Library of Congress's Blog, page 47

Rodney King Beating Was 30 Years Ago Today; Courtroom Sketches Now at Library

Rodney King on the witness stand. Artist: Mary Chaney. Prints and Photographs Division.

This is a guest post by María Peña, a public relations strategist in the Library’s Office of Communications.

In a hushed Los Angeles courtroom, Rodney King recalled in a faint voice the blows he took from four white police officers wielding metal batons on March 3, 1991. King, who was Black, told a prosecutor that he tried to flee because he was “just trying to stay alive.”

As jurors leaned forward to hear King’s riveting testimony during that 1993 trial, Mary Chaney  took to her sketch pad. Chaney, then one of the nation’s top courtroom artists, created 269 sketches from King’s federal and civil trials between 1992 and 1994. “It’s like walking a tightrope without a net,” she told the Los Angeles Times about the pressure she was under.

The beating of King was one of the most pivotal moments in recent American history. It took place 30 years ago today. The Library marks the occasion by announcing that it has acquired those sketches from Chaney’s estate.

“The sketches from the federal trial against the police officers for violating Rodney King’s civil rights and his civil lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles stand out as the type the Library should be collecting and making available to researchers,” said Sara Duke,  curator of Popular and Applied Graphic Art.

Chaney, who died of cancer at 77 in 2005, would have been thrilled to see her  artwork added to the Library’s collection of landmark court trials, said Lark Ireland, her daughter. Chaney’s sketches joins those of , Aggie Kenny, Pat Lopez, Arnold Mesches, Gary Myrick, Joseph Papin, Freda Reiter, Bill Robles, David Rose, Jane Rosenberg and among others.

“It gives me chills, it really does,” Ireland said in a recent phone interview. “Recognition was not her goal in life, she lived for her art; it was sacred to her.”

King’s beating — caught on tape by a witness who saw the event unfold from his apartment balcony — shocked the nation because it laid bare the problems of police brutality and racial bias in law enforcement, themes that are still relevant today.

King’s run-in with police began as fairly routine. He was unarmed but on parole for robbery when police attempted to pull him over, suspecting him of driving under the influence. Instead, he led them on a high-speed chase on I-210.The officers beat him viciously after he was finally stopped. Police log records would later reveal that one of the officers seemingly boasted about his role in the beating.

The four defendants listen to testimony in the Rodney King trial. Artist: Mary Chaney. Prints and Photographs Division.

The trials against officers Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, Stacey Koon and Ted Briseno are considered a critical moment in legal history. The acquittal on state criminal charges in 1992 unleashed five days of looting and rioting in Los Angeles, leaving more than 60 dead, thousands injured and about $1 billion in damages. Businesses left in smoldering ruins took years to recover. It became a landmark moment in U.S. culture.

Chaney did not begun her career in courtrooms, as she started out in commercial art. But cameras are generally forbidden in courtrooms, so sketch artists helped pull back the curtain and catch the essence of significant legal proceedings. At the suggestion of a colleague, she switched from commercial to courtroom art in the mid-1980s. She practiced by sketching her seven children.

“She was the worst cook in the world, but she was always painting or sketching, and we would be her subjects when she’d try to figure out something,” Ireland recalled.

Disciplined and passionate about her art and social causes, Chaney sketched life in downtown L.A., where her drawings of the homeless later became an exhibit. Her pieces were also exhibited at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.

Chaney was “invisible” in the courtroom, but her poignant sketches became prominent, featured on television and on the the covers of major newspapers, magazines and law journals. She had already worked on many high-profile cases by the time the four LAPD police officers were indicted for excessive use of force in arresting King and would go on to document many more. Her career included trials ranging from that of “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez to “Hollywood Madam” Heidi Fleiss, the Menendez brothers and O.J. Simpson.

U.S. Judge John G. Davies in King’s 1994 federal trial. Artist: Mary Chaney. Prints and Photographs Division.

Her work during the King trial shows dozens of indelible moments. On the stand, King described the racial epithets the police officers hurled as they beat, kicked, stomped, tasered and taunted him. When they were done, King had a fractured skull, broken bones and teeth as well as permanent brain damage. Others show King up close on the witness stand, pointing to a video clip or describing his arrest for drunken driving. Ireland still remembers an illustration where King was asked to read something out loud and he confessed that he was illiterate.

Chaney “had quite a passion for civil rights, so when the beating occurred… so many people were horrified about it, as she was,” said Ireland.

Still, she kept her composure through the testimonies, the grainy video of King’s beating and graphic photos of his injuries. The various trials stretched out, in all, for more than three years. After the officers were acquitted of criminal charges in 1992, she sketched the sentencing of officers Powell and Koon on federal civil rights charges in 1993, as well as the civil trial in which a jury awarded King $3.8 million in damages in 1994.

King, who had further arrests and convictions for traffic violations after the trials, accidentally drowned in the backyard pool of his home in Rialto, California, in 2012.

Chaney continued drawing all of her life. Even in hospice, Ireland said, when her mother could no longer string words together, she’d sketch. She’d like to be remembered, Ireland said, simply as someone who “showed up and did her job.”

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The Aramont Library: Stunning Private Collection Now at Library of Congress

“Constellations,” 1959, Joan Miró, with commentary by poet Andre Breton. Aramont Library. Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

This is a guest post by Stephanie Stillo, curator of Rare Books in the Rare Books and Special Collections Division. It appeared in slightly different form in the Jan.-Feb. issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

What makes a perfect book? Is it the typography? The illustrations? The binding? Is it what someone adds, like a signature, a note or a drawing? Or is it what they take away, like a perfectly trimmed edge?

