Ernestine Rose | |
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| Born | March 19, 1880  Bridgehampton |
| Died | March 28, 1961 (aged 81) |
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| Occupation | Librarian |
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Ernestine Rose (March 19, 1880 – March 28, 1961) was a librarian at the New York Public Library responsible for the purchase and incorporation of the Arthur A. Schomburg collection. [1]
Ernestine Rose was born on March 19, 1880, in Bridgehampton, New York, and named after Ernestine Polowsky Rose, a nineteenth-century feminist. [2] [3] She studied at Wesleyan University and the New York State Library School at Albany, where she graduated in 1904. During her study at the New York State Library School, she worked a summer at a branch of the New York Public Library (NYPL) on the Lower East Side during her college education where she was exposed to Russian-Jewish immigrants and their culture. She emphasized programs that would help immigrants adjust to a new country rather than programs design to "Americanize" them, as was the norm at the time. [2]
During World War I, Rose served as director of hospital libraries for the American Library Association (ALA). [2] Returning to New York, in 1915, she served as head librarian at the Seward Park Branch, located in a Jewish immigrant community of New York City, until 1917. At Seward Park, she encouraged her assistants to become well versed in Jewish, Yiddish and Russian holidays, customs, and literature, intending to make them sensitive to the surrounding community. [3]
Rose became the branch librarian at the 135th Street Branch in Harlem in 1920. The branch had opened in 1905 when the neighborhood was inhabited by middle-class Jews, but a migration of southern Blacks, Caribbean, and South American Blacks following World War I changed the neighborhood to be a majority African-American neighborhood by the time Rose was appointed. [2] The Harlem Renaissance of the time made Harlem a destination for black writers, artists, musicians, and scholars. [4] Rose immediately noted that many cultural institutions weren't working with the new community and she wanted to make the library an integral part of the community that would provide guidance and promote racial pride. [2] Her first role was to integrate the library staff, hiring four new library assistants of color, starting with Catherine Allen Latimer and including Pura Belpre and Nella Larsen Imes. [2] [5] She also worked to encourage community groups to hold meetings, reading and organized story hours, free public lectures, exhibitions of Black artists and sculptors and a reference collection of Black literature. [2] [6]
In 1922, Rose worked with the ALA to organize a group of librarians to exchange ideas and discuss issues of working with African Americans. [2]
In 1924, Rose worked with Franklin F. Hopper, chief of the circulation department of the Central Branch, the National Urban League, and the American Association for Adult Education to secure a combined $15,000 grant from the Rosenwald Fund and the Carnegie Corporation. They formed the Harlem Committee, whose goals were to use the funds to develop cultural, vocational, and social programs within the Harlem community. They developed programs featuring well-known speakers, vocational classes through the YWCA and the Urban League. In 1926, the committee oversaw the purchase the Arthur A. Schomburg collection to incorporate into The Division of Negro Literature and History, later becoming the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, at the library. [7] [8] [9] [10] The collection included "over 5,000 volume[s], 3,000 manuscripts, 2,000 etchings and portraits and several thousand pamphlets" showcasing the history and culture of African Americans. The grant also made possible the hiring of Schomburg to head the collection. [10] [11]
In 1933, the library worked with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to host a writers project. [8]
Rose retired from the NYPL in 1942. [2]
Nellallitea "Nella" Larsen was an American novelist. Working as a nurse and a librarian, she published two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), and a few short stories. Though her literary output was scant, she earned recognition by her contemporaries.
The New York Public Library (NYPL) is a public library system in New York City. With nearly 53 million items and 92 locations, the New York Public Library is the second largest public library in the United States and the fourth largest in the world. It is a private, non-governmental, independently managed, nonprofit corporation operating with both private and public financing.
Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, was a historian, writer, collector, and activist. Schomburg was a Puerto Rican of African and German descent. He moved to the United States in 1891, where he researched and raised awareness of the contributions that Afro-Latin Americans and African Americans have made to society. He was an important intellectual figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Over the years, he collected literature, art, slave narratives, and other materials of African history, which were purchased to become the basis of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, named in his honor, at the New York Public Library (NYPL) branch in Harlem.
