The Beinecke Library’s new exhibition, “Destined to Be Known: The James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection at 75,” explores, in part, the life and work of James Weldon Johnson
Though writer, photographer, cultural critic, and modernist-era taste-maker Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) is celebrated today for a great many achievements, we count his founding of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters at Yale University among his most lasting contributions to American arts and culture.
On March 4, Beinecke, the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, and the departments of English and African American Studies are co-sponsoring a symposium on Austin Reed’s The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict, a 19th-century memoir of Reed’s life and eventual incarceration at New York’s House of Refuge and the notorious Auburn State Prison.
Bringing Unknown Patterns into View: The Critical Vision of Robert B. Stepto brings together scholars from across the field of African American Studies to celebrate Professor Stepto’s 40-year career at Yale.
Scholar Jasmine Nicole Cobb compares William Townsend's sketches of captive Africans from the schooner Amistad, held at the Beinecke, to later images of African Americans.
The Heritage Theater Ensemble will perform scenes from play featured in the Beinecke Exhibition “Casting Shadows” on Saturday, April 18 at 1 p.m. at Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street.
Known only as the “Ex-Colored Man,” the protagonist in Johnson’s novel is forced to choose between celebrating his African American heritage or “passing” as an average white man in a post-Reconstruction America that is rapidly changing.
