Library of Congress's Blog, page 159

Library Launches Portal For Civil Rights History Project

(The following is a story written by my colleague, Mark Hartsell, editor of The Gazette, the Library of Congress staff newsletter.)

Simeon Wright / Civil Rights History Project

Simeon Wright still recalls the terror of the night they came and took his cousin away.

“I woke up and saw these two white men standing at the foot of my bed,” Wright said. “One had a gun, flashlight. He ordered me to lay back down and go to sleep. He made Emmett get up and dress and marched him out to the truck.”

Wright witnessed one of the most notorious incidents of the civil-rights era: the murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American from Chicago who was murdered during a visit to relatives in Mississippi in 1955. Wright drove into town with Emmett, watched him come out of the store, and heard him whistle at a passing white woman. And he was at home, asleep, when the woman’s husband and other men came to the house, took Emmett away and killed him.

“They drove off, and we never saw Emmett alive again,” Wright said. “But in that house that night, I never went back to sleep.”

Wright’s story is one of 55 interviews placed online by the Library of Congress as part of the Civil Rights History Project, a congressionally mandated initiative to collect, preserve and make accessible personal accounts of the civil-rights movement.

A Mandate from Congress

The Civil Rights History Project Act, passed in 2009, directed the Library and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) to conduct a survey of existing oral-history collections related to the movement and to record new interviews with people who participated.

The American Folklife Center (AFC), which manages the project at the Library, today officially made videos and transcripts of those interviews and a database of oral-history collections around the country available online.

“The project is unique in its capacity to expand our collective awareness and understanding of one of the most fundamentally important social, political and cultural movements, not just for this country but the world over,” said Guha Shankar, project director for the AFC. “At the same time, the public can immediately connect to the intimate, unfiltered stories of people in the freedom struggle through the interviews online and also find similar stories that exist in libraries in their own backyard via the searchable database.”

Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Bradley / Prints and Photographs Division

The database, the first of its kind, makes available to researchers information about civil rights oral-history collections at public libraries, museums, universities and historical societies in 49 states and the District of Columbia. Library contractors conducting the survey of repositories nationwide discovered a surprisingly large number of collections.

“We thought they’d find maybe 150 collections and instead they found over 1,500,” said Kate Stewart, who helps manage the project for the AFC. “It’s a big and quite comprehensive database.”

The Library’s partner, the NMAAHC, chooses the interview subjects, and the interviews – now more than 100 of them – are conducted by the University of North Carolina’s Southern Oral History Program. The Library catalogs the interviews, makes the video and transcripts available, and provides copies to the Smithsonian for inclusion in the NMAAHC, scheduled to open on the National Mall in 2015.

A Movement of Everyday People

The project focuses not on prominent figures of the movement, but on foot soldiers – the young men and women who sang, marched and protested, who witnessed historic events, who watched great leaders work up close.

“There’s always been such a focus on the history of certain people, like Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks,” Stewart said. “These interviews tell different stories, things that you wouldn’t have thought about before.”

Jamila Jones recalls riding public buses in Montgomery, Ala., and Parks offering her Kool-Aid and cookies at an NAACP youth group meeting. She also recalled a tense moment during a police raid on a community meeting. The group began singing “We Shall Not be Moved,” and she spontaneously added the line “we are not afraid.”

Mildred Bond Roxborough, a longtime secretary at the NAACP, recalls working alongside many of the movement’s great leaders – and the impressions they made not as historic figures but as real people who could be funny, difficult, compassionate, tough.

“I never heard so many cuss words in my life, which was colorful,” Roxborough said of Thurgood Marshall, who later became the Supreme Court’s first African-American justice. “He was a wonderful raconteur. He had a tremendous sense of humor.”

Sisters Joyce (left) and Dorie Ladner / Civil Rights History Project

Sisters Doris and Joyce Ladner grew up together, became activists together, helped organize the March on Washington together and, in interviews conducted for the project five decades later, still finish each other’s sentences. Joyce recalled the excitement and glamour of the March on Washington in 1963: seeing Josephine Baker and Marlon Brando, meeting Lena Horne – and the singer who crashed at their apartment in the days before the march and kept everyone awake.

