Archives, Collections, and Libraries

was born in Port-au-Prince to entrepreneur Claude Duval and his wife Anita. His family was forced into exile when the artist was 9 years old. Relocating to San Juan, Puerto Rico, Duval-Carrié would attend the Colegio San Jose until the age of 15, when his family decided to return to Haiti. His knowledge of Haitian Vodou and culture, as well as his experience of exile and migration, inform Duval-Carrié’s work and have made him among the highest-regarded Haitian contemporary artists and an influential player in Miami’s diverse contemporary art scene. His works include paintings, sculpture, mixed media, and immersive installations, often addressing themes that pertain to Haitian history and religion.

After graduating from high school, Duval-Carrié relocated to Montreal, Canada, with his brother Bobby Duval; there, he would receive a bachelor of arts from Loyola College in 1978 During Duval Carrié s time in Canada his brother Bobby was ...

Nigerian curator, art critic, writer, and academic, was born in Kalaba, Nigeria, a middle-sized city close to the Cameroonian border, on 23 October 1963. He grew up in Enugu in eastern Nigeria, where he attended a British boarding school. He was taught to speak in English in addition to his native Igbo.

In 1982 Enwezor moved to the United States, where he enrolled at the Jersey City State College (now New Jersey City University) in Jersey City, New Jersey, as a political science major. He earned a BA in political science in 1987. Enwezor entered the world of art through friends and by visiting a large number of art exhibitions. He turned his attention not only to contemporary American and European art but also to modern African art. He noticed that African artists were severely underrepresented in the American art scene. In 1989 Enwezor became a freelance ...

librarian, was born in Chicago, the daughter of Fenton W. Harsh and Maria L. Drake Harsh, two graduates of Fisk University. Vivian attended Forrestville Elementary School and completed Wendell Phillips High School in 1908. In 1909 she took the first step toward what would become her life's career—a position, as a clerk, at the Chicago Public Library (CPL).Harsh pursued her education by matriculating at Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science (Boston). In 1921 she earned a degree in Library Science and three years later was appointed the head of a local branch of the CPL becoming Chicago s first black librarian She joined the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History ASNLH which allowed her to remain abreast of literary developments in black history Thanks to a fellowship from the Rosenwald Foundation she pursued advanced studies in library science at ...

She was called “the Lieutenant” by some of her colleagues and a taskmaster by many of the young people who did their research at the Chicago Public Library branch she headed. Yet Vivian G. Harsh was revered by a generation of prominent black writers and scholars. She was eulogized as “the historian who never wrote,” yet she succeeded in building one of the most important research collections on black history and literature in the United States.

Vivian Gordon Harsh grew up in the world of Chicago’s Old Settlers, the tightly knit community of pioneer black families in the city. The year after she graduated from Wendell Phillips High School on Chicago’s South Side, Harsh began working for the only employer she would ever have, the Chicago Public Library. She started as a junior clerk in December 1909 rising slowly through the ranks during her first fifteen years of service ...

librarian, archivist, bibliophile, and college professor, was born Jean Blackwell in Summerfield, Florida, to Paul O. Blackwell and Sarah Myers. Her father was a commission merchant who operated a farm, buying and shipping produce. Her mother taught elementary school. At age four she moved to Baltimore, Maryland, her mother's hometown. Paul Blackwell remained in Florida and visited the family over the years. Blackwell was a very precocious child and a voracious reader. She graduated as valedictorian from Baltimore's Frederick Douglass High School in 1931. The prestigious secondary school gave her a love of black history, which was taught by Yolande Du Bois and May Miller, daughters of two famous black leaders, W. E. B. Du Bois and Kelly Miller. She met the poet and writer Langston Hughes, with whom she shared a lifelong friendship, and the composer and pianist Eubie Blake ...

historian, curator, writer, and educator, was born in Jacksonville, Florida. He graduated magna cum laude, probably majoring in history, from the historically black Fisk University in 1932, where he studied under African American scholars Charles S. Johnson, Horace Mann Bond, and with white history professor Theodore Currier, who is perhaps best known as the undergraduate mentor of historian John Hope Franklin. Reddick went on to receive a MA in History from Fisk the following year and then pursued doctoral work at the University of Chicago, receiving his PhD in History in 1939 under the direction of Avery Craven, a prominent historian of the South. Reddick's dissertation, a study of four antebellum New Orleans newspapers and their depiction of African Americans (especially slaves), was entitled “The Negro in the New Orleans Press, 1850–1860: A Study in Attitudes and Propaganda.” In 1939 ...

historian, bibliophile, and curator, was born Arturo Alfonso Schomburg in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the son of Mary Joseph, an unwed midwife or laundress who had been born free in 1837 on St. Croix, Virgin Islands. His father's name is unknown, though Schomburg recorded that he was born in 1839, the son of a German émigré merchant.

Details of Schomburg s education are also sparse He may have attended the College of St Thomas a secondary school but there is no documentation Schomburg knew French and his writings in Spanish are both grammatically correct and eloquent His lack of formal education ate away at him all his life and it was surely one of the spurs to his untiring search for information and his efforts to make the results widely known As a child he belonged to a club of young people who studied history ...

Dorothy Burnett Porter Wesley was the longtime librarian and curator of the Moorland-Spingarn Collection (now known as the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center) at Howard University. Her tenure extended from 1930 to 1973 and encompassed the explosion of black history and culture that extended from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s through the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Porter Wesley assisted the many historians and other scholars who documented, researched, studied, and wrote about black history and culture, especially those associated with Howard University. These scholars included Alain LeRoy Locke, the first African American Rhodes scholar and an important contributor to the New Negro Movement, which became popularized as the Harlem Renaissance; the poet and literary scholar Sterling A. Brown; the artist and art historian James A. Porter, who was Porter Wesley’s husband; the political scientist and diplomat Ralph J. Bunche the sociologist E Franklin Frazier and the historians ...