While the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library building was closed to the public during the height of the pandemic, the building’s ground floor windows became a platform for sharing images from the collections, with a display celebrating the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters installed on the exterior glass in November 2020, remaining on view through July 24, 2024.
On the building’s east side, facing Hewitt Quadrangle, the new exhibition began with text from the opening lines of Langston Hughes’s poem, “Let America Be America Again.” The poem by Langston Hughes was first published in Esquire in 1936 and, revised, in a collection of his poetry, A New Song, in 1938. The Langston Hughes Papers are the single most consulted archive in the Beinecke Library. Given by him beginning in 1941 and continuing throughout his life, they are part of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection.
Watch: Professor Willie Jennings reads “Let America Be America Again”
To the right of that text were a series of images from color photographs taken by Carl Van Vechten. He was the founder of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection with support and donations by many authors, artists, and activists, including some pictured on the windows, such as Hughes, Dorothy Peterson, Harold Jackman, Grace Nail Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Paul Robeson. Other images show writers represented in Beinecke Library archival collections, including James Baldwin, Margaret Bonds, Countee Cullen, and Richard Wright, and other great civic and cultural leaders such as Marian Anderson, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Ella Fitzgerald.
The 14 photographs shown in the display are among the hundreds of Van Vechten photographs visible to all in the Beinecke Library digital collections – and among the tens of thousands of images from the overall James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters and the more than one million total images of material across Beinecke Library collections.
Read: Emily Bernard on Carl Van Vechten
The display was organized in fall 2020 by Beinecke Library staff and designed by the Office of the University Printer.
Watch: Lift Every Voice by Shades of Yale 2021
On the north side of the building, toward Grove Street, the library has installed a dsiplay, “We hold these truths … ” that feature images related to Declaration of Independence, Frederick Douglass’s 1852 Oration (“What to the Slave is the Fourth of July”), and the Woman’s Right Convention of 1848.
More information on We hold these truths …
Previously, on the south side of the building, toward Wall Street, vinyl images showed James Weldon Johnson in an iconic black and white photograph by Van Vechten, along with items from the James Weldon Johnson and Grace Nail Johnson Papers related to “Lift Every Voice and Sing” including: the lyrics from his notebooks, 1900; a small-scale reproduction of Augusta Savage’s plaster sculpture “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” 1939; and sheet music, 1928, with presentation inscription from J. Rosamond Johnson, James Weldon Johnson’s brother and musical partner.
Article updated July 2024