Over the next 40 years, she was key to building up what is now the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at the university as one of the world's best collection of library materials for Black/Africana history and culture.

Her friends and contacts included Alain Locke, Rayford Logan, Dorothy Peterson, Langston Hughes, and Amy Spingarn.

It includes music and academic studies on linguistics, as well as literature and scholarship by and about Black people in the United States and elsewhere.

[4] In addition, she was instrumental in ensuring scholars, such as Edison Carneiro, and statesmen, such as Kwame Nkrumah and Eric Williams, visited the university to increase students' interest in their African heritage.

[4] Burnett developed a new cataloging system for the growing collection, as well as expertise to assess the materials.

Porter built on this to highlight genre and authors rather than to use the conventional Dewey Decimal Classification, which lacked appropriate class-marks.

She later helped create the African American Research Library & Cultural Center in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

[11] Several years later, in 1979, Burnett Porter married Charles Wesley, an American historian and educator who pioneered important studies in black history.