“Bobby Dylan [was] sitting on the sofa strumming his guitar, and I wanted to go to sleep,” she said. “And he would sit there until midnight, and I just couldn’t wait until he would go to sleep.”

They also recalled the murder of activist Medgar Evers in 1963 – they’d known him as girls in Mississippi – and the horror of the trial of the man charged with the killing, Byron De La Beckwith. Each day, they said, De La Beckwith would enter the courtroom to a standing ovation from some in attendance – applause he received with a bow.

“Like some famous rock star,” Joyce said.

‘Powerful, Very Powerful’

Freeman Hrabowski, now president of the University of Maryland Baltimore County, participated in the “Children’s Crusade” march of young people in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963. Hrabowski, then 12, was leading his group, when they were confronted by a policeman.

“He was so angry, he spat on me,” Hrabowski said. “I’ll never forget it. He spat in my face. Picked me up and threw me. They came and got the kids, and they just threw us into the paddy wagon.”

Later, King led parents to the jail where the students were held and spoke to the crowds outside.

“We were looking through the bars, and they were singing the songs,” Hrabowski said. “And he spoke. He said, ‘What you do this day will have an impact on children yet unborn.’ I didn’t even understand it, but I knew it was powerful, powerful, very powerful.”

The AFC eventually will place all the interviews online, and excerpts will be included in the Library’s exhibition, which opens in June, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

“The civil-rights movement is such a fundamental part of American history,” Stewart said. “You can read about it in textbooks, but oral history is such a moving way to learn. It really engages people in a way I don’t think the average textbook does.

“A lot of these people are talking about things they did as teenagers. What motivated them to do that? They were really risking their lives or putting themselves in danger to do this.”

The database of oral-history collections related to the civil-rights movement is available here.

Library Welcomes New Blog, NLS Music Notes

The Library adds another blog into its blogosphere today. Welcome NLS Music Notes.

The blog is designed to share information about the services of the Music Section of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped and its special format music collection: in braille, large print and audio. The blog will highlight the collection — which is the largest music braille collection in the world and very much an international one — new acquisitions and the patrons who use the collections and NLS services.

Take a look at today’s inaugural post.

The Power of One: Roy Wilkins and the Civil Rights Movement

(The following is a story written by Mark Hartsell, editor of the Library’s staff newsletter, The Gazette, for the May-June 2014 issue of the Library of Congress Magazine. The Library exhibition, “The Civil Rights Act of 1964: The Long Struggle for Freedom,” opens June 19 in the Thomas Jefferson Building.)

Rev. Martin Luther King, seated next to NAACP Director Roy Wilkins. 1964. New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Prints and Photographs Division.

Civil Rights activist Roy Wilkins devoted his life to achieving equal rights under the law for the nation’s African Americans.

The legacy of slavery, Roy Wilkins once wrote, divided African Americans into two camps: victims of bondage who suffered passively, hoping for a better day, and rebels who heaped coals of fire on everything that smacked of inequality. Wilkins belonged among the rebels.

“I have spent my life stoking the fire and shoveling on the coal,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Standing Fast.”

Wilkins, the grandson of Mississippi slaves, devoted more than 50 years of that life to advancing the cause of civil rights, speaking for freedom and marching for justice. He led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) during the civil rights movement’s most momentous era—the years of freedom rides and bus boycotts, the March on Washington and the march from Selma, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the murder of Medgar Evers and the police dogs and fire hoses of Birmingham.

Wilkins’ family hailed from Mississippi, but his father was forced to flee to St. Louis after an altercation with a white man—one step, Wilkins recalled, ahead of a lynch rope.

Wilkins was born in St. Louis in 1901, followed closely by a sister and brother. His mother died when he was 5, and relatives contemplated sending the two older children back to Mississippi and the baby to Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Sam in St. Paul, Minn.

Roy Wilkins meets with President Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House to discuss strategies for securing passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Prints and Photographs Division.

Sam wouldn’t hear of it. “I won’t break up a family,” he telegraphed. “Bring all three.” Those nine words changed Wilkins’ life.