For the collector of the Aramont Library, a recent donation of over 1,700 volumes to the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, the answer is clear: A perfect book is one that is unique, surprising or personal.

James Joyce’s hand-drawn map of Dublin. Aramont Library. Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

It is a rare first edition of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” with a curious annotated anatomical drawing tipped in. It is a signed 23-volume set of the collected works of Joseph Conrad with a unique leather vignette on every cover. It is a 20th-century edition of the poems of Baroque poet Luis de Góngora with original illustrations and commentary by Pablo Picasso and bound by Paul Bonet. While beauty certainly resides in the eye of the beholder, it is quite easy to share the vision of the collector of the Aramont Library.

In private hands for over 40 years, the Aramont Library consists of 1,700 volumes of literary first editions, illustrated books, and an astonishing collection livres d’artiste (books by artists) by some of the most important artists of the 20th century. Many of the books in the collection are enclosed in fine bindings; stunning expressions of craft that are more appropriately described as works of art than simple bindings.

The library began in the early 1980s with signed and inscribed first editions of modernist literature, a genre that critically explored topics such as alienation, disillusionment and fragmentation in the industrial, postwar West. These range from the poetry of Miguel de Unamuno and Ezra Pound to the novels of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather.

Nothing captures the Aramont Library’s hunt for perfection better than the collection’s three first editions of Joyce’s bawdy, stream-of-consciousness novel “Ulysses,” first published in Paris in 1922 by Shakespeare & Company. Loosely based on Homer’s “Odyssey,” the novel follows Joyce’s protagonists as they meander the streets of Dublin one day in June, exploring the drama and heroism of everyday people. The rare, and highly sought-after, first editions in the Aramont Library include inscriptions, signed letters by Joyce, photographs, a rare copy of Joyce’s 1920 schema for his “dammed monster novel,” as well as a unique and unusual anatomical figure that corresponds to the structure of the book, perhaps in the author’s hand.

The heart of the Aramont collection is a thoughtful assemblage of illustrated books and livres d’artiste that span from the late 18th to 20th centuries. The Aramont begins its exploration of illustration with the most important Spanish painter and graphic artist of the Baroque period, Francisco Goya (1746-1828). Goya used the technique of printing to level piercing critiques about the world around him. His two most famous series, both in the Aramont, are “Los Caprichos” (1799), a visual critique of the hypocrisy and foolishness of the Spanish Royal Court, and “Los Desastres de la Guerra” (1810-20, published posthumously in 1863), a graphic and disturbing expose about the horrors of the Peninsular War.

“Les Chants des Morts,” (“The Songs of the Dead”), 1948. Handwritten poems by Pierre Reverdy. Illustrations by Pablo Picasso. 1948. Aramont Library. Rare Books and Special Collections Division.

From the continental conflicts of the early modern period to the aesthetics movements of the 19th century, the Aramont Library focuses specifically on the illustration and bindings of the arts and crafts and art nouveau movements. Disillusioned with the impact of industrialization on the aesthetics of the everyday, notable artists and intellectuals like William Morris (1834-1896) sought to reestablish the close relationship between artists, craftsman and final product.

The Aramont demonstrates how the arts and craft movement held a special significance for book binders. From the bejeweled bindings of Sangorski & Sutcliffe to the intricate pointelle patterns of Doves Bindery, binders of the late 19th and early 20th centuries challenged the mass production of commercial binderies by crafting customized binding for everything from single books to multivolume sets.

The late 19th century also witnessed the rise of art nouveau. Defined by an artistic preference for the sensual, wild and unkempt, the art nouveau aesthetic shaped the appearance of everything from commercial advertising to furniture design until the start of World War I.

The impact of art nouveau in graphic art is best represented in the Aramont Library by the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley. In 1894, Beardsley created illustrations for the English translation of Oscar Wilde’s play about the biblical femme fatale, Salome. Wilde’s play (by the same name) dramatized an evening of carnal desire that concluded in the decapitation of the itinerant prophet John the Baptist. Banned from stage performances until 1896, Beardsley’s illustrations offered the play its first visual performance through fantastic and erotic imagery that skillfully elucidated Wilde’s story of female domination, sexual desire and death.

Detail from an Aubrey Beardsley illustration from Oscar Wilde’s “Salome.” Aramont Library. Rare Book and Special Collections Divisoin.

The Aramont Library’s greatest strength is its assemblage of livres d’artiste, a corpus of material that reveals the deep and meaningful collaborations between artists, authors and publishers during the 20th century. These range from the early post-Impressionist work of Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse to the fauvist revelations of George Rouault and André Derain. From the geometric cubism of George Braque and Jacque Villon to the unbridled surrealist visions of Marc Chagall, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. For example, “À Toute Épreuve” (1958) was a visual meditation on the surrealist poetry of Paul Eluard.

In the early 1940s, Swiss art dealer and publisher Gérald Cramer enlisted the expert vision of surrealist painter Joan Miró to illustrate Eluard’s prose. The now-iconic “À Toute Épreuve” was the result of a 10-year collaboration between the artist, poet and publisher, cut short only by the death of Eluard in 1952. The result was a monument to the book as an art object. To create distinctive graphic texture to the images that would interlace the letterpress pose, Miró glued wire, stones, bark and sand to his woodcuts, assembled discrete collages from old prints and added visual embellishments from mail order catalogs.

Many of the livres d’artiste in the Aramont Library are enclosed in bespoke bindings that meditate on the major themes of the text or the visual contribution of the artist.

