special collections, fisk university library

Special Collections, Fisk University LibraryAuthor(s): Ann Allen ShockleySource: The Library Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Apr., 1988), pp. 151-163Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4308232 .

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RESOURCES FOR SCHOLARS 151

REFERENCES

1. Winston, Michael R. "Moorland-Spingarn Research Center: A Past Revisited, a Pres- ent Reclaimed." New Directions (Summer 1974), pp. 20-25.

2. Kelly Miller Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, box 71-1, folders 13-37. 3. Jesse E. Moorland to Stephen M. Newman, December 18, 1914, Miller Papers, box

71-1, folder 28. 4. "The J. E. Moorland Foundation of the University Library," Howard University Record

10 (January 1916): 10. 5. Porter, Dorothy B. "A Library on the Negro." Amnerican Scholar 7 (Winter 1938): 115-

17. 6. "Negro Materials Catalogued by WPA Project Workers." Hilltop 8 (April 13, 1939): 2. 7. The Arthur B. Spingarn Colection of Negro Authors. Washington, D.C.: Moorland Foun-

dation, Howard University Library, n.d. [ca. 19471. 8. Guide to Processed Collections in the Manuscript Division of the Moorland-Spingarn Research

Center. Washington, D.C.: The Center, 1983. 9. National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United States. Cambridge, Mass.: Chad-

wick-Healey, 1983. 10. The Glen Carrington Colkction: A Guide to the Books, Manuscripts, Music, and Recordings.

Washington, D.C.: Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, 1977.

SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, FISK UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

Ann Allen Shockley4

Asked what he considered to be his major accomplishment as head librarian at Fisk, Arna Bontemps replied: "I suppose that the biggest thing was keeping active the interest in the Black experience and back- ground. We sort of served as a clearing house for information on the subject" [1].

Indeed, the Special Collections area of the Fisk University Library has been a major resource center on the Black experience for scholars, researchers, students, and lay persons throughout the years. There is no specific founding date for the Special Negro Collection, but "the pre- sumption is that when Fisk was founded in 1866 there were then some books by and about the Negro in the 'library'" [2, p. 1]. In 1867, the library occupied a small section of bookcases in the office of George L. White, treasurer and singing teacher. Two of the books on the shelves relating to Africa were Livingstone'sJournals and Speke'sJournal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile.

4. Special Collections, Fisk University Library, Nashville, Tennessee 37203.



152 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY

The Fisk School had just opened for freedmen on January 9, 1866, in a Union Army barracks, under the auspices of the American Missionary Association and the Western Freedmen's Aid Commission. It was named in honor of General Clinton B. Fisk, assistant commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau for Tennessee and Kentucky, who had given it a great deal of time and money. His large mahogany desk is now among the furnishings in the Special Collections room of the library, a vestige of his times.

Exslaves from "seven to seventy" came to the school with the hopes of mastering reading and writing, and as they did, they brought a part of their history with them. In 1871, the school faced a dire financial crisis, and in a last-minute attempt to save it, George L. White, man of many hats and "dreamer of dreams," conceived the idea of taking eleven students on tour to sing for the purpose of raising money.

With no encouragement from General Fisk, White set out with his group on October 6, 1871 (a university holiday since 1876), on an eventful tour that was destined to make history. White christened the group Jubilee Singers, after the Jewish year of Jubilee [3]. The little band of singers was the first to introduce slave songs to the world. They sang at home and abroad before crowned royalty who wept upon hear- ing the soulful sounds of "Steal Away" and "Couldn't Hear Nobody Pray," songs that reflected the lives of the singers. Because the songs were not written down, Theodore F. Steward sought to preserve them by publishingJubilee Songs: As Sung by the Jubilee Singers in 1872.

Not only the heritage of slave songs but also valuable documents left by the singers while on tour were preserved. These now make up the Jubilee Singers Archives and include personal letters, financial records, scrapbooks, photographs, reviews, autographs, programs, newspaper clippings, and memorabilia. Ellen Shepherd, who had arrived at Fisk with six dollars and a trunk, facetiously called a "pie box" by male students, traveled with the group and was its mainstay. She left a diary, 1877-78, that told of her experiences. Diaries of nineteenth-century Black women are extremely rare, and hers is of great value to social and women historians.

