Library of Congress
for a number of years, briefly,
actually it was about 3 years.
But he came from Michigan State.
But secondly, the idea that your
book is really a step towards a
larger biography of Dorothy,
which you talk about.
Now, are you interested
in doing that biography?
>> Janet Sims-Wood: I think it's
better for somebody younger.
I always say, somebody that
needs tenure [laughter].
>> John Cole: Well, there's
a Dorothy Porter trait
that you share with Dorothy.
But thank you so much.
There is going to be a book
signing out in the foyer outside.
But just to help remember your
day here, I'd like to present you
with as a book person, one
book person to another,
the Center for the Book
super deluxe book bag.
This has wooden handles
and this is made of burlap.
So this doesn't go to everybody.
>> Janet Sims-Wood: He must know
that I collect bags,
as most librarians do.
Thank you so very much,
I appreciate it.
>> John Cole: Thank you.
Let's give her a final round
of applause and meet out back.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at LOC.GOV.