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.

  • 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.”

  • Martin Luther King Jr. helped to change America, with poet Langston Hughes’ help (Sedona Red Rock News)

    January 13, 2024

    King and Hughes maintained a friendship until Hughes’ death in May 1967, even traveling together to Nigeria in November 1960. Hughes wrote about King’s civil rights efforts in at least 40 articles in the Chicago Defender and penned several poems about King’s activities. King quoted or paraphrased at least seven Hughes poems in various speeches before he was assassinated in April 1968, according to W. Jason Miller’s book, “Origins of the Dream: Hughes’s Poetry and King’s Rhetoric.” Hughes had written his poem “Harlem” in 1951, which begins, “What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?”

  • Writing and Resistance: 2024 Black History Month Display

    January 8, 2024

    Materials related to a temporary display on the Beinecke Library mezzanine, January 8 - March 18, 2024, for the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, Black History Month, and in conjunction with the publication of Yale and Slavery: A History (Yale University Press, 2024) and the exhibition Shining Light on Truth: New Haven, Yale, and Slavery, on view from mid-February at the New Haven Museum.