America Robinson, another singer, left an assortment of romantic letters written on tour in Europe to her fiance, James Dallas Burrus, a Fisk student. The couple did not marry, but Burrus kept the letters that she had asked him to destroy, and at his death, they were found. Robinson's correspondence is of special importance, for as writer Dorothy Sterling noted: "Little is known about the romantic attachments of the free black women" [4, p. xiii].

As music ambassadors, the Jubilee Singers helped to publicize the university and draw serious attention to it. Knowing of Fisk's reputation,




Robert Todd Lincoln presented the Bible of his father, Abraham Lin- coln, to the school in 1916. The Bible had been given to Lincoln by "The Loyal Coloured People of Baltimore as a token of respect and gratitude" on July 4, 1864. It is now a permanent showpiece in a locked glass case in the Special Collections room.

Book Collection

The library's collection of books and related materials by and about Blacks had its genesis around 1928. A new building was in the offing, and special facilities were being considered for housing Black materials. The aid of foreign dealers was enlisted, and twenty-eight pamphlets and manuscripts dealing with the early history of Black domestic servants in Europe were purchased.

Undoubtedly, the headiness of the New Negro Movement in vogue during the epoch, with its emphasis on Black identity, also stirred interest in collecting Black history. This happened again during the sixties, when the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement had a strong impact on Black library collections.

In 1929, another boost to the formation of a Black collection was provided by Arthur A. Schomburg, who penned a letter from his Brooklyn home to Fisk's president, Thomas Elsa Jones, saying: "I believe the time is ripe for an exhaustive study and presentation of historical material with the Negro in America" [5]. Retired on a pension from the Bankers Trust Company, Schomburg wanted to devote the rest of his time to literary pursuits. Accordingly, he expressed the desire "to be useful in helping Fisk library obtain the best collection on Negro life" [5].

Jones referred Schomburg's letter to Louis Shores, Fisk librarian, and received back Shores's concurrence with Schomburg: "A beginning in building up our Negro collection should now be made" [6]. Since the library did not have special funds for purchasing Black materials, Shores suggested seeking foundation assistance.

Two years later, Charles S. Johnson, godfather of the New Negro Movement and now a research professor in sociology at Fisk, joined Jones in writing to Frederick P. Keppel of the Carnegie Corporation for funds to secure the "experience" of Schomburg for the library's program to assemble a "working collection of Afro-Americana" that would support the newly developing research programs of the university [7].

Since 1929, Schomburg had been used by Fisk as a consultant for appraising private collections that the school was interested in purchasing. Eventually, he was appointed curator of the Negro Collection, appearing in the university's catalog for the year 1931-32. During this




time, he laid the basis for developing a collection of African and Afro- American materials duplicating his own.

The Depression of the thirties had repercussions on the university and the library. Book purchasing and library personnel were reduced, which had a "very drastic effect on the Negro Collection." Schomburg's services had "to be dispensed with before he was able to complete his buying programs, or to put into shape all of the material already bought" [8, p. 33].

A renewed surge of interest in the collection did not occur until 1936, under the administration of Carl White, who, like Shores, was white. He wanted Fisk to become the center for Black research in the south. To accomplish this, he persuaded the Nashville Committee on Delimitation of Fields of Interest (DFI), created by the Nashville Library Club in 1935 with representatives from all major libraries in the city, to withdraw from this field in deference to Fisk.

The following year, Fisk purchased the library of the Southern YMCA Graduate School, which had "three thousand or more books by and about the Negro, and several more dealing with race relations" [9, p. 5]. The school, headed by W. D. Weatherford, "was the first in the area to do intensive buying in the field of race problems" [10, p. 47]. Specializ- ing in material dealing with the American Negro prior to 1865, the YMCA collection merged with Fisk's, which focused on material relating to the Negro in America since 1865 [10, p. 47].

