Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

by R. Eric Thomas

Years later, I would learn about the work of Dorothy Porter, the Howard University librarian who devised her own classification system for library materials. In the 1930s she began building a collection of books by black writers and volumes on black and African history that would eventually become Howard’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. At its inception, it was an anomaly. In 1995 she told The Washington Post, “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 system, like the Dewey, classified work by genre and subject but included black authors and black history in every area.

This is absolutely fascinating, and I feel terrible that I knew nothing about that history. My elementary librarian (a dear friend of my first grade teaching mom) taught me to use the card catalogue and the Dewey decimal system. I remember him saying something about there being flaws in the system, but he didn’t quite touch on them. In my mind, this is what he meant.