In St. Paul, Wilkins lived in an integrated, working-class neighborhood of Swedish, Norwegian, German and Irish immigrants and attended integrated schools—experiences that later allowed him to view whites as civil-rights allies and to reject militant activism.

Sam emphasized hard work and education. No one can steal an education from a man, he’d say. He also taught Wilkins to keep faith in the goodness of others, that the world was not a wholly hostile place.

“Everything I am or hope to be I owe to him,” Wilkins wrote.

After graduating from the University of Minnesota, Wilkins eventually edited an influential African-American newspaper in Kansas City, where he first encountered widespread segregation. Wilkins’ work drew the attention of NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White, and in 1931 he moved to New York to serve as White’s chief assistant and, later, editor of The Crisis magazine. With the NAACP, Wilkins fearlessly took his cause to the streets. He led many protests, helped organize the historic 1963 March on Washington and participated in marches in Selma, Ala., and Jackson, Miss.

Wilkins mostly sought to force change within the system, through legislation and the courts. He led the legal efforts that culminated with the historic 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine in public schools—a decision, he said, that gave him his greatest satisfaction.

In 1955, Wilkins took over as the NAACP’s director and implemented a strategy designed to get all three branches of the federal government actively working to advance civil rights.

“We wanted Congress and the White House to come out of hiding and line up alongside the Supreme Court on segregation,” he wrote.

Leaders of the March on Washington lock arms as they walk down Constitution Avenue, Aug. 28, 1963, with Martin Luther King Jr., far left, and Roy Wilkins, second from right. New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph
Collection, Prints and Photographs Division.

The legal cases, protests and marches helped produce historic legislation in the 1960s, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964—a measure Wilkins called a “Magna Carta for the race, a splendid monument for the cause of human rights.”

Wilkins retired from the NAACP in 1977 and died in 1981, leaving behind an America radically changed for the better.

“The only master race is the human race,” he once said, “and we are all, by the grace of God, members of it.”

REMEMBERING THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964 

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Civil Rights Act and the struggle for racial equality, the Library of Congress will present a new exhibition. “The Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Long Struggle for Freedom” will open on June 19, 2014, and remain on view through June 20, 2015. The exhibition is made possible by a generous grant from Newman’s Own Foundation and with additional support from HISTORY.

Drawn from the Library’s collections, the exhibition will include 200 items, featuring correspondence and documents from civil rights leaders and organizations, images captured by photojournalists and professional photographers, newspapers, drawings, posters and in-depth profiles of key figures in the long process of attaining civil rights.

Audiovisual stations will feature oral-history interviews with participants in the Civil Rights Movement and television clips that brought the struggle for equality into living rooms across the country and around the world. Visitors also will hear songs from the Civil Rights Movement that motivated change, inspired hope and unified people from all walks of life. In addition, HISTORY has produced two videos about the legislation and its impact that will be shown in the exhibition.

Make sure to check back next Thursday for another spotlight on other items from “The Civil Rights Act of 1964: The Long Struggle for Freedom,” as the Library of Congress blog leads up to the June 19 exhibition opening.

Download the May-June 2014 issue of the LCM in its entirety here. You can also view the archives of the Library’s former publication from 1993 to 2011.

Pics of the Week: Behind the Music

Ann and Nancy Wilson. Photo by Amanda Reynolds

Last week, the Library hosted the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) Foundation for its annual “We Write the Songs” concert, featuring the songwriters performing and telling the stories behind their own music. Carly Simon, Randy Newman and Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart joined others in performing some of their most popular tunes.

“We used to tell our mom and dad that we were going to the library when we actually were rocking out,” Ann Wilson said before performing Heart’s “Dog and Butterfly” and “Crazy on You.” “Now, we’re actually at the Library, rocking out. They would be so thrilled.”

 

A sentiment surely shared by many of the performers taking the historic Coolidge Auditorium stage.

“Hasn’t this been the best concert you’ve ever been to?” Simon asked. “This astonishes me.”

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Carly Simon at the sixth annual “We Write the Songs” concert. Photo by Amanda Reynolds.