Rose Adler’s binding for Jean Cocteau’s “The Human Voice,” with illustrations by French expressionist Bernard Buffet, used an assemblage of dyed leather and abalone shells to depict a large rotary phone, a gesture to Cocteau’s emotionally charged narrative about a woman on the phone with her former lover. The Aramont Library also holds six bindings by the most celebrated binder of the 20th century, Paul Bonet. This gathering includes Bonet’s famous sunburst pattern. Perfected by Bonet in the 1930s and 1940s, the pattern uses a combination of gold lines and colored leather to create the illusion of dimensionality and depth. In the Aramont Library, Bonet’s sunburst announces George Rouault’s “Circus of the Shooting Star,” an illustrated rumination on human frailty as seen through the daily lives of circus performers, a common theme for many post-impressionist artists.

Cover of “Circus of the Shooting Star,” by George Rouault, bound by Paul Bonet. Aramont Library, Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

When taken as a whole, the Aramont Library is both a measure of Western creativity over the last two centuries and a reflection of a collector’s pursuit of the perfect balance between book design, illustration and binding. We in Rare Book look forward to sharing more with you about this extraordinary collection in the months and years to come.

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Afro-Latinos: Shaping the American story

Roberto Clemente at bat for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1967. Photo: Jim Hansen. Prints and Photographs Division.

This is a guest post by María Peña, a public relations strategist in the Library’s Office of Communications.

No discussion around Black History Month would be complete without exploring the significant contributions of Afro-Latinos to American culture and society. The Library provides a rich sampling of some of these icons who have enriched the national mosaic.

Latinos can be of any race, and according to the Pew Research Center, about 25 percent of Hispanics in the U.S. self-identify as Afro-Latinos. As members of the African diaspora, they have faced discrimination for being black and alienation because of their language and accent.

Orlando Cepeda, the Hall-of-Fame first baseman from Puerto Rico, summed it up this way after a brilliant 17-year career in Major League Baseball from 1958 to 1974: “We had two strikes against us: One for being black, and another for being Latino.”

Spanish-speaking Africans were present in North America before the arrival of English settlers and Afro-Latinos came to be an integral part of American history. Their stories and struggles interweaved with those of Africans enslaved by English settlers and added to the nation’s cultural tapestry. Still, because white society seldom sought to understand or differentiate differences between Blacks, Afro-Latinos have often been underreported in the news media or are barely mentioned in history textbooks.

“Afro-Latinos have had a long history and strong presence in U.S history since the mid-16th century and very few Americans are aware of the term ‘Afro-Latinos,’ ” said Carlos Olave, head of the Hispanic Reading Room.

Nevertheless, as D.C. AfroLatino Caucus founder Manuel Méndez points out, the world would not be the same without prominent Afro-Cuban musicians like Mario Bauza. And no one can forget Johnny Pacheco, the Dominican-American music legend who co-founded Fania Records in the 1960s and helped create the genre of music known today as salsa. When he died on Feb. 15, the world lost an icon. There was also the  heroic efforts of Dominican-born Esteban Hotesse, a Tuskegee Airman during World War II, to integrate the military.

Here are just a few more of the names who have changed American history, many of whom you can find in the Library’s collections.

— Puerto Rican historian Arturo Alfonso Schomburg was a key intellectual figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and spent his life championing Black history and literature.  His collection of books, documents and artifacts from and about Black history from around the world helped establish the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem in 1926, within the New York Public Library.

Before Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color line with the Dodgers in 1947, several Afro-Cuban players had made inroads decades earlier for people of color in the nation’s pastime, including Estevan Enrique Bellán, Rafael Almeida and Armando Marsans. During the ensuing decades, Roberto Clemente, Orlando Cepeda, Minnie Miñoso and the Alou brothers (Felipe, Manny and Jesus) were among the sport’s most important Afro-Latino players, setting the stage for future generations to become some of the brightest stars in the game. In 2020,10.7 percent of MLB’s entire roster was from the Dominican Republic alone.

Machito, performing in 1947. Photo: William P. Gottlieb. Prints and Photographs Division.

— The arts and entertainment world of the early to mid-20th century was flavored with the rhythms of Afro-Latino mega stars like Sammy Davis Jr. (his mother, Elvera Sanchez, was of Afro-Cuban descent), Celia Cruz, Machito (Frank Grillo) and Negrura Peruana. Machito fused traditional Cuban dance rhythms with big-band arrangements to dominate the post-war Latin music scene during the Golden Age of Latin Music; the Library has a huge trove of his papers. Cruz, also known as the “Queen of Salsa”, won numerous awards throughout her 60-year career, with sold-out performances where her battle cry “¡Azúcar!” (“Sugar!”) alluded to African slaves working in sugar cane plantations in her native Cuba.

As in baseball, these Afro-Latino artists founded a platform so broad that is taken for granted today;  Mariah Carey, Rosario Dawson, Esperanza Spalding and Zoe Saldana and just a few names to drop.

—In literature, Afro-Latino authors have added their voices to the national dialogue for years, with their works attracting an international following. The list includes Junot Díaz, (“Drown,” “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”) born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey; Brazilian author Paulo Lins (“City of God,” adapted to film in 2002); Dominican-American author Elizabeth Acevedo (“The Poet X,” winner of the National Book Award For Young People); Veronica Chambers, the Panamanian-American journalist and author; and Puerto Rican authors Mayra Santos Febres and Dahlma Llanos Figueroa.

–In science, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has talked about his Afro-Latino heritage as the son of a Puerto Rican mother and an African-American father and has written about his experiences with racial profiling. Growing up in the Bronx, deGrasse Tyson developed a passion for astronomy after a visit to the sky theater at the Hayden Planetarium at the age of nine. He became the fifth director of the New York City-based planetarium in 1996, and he continues to promote science literacy and to popularize science through lectures, seminars, and national book tours.

