Under Moore's leadership, Spady joined the historic 1965 protests to desegregate Girard College, a whites-only K-12 school for poor, orphaned boys.

[10] The library housed—according to contemporary accounts—"three thousand volumes, pamphlets, brochures, slave tracts, papers, correspondences, paintings, musical instruments, recordings, unpublished manuscripts, news clippings, and other materials.

The formal museum/library space was forced to close by 1973 after a fire and subsequent theft, but continued to release its newsletter and publish books for many years thereafter under various iterations of the Black History Museum UMUM imprint.

[12] In his work as a historian and journalist, James G. Spady interviewed, wrote about, and in some cases befriended a wide range of the most significant scholars, musicians, and writers of the twentieth century, including: Nina Simone, James Brown, Fela Kuti, Stevie Wonder, Bob Marley, Miles Davis, and Dizzy Gillespie; James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ntozake Shange, and Sterling Brown; Cheikh Anta Diop, Mercer Cook, Merze Tate, Adelaide Cromwell, Charles H. Wesley, and Benjamin Quarles.

Brown, by organizing a major public tribute to him at Washington, DC's Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in 1976 and enlisting poet Robert Hayden to serve as Chairman for the day's program.

Spellman, Dr. Montague Cobb, Dr. Allison Davis, and Milford Graves, as well as Loïs Mailou Jones who drew charcoal portraits of Sterling Brown live during the event.

Brown: A UMUM Tribute[19] (1976 and 1982), which featured contributions by Amiri Baraka, Alan Lomax, Ophelia Egypt, Houston Baker, Léon Damas, Arthur Huff Fauset, and Léopold Sédar Senhgor.

[21] After interviewing and befriending Senegalese intellectual Cheikh Anta Diop in the late 1960s, Spady wrote one of the first English-language scholarly articles to examine his work (“Negritude, PanBanegritude, and the Diopian Philosophy of African History”] in 1972).

[29] Shortly before Spady's death, he wrote the text that formed the basis for SEPTA's recently installed historical exhibit at the Cecil B. Moore Subway Station on Philadelphia's Broad Street Line.