This purchase brought "to a head the problem which had long been existent in the library, that of adequate subject headings for the catalog- ing of books by and about the Negro" [9, p. 5], and in 1937, Frances L. Yokum, a Fisk cataloger, devised and published A List of Subect Headings for Books by and about the Negro (1940), the first of its kind.

When Arna Bontemps came aboard as head librarian in 1943, the Negro Collection was substantially enhanced by E. R. Alexander, who established the Ernest R. Alexander Collection of Negroana, named in honor of her husband, a 1914 Fisk graduate and a specialist in dermatol- ogy at New York City's Harlem Hospital. Its purpose was to allow the Fisk Library to acquire some of the rare and valuable items that it lacked in the field of Negro history and achievement. The first book acquired was Les ceneles (1845), an anthology of poetry by free Blacks of New Orleans, edited by Armand Lanusse. Not more than four or five copies had been preserved, and Fisk's "caused a mild panic among certain antiquarians of New Orleans," according to Bontemps [11, p. 2]. Addi- tional rare items procured were Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), the first book of poems published by a Black; William Wells Brown's Clotel, or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853), the first novel by an




American Black, published in London; and Benjamin Banneker's Penn- sylvania, Delaware and Maryland Almanack of 1792.

Backed by money and enthusiasm, the Negro Collection continued to grow in national reputation, drawing additional gifts and contributions. Among the new acquisitions were a rare edited Bible entitled Parts of the Holy Bible Selected for the Use of the Negro Slaves in the British West-Indies Islands (1808); Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends (1857), which was the second novel by a Black, again published in London; and Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, In a Two-Story White House, North: Showing that Slavery's Shadows Fall Even There (1859), by Harriet E. Wilson, which was recently identified as the first novel published by a Black and a Black woman in the United States.

In addition to over 51,000 book titles by and about the Negro in America, Africa, and the Caribbean, the Special Collections include newspapers, journals, magazines, theses, dissertations, microfilm, and phonograph records [12].

Archives

Further enhancing the Special Collections are ninety-five archival and manuscript collections. The ground was laid for an archival program in 1947, when Dwight Wilson, who had read of Fisk's having received archival records, wrote to Charles S. Johnson, the first Black president of Fisk, with a plan for setting up a university archive. Wilson pointed out: "Though many large and small white colleges have archives, no Negro college has yet taken this step towards the preservation of its records" [13].

Johnson responded by offering Wilson the position of university ar- chivist; a contract was issued on March 15, 1948, and Wilson assumed the position on April 1 of the same year.

He had degrees from Howard and Allen Universities and had for- merly worked for the National Archives, serving with the Allied Force Records Administration. In a memo to the faculty and staff concerning Wilson's appointment, Johnson stated that his duties were "to locate, classify and preserve all University archival materials and to formulate measures for providing security for the records" [14].

An Archival Council was instituted by Johnson, and an Archives Charter was structured to establish officially the University Archives on May 1, 1948, approved by the council and board of trustees. At an annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists in Raleigh, North Carolina, October 1948, John M. Jennings of the Virginia Historical Society lauded the charter as "the most comprehensive statement of




archival aims ever articulated by an American institution of learning" [15]. As a result of its archival program, in 1948, Fisk became the first Black university to belong to the Society of American Archivists.

Wilson brought additional laurels to Fisk when he was made chairman of the Committee on College and University Archives of the Society of American Archivists in February 1949. The position was created by the society's president because of Wilson's "work in locating all the university archivists and attempting to set up some method of exchanging ideas and problems" [16]. The function of the committee was to formulate standards for university archives and to bring about appointments of archivists in academic institutions.