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Black History Portraits: The Famous and The Forgotten

William Pettiford, 1908. Prints and Photographs Division.

This is a guest post by Elizabeth Gettins, a digital library specialist in the Digital Collections Management and Services Division.

William R. Pettiford was born in Birmingham, Alabama, coming of age in the turbulent years after slavery ended and Reconstruction was a violent, uncertain business. In this tumultuous environment, he was smart, studious and devoutly religious. Early in his career, he worked as a minister and teacher in various towns across Alabama. In 1890, when he was in his late 40s, he founded the Alabama Penny Savings Bank. which greatly spurred black economic development in the region, with an emphasis on home ownership. Starting out with initial deposits and stock of $2,500, in 20 years deposits were $420,000 (roughly $11 million in 2021). He’s credited with being one of the most significant Black bankers and lenders of the era.

His is one of many portraits in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division’s new digital gallery of African American Portraits, the most recent addition to the digitized African American Perspectives Collection. It’s a fascinating collection of nearly 800 items that show the famous and the forgotten in a generation of Black Americans who strived, fought, prayed and kept making a way out of no way during the early decades of freedom.

Taken together, the portraits show the character and humanity of the individuals who fought to better their circumstances against the headwinds of bigotry, enforced poverty and discriminatory laws. Scrolling through the images, you’ll see well-known social activists and religious leaders including Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Alexander Crummell. However, you may be surprised to see  so many unfamiliar faces that accomplished so much and made such impressive inroads.

This mosaic of faces brings together those that came before us, from many places across the country and from many walks of life. Together, they form the story, both told and untold, upon which future generations built their own successes.  It is our hope that this gallery will encourage further research into the lives of these intriguing historical figures and to give them the credit they so richly deserve.

In addition to Pettiford, here are two more stories. The larger catalogue, and the stories they contain, are yours for the seeking.

Gertrude Bustill Mossell, 1902. Prints and Photographs Division.

Gertrude Emily Hicks Bustill was born in Philadelphia in 1855 to a prominent African American family during the last of the antebellum era. She would lead a remarkable life over her 92 years, playing an active, socially-engaged role in all of it. She was a child during the Civil War. She saw Blacks gain freedom from slavery but then be forced into the “separate but equal” lie of segregation. She lived through World War I and worked to help get women the right to vote. She endured the Great Depression, watched World War II unfold and lived to see the United States emerge as the world’s greatest power. She died in 1948, the year after Jackie Robinson integrated professional baseball.

Her father, who had worked on the Underground Railroad to help enslaved Blacks escape to freedom, encouraged her education from an early age. It was a rare opportunity for a woman in that era. She worked her way into being a journalist, author, teacher and activist who strongly supported black newspapers and advocated for more black women to enter journalism. She served as a writer and editor for several newspapers and magazines and published a number of books.

When she married, it was to Nathan Mossell, a prominent Black doctor who helped co-found and then direct the city’s Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital and Training School. She was an outspoken advocate for Black women in particular and an ardent supporter of all women’s right to the ballot. She was 65 when the 19th Amendment passed and she was finally eligible to vote.

By the time she died in January of 1948, only part of her life-long goal of a fair life for African Americans had been achieved, but she had left in an indelible mark in her city.

Robert Reed Church. Prints and Photographs Division.

Robert Reed Church was an imposing figure who rose from slavery to become one of the richest and most influential Black men in the South in the late 19th century – and his oldest daughter, Mary Church Terrell, became one of the most important educators, activists and female suffrage advocates in American history. Her papers are at the Library and you can help digitize them in this month’s By the People Transcribe-A-Thon.

Church, born in 1839 in north Mississippi, was the son of slave-owner Charles Church and one of his enslaved women, Emmeline. Charles Church owned and piloted steamboats. Emmeline Church died when Robert was 12. He said later in life that his father had never treated neither him nor his mother as slaves — but his father never acknowledged him as his child, didn’t have him educated and only allowed him to work on his steamships in menial jobs that were reserved for Blacks.

His break in life came in the Civil War when Union troops seized his father’s ship (with him on it), and then dropped off the crew in Memphis. From there, Church began to run a series of saloons, shops, stores and buy land that, over time, made him a fortune. In the 1866 riot by white mobs in Memphis – 46 Black people were killed, an unknown number of  women were raped, a dozen churches were burned – whites shot Church and, believing him dead, left him. He survived. A few years later, a sheriff shot and wounded him yet again.

Undaunted, he became a hugely influential city booster and founded Solvent Savings Bank & Trust Company, the first black-owned bank in the city, which extended credit to Blacks so they could buy homes and develop businesses. As a philanthropist, he also used his wealth to fund and develop prominent parks, concert halls and entertainment facilities for Blacks who were excluded by racial segregation from nearly all other amenities. President Theodore Roosevelt spoke at one of his venues, as did Booker T. Washington. W.C. Handy performed there.

By the time Church died in 1912, his family was an institution in city life. His children continued the family tradition of education, service and devotion to civic causes and African American achievement.

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Kluge Prize Winner Danielle Allen Hosts “Our Common Purpose”

Danielle Allen. Photo: Laura Rose.

This is a guest post by Andrew Breiner, a writer-editor in the Kluge Center. 

Danielle Allen, winner of the Library’s 2020 Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity, will host a series of exciting conversations at the Library to explore the nation’s civic life and ways that people from all political beliefs and social causes can build a stronger, more resilient country.

