How a woman born in rural Virginia built one of the world’s greatest African American research collections.
Born in Warrenton, Virginia in 1905, Dorothy Porter Wesley would become one of the most influential figures in African American librarianship. As curator of Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, she transformed a modest collection into one of the world’s leading archives of Black history and culture. Her meticulous bibliographies, groundbreaking classification systems, and unshakable belief in preserving African American stories continue to influence scholarship today.
The books were there, but they were hidden.
In the stacks of America’s libraries during the early 20th century, works by Black authors—or books about Black life—were either absent or buried. If they appeared at all, they were often shoved into the “900s” of the Dewey Decimal System, a vague catch-all for “history” that left them essentially unclassified. The system, designed to arrange knowledge into neat categories, had its own built-in preferences: Christianity at the center of religion, women as a subtopic under family, homosexuality placed under pathology. Race—particularly Black history—was barely acknowledged.
Dorothy Porter Wesley noticed. And she wasn’t about to leave it that way.
Born in Warrenton, Virginia, in 1905, Dorothy grew up in a world where the written record of Black achievement was scattered, incomplete, and often invisible in public archives. She graduated from Howard University in 1928 with a degree in English and history, then began working at the New York Public Library in its Schomburg Collection of Black literature and history. There, under the guidance of a senior librarian, she began to imagine something revolutionary: a classification system that could actually capture the depth and breadth of the Black experience.
In 1932, she became the first Black woman to earn a master’s degree in library science from Columbia University. But she had already started her most important work two years earlier, when she returned to Howard University as head librarian of the Moorland Foundation (later the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center). The collection had rich materials but little organization—and Dorothy knew the Dewey Decimal System wouldn’t work for scholars researching Black life.
Her philosophy was simple but radical: a book should be classified according to its subject matter, not lumped into a generic racial category. A history book by a Black author belonged in the history section. A novel belonged in literature. Anthropology, politics, music—all deserved their proper place.
Over the next four decades, Dorothy built Howard’s collection into one of the world’s premier archives of the African American experience. Students and scholars from around the globe came to her for help—including Langston Hughes, John Hope Franklin, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. She not only preserved the record of Black history—she made it accessible, visible, and central.
In the end, Dorothy Porter Wesley didn’t just create a library system. She reclaimed a culture from the margins and placed it squarely in the center of knowledge.
Dorothy Porter Wesley at Howard University: Building a Legacy of Black History (American Heritage)
American Pulp Culture 