With Love from the Library: Diversity in Libraries

Remembering the Howard University Librarian Who Decolonized the Way Books Were Catalogued. Dorothy Porter challenged the racial bias in the Dewey Decimal System, putting black scholars alongside white colleagues

There’s a building in Harlem that houses, some say, the largest collection of Black history in the world. At the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, you can see and touch original documents like the Malcolm X papers and the Nate King Cole papers. The center also holds specialized exhibits, film screenings, and panel discussions. The center is named after Arturo Schomburg, who sold his personal collection of books, pamphlets, manuscripts, and data to the New York Public Library in 1926.

Pura Belpré (1899-1982), was born in Puerto Rico. She came to New York in 1920 and joined the New York Public Library in 1921, as a Hispanic Assistant at the 135th Street Branch (renamed the Countee Cullen Branch in 1951). With a passion to reach out to the growing Puerto Rican community in Upper Manhattan, she introduced bilingual storytime where she retold stories from her own childhood in Puerto Rico. This served as a familiar medium to attract new families settling into their communities, into the library.