The series is called “Our Common Purpose—A Campaign for Civic Strength at the Library of Congress.” It consists of three public events this spring that are free and open to everyone. Each event will be accompanied by a workshop for K-12 educators and public librarians, in which teachers from across the country will connect, explore, experiment and create new ways of making civic ideals come to life in their classrooms.

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences is supporting Our Common Purpose and recently released a report, co-edited by Danielle Allen, “Reinventing Democracy for the 21st Century.”

The series begins March 11 with an event highlighting civic media as a promising counterpoint to the polarizing universe of social media. The second event, in April, will explore how voting systems can be a deciding factor in political decision-making, and how they might be reformed. The final event, in May, will look to history and search for ways we can create an inclusive narrative of America’s past. Each will feature Danielle Allen as the moderator with leading thinkers in social and civic media, reform in political institutions and the American historical experience.

The poster for the campaign, created by artist Rodrigo Corral, showcases the shared iconography of American civic life as well as the Juneteenth flag, a symbol that is known to some, but unknown to many others. This illustrates the theme of invisibility – that not everyone’s American experience is broadly understood or apparent.

“The art celebrates so much of what the Kluge Prize and Danielle Allen stand for: togetherness, connectivity, action, and above all else the bonds we have in our communities no matter our differences,” Corral said.

Allen, a native of Takoma Park, Maryland, grew up in California and is a multi-talented academic, political theorist, author and columnist. She is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and Director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. Librarian Carla Hayden announced Allen as the Kluge Prize honoree last June. She was awarded the prize for her internationally recognized scholarship in political theory and her commitment to improving democratic practice and civics education. Her books include “Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality,” “Why Plato Wrote,” and a memoir about her cousin’s tragic experiences in the criminal justice system, “Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A.”

The Kluge Prize recognizes the highest level of scholarly achievement and impact on public affairs and is considered one of the nation’s most prestigious award in the humanities and social sciences.

“At a time when trust in both civic and scientific institutions seems to be at a low point, Allen’s research, writing, and public engagement exemplify the societal value of careful scholarship and inclusive dialogue,” Hayden said. “Her engagement with public policy issues, including societal responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, demonstrates the possibility and value of careful, judicious, and rational deliberation among individuals from multiple academic disciplines and vastly different political backgrounds.”

Here’s the schedule of events.

Using Civic Media to Build a Better Society

March 11, 2021

Panelists will explore the role of information in democratic society and addressing the challenges citizens face in identifying trustworthy sources of information in the digital age. They will consider the potential of civic media to inform and educate within the context of the broader social media ecosystem, where the incentives are to spread information regardless of its truth or value. Panelists will consider what civic media looks like and how it can it compete with social media.

Moderator: Danielle Allen

Panelists:

Talia Stroud (University of Texas) is a nationally-renowned expert on examining commercially viable and democratically beneficial ways of improving media.

Brendesha Tynes (University of Southern California) is a leader in the study of how youth experience digital media and how these early experiences are associated with their academic and emotional development. She is also interested in equity issues as they relate to digital literacy.

Richard Young is the founder of CivicLex, a non-profit that is using technology, media, and social practice to build a more civically engaged city. CivicLex aims to build stronger relationships between citizens and those who serve them.

How Political Institutions Shape Outcomes and How We Might Reform Them

April 15, 2021

In the U.S., political institutions are often seen as neutral, but in fact they reflect choices and compromises about how we balance between majority and minority interests. Panelists will look at the way different systems of electoral decision-making in a democracy can, by themselves, lead to very different outcomes, and what can be done to reform them in ways that result in more responsive and deliberative legislative bodies.

Moderator: Danielle Allen

Panelists:

Lee Drutman (New America Foundation) is an influential and prolific author on reforming political parties, electoral systems and Congress.

Katie Fahey (Of The People) leads an organization dedicated to pursuing reforms to empower individuals in the political system.

Cara McCormick (National Association of Nonpartisan Reformers) is an activist and leader of organizations dedicated to electoral reforms at all levels.

Finding a Shared Historical Narrative

May 13, 2021

Speakers will discuss the changing interpretations of the nation’s founding documents and the principles they were founded upon. They will also explore the tension between celebrating what is good about the U.S. and its history, while addressing the exploitation and inequality that are also part of the American legacy.

We have not finalized the panelists for this program

In addition, late in the year the Library will be reaching out to public librarians across the country to explore ways in which they guide citizens of all ages in finding credible information on the internet. Hundreds of librarians will participate in six weeks of moderated, online discussion. After these six weeks of conversation, a smaller, representative group of librarians will share with Danielle Allen and the president of the American Library Association a report that summarizes the group’s insights on separating fact from fiction on the internet.

“Our Common Purpose” featuring the Juneteenth flag with one star. Artist: Rodrigo Corral.

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On This Date: A “Monumental” Day for Women

Women’s groups at the “Portrait Monument” dedication, 1921. Prints and Photographs Division.

This is a guest blog by Elizabeth A. Novara, a historian in the Library’s Manuscript Division.

One hundred years ago, on Feb. 15, 1921, over 70 women’s organizations gathered in the U.S. Capitol rotunda for the unveiling of the statue “Portrait Monument to Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.”

The National Woman’s Party (NWP), one of the leading women’s suffrage organizations, had officially presented the statue as a gift from the women of the nation to Congress’ Joint Committee on the Library several days earlier. The dedication ceremony marked both the 101st anniversary of the birth of Susan B. Anthony and the ratification of the 19th Amendment the previous summer. The latter capped more than 70 years of activism for women’s suffrage.

Millions of women voted in their first presidential election in November 1920 and they were filled with hope and excitement for changes yet to come.