Through the years, the archive has grown in quantity and stature, housing the papers of past presidents, deans, faculty, and adminis- trators. Among these are the presidential papers of Charles S. Johnson, as well as those he accumulated when serving as chair of the sociology department. Johnson had a brilliant, varied career as an eminent sociologist, editor of Opportunity magazine of the National Urban League, and author of several books, including The Collapse of the Cotton Tenancy (1934), Shadow of the Plantation (1934), and The Negro College Graduate (1938), which won the Anisfield Award. When eulogizing him, John- son's colleague, Fred Brownlee, wrote: "We shared a common faith in the solidarity of the human race and worked for an inclusive cooperative world society in which everyone would be free to perform the full functions of personality" [17, p. 9]. Johnson's voluminous collection of presidential and social science papers attest to the greatness of the man and his work. There are 450 manuscript boxes containing correspondence, speeches, unpublished and published writings, faculty/staff records, accounts, receipts, newspaper clippings, and numerous other items.

The papers of a second renowned sociologist in the field of race relations, George Edmund Haynes, Fisk graduate of 1903, join John- son's on the archival shelves. Haynes was the first Black graduate of the New York School of Social Work, and the first Black to be awarded the Ph.D. degree by Columbia University. Haynes cofounded the National Urban League in 1910 and was its first executive director; he also organized the Department of Social Science at Fisk between 1910 and 1921. His collection numbers 3,600 items in the form of correspondence, classroom lectures, notes, book reviews, memos, and bills. An author, he published such works as The Clinical Approach to Race Relations (1946), The Negro at Work in New York (1912), and Migration of Negroes into Northern Cities (1917).

Supplementing the assemblage of papers are a complete run of Fisk's college catalogs dating back to the first one of 1867 and the first faculty




publication, The Expositor, of 1878; in 1883 The Expositor developed in- to the Fisk Herald, a student literary magazine, which once had W. E. B. Du Bois as editor and published short stories by Frank Yerby and William Demby. In addition are student newspapers and underground publications; the Fisk News alumni magazine; an early Fisk Cookbook of faculty and staff recipes; a thirties Yell book for football games; and the Fisk Blue Book of the forties that ladled out "do's" and "don'ts" for Fisk men and women and was the brunt of many student bon mots. All of these materials, coupled with commencement and convocation programs and documents relating to special activities, make up the Fiskiana Collection.

Besides the University Archives, there are records of outside organi- zations. The Julius Rosenwald Fund Archives of 150,000 items reflect the work of the Fund during 1928-48. Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck and Company in 1909, was a philanthropist who benefited Black scholars, artists, writers, educators, scientists, sociolo- gists, and anthropologists. His money went to aid rural southern Black schools, libraries, hospitals, and educational institutions, including Fisk.

After Rosenwald met Booker T. Washington in 1911, Blacks became the major recipients of his benevolence. The collection is a gold mine for researchers; it abounds in photographs of early rural schools; correspondence; and records of financial aid extended to Black hospitals and to such individuals as Zora Neale Hurston, John Hope Franklin, Claude McKay, and James Baldwin. The book titled Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (1981), by James Howard Jones, drew on documents in the Rosenwald Collection.

A recently acquired archival collection is that of the Grand Boule of the Sigma Pi Phi fraternity, the first national fraternity for Black college graduates, founded on May 15, 1904, in Philadelphia. The collection contains correspondence, histories of chapters, minutes, programs, financial reports, and newsletters.

Complementing the archival materials are manuscript collections of personal papers. An outstanding literary collection in this group is that of Charles W. Chesnutt, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writer, who was the first Black fiction writer to receive serious attention. Chesnutt published in the Atlantic Monthly as early as 1887 and wrote such works as The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories (1899), The House behind the Cedars (1900), and The Marrow of Tradition (1901). The collection holds published and unpublished works, scrapbooks, reviews, newspaper clippings, a diary, and correspondence with, among others, Ida B. Wells Barnett, George Washington Cable, Du Bois, Oswald Garrison, Langston Hughes, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Booker T. Washington. The late Sylvia Render, Afro-American specialist for the




Library of Congress and a Chesnutt scholar, was a Fisk collection sitter at various times. Out of this came her work, The Short Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt (1974). When I asked her how she became interested in Ches- nutt, she replied, "Oh, he was just here waiting for me!" Chesnutt's private library is on view in the Special Collections room with the Spin- garn medal that he was awarded in July 1928.

