James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection

The James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection (JWJ) documents and celebrates the cultural and artistic achievements and the intellectual and political activities of African Americans.

  • 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.

  • The ‘ubiquity of Black presence’: Alum curates exhibition about Yale, New Haven, and slavery

    March 8, 2024

    Morand, Director of Community Engagement at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, organized the show as part of the Yale and Slavery Research Project, which arose from a 2020 summons by President Peter Salovey for Yale to reckon with its historical ties to slavery. The museum exhibition coincided with the February publication of Yale and Slavery: A History by David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of History and African American Studies, written and edited with research project colleagues Hope McGrath and Morand. The book was released alongside a companion website, videos, and audio walking tour, accessible from yaleandslavery.yale.edu (link is external).

  • Exhibit Shines Truth on the HBCU That Wasn’t

    February 21, 2024

    The exhibition—presented by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and Yale University Library in partnership with the New Haven Museum—was curated by the Beinecke’s Director of Community Engagement Michael J. Morand with Charles E. Warner, Jr., and designed by David Jon Walker. It runs Feb. 16 through summer 2024 and includes findings from David W. Blight and the Yale and Slavery History Project’s new book Yale and Slavery: A History, which is available online for free. Admission to the museum is also free for the duration of the exhibition, underwritten by Yale.

  • WWII Tuskegee Airman Enoch Woodhouse II ’52 returns to Yale

    February 1, 2024

    Michael Morand ’87, ’93 MDiv, director for community engagement at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, who arranged a special visit of the Library for Woodhouse, including a meeting with staff members, remarked that alumni like Woodhouse are a wealth of knowledge, wisdom, and experience that informs the greater narrative of Yale and, therefore, is worthy of documentation, preservation, and dissemination. “We have so much more to learn about the full story of Yale,” he said. “People like General Woodhouse bless us all when they share their stories—it’s a privilege to learn these stories and a solemn duty to make sure they are more broadly known.”