“Portrait Monument” also represented a high point in sculptor Adelaide Johnson’s career. In 1893, Johnson exhibited several portrait busts of well-known suffragists, including Anthony, Stanton and Mott, as well as pioneer physician Caroline B. Winslow, at the Woman’s Pavilion of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

In 1896, she married English businessman Alexander Frederick Jenkins. It was a unique event, held not in a church but in her Washington, D.C., studio. She regarded the statues as her bridesmaids. Jenkins took his wife’s last name. The ceremony was presided over by a woman.

A month later, Susan B. Anthony wrote to Johnson, supporting her innovative wedding, noting that “he and you have a perfect right to make your arrangements, as to name, residence, and mode of living, to please yourselves.” Anthony also expressed her wish that Congress would purchase the busts exhibited in Chicago for installation in the new Library of Congress building, then under construction and slated to open in November 1897. She wrote, “their busts ought to stand in some of the niches in that mammoth building, the taxes to build which have been wrung from the hard earnings of the women of this nation as well as from those of the men.” Johnson’s marriage did not endure (she divorced in 1908) and her portrait busts were not placed in the Library. But she did use them as the basis for the larger “Portrait Monument.”

Adelaide Johnson, Dora Lewis and Jane Addams, Feb, 1921. NWP Records, Manuscript Division.

The unveiling of “Portrait Monument” was part of the 1921 NWP convention, at which members charted the organization’s future after the achievement of the 19th Amendment. Some of the women’s groups that attended the unveiling ceremony included the National Council of Women, the National Consumers’ League, the National Women’s Trade Union League, the National Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the National League of Women Voters and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. While these organizations may not have all agreed on the NWP’s tactics and policies, they attended to demonstrate a spirit of cooperation. The notable exception was the absence of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, a competing national suffrage organization.

The convention also made clear that the NWP was the only women’s organization at the time that supported a federal equal rights amendment, later known as the ERA. Women’s social service and labor organizations saw such an amendment as having the potential to undo protective labor legislation for women. In addition, the NWP’s focus on achieving equal rights for women continued to take precedence over racial equality. African American women in attendance at the convention objected that they and their issues were overlooked in favor of well-known white speakers. After the successes of the suffrage movement, the women’s movement struggled to redefine itself without the single issue of suffrage that had bound various women’s groups together.

Soon after the dedication ceremony, “Portrait Monument” was moved to a less prominent location in the Capitol’s crypt, removed from display in the rotunda until 1997. Much like the statue’s overdue reemergence in the rotunda, it would take decades for women’s rights to again gain prominence in the nation’s discourse. It would also take years for women’s organizations to support the goal of equality for all. Slowly but surely, the struggle continues.

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Lincoln’s Birthday … And First Inauguration

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February 12 is the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, who is routinely voted by historians to be the best — or, at worst, the second-best — president in American history, depending on how George Washington is polling.

The Library has Lincoln’s papers as well as any number of things the president and Mary Todd Lincoln possessed, including the pearl necklace and bracelets that the first lady wore to their first inaugural ball. Log-splitting Abe was a man of such modest means that he had to buy them on layaway from Tiffany’s in New York. Also, one of the most requested things to see in the Library (it’s a single collection) is the contents of his pockets when he was assassinated.

There are also stunning documents in his hand, including the Gettysburg Address, as well as the working drafts and final copies of his memorable inaugural speeches. Both contributed lines that still resonate in the national consciousness. In the second, given during the waning weeks of the Civil War, there was “with malice toward none,” a call towards national healing.

In the first inauguration, some states were already seceding when Lincoln took office. In this speech, trying to hold a fragmenting nation together, he concluded with a passage about the shared bonds of all Americans: “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

As you’ll see in the short video above, the Library holds these and other documents of the Lincoln administration, in its faults and glories. It’s a highlight reel of one of the Library’s most important collections and a cornerstone of American history. It’s something worth thinking about on the birthday of one of the nation’s most important citizens.

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Douglass Day Transcribe-a-Thon!

Frederick Douglass. Photo: John Andrew and Son. Prints and Photographs Division.

This is a guest post by Lauren Algee, community manager for the Library’s By the People program.

We are delighted to announce that our online transcription campaign the Library’s Mary Church Terrell Papers is the 2021 Douglass Day service project chosen by the Colored Conventions Project – and you can take part!

Starting at noon tomorrow (Feb. 12), this project is an excellent way to spend a few hours of Black History Month — helping preserve and digitize the papers of Terrell, the legendary activist and educator who was co-founder and president of the National Association of Colored Women and who helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Each year, during the celebration of Douglass’ birthday,  the non-profit Colored Conventions Project selects an online transcription project to promote as part of a day of service in his honor.

This year, they selected the Library’s By the People crowdsourcing transcription effort, in which volunteers have already transcribed more than 20,000 pages of Terrell’s papers. At noon on Feb. 12, we will release the final section of the collection for a weekend-long Douglass Day transcribe-a-thon. These 4,607 pages, constituting the “Miscellaneous Series” of the Terrell Papers, include documents from all phases of her public activities and provide glimpses of her private life. 

Sign-up is free and easy. Along with transcribing, the Douglass Day celebration will feature readings, a virtual panel including Adrienne Cannon, the Library’s African American History and Culture Specialist, and a birthday cake bake-off.

As the CCP website says, “Our collective efforts—what we create on 2/14—helps to remind us that African American history is American history.”

Mary Church Terrell. Photo: Addison N. Scurlock. Prints and Photographs Division.

Combining the legacies of Douglass and Terrell is a reflection of the pair’s long friendship. Terrell met Douglass as a college student when she was invited to President James A. Garfield’s inauguration. Their friendship lasted decades.