The Library is home to the ASCAP collection, which includes music manuscripts, printed music, lyrics (both published and unpublished), scrapbooks, correspondence and other personal, business, legal and financial documents, scrapbooks, and film, video and sound recordings.

Established in 1914, ASCAP is the first United States Performing Rights Organization (PRO), representing the world’s largest repertory of more than 8.5 million copyrighted musical works of every style and genre from more than 350,000 songwriter, composer and music-publisher members.

 

Inquiring Minds: Commemorating the Federal Writers’ Project

David A. Taylor

David A. Taylor is the author of “Soul of a People: The WPA Writers’ Project Uncovers Depression America” and writer and co-producer of the Smithsonian documentary, “Soul of a People: Writing America’s Story.” On Thursday, he joins others at the Library for an event marking the 75th anniversary of “ These Are Our Lives ,” a collection of life histories produced during the New Deal era by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Read more about it here.

Your book, “Soul of a People” (2009), is about the WPA Federal Writers’ Project. What about the New Deal program inspired and interested you to write the book?

I came to the Writers’ Project by chance, from using the series of travel guidebooks the WPA writers produced – what we now call the WPA guides. A friend lent me the “WPA Guide to New Orleans,” and I found in it a fresh and authentic portrait of the city and its people: gritty and vivid and unlike any guidebook I’d read before. The editor, Lyle Saxon, had been a journalist and a novelist before, and I became curious: How had that book and the others in the series come about? Eventually I wrote an article for Smithsonian magazine using the WPA Guide to Nebraska as a test of its durability. It held up surprisingly well, too. So I became intrigued by this sudden nationwide agency of writers.

For that article I got to speak with several of the Project’s survivors including Studs Terkel, who championed oral history in many forms – from his radio interviews to his books, which he called “oral histories.” He was generous with his time and memories. In following those leads and reading their papers, I found the story of their intersecting lives at that time of crisis fascinating. The stories and conversations led to the book and a documentary film, also titled “Soul of a People,” produced by Spark Media and funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and state humanities councils.

Studs pointed me to Ann Banks, whose book “First-Person America” contains selections from many of the rich life histories gathered by the WPA writers. She was really the first to rediscover that collection in the Library of Congress in the 1970s. We’re thrilled that she will join us for the May 15 event.

Tell us about your experience using the Library’s WPA collections for your research. What did you learn that helped you develop your book?

I researched my first book, a cultural history of ginseng, at the Library and had learned so much from the reference librarians in the Main Reading Room. When I started this project, the research took me into more parts of the Library, especially the Manuscript Division (which holds much of the editorial correspondence of the project and personal collections of several WPA alumni), the American Folklife Center (which has the life histories and recordings gathered by the Folklore Division of the Writers’ Project) and Prints and Photographs (which has all the wonderful photographs from the Farm Security Administration).

Each collection gave a part of the puzzle. For example, I could find the life histories that Ralph Ellison conducted, now in the American Folklife Center, and then go to Ellison’s personal collection in the Manuscript Division, a rich trove that was cataloged not long before. Zora Neale Hurston’s plays are also there. Then I visited Prints and Photographs and saw Ellison’s photos from his early years and his friendship with other WPA writers, including John Cheever. I learned how these individuals approached their work and friendships and how they sometimes reflected on influences later.

What collection items did you find most illuminating? Any life histories stand out in particular?

The life history interviews were fascinating to read through. May Swenson’s interviews in the Bronx, for example, were a wonderful surprise. As a young project employee, this great poet captured people in glimpsed observations and quirks of character. Really, it was fascinating to find the many stories of everyday people documented with the intent of capturing their words.

For entering the experience of a young person going from poverty to the thrill of finding their voice as a storyteller, it’s hard to top paging through Ralph Ellison’s letters. As a young man, he poured himself out in correspondence. His exchanges with Richard Wright are hard to top for a window into brilliance, creativity and youth. One of the life history interviews he did was with an older man on a park bench in Colonial Park in Harlem – a park where Ellison himself had spent his first nights when he arrived in the city, homeless. It’s a rich interview where Ellison taps a flood of honest outrage, with a poignant backstory.

