African American Studies at Beinecke Library

Collections, events, and news from the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters.

  • Baldwin Set to Music at Arts & Ideas (The Arts Paper)

    June 18, 2024

    The concert held particular weight in its coincidence with the birthday of writer and civil rights activist James Welden Johnson, for whom Beinecke’s collection of materials related to African American politics and culture is named. The James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection contains an original copy of Johnson’s lyrics for “Lift Every Voice and Sing”—colloquially the Black National Anthem—as well James Baldwin’s letters, among other things. “There are lots of materials related to liberation in this library,” said Beinecke’s Community Engagement Director Michael Morand before the performance. “All are welcome to do research in this place.” (To access materials held in the Beinecke, members of the public should register with the Yale library system.) Morand first encountered Harris at Bill Lowe’s performance at the Beinecke for last year’s Arts & Ideas festival, where Harris played piano. Afterwards, Morand spoke with Harris about his own work and thought that the Baldwin theme related perfectly to Beinecke’s materials on the author as well as the Baldwin centennial. “I had high expectations,” Morand said after the performance. “But this was phenomenal.”

  • Beinecke Jazz Reframes Reality (New Haven Independent)

    June 18, 2024

    As the music swelled to a triumphant peak, Harris encouraged the audience to clap along, which many had already been doing. Then he urged them to their feet, until the entire room was dancing in place. This also meant they were in exactly the right position for a standing ovation, which, as the movement ended, they happily gave. Harris hoped his audience left with a feeling of deep meaning, from both Baldwin and himself. ​“The words of Baldwin that move them, I hope my music moves them in the same way,” he said. If the bright smiles and energetic applause were anything to go by, he had succeeded in his mission.

  • Bringing truth to light

    May 28, 2024

    “Shining Light on Truth: New Haven, Yale, and Slavery” is free and open to the public through August 2024. The New Haven Museum, located at 114 Whitney Avenue in New Haven, is open Wednesday through Friday, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and Saturday, noon to 5:00 p.m.

  • Yale Film Archive Adds Sound to Silents (New Haven Independent)

    April 5, 2024

    As Yale Film Archive launches into the last quarter of its 2024 spring semester programming, it offered something a little different on Thursday evening: silent films that each had a special distinction. The first, presented in conjunction with the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, was a selection of Solomon Sir Jones Films from 1924 to 1928 that are currently a part of the library’s holdings. The second was a showing of Within Our Gates, a 1920 film written, produced, and directed by Oscar Micheaux; it’s the oldest known surviving film with a Black director. One more bonus: both films on this evening were accompanied by live music, played by pianist Donald Sosin.

  • The Rent Was Too High So They Threw a Party (New York Times)

    March 28, 2024

    Minnie Pindar was at home in Harlem on a Saturday in 1929, and she had a party to throw. She and her sister, Lucibelle Pindar, had passed out invitations, printed on cheap, white card stock, promising a good time in their ground floor apartment at 149 West 117th Street. “Refreshments Just It” and “Music Won’t Quit,” the invitation read. Their invitation, one of dozens of similar party invitations tucked into the Langston Hughes papers at Yale’s Beinecke Library, hints at the rich but difficult lives of Black people living in New York at the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance.

  • The Dinner Party That Started the Harlem Renaissance (New York Times)

    March 21, 2024

    On March 21, 1924, Jessie Fauset sat inside the Civic Club in downtown Manhattan, wondering how the party for her debut novel had been commandeered. The celebration around her was originally intended to honor that book, “There Is Confusion.” But Charles S. Johnson and Alain Locke thought the dinner could serve a larger purpose. What if the two Black academic titans invited the best and brightest of the Harlem creative and political scene? What if, over a spread of fine food and drink, they brought together African American talent and white purveyors of culture? If they could marry the talent all around them with the opportunity that was so elusive, what would it mean to Black culture, both present and future?

  • New Haven, Yale, and Slavery: The Real Story (New Haven Independent)

    March 13, 2024

    Chapter 6 was written by Michael Morand, director of community engagement at the university’s Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, who is also lead curator of the New Haven Museum exhibition. It recounts an event of mob mentality, deplorable then but also prescient. Reading it today, noting the power of the politics of fear, it leaps right out of history and into the stream of denigrations of 2024. The chapter covers what might have been in New Haven: the establishment of the nation’s first college built specifically for Black men. The plan was discussed and endorsed in 1831 in Philadelphia, at a convention of Black intellectuals and abolitionists who decided on New Haven as the best option. One of the reasons: It was already a center of higher education, as Yale was then the largest college in the nation, even as it restricted its student body to white, Protestant and of European descent. The city, too, grew more prosperous from international trade and in population, the 23rd largest in the nation.