Together, they visited the White House and attended the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Terrell even saw Douglass on the day of his death in 1895. Her papers include reminiscences of Douglass in which she writes, “No matter how poor in this world’s goods I might become, if one should promise to give me a fortune to sell him the honor and the pleasure which being Frederick Douglass’ friend afforded and thereby deprive myself of that blessed, rich experience I should reject his offer and remain in poverty the rest of my life.”

After Douglass’ death, Terrell founded Douglass Day as a member of the Washington, D.C. school board. (She was the first African American woman to serve in that capacity in a major city.) The commemoration of Douglass’ legacy took place on his chosen birthday of February 14, selected because his mother called him her “little Valentine.”

Terrell wrote that the establishment of Douglass Day was her proudest accomplishment.

“I am prouder of having made it possible for future generations of Colored children to learn what a great member of their own race accomplished, in spite of almost insurmountable obstacles and to afford them an opportunity of honoring his memory in the public schools than of anything I have ever done.”

Douglass Day was adopted by schools across the country. In the 1920s. Carter G. Woodson proposed to connect Douglass Day and Abraham Lincoln’s birthday into a full week of celebration in the middle of February. By the 1960s, student activists turned that week into a full month of Black History recognition.

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Free to Use and Reuse Pictures and Prints: Black Women Changemakers

This month, our Free to Use and Reuse set of copyright-free images and prints features African American Women changemakers. It’s always difficult picking just three from these collections, but this month was particularly so — there are great images of Billie Holiday, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Ella Fitzgerald and so many others.

But here are three remarkable women, two from my home state of Mississippi, who made the lives of so many millions of Americans so much better at great personal sacrifice to themselves.

Ida B. Wells in 1891. Prints and Photographs Division.

Ida B. Wells is a towering figure, one of the most consequential journalists in American history, a key figure in the women’s suffrage movement and an absolutely fearless human being. Her work on lynching continues to be a historical record that scholars draw on, illuminating one of the darkest periods of American history. She was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for “her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching,” in the words of the Pulitzer committee.

Born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862, she was the child of parents who became strong advocates of Reconstruction in the brutal realm of the post-Civil War South. Both parents died of yellow fever when she was a teenager. She attended segregated colleges, became a journalist and soon was working as a teacher in Memphis to support her siblings. At 22, she sued a train company for discrimination in a case that resembled the later case of Plessy v. Ferguson. (She won, but it was overturned.)

She soon became editor of The Memphis Free Speech, using her platform to decry the rampant lynching of black people. She investigated these crimes and in 1895 published a blistering book, “The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States,” destroying the myths that had been given as justification for the killings. The real reason, she wrote, was that “Negroes were whipped, scourged, exiled, shot and hung whenever and wherever it pleased the white man.”

Frederick Douglass revered her for it, but a white mob soon destroyed her printing presses and threatened to kill her, forcing her to move to Chicago, where she continued her anti-lynching research and writing.

In 1895, when she married Ferdinand Barnett, a famed civil rights advocate, she became one of  the first married women in the nation to keep her maiden name. She then took on the women’s suffrage movement, demanding black women be included.

She died of kidney disease in Chicago in 1931, one of the great — and greatly underrecognized — Americans of the age.

Fannie Lou Hamer at the Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, New Jersey, Aug, 1964. Photo: Warren K. Leffler.

I grew up in rural north Mississippi in the 1960s and 1970s, and Fannie Lou Hamer was an astonishing figure. She was born into mind-numbing poverty in the Delta in 1917, the last of 20 children to parents trapped in the vice of Jim Crow-era sharecropping. She had to start picking cotton as a child and dropped out of school at 12 to work for the family. She married young and worked in near-feudal conditions for decades. In her late 30s, she underwent surgery for a uterine tumor and the white doctor removed her uterus as well, without her consent. This was not uncommon in the time and place.

In the early 1960s, when she in her 40s, she became a fierce civil rights activist, registering herself and others to vote and taking part in sit-ins to protest segregation. She was fired from her job, kicked out of her home and beaten so badly that it left life-along injuries.

“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired,” she said, memorably. And, of the deadly violence she faced: “If I fall, I’ll fall five feet four inches forward in the fight for freedom.”

And still, in 1964, she helped organize Freedom Summer, a national campaign that brought college students to Mississippi to help Blacks fight through state-sponsored barriers to be eligible to vote. She founded the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party in protest of the all-white Democratic delegation, and created a national moment at the Democratic national convention when she rose to speak. President Lyndon Johnson was so fearful of her impact that he hastily called a press conference so that television cameras would cover him, not her. She later founded a cooperative for Black farmers and helped found the National Women’s Political Caucus.

Her health was failing, though, and the political, social and economic violence she faced never truly abated. She died, still in poverty, of breast cancer in 1977. She was just 59.

Charlayne Hunter-Gault, 1975. Photo: Bernard Gotfryd.

Lastly, journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault, a living connection to this history and a prominent name in television and radio news. She worked on the MacNeil/Lehrer Report on PBS starting in 1978, later worked in South Africa for National Public Radio and then CNN. Her work won two Emmys and two Peabody Awards.

She’d made history of her own just to get there, of course. Born in Jim Crow-era segregation in South Carolina in 1942, she and fellow student Hamilton Holmes won a protracted legal battle to become the first African Americans to enroll in the University of Georgia in 1961. While there, she married a fellow student who was white, in contravention of the state’s law forbidding interracial marriages. The state’s governor called them “a shame and a disgrace.” She and Holmes persisted through graduation — she became a journalist and he became an orthopedic surgeon. (Today, the school’s academic center is named for them.)

