“When I started building the collection nobody was writing about blacks in history. You couldn’t find any books.” As her collection grew, it became apparent that Dewey reified the same sort of structural inequities that kept black history out of books and black books off of shelves. In Dewey, she said, “they had one number—326—that meant slavery, and they had another number—325, as I recall it—that mean colonization.” The result, she explained, was that many libraries were reaffirming a Eurocentric mindset by filing any- and everything about black life under these two categories. Porter’s
...more
