In Pursuit of ‘Scattered’ Histories

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The year before Arturo Schomburg sold his extensive collection of books, pamphlets, and manuscripts to the New York Public Library, he penned an essay that recapitulated his life’s mission to document evidence of Black intellectual and cultural achievement. “The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future,” he famously wrote in his 1925 essay “The Negro Digs Up His Past.” It was a proclamation as much as it was a directive for the next generation of Black recordkeepers.

“Schomburg really believed, to a degree that’s almost hard to understand now because we’re in a very different moment and generation, that knowledge was power and that if misinformation and stereotypes about Black history could be overturned and rectified, it would change minds and remake the future,” says Laura E. Helton ’00, author of Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History (Columbia University Press, 2024).

In Scattered and Fugitive Things, Helton, a historian and associate professor at the University of Delaware, shows how Black archives shaped Black intellectual and social life in the early 20th century by tracing the contributions of Schomburg, scrapbook maker L.S. Alexander Gumby, librarians Virginia Lee and Vivian Harsh, Howard University curator Dorothy B. Porter, and historian L.D. Reddick.

The book was nearly 20 years in the making. It was fueled by Helton’s previous work as an archivist of social movements, a career that has taken her from Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to the Mississippi Digital Library, among other cultural institutions.

While a graduate student at New York University, she returned for a doctoral seminar on Black radical archives and began to lay the foundation for the chapter in Scattered and Fugitive Things about Harlem socialite and collector Gumby, whose scrapbooks are part of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Columbia. “I wanted to tell the story of what archives meant to the generation that built them,” she says. “And they were always built both by communities and for communities.”

At a time when public libraries in many cities in the country were limited to whites and no library existed that centered Black life and history, these spaces became meccas for Black thinkers. But the road to building Black archives was not without its challenges or risks.

Some of Helton’s earliest research for the book was made possible through a 2009 Alumnae Association of Barnard College Graduate Fellowship. This turned into her fourth chapter on Porter, who built out the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University during the 1930s and ’40s, when African diasporic materials required a new kind of knowledge structure. Under the prevailing Dewey Decimal Classification system, Blackness was marginalized, and books about Black life typically fell into one of two categories: slavery or colonization.

“She renumbered Dewey Decimal Classification to tell a story where Black history was American history, and that was work that really was not happening in mainstream information spaces,” says Helton.

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In Roanoke, Virginia, Jim Crow restrictions on Black literacy led Virginia Lee, a churchgoing librarian working at the only branch open to Black patrons in the city, to hide her modest collection of Black history books in the basement of the library.

“She was a visibly respectable figure in the community, and so in some ways, she’s the last person you would imagine breaking the rules,” says Helton. “And yet she did.”

Elsewhere, archive building was being “conjoined with activist and organizational agendas,” a fact that appears most notably in Helton’s profile of Reddick, who was named curator of the Schomburg Collection after Schomburg’s passing in 1938.

“He saw the library as a form of media that’s akin to the radio and that activists needed to use libraries in the same ways that they were using media and other forms of new technology,” says Helton. “He was very explicit about his vision of the Schomburg Collection as a sort of stock headquarters for the Black freedom struggle.”

Still, it’s hard to ignore the connection between past threats to the study of Black history and current movements around the country to suppress African American studies and banish from public libraries the kinds of books that Schomburg and his cohort of Black bibliophiles fought so hard to make accessible.

“I wish [Scattered and Fugitive Things] weren’t so timely,” says Helton. “I hope that the book and the stories of the risks people took and the impact their work had serves as inspiration for people that are following in their footsteps today.”