For heartbreak, I’m struck by the interview with James Griffin, a 21-year-old whose account was recorded during a Florida sound recording tour arranged by Zora Neale Hurston. I included Griffin’s story in “Soul of a People.” In a turpentine camp, he’s asked by his WPA interviewers – including a young Stetson Kennedy – the story behind his song, “Worked All Summer Long.” Griffin explains he was jailed for 90 days at hard labor in the Dixie County Prison Camp to repay $50 to a lumber company. The song came to him while he was in jail.

“I started singing it and thought it would be my theme song,” he said.

He and the other inmates would take it up in the evening after the day’s labor.

“We’d be singing,” he said. “It helps.”

Then he sings the song for the recording. The song includes a prayer from the singer’s mother, asking that someone look down and see him, wherever he may be. His recording, from a hot day in August 1939, still lives here.

“These Are Our Lives,” written 75 years ago, featured selections from the Federal Writers’ Project. Tell us a bit about the book. How significant was it at the time, and what about it endures today?

That book was a departure, in that it showed a new way to portray history. It was a collection of life histories gathered by WPA interviewers in the South, as part of a nation-wide effort led by Benjamin Botkin, the project’s folklore director. In 1939, traditional historians still considered history to be an expert’s distillation of key documents and leaders, and folklorists were focused on tall tales and legends – not living history from people’s mouths. The New York Times reviewed “These Are Our Lives” twice when it came out, calling it “history of a new and peculiarly honest kind” and “an eloquent and important record.” One review hoped it might be the first of a series. Although that was originally Botkin’s plan, it didn’t happen. Budget cuts would soon shutter the whole Writers’ Project.

I think the book’s most enduring quality is its intimacy with people’s lives and their voices, across race and economic background. At their best, these stories evoke a scene in Wim Wenders’ film, “Wings of Desire,” where two angels dressed in overcoats wander through a subway car, listening to the unspoken fears and dreams of the people there. In some ways, the WPA interviewers were doing that. They were often the first ones ever to ask everyday people for their stories, and often neither interviewer nor interviewee knew what would come out.

The event on May 15 will highlight this sense of intimate history. In addition to StoryCorps, there will be actors bringing to life two selections from “These Are Our Lives.” The actors come from the Theatre Lab, a leading nonprofit in DC with a Life Stories program that resonates with the WPA life histories.

What would you say is the legacy of the Federal Writers’ Project? What can we learn from the life histories and individuals who brought them to life?

There are three ways to answer that, I think. The first is essentially economic – to say it provided an unexpected incubator for talent that was otherwise idled by the Depression. The project gave some of the best writers of the 20th century their first jobs as writers at a crucial time.

The second legacy is that, culturally, the project influenced American literature and its dialogue for decades afterward by putting young writers together. For example, the friendship between Richard Wright and Nelson Algren (which I wrote about for American Scholar) bloomed on the Writers’ Project and influenced how both of them depicted America in bestselling novels and films. The project influenced writers like Meridel Le Sueur, who used her interviews with Minnesota women for her novel “The Girl,” about a botched bank robbery; and Margaret Walker’s poetry and novel “Jubilee,” about slavery’s history through one family. Ralph Ellison later cited his early Harlem experiences, when he conducted life interviews for the project, as a seed for the voice and character in “Invisible Man.”

That’s not to say that the life histories just provided material for talented writers, but the project provided many writers with a vital point of engagement with American life. FDR said, “One hundred years from now, my administration will be known for its art, not its relief.”

Maryemma Graham, a professor of English at the University of Kansas and one of our NEH advisors for the film, told Poets & Writers, “The WPA was a godmother or godfather for so many writers who had had few opportunities before that point. For example, the largest single impact on black writing before the civil rights movement was really the WPA, not the Harlem Renaissance.” Graham explains that many Harlem Renaissance writers “did not continue to write after the twenties; Zora Neale Hurston [also a prominent Writers’ Project contributor] and Langston Hughes were the exceptions. Of the WPA writers who were black, more of them developed substantial careers beyond that period.” I was so glad we interviewed Graham for the “Soul of a People” documentary because her commentary is so trenchant.