The personal papers of W. E. B. Du Bois, internationally known scholar and Fisk graduate (1888), are also housed in the manuscript division. Second in size only to the University of Massachusetts's Du Bois collection at Amherst, it numbers 128 boxes of correspondence, publications, and notebooks, handbills, programs, and memorabilia.

Through the efforts of Thomas Elsa Jones, the last white president of Fisk and predecessor of Charles S. Johnson, prominent scholars and artists were attracted to the university, including Johnson himself. As- sisted by private funding, Jones secured the services of James Weldon Johnson in 1931 to occupy the Adam K. Spence Chair of Creative Literature. Johnson was a nationally known writer, field secretary for the NAACP, a lawyer, and U.S. Consul to Venezuela and Nicaragua. His novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), is now considered a classic. The Johnson collection comprises biographical data, correspondence, newspaper clippings, speeches, writings, poems, course outlines, programs, his death mask, and sheet music by Johnson himself, Bob Cole, and J. Rosamond Johnson.

In 1929, Charles S. Johnson asked Aaron Douglas, one of the leading Harlem Renaissance artists, to talk with President Jones about painting murals on the walls of the former Erastus Milo Cravath Library. The discussion went well, and the following year, Douglas returned to begin his task of painting what he called his "panorama of the development of black people in this hemisphere." He remained to chair the art department until his retirement in 1966. The contribution of Douglas to Afro- American art is memorialized in his personal papers, including sketches, programs, correspondence, speeches, and a short unpublished autobiography.

Music Collections

The legacy of the Fisk Jubilee Singers left an indelible imprint on Afro- American music history, and in part because of this, Fisk has received a number of valuable musical collections as gifts. For example, the George Gershwin Memorial Collection of Music and Musical Literature was received from Carl Van Vechten; it includes books on music, programs, musical scores, clippings, sheet music, and eleven volumes of photo-




graph portfolios. Van Vechten explained his reason for giving the collection to Fisk and naming it after his friend: "The name of Gershwin was intended not only to honor a personal friend but also to recall the fact that this American belonged to a minority group, that as a composer he worked successfully in both the popular and the classical fields, and that much of his best music was inspired by Negro rhythms" [18, p. 7].

The John W. Work family name is prominent in the history of Black music and the university itself. John W. Work I1 (Fisk B.A., 1895, and M.A., 1898), was professor of Latin and history, as well as director of the Jubilee Singers. He is looked upon by scholars as "the rescuer of Negro folk song" because of his efforts to preserve Black religious folk music; he wrote the pioneer work Folk Song of the American Negro (1915), which "represents one of the first extensive studies of the origin and development of religious Black folk music by a descendant of an ex-slave who lived during the era in which many of the songs originated" [19, p. 32].

Like his father, John W. Work III (Fisk B.A., 1923) directed the Jubilee Singers; he also chaired the music department. Work expanded on his father's book by including secular songs in American Negro Songs: A Comprehensive Collection of 230 Folk Songs, Religious and Secular (1940). The John W. Work III Collection of 2,213 items has biographical information, general and personal correspondence, speeches, compositions, family history, and sheet music. It is a testament to a musical family that pioneered in preserving the roots of Black music. William Garcia Burres did much of his research in this collection for his dissertation, "The Life and Choral Music of John Wesley Work (1901-1967)."

There are additional music collections of Scott Joplin, ragtime composer and pianist; W. C. Handy, "Father of the Blues"; Thomas Dorsey, "Father of Modern Gospel Music"; and J. C. Johnson, musician and composer, who wrote songs for the legendary blues singer, Bessie Smith, of which one was her famous "Empty Bed Blues."

Political and Social History Collections

Another collection centers on William Levi Dawson, a Fisk graduate of 1909 and a Congressman from Chicago. The first Black to head a committee in the House of Representatives, Dawson's political slogan was, "Don't get mad, get smart." Besides correspondence with major political U.S. figures from the late 1930s to the 1960s, among them Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, and Richard Daley, the collection includes speeches, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, photographs, and artifacts.

