A Reclamation
of S p a c e s
By CKZ Shareef
My grandmother’s light blue house in Louisville was my first library.
My grandmother, a Kentucky countryside-bred, tobacco factory working single mother, was a librarian in practice if not by vocation. Through her collections, I learned to recognize her hand, feel my mother’s touch, and sense, by extension, a bit of me. I spotted my features in the sepia and monotone faces within photo albums chronicling years before my time. Her selections taught me the importance of narrative, and the intention behind curating and preserving family history. As literary critic Cheryl A. Wall describes it, “‘pictorial genealogies’ were how black people ‘ensured against losses of the past.’”
The Shawnee Branch of the Louisville Public Library was a more cerebral home. There I imagined myself as James Baldwin’s Tish and loved Fonny just as hard. Terry McMillan’s protagonists were my aunts. My neighbors were Langston Hughes’s Semple, the West End was Zora Neale Hurston’s Eatonville. I learned the power I wielded in selecting a narrative.
These combined experiences helped me discover myself. Photo albums helped me understand myself in relation to my family; literature helped me understand my relation to the broader world.
When I was 14, my grandmother sold her house and moved to the suburbs. Feminist scholar Marina Magloire says that many Black families displaced from their homes “experience the loss of their spaces without adequate time to mourn.” Those experiencing such a loss may not sufficiently mourn because they do not recognize it for what it is – a loss – until much later. Nostalgia tinges my grandmother’s house with a significance I wasn’t privy to while we lived there. Similarly, it is only now after having experienced others that I feel an affinity for the quaint, predominantly-Black staffed, red brick and stone branch library of my youth.
Like new neighborhoods…
new libraries feel different.
The first thing I notice about a library or bookstore is the African American fiction section. The authors on the shelves: McMillan, Eric Jerome Dickey, Zane? Almost always yes. Baldwin, Hughes, Hurston, Toni Morrison? Most often not. These more lauded African American authors were often integrated into the general or classic fiction sections. But who made the distinction? It hadn’t been made before.
Next, I notice whether I am the only Black patron and if any of the librarians or clerks look like me. Casual checkout conversations once felt like community; now they often feel like critique. I begin to feel the very specific type of neurosis that Damon Young defines as “what happens when something unexpected happens, and I’m left to wonder if this thing happened because I happened to be black” without ever knowing for certain whether “my blackness is why what’s happening is happening.”
I do not know whether I learn to think of libraries as white spaces or if I have always known them to be. Had I believed Shawnee to be an exception? I don’t know. But the joy and security I once felt in these spaces becomes, like my grandmother’s blue house, a memory.
When I entered this profession, I had very little understanding of the library lineage that produced me: Black, female, southern. My mental photo album of the librarian profession was filled with the heralded names like Benjamin Franklin, Melville Dewey, and Andrew Carnegie. All of them seemed so far removed from me.
Librarian/historian Reinette F. Jones describes a similar feeling in her book Library Service to African Americans in Kentucky. “I needed to know how African American librarians in Kentucky fit into the big picture of librarianship” wrote Jones. “There was emptiness because knowledge of the original connection was missing.”
I did not think I belonged. I knew the names of a few black librarians and bibliophiles – Arturo Schomburg, Jean Blackwell Huston, Thomas F. Blue. But I did not know how to trace a line connecting us.
I hadn’t been taught a history of Black librarianship.
So, I decided to teach myself.
Like Jones, I was surprised to learn my home state and town had made such a big mark on librarianship. Conceived in 1855, Berea College, for example, was the first interracial and coeducational institution in the South. It was also the first school to provide library service to African Americans in Kentucky. It had Black teacher-librarians. There is even a photo in Jones’s book from 1904 of Berea’s librarians and library student assistants, including Sophia Overstreet, the institution’s last Black student library assistant before it was forced to segregate that same year. Goosebumps erupted on my arms seeing her. I think we look related.
In 1905, a year after the Day Law mandate, the Louisville Free Public Library’s Western Colored Branch became the first library in the country to be exclusively for and staffed entirely by African Americans. Its director, Thomas F. Blue, was the first African American to head a library. The Western Branch’s library training program offered the only library classes then offered to Blacks in Kentucky, and it served as a model for others around the country. Among its librarians were Eliza Atkins Gleason and Virginia Lacy Jones, two of the first African Americans to obtain Ph.D. 's in library and information science.
Jones said she cried when she discovered “Kentucky was once the leader of colored libraries, library education, and traveling libraries for Negroes.” This history affirmed for her, and for me, that libraries could be Black spaces, and should feel like home. The Western branch, still operating today, is just a 10-minute drive from the Shawnee branch I frequented as a child. And I, a new home owner, live just a two-minute drive from my grandmother’s old blue house. As I pass it on my daily commute to work, I often reflect on how close each of us are to an unwitting history. And I feel a soothing and surreal sense of validation in reclaiming a little bit more of mine.
Works Cited
Jones, Reinette F. Library Service to African Americans in Kentucky. McFarland & Co., 2002. WorldCat.org.
Magloire, Marina. “40 Years Ago, Poet Lucille Clifton Lost Her House. This Year, Her Children Bought It Back.” Harper’s BAZAAR, 6 May 2021, https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a36352411/40-years-ago-poet-lucille-clifton-lost-her-house-this-year-her-children-bought-it-back/.
Wall, Cheryl A. “Sifting Legacies in Lucille Clifton’s ‘Generations.’” Contemporary Literature, vol. 40, no. 4, 1999, pp. 552–74, https://doi.org/10.2307/1208794. JSTOR.
Young, Damon. “Nothing Reminds You That You’re Black in White America Like Trying to Buy a House.” The Root, 1 Aug. 2018,https://www.theroot.com/nothing-reminds-you-that-youre-black-in-white-america-l-1828034347.
CKZ Shareef is a lover of archives and literature. A champion of the digital and public humanities, she believes in the transformational powers of information and narrative. She currently serves as Strategic Initiatives Librarian/Diversity Resident for the University of Louisville.