She started her writing career at the New Yorker, then moved to the New York Times for just over a decade before moving into television. As it happens, we were both roving correspondents in Africa during the late 1990s, and I worked alongside her on several big-picture stories. She was terrific, and I was always self-conscious that I was talking to a woman who had helped change American history, particularly in our native Deep South. It was special.

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Rubén Darío: Latin Poet Still an Icon a Century After His Death

Ruben Dario, as pictured in a New York Tribune story on Feb. 8, 1915.

This is a guest post by María Peña, a public relations strategist in the Library’s Office of Communications. 

Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío has been dead for over a century, but on the cobblestoned streets of his hometown, renamed Ciudad Darío in his honor, and throughout Spain and Latin America, his poetry and prose continue to inspire generations of writers.

His given name was Félix Rubén García Sarmiento, but he was known to all as Rubén Darío. During his career, spanning the late 19th and early 2oth centuries, he became one of Latin America’s greatest poets, eventually known as the father of modernism.

He died 105 years ago this Saturday at age 49, from complications to alcoholism. But his work has proven timeless, as his name is today emblazoned everywhere in the Spanish-speaking world — metro stations, street signs, statues, schools, parks and squares. The National Library of Nicaragua is named for him. The Library of  Congress holds more than 500 volumes by or about Darío, including the 1905 edition of his masterpiece, “Cantos de vida y esperanza” (“Songs of Life and Hope.”)

I recently interviewed Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez about Darío’s life and legacy. In 2016, Ramírez published “A la mesa con Rubén Darío,” a book about the poet’s little-known life as a foodie.

The interview, originally in Spanish, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

How relevant is Rubén Darío’s body of work today?

Sergio Ramírez. Photo: Margarita Montealegre.

Rubén Darío´s poetry is undoubtedly relevant in the Spanish language. As (Argentine writer) Jorge Luis Borges once said, “Everything changed with Darío.”

Borges called him the “liberator of language” because he transformed it. Modernism as such did not remain a mere pyrotechnic game with the novelties it brought.

Darío led a current that revolutionized language and breathed life into it. His legacy lives on not only in the poets that came after – like (Nobel Prize laureate) Juan Ramón Jiménez, who was his disciple — but also in others he influenced, like César Vallejo and Pablo Neruda.

He was called “the Prince of Castilian letters” and he continues to be read. “Cantos de vida y esperanza” is considered his masterpiece because it reflects his full maturity as a poet.

He was a prodigy. He learned to read when he was three and published his first poems as a teenager.

He had a gifted memory from a very young age. He was only 17 when he traveled to Chile but already he had a vast cultural knowledge.

In his autobiography, Darío fondly remembers the house he grew up in in León with his aunt and uncle, surrounded by books like Cervantes´ “Don Quixote,” and how he´d climb up the branches of a jícaro tree to read undisturbed.

When Darío moved to Managua to work at the first national library, he´d spend hours reading the Spanish classics. And that was very significant, in a country so rural and poor, so small and underpopulated, so ravaged by years of civil wars and pandemics.

How did that experience inform his work and his world view?

 There are two things worth noting here: Like a sponge, he absorbed everything from his readings, the landscapes, his understanding of people, the very essence of Nicaraguan identity. There´s a beautiful poem he wrote about Nicaragua bearing fruits “from a small womb,” so he was aware of living in a small, poor country.

The other big influence is his messy family life, because his parents had an unhappy marriage and his mom ultimately went to live with her lover in Honduras. This really affected him, and I believe it greatly shaped his later addiction to alcohol.

Yet he was very eclectic: a poet, journalist and a diplomat.

Well, those were facets borne out of necessity, because a poet couldn´t survive on his craft alone. Journalism was his main source of income and he was truly an innovative journalist.

Darío was part of a crop of poets — Amado Nervo, Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera and Julio Herrera y Reissig among them – who were also great journalists and chroniclers of their time. He made good money working for La Nación (Argentina), because he couldn´t rely only on publishing his poetry books.

I don´t think he had great diplomatic qualities, even though he went on to have several diplomatic postings.

Was poetry a refuge for Darío?

Darío had problems with alcoholism, but he was a very disciplined writer. If he didn´t file stories he wouldn´t get paid to support his family. And he continued writing poetry.

Darío was an essential poet; he couldn´t have been anything else in life. His poems show a deep understanding of classical Greek, Latin and Spanish culture. Salvadoran writer Arturo Ambrogi once visited him in his Paris studio and found his table full of dictionaries and reference books on Greek mythology and other topics. He approached his work with diligence.

The world knows Darío as this gifted modernist writer, but you wrote about him being a “foodie” before the term existed.

He loved fine dining, but he wasn´t dining at fancy restaurants every night, drinking champagne or eating quail or pheasant. Food was something Darío was interested in as a core cultural topic and wrote about French and Spanish cuisines. He also loved Nicaraguan dishes, and he taught Francisca Sánchez (his Spanish mistress) how to prepare them.

In an era of tweets, emojis and short attention spans, how do you entice young people to read Darío and other great poets?

Some would argue social media is an enemy of culture, but I think it’s a powerful tool for teaching profound subjects. Look at how this pandemic has moved learning online. Social networks have created opportunities to democratize culture and mass communication.

I´m not concerned about the silly things people share, because there´s lots of learning that can happen, too. I believe Nicaragua has the most poets per kilometer squared. People enjoy writing and publishing poetry not because they want to be recognized as great poets, but more for spiritual relief.

What is the best way to remember Darío and honor his legacy?

I believe the best way to do so is by reading his works and teaching them. There´s Darío and his musical poems, and Darío the storyteller in verses like “Margarita está linda la mar,” but there´s also his existential poetry.

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