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.

Archive illuminates New Haven’s Bias Stanley, a 19th-century civil rights advocate
April 18, 2023
Papers at Yale’s Beinecke Library shed new light on the lives of Bias and Margaret Stanley, stalwarts of New Haven’s Black community in the early 1800s.
Uncovering the link between 'Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing' and Yale's historic Beinecke Collection (Connecticut Public Radio/WNPR)
March 23, 2023
"Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing," also known as the Black National Anthem, was adopted by the NAACP and prominently used as a rallying cry during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. This year, the song was performed at the Super Bowl by Waterbury native Sheryl Lee Ralph, an actress on “Abbott Elementary.” That’s not the song’s only tie to Connecticut.
Suffragist, Activist, Journalist: The Incredible Life of Jersey City’s Own Ella Barksdale Brown (The Hoboken Girl)
February 27, 2023
Her involvement with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Circle for Negro War Relief, the New Jersey Civil Rights Bureau, and the National Association of Colored Women led to her friendships with such pioneering civil rights leaders as W.E.B. Dubois, Booker T. Washington, Paul Robeson, and James Weldon Johnson. Archive boxes in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library hold letters of well wishes, sympathy, news, and greetings between Ella and her illustrious peers.
In "What Could Have Been," New Haven's Past Haunts Its Present (Arts Paper)
February 23, 2023
The year is 2023. Just beyond East and Water Streets, the nation’s first Historically Black College is gearing up for its 192nd anniversary. Balloons bob in the breeze outside. Buildings reach into the blue New Haven sky. Gulls cry and cackle above the water, and sound like they are laughing. All day, the nation’s most prominent Black scholars file in and out of the campus buildings, holding a history that is nearly two centuries old. Except, their path to that day never happened. The year is 2023, and the space is just an ocean of asphalt and road, with a labyrinth of highway winding above. It didn’t have to be this way.
Doc Reveals The New Haven HBCU That Could Have Been (New Haven Independent)
February 23, 2023
On Wednesday night at the New Haven Museum, New Haveners had a chance to learn, together, about an uncomfortable truth: that, in 1831, New Haven’s white community leaders overwhelming rejected a serious proposal to found what would have been the first U.S. Black college, on the land where the interchange of I‑95 and I‑91 now exists. That story is told in What Could Have Been: America’s First HBCU, a short and powerful documentary written by Tubyez Cropper and Michael Morand of the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library and directed and edited by Cropper. Released in April 2022, the film on Wednesday night enjoyed a robust audience at the museum on Whitney Avenue dedicated to New Haven’s history.
A CT city could have had the first Black college in America. But the opposition was too strong, as 'knowledge is power.' (Hartford Courant)
February 22, 2023
The film produced by the Beinecke, will be shown at the New Haven Museum on Wednesday at 6 p.m., followed by a discussion.
Film explores how New Haven almost became home of the first Black college in the U.S. (New Haven Register)
February 13, 2023
Tubyez Cropper, and Michael Morand, community engagement program manager and director of community engagement at the Beinecke Library at Yale, respectively, joined forces to create a documentary about the 1831 proposal for a Black college in New Haven
Yale documentary explains how New Haven had a chance to become home to the first HBCU (Fox 61)
February 8, 2023
“What Could Have Been” is a new documentary from the Beinecke Library at Yale University that explores the Elm City in 1831 and the group of freed Black people and white abolitionists that formed a proposal to establish a Black college in the city.
Beinecke Library unites past and present in spring exhibit (Yale Daily News)
February 8, 2023
On Jan. 27, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library unveiled its spring exhibit “Revisiting the Past — Imagining the Future.” Featuring artifacts spanning centuries and cultures, the exhibit is intended to add new perspectives to popular readings of history. The process for building the exhibit began about a year ago when Timothy Young, curator of modern books and manuscripts at the Beinecke, reached out to his colleagues at Sterling Memorial Library, sparking a new collaboration between the Beinecke and other collections at Yale.
A COMPOSITIONAL COLLABORATION(?) BETWEEN MARGARET BONDS AND FLORENCE PRICE: “Sleep Song” (Medium)
January 20, 2023
And it’s how we know that Florence B. Price had a hand in producing the only surviving exemplar of Margaret Bonds’s earliest surviving choral work: the Sleep Song for women’s chorus and piano, recently published by Hildegard Publishing Company as part of their ongoing Margaret Bonds Signature Series. That undated manuscript is held among the Margaret Bonds Papers in the James Weldon Johnson Collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University (shelfmark JWJ MSS 151 Box 8, folder 41), as are the three autographs for the solo version of Sleep Song. The latter all identify Margaret Bonds as a member of ASCAP, which Bonds joined as a non-participating member in 1952, and of which she became a full member in 1955.