A third legacy is in historical perspective. With the life histories, the Writers’ Project sort of provided big data for a wider range of perspectives in history, for making history more inclusive. It provided an approach that influenced many writers of history afterward.

Why do you think it’s valuable for the Library to preserve such historical collections, and what do you think the public should know about the Library’s mission to collect and preserve our cultural and historical heritage?

Many writers treat the Library’s collections as a secret trove. The collections offer open access to material where researchers can find new insights that affect how we understand the world. But any visitor gains from visiting the collections. You get a sense of history and its range of viewpoints as a larger view of life. Everyone should know that the Library is theirs to use. For residents lucky enough to live close enough to visit, it just takes five minutes in the James Madison Building to get a researcher’s ID. The generous help of reference librarians in the Main Reading Room puts so much in reach, even if you’re daunted when you enter.

Stetson Kennedy, the Florida folklorist, spoke to that wealth of the Library’s collections in our national life when we interviewed him in his 90s. He recalled a conversation with Alan Lomax, who had made recording tours in the 1930s, hauling a sound machine out to where people lived and worked: soup kitchens, homes, churches and prisons. Back in Washington, Lomax replayed those voices and told Kennedy that he felt was as if they were liberated:

“Alan was telling me how it felt to him later, back in the little room at the Library of Congress, plugging in this machine and listening to a black man’s voice coming out of a prison cell in Rayford, Fla. What an eerie thing it was for that voice and that man’s song to be there in the Library of Congress and echoing in this little chamber.”

For me, Stetson was talking about the Library’s majesty that holds whole worlds for us to find.

Inquiring Minds: The Intrepid Explorer

(From time to time, we’ll feature the story of one of our many researchers here at the Library and the discoveries they made using our collections. The following is the story of Meg Kennedy Shaw, who conducted research on her father, a British  desert explorer, botanist and archaeologist.)

Meg Kennedy Shaw has made many trips to the Library of Congress, “a favorite destination” of hers in Washington, D.C.

W. B. Kennedy Shaw taking theodolite observations from which to compute latitude and longitude. c. 1935. Courtesy of Meg Kennedy Shaw.

“Early on, I fell victim to the exquisite beauty of its great hall, staircases, Bibles gallery, the [Main] Reading Room and exhibitions,” she said.

Shaw accompanied her husband to the area in 2010, when he was awarded a one-year congressional fellowship working as a science advisor to a senator.

“Imagine my delight upon discovering that the [Main] Reading Room was open to all upon presentation of an easily-obtained Reader Registration Card!” she said.

It was during this time she began to research her father, W. B. Kennedy Shaw.

“When researching my father’s work in the Middle East in the 1920s and 1930s, in preparation for my family’s 2009 extensive expedition into Egypt’s western desert, I realized that there were many publications by and about him of which I was unaware,” Shaw said. “Then, when I moved to Capitol Hill for a year, it became obvious to me that if I were ever to find these publications they would be at the Library of Congress.”

According to Shaw, her father was born in 1901 and spent much of his early adult life as an explorer, geographer, cartographer, archaeologist and botanist in the deserts of Sudan, Palestine, Egypt and Libya. His knowledge and understanding of survival and travel in these waterless interior areas was so detailed that he was recruited in 1940 for intelligence work in a special-forces unit of the British Army.

Working with reference librarians at the Library of Congress, Shaw found scientific journal articles her father authored, both familiar and unfamiliar. These also led her to additional resources by her father, his colleagues and earlier explorers.

“I discovered many more publications by and about my father than I had previously known existed,” she explained. “Additionally I learned that he published not only accounts of exploration and mapping in Sudan and Egypt, but he also researched and made discoveries in botany, rock painting and engraving, archaeology, ethnography and geology – even one article speculating upon the political future of Libya.”

During his career, Shaw’s father also contributed to several British government maps, several of which are in Shaw’s collection.

“In preparation for our family’s Egyptian deep-desert expedition, I consulted those maps of my father’s that were in my possession,” she said. “One important map, though not unknown to me, was missing from my collection. On one visit to the Library, the helpful staff in the Geography and Map Division found this map in their collection, which they digitized and reproduced for me.”

