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.

  • Poem: I look at the world (New York Times)

    November 30, 2023

    This poem by Langston Hughes was discovered by a rare-books cataloger in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It was scrawled in the pages of a book called “An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry.” The poem itself could be an entry. The speaker, a Black person, sees the world as a “fenced-off narrow space,” an unnecessarily walled place, and resolves to obliterate cruel boundaries. It’s a timeless sort of gesture, at home in the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement — or now.

  • Office Hours with… Nana Adusei-Poku

    November 13, 2023

    Who is an artist who particularly interests you for this project? Adusei-Poku: Augusta Savage, a sculptress from the Harlem Renaissance who was very active in the early 20th century. The reason why I’m so fascinated by her is that not only can you see in her biography how anti-Blackness consistently made it impossible for her to work, but also we don’t have many of her works left. They are only represented through photographs and yet she was a formative figure of a modernist movement. One reason why I’m so happy to be here at Yale is that we have this incredible archive in the Beinecke [Rare Book & Manuscript Library] and the Yale Art Gallery Collection that’s like a treasure for people who are interested in Black artists from New York in the early 20th century.

  • Pondering the power of art in protest

    September 26, 2023

    “Art, Protest, & the Archives,” an exhibition at the Beinecke Library, explores the connections between dissent and artistic expression over the past century.

  • Fall exhibit at the Beinecke Library explores art and protest (Yale Daily News)

    September 14, 2023

    The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library’s newest exhibit, “Art, Protest, and the Archives,” probes the relationship and tensions between aesthetics and dissent. The exhibit premiered on Aug. 4 and will run through January. The first floor offers a chronological look at protest art over time, while the work upstairs is arranged by topic. Kevin Repp, a curator at the Beinecke, worked with other museum staff to create an exhibition that covers a vast geographical and temporal span.

  • Beinecke event highlights failed effort to make New Haven the site of America’s first HBCU (Yale Daily News)

    September 12, 2023

    Yale’s Beinecke Library hosted an event reflecting on the unsuccessful effort to establish the United States’ first Historically Black College/University in New Haven. The event, which was called “New Haven 1831: What Was and What Could Have Been,” was held on the 192nd anniversary of the very town meeting in 1831 where the proposal for the college was struck down in a 700-4 vote.

  • Rare collection of recordings by Anthony Braxton enters library’s digital collections

    September 7, 2023

    The Irving S. Gilmore Music Library partnered with the Tri-Centric Foundation to digitally preserve and provide online access to a treasure trove of rare archival material: 751 audio and video recordings by Anthony Braxton, one of the most prominent and ground-breaking composers and musicians of the 20th and 21st centuries. “This is perhaps the most notable collection of Anthony Braxton’s recordings anywhere in the world,” said Jonathan Manton, director of digital special collections and access at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. “Thanks to the efforts of Digital Special Collections and Access staff members Christy Bailey-Tomecek, librarian for AV Access Services, and Tracy MacMath, manager of Digital Accessibility and Design, this collection is now available online for teaching, learning, and research both here at Yale, and across the world.”

  • Beinecke Readings Examine Freedom From All Angles (New Haven Independentt)

    July 6, 2023

    The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library holds one of 26 known surviving copies of the first printing of the Declaration of Independence. The document, printed by John Dunlap in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, has a single typographical error, an indication that the founders issued it in a hurry to declare independence from England. On Wednesday, a few dozen New Haveners got to hear the words of that revolutionary broadside read aloud — along with that of Frederick Douglass’s 1852 oration ​“What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” — as part of an annual primary-source-focused tradition to celebrate the 247th anniversary of Independence Day.