Mar 01, 2012 - Sale 2271

Sale 2271 - Lot 296

Price Realized: $ 43,200
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 50,000 - $ 75,000
(EDUCATION.) PORTER WESLEY, DOROTHY. The Dorothy Porter Wesley Papers (1905-1995). Her writings, research notes and in many cases original 19th and 20th century manuscript and or documentary material for her numerous articles, and books, together with her correspondence files, including retained copies (in some instances) of her letters, with books and ephemera. Over eighty-five cartons. should be seen. Vp, 1905-1995
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Dorothy Porter Wesley (1905-1995), scholar-librarian and bibliographer, was born in Warrenton, Va., and raised in Montclair, N.J., by her father, Hayes Joseph Burnett, a physician, and her mother, Bertha Ball Burnett, a tennis champion. She graduated from Montclair High School (1923), and in 1925 received a teaching diploma from Minor Teachers College in Washington, D.C. However, under the influence of her mentor, Lula Allan (librarian at Minor), she changed her field of interest from teaching to library science. After receiving her A.B., from Howard University in 1928, she became the first African American woman to complete her graduate studies at Columbia University, receiving a Bachelors (1931) and a Masters of Science in Library Science (1932).
She joined the library staff at Howard University as a cataloguer in 1928, and in 1930 was appointed by the University's first black president, Mordecai Wyatt Johnson to administrate and organize a Library of Negro Life and History. This grew from a small collection of 3000 titles (presented in 1914 by Jesse Moorland and Lewis Tappan) to nearly 200,000 titles under Porter's careful guardianship. For over 43 years, Porter devoted herself to creating a modern research library that served an international community of scholars. She developed and "fine-tuned" the facility into an unparalleled collection which, upon her retirement in 1973 was re-named the Moorland-Spingarn Research Collection with Dorothy Porter as Curator Emerita.
As a scholar, avid writer and researcher, she developed a wide variety of research tools and authoritative bibliographies based on her vast knowledge in the field that would become known as "Black Studies." Her 1936 publication, A Selected List of Books by and about the Negro, (published by the U.S. Government Printing Office) was one of the foundation works in the field of African American Studies. Other publications include Early American Negro Writings: A Bibliographical Study, published in The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (1945); North American Negro Poets (1945); Early Negro Writing, 1760 to 1837 (1970, reprinted in 1995); Afro-Braziliana; A Working Bibliography (1978); The Remonds of Salem, Massachusetts: A Nineteenth Century Family Revisited, and The Negro in the United States; A Bibliography. William Cooper Nell: Nineteenth-Century African American Abolitionist - Historian - Integrationist; Selections From His Writings (1832-1874) was printed posthumously in 2002.
The biennial Conover-Porter Award (given by the Africana Librarians Council of the African Studies Association) is the most prestigious award for published works of bibliography or reference on Africa. It is given for any Africa-related reference work, bibliography or bibliographic essay published. The first award was presented in 1980.
Dr. Porter Wesley received a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship for research in Latin American literature (1944), she served as a Ford Foundation consultant to the National Library in Lagos, Nigeria (1962-64), and she attended the 1st International Congress of Africanists in Accra, Ghana, in 1962. She received an honorary degrees from Susquehanna University (1971), from Syracuse University (1989), from Radcliffe College (1990), the Distinguished Alumni Award from Howard University (1974), a Ford Foundation study and travel grant which took her to Scotland, Ireland, England and Italy (1973), and a fellowship from the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University (1989). In 1994 President Clinton presented her with the National Endowment for the Humanities' Charles Frankel Award. The Inaugural annual Dorothy Porter Wesley Lecture Series commenced in 1989 under the auspices of Moorland-Spingarn Research Center.

Constance Porter Uzelac

Because of the size and scope of this archive, we ask that serious bidders arrange appointment time with Swann during the preview period one week prior to the sale.