Review | Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History
Reviewed by Eurie Dahn
In Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History, Laura E. Helton demonstrates the ways that Black librarians, collectors, and archivists used the unglamorous acts of cataloguing and collecting to unearth and make accessible Black histories. Helton’s focus is, for the most part, not on activists and leaders on the main stage of Black history but her subjects are activists and leaders all the same. Collectors and librarians like Arturo Schomburg, Virginia Lee, and Dorothy Porter fought countless battles to insist upon the importance of Black materials and histories.
Some of Helton’s subjects, particularly Arturo Schomburg, are better known than others but, even then, deeper knowledge of Schomburg’s work has been brought to the surface through the scholarship of Helton and others, such as Vanessa Valdés, in recent years. In chapter one, “Thinking Black, Collecting Black: Schomburg’s Desiderata and the Radical World of Black Bibliophiles,” Helton provides a picture of activism that was grounded in the mundane and often tedious act of cataloging. Schomburg was not a collector of books for simple pleasure but he and friends such as William Carl Bolivar worked “to institutionalize their collections” (44). They understood that their book collections needed institutional heft to increase their influence. Throughout Helton’s book, the complicated relations between the aims of these collectors and librarians and that of institutions like libraries is a central focus. The institutions were themselves complicit in racial injustice, but they were also seen as the avenue toward providing access to histories that were erased.
With chapter two, “A ‘History of the Negro in Scrapbooks’: The Gumby Book Studio’s Ephemeral Assemblies,” Helton moves from Schomburg’s drive toward respectable institutionalization to the more irreverent and unruly scrapbook collection of L. S. Alexander Gumby. Focused on contemporaneous events, including those from his own life, Gumby’s scrapbooks presented clippings from the newspapers of the day as historical artifacts, worthy of preservation and perusal. Gumby’s scrapbooking could not be separated from the queer collectivity created and sustained within the physical space of his book studio with its social gatherings. In this chapter, Helton demonstrates how this intensely individual collection of ephemera provided a magnetic force that bonded people together, particularly those who were at the margins of society.
Gumby’s strategies of collecting share a kinship with the underground work in building Black archives of Virginia Lee, a branch librarian in Roanoke, Virginia, beginning in the 1920s and extending into the 1960s. As Helton puts it in chapter three, “Defiant Libraries: Virginia Lee and the Secrets Kept by Good Bookladies,” “Although New York boasted the first Negro Collection in a public library, and Chicago the second, there were smaller, unnamed collections at Black-serving branch libraries across the country” (84). One of my favorite aspects of Scattered and Fugitive Things is Helton’s careful attention to the modest, the seemingly inconsequential, in demonstrating the many ways in which Black collections and access to Black histories were built, and often with fugitive tactics, working with quotidian heroism—what Helton calls “a bibliographic strategy of dissemblance, calling on Black women’s use of concealment and privacy to shield themselves from violence” (99). Lee, for example, moved her collection of Black texts to the basement to protect them from censorship—a simple act that at the same time allowed her to continue to provide access to the materials in defiance of various pressures.
As Lee’s work reveals, Black women were key to the work of building Black collections. Helton’s earlier scholarship on Dorothy Porter, the librarian of the Moorland Foundation at Howard University, is expanded upon in chapter four, “Unauthorized Inquiries: Dorothy Porter’s Wayward Catalog.” Porter’s scale of influence was different from Lee’s due to her position at an historically black college or university (HBCU), which afforded her support and a degree of protection. In increasing access to Black materials, Porter wielded her knowledge of cataloging practices and the Dewey Decimal System: “The authority lists used by catalogers to standardize data excluded many Black authors, while subject heading and classification schemes omitted or misfiled Black topics” (109-10). Within the Dewey Decimal System’s taxonomy, Black Americans were categorized as either enslaved or “foreign to the nation” as immigrants (112). This classificatory violence was intolerable to Porter. Despite Melvil Dewey’s prohibitions on revising his schema, she dismantled, revised, edited, and manipulated it to create new classifications for Black people to better reflect their work and places in the world and, most of all, to make these materials accessible. At the same time, she investigated the presence of Black people and histories in other spaces and questioned the assumptions inherent in the infrastructure of collections in white institutions. Helton notes, for example, Porter’s recognition that Harvard’s holdings on slavery lived in its business library (121). The horror and absurdity of this fact reveal the long legacy of classification systems.
Porter’s work provided pathways to information about Black history and culture; in doing so, she created infrastructures that supported the work of this learning. Beyond infrastructure, the George Cleveland Hall Branch, a public library in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Chicago’s South Side, offered an actual structure, a physical space for those interested in Black history. Chapter five, “A Space for Black Study: The Hall Branch Library and the Historians Who Never Wrote,” focuses on librarian Vivian G. Harsh, who established the “Special Collection of Books By and About the Negro” and the space for those who wished to read and discuss those books and topics in Black history and culture in Chicago. As Elizabeth McHenry’s scholarship has demonstrated, there was a real hunger among Black Americans under Jim Crow to learn about themselves and their history through shared reading practices and communities. As Helton points out, the true legacy of Harsh is not in the creation of an archive as a storehouse but as a site of community. Harsh’s special collections, which would later become the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature at the Woodson Regional Library of the Chicago Public Library system, was an integral part of the community.
In chapter six, “Mobilizing Manuscripts: L. D. Reddick and Black Archival Politics,” Helton focuses on collective archive-building in the work of L. D. Reddick, who took over the leadership of the Schomburg Collection after Schomburg’s death in 1939. Like Gumby, Reddick saw the contemporary moment as worthy of preservation and archiving as a collective activity. He called for Black servicemen’s letters from World War II to be added to the Schomburg Collection and “inculcated the imperative to archive as a participatory form of Black politics. It asked people, far from the library’s doorstep, to imagine themselves as collectors—and to imagine archiving as movement building” (156). His call was a crowdsourcing of archival materials, grounded in a different way of seeing what history is and who might be involved in creating the archives that provide access to that history.
Helton’s earlier scholarship increased the anticipation around Scattered and Fugitive Things and it was a delight to finally read it. At a time when librarians, libraries, archives, and Black contributions are under attack in the United States, her scholarship offers hope in the subversive practices of librarians, the resilience of Black collections, and the continued lives of collectivities. An unusually creative and thoughtful work of scholarship, Helton’s book is a major contribution to the study of archives, institution building, and Black history.
This page has paths:
- Volume 21 | 2025 | General Issue Sarah E. Cornish