I recently watched the PBS American Experience documentary about Jesse Owens. It has inspired me to continue working on the Regina Andrews' documentary this summer.

Here is an interesting new publication about Black librarians in the United States nearly one hundred years after Regina Andrews entered the profession.

Zora Neale Hurston

Last weekend I had brunch at Eatonville, a Washington, DC restaurant named after the birthplace of folklorist and writer Zora Neale Hurston.

In 1924 Hurston’s story Drenched in Light was published in Opportunity magazine after she won one of the writing prizes. Hurston lived in Florida at the time and the editor Charles S. Johnson encouraged her to move to New York City. He suggested that Hurston contact his assistant Ethel Ray (Regina’s roommate), assuring her that she would be warmly welcomed at her apartment. Hurston ended up staying on their couch when she first arrived in New York City.* Ethel recollected that, “Zora could tell a good story…pretended that she couldn’t talk English and so she was passed off as an African and was permitted to stay at this hotel. It gave us a good laugh.” Later, “Zora was a person rather hard to keep within bounds, you had to ride herd on her a bit, so she stayed with us at the time. We felt responsible in making certain that she was going to keep these appointments (at Barnard College for a scholarship) because with her if something else interesting came up, off she was.”**

* Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (Great Britain: Virago, 2003).

** Ethel Ray Nance, interview by Anne Allen Shockley, tape recording, San Francisco, CA., 18 November 1970 and Nashville, TN., 23 December 1970. Black Oral History Collection, Fisk University, Nashville, TN.

Alexandria, Virginia

A year after Regina Andrews became the first African American to head a branch of the New York Public Library there was a sit-in at a public library in Alexandria, Virginia in 1939. African Americans were not allowed to use the public library so several men (William Evans, Otto L. Tucker, Edward Gaddis, Morris Murray and Clarence Strange) staged a sit-in to protest the policy and were arrested (see picture on the right). This was organized by a young African American lawyer Samuel Tucker (Otto's brother). Instead of integrating the library, the city created a Negro branch--separate and unequal. Samuel Tucker refused to use the new branch. Last weekend I was in Alexandria and took pictures of the original library and the former Negro branch which is now a museum. For more about the sit-in.

Black Library Pioneers

Project Assistants Dawn Wing and Mel Nicholas in my department, the School of Library & Information Studies, at the University of Wisconsin - Madison made an exhibit featuring pioneering Black librarians that went up today. Besides a timeline of key events, they included several biographies of key figures including the bibliophile Arturo Schomburg, and librarians Nella Larsen, Audre Lorde and Belle da Costa Greene.

Carl Van Vechten

Photo: Regina is in the front in the middle wearing the lightest colored dress. Louella Tucker is behind her on Regina's left (our right) and Ethel Ray is on our far left behind Langston Hughes. This is on the rooftop of their salon at 580 St. Nicholas Avene. Source: Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in BlackCulture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Regina’s Harlem Renaissance roommate Ethel Ray Nance recorded two oral histories. The following vignette describes a visit by Carl Van Vechten and “the girls” refers to Regina and Louella Tucker:

“I remember Van Vechten coming into our apartment this one evening and inquiring who was the hostess, well, the girls didn’t move, so I moved and he handed me this bottle of some exquisite wine. I took it to the kitchen, which was on the side of the living room and just left it there. Then later on when it was to be served, two of the women…their names escaped me not entirely, but we’ll just skip that, refused it when we passed the wine glasses. And then almost immediately, they came out in the kitchen and asked, ‘may we have some’ and I said ‘no,’ (Laughingly) ‘if you’re not willing to accept it in front of the group, I’m sorry.’"*

* Source: Ethel Ray Nance, interview by Anne Allen Shockley, tape recording, San Francisco, CA., 18 November 1970 and Nashville, TN., 23 December 1970. Black Oral History Collection, Fisk University, Nashville, TN., 32.

Carl Van Vechten

Emily Bernard’s new book, Carl Van Vechten & the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black & White (Yale University Press, 2012), is about the controversial patron of black artists. Van Vechten visited Regina’s famous salon at 580 St. Nicholas Avenue where attendees included Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Some have suggested that Regina was the model for the librarian character Mary Love in his infamous novel, Nigger Heaven. He was banned from their salon after its publication in 1926. Regina’s roommates included Ethel Ray (later Nance) who worked for Charles Johnson at Opportunity magazine but almost nothing is known about the third roommate, Louella Tucker, although Van Vechten’s social diary entry provides one interesting tidbit:

Monday, 26 January 1925
…Then to the James Weldon Johnson’. Walrond brings three girls in, including the wonderful Louella Tucker who dances the Charleston more wonderfully than I’ve ever seen it danced.*

Several months later…

Thursday, 21 May 1925…At 10.30 went to Regina Anderson’s birthday party. Louella Tucker, Eric Walrond, Ethel Ray...*

*Source: Carl Van Vechten, The splendid drunken twenties: Selections from the daybooks, 1922-1930, ed. Bruce Kellner (Chicago, IL.: University of Illinois Press, 2003),72 and 85-86.