Around 1916, a Jamaican named Marcus Garvey came to New York




and set up a chapter of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which he had begun in his native country. The association grew to over thirty branches by 1919, drawing its membership from the Blacks in the lower socioeconomic stratum. Garvey expounded on Black pride and promoted a back-to-Africa movement, publishing a newspaper, The Negro World, to espouse his philosophy. The Marcus Garvey Memorial Collection contains materials brought together by his second wife, Amy Jacques, and has supported the research of Robert Hill, who edits Garvey's works.

The papers of another Jamaican, Joel Augustus Rogers, are also held in the manuscript collections. Rogers was a lay historian and publisher who became the first Black war correspondent when he covered the Italo-Ethiopian War for the Pittsburgh-Courier. He is known for World's Great Men of Color (1946-47), 100 Amazing Facts about the Negro (1934), the three-volume Sex and Race (1940), and other publications.

The Civil Rights Movement inspired the Women's Movement and caused an awakening to the importance of documenting both women's and Black history. In 1970, under my curatorship, the Special Collec- tions began actively to solicit the papers of Black women. There were already a few collections, one of which had belonged to Pauline E. Hopkins, who was a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novelist, short story writer, editor, and musician. Today, Hopkins has been given her proper recognition as a contributor to the Afro-American literary tradition and is the focus of several scholarly articles.

The papers of Constance Fisher, a 1924 Fisk graduate and early Minneapolis social worker, have been used by social and family historians. The warm, endearing letters between Constance and her father, Isaac, are particularly valuable.

Augmenting the women's collection are the papers of Dorothy L. Brown, who was the first Black female surgeon in the south and the first Black woman to serve in the Tennessee legislature; Ophelia Settle Egypt, sociologist, author and Fisk staff member; GraceJames, pediatrician and first Black female appointed to the Louisville, Kentucky, Medical School faculty; Naomi Long Madgett, poet and publisher; and Eileen Southern, musicologist and author. The research papers and tapes used by historian Gerda Lerner in the writing of Black Women in White America (1972) also bring distinction to the collections.

A most unusual woman's collection for a predominantly Black school to hold is that of Yorkshire author and social reformer Winifred Holtby, whose novel, South Riding, was made into a BBC production. The Winifred Holtby Memorial Collection was given to Fisk in 1955 by English bibliographer Geoffrey Handley-Taylor "because of Winifred's




great fight for racial tolerance" (quoted in [20]). The place where Winifred visited in 1926 and found racial conditions so repugnant to her was South Africa, whose repressions still remain. Holtby is said to have confided to her friend, the writer Vera Brittain, that she had written literally millions of words about native affairs, a fight that "absorbed her time, her energy, and her money" [21]. The collection of nine boxes contains writings, correspondence, clippings, manuscripts, photographs, and tapes.

Oral History Collection

Complementing the primary source collections is the Black Oral History Collection, which I instituted in 1970. Collecting interviews was not a wholly new activity at Fisk, for in 1929-30, Charles S. Johnson, who was then in the sociology department, initiated a project to interview exslaves in Tennessee and Kentucky, an undertaking that predated the famous WPA interviews. Ophelia Settle Egypt was the chief interviewer. Unlike the interviewers of today, she had no handy tape recorder and instead relied on a stenographer. The narratives were gathered into a book titled The Unwritten History of Slavery: Autobiographical Account of Negro Ex-Slaves (1945).

The Black Oral History Program is designed to interview people who have been eyewitnesses or contributors to the Black experience in America [22]. The interviews are autobiographical, biographical, and topical in scope, and conducted with persons from all walks of life. The program was strengthened in 1971-73 by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which helped expand its operations.

