Exploring the History of Music Materials in Black Libraries

As Black His­to­ry Month comes to an end, I want­ed to share some of the research I’ve done on the music-relat­ed mate­ri­als that black (or “col­ored”) libraries offered their patrons in the ear­ly 1900s.

Accord­ing to a sur­vey admin­is­tered by a librar­i­an at the New York Pub­lic Library in the ear­ly 1920s, areas in the south­ern and mid­dle states that pro­vid­ed sep­a­rate branch­es for black peo­ple were typ­i­cal­ly infe­ri­or and under­fund­ed com­pared to those avail­able to white citizens. 

Addi­tion­al­ly, white peo­ple often main­tained admin­is­tra­tive con­trol of branch­es for black cit­i­zens; how­ev­er, the West­ern Col­ored Branch in Louisville, Ken­tucky was an excep­tion. It opened in 1905 and was the first free pub­lic library for Black read­ers. It was staffed and oper­at­ed entire­ly by Black library work­ers. The Rev­erend Thomas F. Blue, a respect­ed leader in the Louisville black com­mu­ni­ty, was the head of the library. He estab­lished an appren­tice pro­gram for aspir­ing library work­ers who then went on to work in libraries all through­out the south.

In the Ken­tucky Dig­i­tal Library, I dis­cov­ered “A List of Books Select­ed from Titles In the West­ern Col­ored Branch of the Louisville Free Pub­lic Library Rec­om­mend­ed for First Pur­chase” that orga­nized titles into Ref­er­ence, Adult Non-Fic­tion, Adult Fic­tion, Juve­nile Non-Fic­tion, and Juve­nile Fic­tion. I exam­ined the list for music-relat­ed titles and found 19. Some exam­ples include Bio­graph­i­cal Dic­tio­nary of Music by Theodore Bak­er, Mas­ters of Music by Anna Chapin, One Hun­dred Folk­songs by Granville Ban­tock, Folk­songs of the Amer­i­can Negro by John Wes­ley Work, and Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Say­ings by Joel Harris.

Inter­est­ing­ly, the book on Uncle Remus is list­ed under Adult Non-Fic­tion and Juve­nile Non-Fic­tion, but Uncle Remus was actu­al­ly a fic­tion­al char­ac­ter cre­at­ed by Joel Har­ris, a white man, to share sto­ries of life in the south. While the Uncle Remus sto­ries were used to encour­age tol­er­ance and sym­pa­thy for Black peo­ple, they leaned into the harm­ful stereo­type of the sub­servient black man who is con­tent with his infe­ri­or posi­tion in Amer­i­can society.

As Cheryl Knott has explored in her book Not Free, Not For: All Pub­lic Libraries in the Age of Jim Crow, Amer­i­can libraries in the ear­ly-to-mid 1900s par­tic­i­pat­ed in the con­struc­tion of black­ness and white­ness. I believe there is so much more to uncov­er about the libraries that catered to the music ‑relat­ed infor­ma­tion needs of black cit­i­zens dur­ing segregation.

For more infor­ma­tion on the his­to­ry of the West­ern Branch Library, check out this time­line cre­at­ed by the Louisville Free Pub­lic Library.