African American Studies at Beinecke Library

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

In Memoriam
May 28, 2014
The James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters honors poet Maya Angelou, 1928-2014.
New Scholarship: Julie Botnick on Dorothy Porter's Life and Work
May 23, 2014
In July 1968, as Howard University’s James M. Nabrit, Jr. stepped down from his role as president amid student protests, Dorothy Porter wrote to friends and colleagues to invite them to her workshop on the topic of “Bibliographic Resources for a Study of the American Negro.”
American Artists and the African American Book
April 21, 2014
Materials shown for Robert Stepto’s “American Artists and the African American Book,” AFAM 423, Spring 2014 class visits
YCAL-JWJ Service Disruptions: A Note from the Curators
March 12, 2014
As the Beinecke Library prepares for a major renovation in 2015, many frequently-consulted YCAL and JWJ archival collections will be moved off site to the Yale Library Shelving Facility (LSF).
New Acquisition: Black Film Ephemera
March 7, 2014
These posters, press books, and lobby cards date from the 1940s through the 1980s, with an especially large concentration in the 1970s, the heyday of so-called "Blaxploitation" cinema.
The Passions of Carl Van Vechten
February 16, 2014
An excerpt from the New Yorker: White Mischief: The Passions of Carl Van Vechten, by Kelefa Sanneh February 17, 2014
Richard Wright’s African Photographs
February 16, 2014
Maren Stange, “Richard Wright’s African Photographs.” In Geography of Photography: American Photography, Vol. 2. Ed. Bettina Gockel. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2013.
Soul Passages
February 11, 2014
The James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters has acquired more than 100 books included on the reading list of the Soul Passages Book Club, a Hartford, Connecticut, based reading group dedicated for more than 20 years to African American literary culture.
New Scholarship: The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America
January 27, 2014
The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America by Edward White. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30 (384p) ISBN 978-0-374-20157-9
Blue: Exhibition Events
January 2, 2014
Please join us on Friday, January 24th at 5pm to celebrate the opening of a new exhibtion Blue: Color and Concept.