The collection contains over 700 interviews, including many arranged into subject series, such as those on Black women, Blacks in the Catholic church, Black Vietnam War veterans, all-Black towns and Black physi- cists. Librarians, musicians, literary figures, educators, politicians, ath- letes, artists, and Fisk alumni, students, and staff have been interviewed. Fisk was the first to interview Charlie Smith, at one time the oldest living person in the United States and an exslave. The recollections of Arna Bontemps were preserved in an interview prior to his untimely death while working on his autobiography, as well as those of Aaron Douglass and Shirley Graham Du Bois, all of whom are now deceased.

Supplementing the collection are tapes donated by individuals en- gaged in independent research for books, theses, or dissertations. An audio collection of 136 tapes of special community programs and cam- pus concerts, lectures, and poetry readings is housed in the oral history




office. The Special Collections division also is a repository for transcripts of interviews carried out through the Black Women's Oral History project of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America [23].

The Fisk University Library's Special Collections house a wealth of Black historical resources. They have been used by scholars and students from surrounding institutions, as well as by national and international scholars, who have traveled to the United States expressly to do research at Fisk and have stayed for as long as a year.

REFERENCES

1. Arna Bontemps. Interview by Ann Allen Shockley, July 14, 1972. Tape recording, Fisk University Library, Special Collections, Nashville, Tenn.

2. Cazort, Jean. Special Colkctions in the Erastus Milo Cravath Memorial Library. Nashville, Tenn.: Fisk University, 1967.

3. Marsh, J. B. T. The Story of the Jubilee Singers, with Their Songs. Rev. ed. Boston: Houghton, Osgood, & Co., 1880.

4. Sterling, Dorothy, ed. We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1984.

5. Arthur A. Schomburg to Thomas Elsa Jones, September 9, 1929, Jones Papers, Special Collections, Fisk University Library.

6. Louis Shores to Thomas Elsa Jones, September 19, 1929, Jones Papers, Special Collections, Fisk University Library.

7. Charles S. Johnson to Frederick P. Kippel, January 14, 1931, Jones Papers, Special Collections, Fisk University Library.

8. Gleason, Eliza. "A History of the Fisk University Library." Master's thesis, University of Illinois, 1931.

9. Yokum, Frances L. A List of Subject Headings by and about the Negro. New York: H. W. Wilson Co., 1940.

10. Williams, Joan. "Some Special Collections in the Fisk University Library," Tennessee Librarian 16 (Winter 1964): 47.

11. Fisk University Library: The E. R. Alexander Collection of Negroana. Nashville, Tenn.: Fisk University Library, 1945.

12. Fisk University. Dictionary Catalog of the Negro Colkction of the Fisk University Library. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1974.

13. Dwight S. Wilson to Charles S. Johnson, December 18, 1947, Johnson Papers, Special Collections, Fisk University Library.

14. Charles S. Johnson to Staff, May 21, 1948, Johnson Papers, Special Collections, Fisk University Library.

15. Wilson, Dwight. "Report on Meeting of the SAA," n.d., Johnson Papers, Special Collections, Fisk University Library.

16. Wilson, Dwight. "Review of Personal Activities, April, 1948-March 1, 1949," Johnson Papers, Special Collections, Fisk University Library.

17. Valien, Mrs. Preston. Charrks SpurgeonJohnson. n.p., [1959]. 18. Bontemps, Arna. Sekected Items from the George Gershwin Memorial Collection of Music and

Musical Literature. Nashville, Tenn.: Fisk University, 1947.




19. Burres, William Garcia. "The Life and Choral Music of John Wesley Work (1901- 1907)." Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1980.

20. Shockley, Ann Allen. "Winifred Holtby: In Dedication." BANC 3-4 (June- December 1973): i.

21. Berry, Paul. "Winifred Holtby, 1898-1925, an Appreciation." BANC 3-4 (June- December 1973): 18.

22. Shockley, Ann Allen. "Oral History: A Research Tool for Black History." Negro History Bulletin 41 (January-February 1978): 787-89.

23. Tucker, Veronica E. An Annotated Bibliography of the Fisk Library's Black Oral History Collection. Nashville, Tenn.: Fisk University Library, 1974.



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