W.B. Kennedy Shaw, left, with other participants in Sudan and Egypt expedition. 1935. Courtesy of Meg Kennedy Shaw.

Shaw believes her research conducted at the Library helped her gain a much better understanding of her father, particularly the importance and depth of his pre-war and wartime work accomplishments.

“It’s critically important for the Library to keep an eclectic and comprehensive collection,” she concluded. “In this way, research opportunities are available for that small number of people with an esoteric, specialized knowledge or interest, as well as for those seeking a more general education.”

Library in the News: April 2014 Edition

The Library made several major announcements in April, including new additions to the National Recording Registry.

The addition of the 25 new recordings to the National Recording Registry brings the list to a total of 400 sound recordings. Among the new selections were Jeff Buckley’s haunting single “Hallelujah” from his one and only studio album; Lyndon B. Johnson’s massive collection of presidential conversations; Isaac Hayes’ landmark soundtrack album “Shaft”; and “The Laughing Song” performed by the nation’s first black recording artist

Linda Ronstadt’s album, “Heart Like a Wheel,” was also added. The singer spoke with the Los Angeles Times following the announcement.

“Ronstadt, upon learning that her album is now among 400 titles from more than a century of recorded music history elected to the Registry, told The Times with a laugh, ‘If I’d known that, I would have sung it better. But I’m delighted.’”

CBS This Morning got a sneak peak at the recordings from Gene DeAnna, head of the recorded sound section in the Library’s Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division.

Other national outlets running features included USA Today, CBS Evening News, Variety, Washington Post and Rolling Stone, among others.

Affiliates of FOX, NBC, ABC and CBS news ran stories nationwide in addition to a variety of local print outlets.

On the literary front, the Library awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction to author E.L. Doctorow.

Doctorow told the New York Times that “the prize was particularly important to him because the nominees were chosen by past winners and other esteemed authors and critics.”

Also running a story was The Washington Post.

Continuing to make the news was Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, who soon ends her second term as the national poet.  She spoke with The Washington Post on all things poetry.

“My friends will sometimes tease me by calling me PLOTUS,” she said.

In addition, her poetry series with PBS NewsHour, “Where Poetry Lives,” launched a new installment in April highlighting the struggles of the civil rights movement.

A new exhibition that opened in April, “A Thousand Years of the Persian Book,” offers a glimpse into the rich literary tradition of the Persian language.

Radio Free Europe featured a pictorial tour of the exhibition.

Lastly, the Library’s rich musical collections were showcased in an article by the Huffington Post. Tony Woodcock, president of the New England Conservatory of Music, wrote about a recent trip to the Library’s Music Division and the musical treasures he had the opportunity to see first-hand.

“It was more like seeing and touching the still beating heart of a masterpiece,” he wrote of viewing the original manuscript of Brahms’ violin concerto.

“It’s all there for everyone. You can look at original scores online and you can go and visit and have the same experience we had. The Library of Congress is there for us all, and it’s one of the most compelling reasons to keep going back to D.C.”

First Drafts: “The Way We Were”

The following is an article featured in the May – June 2014 issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, LCM, now available for download here. You can also view the archives of the Library’s former publication from 1993 to 2011.

“Daydreams light the corners of my mind.”

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“The Way We Were,” Holograph lyrics, Alan and Marilyn Bergman, 1973. ASCAP Foundation Collection, Music Division.

These might have been the lyrics sung by Barbara Streisand in the 1973 film “The Way We Were” if not for the minds—and pens—of songwriting team Marilyn and Alan Bergman. But the word “daydreams” was changed to “memories” and the result was the Academy Award-winning song, “The Way We Were” (autographed score pictured here) from the film of the same title.

The Bergmans’ personal and professional collaboration, which began in the late 1950s, continues today. Lyricists for film, stage and television, they have earned 16 Academy Award nominations, multiple Emmys, Grammys and three Oscars.

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Alan Bergman, Marilyn Bergman and Marvin Hamlisch accept the Academy Award for “Best Song,” 1974. ASCAP Foundation Collection, Music Division.