John Edward Bruce, also known as Bruce Grit or J. E. Bruce-Grit, was an American journalist, historian, writer, orator, civil rights activist and Pan-African nationalist. He was born a slave in Maryland; as an adult, he founded numerous newspapers along the East Coast, as well as co-founding the Negro Society for Historical Research in New York.
The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is a research library of the New York Public Library (NYPL) and an archive repository for information on people of African descent worldwide. Located at 515 Malcolm X Boulevard between West 135th and 136th Streets in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, it has, almost from its inception, been an integral part of the Harlem community. It is named for Afro-Puerto Rican scholar Arturo Alfonso Schomburg.
Regina M. Anderson was an American playwright and librarian. She was of Native American, Jewish, East Indian, Swedish, and other European ancestry ; one of her grandparents was of African descent, born in Madagascar. Despite her own identification of her race as "American," she was perceived to be African-American by others. Influenced by Ida B. Wells and the lack of Black history teachings in school, Anderson became a key member of the Harlem Renaissance.
The American Negro Theatre (ANT) was co-founded on June 5, 1940 by playwright Abram Hill and actor Frederick O'Neal. Determined to build a "people's theatre", they were inspired by the Federal Theatre Project's Negro Unit in Harlem and by W. E. B. Du Bois' "four fundamental principles" of Black drama: that it should be by, about, for, and near African Americans.
Augusta Braxton Baker was an American librarian and storyteller. She was known for her contributions to children's literature, especially regarding the portrayal of Black Americans in works for children.
Dorothy Louise Porter Wesley was a librarian, bibliographer and curator, who built the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University into a world-class research collection. She was the first African American to receive a library science degree from Columbia University. Porter published numerous bibliographies on African-American history. When she realized that the Dewey Decimal System had only two classification numbers for African Americans, one for slavery and one for colonization, she created a new classification system that ordered books by genre and author.
Pura Teresa Belpré y Nogueras was an Afro-Puerto Rican educator who served as the first Puerto Rican librarian in New York City. She was also a writer, collector of folktales, and puppeteer.
Vivian Gordon Harsh was an American librarian. Harsh is noted as the Chicago Public Library (CPL) system's first African American librarian, being assigned to the position on February 26, 1924. Harsh served as a librarian for 34 years until retiring in 1958. During her career, she began an extensive archive on African American history and culture, which is now known as, the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection, at the CPL.
Charlemae Hill Rollins was a pioneering librarian, writer and storyteller in the area of African-American literature. During her thirty-one years as head librarian of the children's department at the Chicago Public Library as well as after her retirement, she instituted substantial reforms in children's literature.
Sadie Peterson Delaney was the chief librarian of the Veterans Administration Hospital in Tuskegee, Alabama, for 34 years. She is well known as a pioneer for her work with bibliotherapy.
Jean Blackwell Hutson was an American librarian, archivist, writer, curator, educator, and later chief of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The Schomburg Center dedicated their Research and Reference Division in honor of Hutson.
Romana Javitz was an American artist, librarian, and Superintendent of the Picture Collection at the New York Public Library.
Catherine Allen Latimer was the New York Public Library's first African-American librarian. She was a notable authority on bibliographies of African-American life and instrumental in forming the library's Division of Negro History, Literature and Prints.
Wendell L. Wray was an American librarian and educator who was dedicated to preserving African-American history through oral history. He was a professor at the University of Pittsburgh from 1973 to 1988, with a break from 1981 to 1983 while he served as the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Henry 'Harry' Albro Williamson was a postal worker and a prolific researcher and writer on the subject of Freemasonry.
The Negro Society for Historical Research (NSHR) was an organization founded by John Edward Bruce and Arthur Alfonso Schomburg in 1911.
Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Black Poets of the Twenties: Anthology of Black Verse is a 1927 poetry anthology that was edited by Countee Cullen. It has been republished at least three times, in 1955, 1974, and 1995 and included works by thirty-eight African-American poets, including Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, and Claude McKay. The anthology also includes biographical sketches of the poets whose work is included in the book.
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