How Dorothy Porter assembled an Africana research collection

He was particularly interested in the global Black experience, and his collection included works by and about Black people in the Caribbean and South and Central America; rare materials in Latin from the early modern period; and works in Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, and many African languages, including Swahili, Kikuyu, Zulu, Yoruba, Vai, Ewe, Luganda, Ga, Sotho, Amharic, Hausa, Xhosa, and Luo. Porter was concerned about assigning value to the materials she collected—their intellectual and political value, certainly, but also their monetary value, since at the time other libraries had no expertise in pricing works by Black authors. As Thomas C. Battle writes in a 1988 essay on the history of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, [5] the breadth of the two collections showed the Howard librarians that “no American library had a suitable classification scheme for Black materials.”

Source: www.historians.org