The Bergmans have also devoted their lives to the rights of creative artists and the preservation of their work. Alan Bergman serves as a member of the Library of Congress National Film Preservation Board. Marilyn Bergman was elected president and chairman of the Board of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) in 1994, after five terms as the first woman ever to serve on ASCAP’s Board of Directors. After leading the organization for 15 years, she continues to serve on ASCAP’s Board. In 2002, she was appointed to chair the inaugural Library of Congress National Sound Recording Preservation Board.

The Library of Congress is home to the ASCAP Foundation collection. The organization, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this year, is the subject of a Library online exhibition.

Go See “Now See Hear!” Now

Today the Library adds another entry in its growing family of blogs.

“Now See Hear!” gives our specialists in the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center a place to showcase some of the amazing treasures of our national audiovisual heritage.

This is a place where Fugazi, Louis Armstrong, Jack Benny, Carole King, Buck Owens, Edward R. Murrow, Aretha Franklin, Mary Pickford, Dick Cavett, Carl Sagan, and Big Bird all share the same stage. We’ve captured their work on film, video, audio disc, wire, tape or CD, and will share news, stories and lessons learned.

Have a look at our first posting.

Photos Document Japanese-American Wartime Internment

(The following is a guest post by Wendi A. Maloney, writer-editor in the United States Copyright Office.)

Manzanar Relocation Center, California / Photograph by Ansel Adams. 1943.

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. This annual recognition of Asian Pacific Americans’ contributions to the American story started with a 1977 congressional resolution calling for a weeklong observance. In 1992, President George H. W. Bush extended it to the entire month of May.

At the Library of Congress, Asian American Pacific Islander resources include books, oral histories, personal papers, community newspapers and many other materials housed throughout Library divisions. Ansel Adams’s World War II photographs of Japanese-American internment in Manzanar, Calif., are a notable inclusion. They bear witness to a sad chapter in our nation’s history – but an important one to document.

Renowned for his images of western landscapes, Adams donated this rare and stunning set of photographs to the Library between 1965 and 1968, placing no copyright restrictions on their use. The complete collection is available through the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog.

Several months after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry were forced from their homes on the West Coast and sent to “relocation centers” by the United States government, which had declared war on Japan.

Toyo Miyatake / Photograph by Ansel Adams. 1943.

Documents accompanying the Adams online photo collection say the evacuation “struck a personal chord” with Adams after an ailing family employee was taken from his home to a faraway hospital. When Ralph Merritt, director of the Manzanar War Relocation Center, invited Adams to document camp life, he welcomed the opportunity. He shot more than 200 photos, mostly portraits, but also scenes from daily camp life with the majestic Sierra Nevada mountains often visible in the background.

One striking portrait features Toyo Miyatake, a fellow photographer and internee whose story of resolve under hardship is noteworthy. Miyatake operated a successful photography studio in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo neighborhood before the war. He smuggled a lens into Manzanar and constructed a makeshift camera – internees were not permitted to have cameras in the camp. When Miyatake was discovered, he was allowed to continue and took about 1,500 photographs over more than three years.

Miyatake’s son Archie has said that his father felt a duty to document camp life “so this kind of thing will never happen again.” Toyo Miyatake and Adams became friends, and Adams used Miyatake’s camp darkroom.

Like Adams, Miyatake shot photos of daily life. Some reviewers have noted an edgier tone to Miyatake’s pictures, however. The mountains around the camp often appear menacing in contrast to Adams’s more pristine views. And one well-known Miyatake photograph shows three boys standing behind barbed wire, even though camp rules prohibited photos of barbed wire or guard towers.

Toyo Myatake / Photograph by Ansel Adams. 1943.

Miyatake returned to Los Angeles with his family in 1945, reopening his Little Tokyo studio and achieving acclaim as a chronicler of the Japanese-American community. He died in 1979. In 2011, a street in Little Tokyo was named after him.

As for Ansel Adams, he told an interviewer in 1974 that “from a social point of view,” his Manzanar photos were the “most important thing I’ve done or can do, as far as I know.”

For more resources on Asian Pacific American cultural and historical heritage, visit www.asianpacificheritage.gov.