Moorland–Spingarn Research Center
In 1946 Howard University acquired the large personal library of Arthur B. Spingarn, an attorney, social activist, and prominent collector of books and other materials produced by Black people.
In a career that spanned more than forty years, Dr. Porter Wesley guided the collection through substantial expansion, including the development of a new classification scheme, authoritative bibliographies, and a wide variety of research tools.
While the Library Division was expected to continue to expand the MSRC's extensive collections of books, newspapers, journals, and printed materials, the other units were an integral part of the Research Center's new program development.
The new programs emphasized the identification, acquisition, preservation, research and exhibition of materials which could transform the existing special collections into a modern archives and manuscript repository and museum facility.
With more than 175,000 books, pamphlets, periodicals and microforms in numerous languages in its collections, the Library Division provides extensive documentary evidence of the history, lives and struggles of people of African descent.
Among the library's holdings are many rare works, going back to the sixteenth century, by such notables as Juan Latino, Jacobus Capitein, Gustavus Vassa, Phillis Wheatley, Jupiter Hammon, David Walker, Frederick Douglass and Martin Delaney.
Du Bois, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Nicolas Guillén, Wole Soyinka, James Baldwin, Chinua Achebe, Toni Morrison and Amiri Baraka.
The resources of the Manuscript Division combine to provide important insight into the growth and development of Black families, organizations, institutions, social and religious consciousness, and the continuing struggle for civil rights and human justice.
These collections include the correspondence, photographs, diaries, scrapbooks, writings and memorabilia of such notables as Alain Locke, E. Franklin Frazier, Frederick Douglass, Mary Church Terrell, Anna J. Cooper, and Paul and Eslanda Robeson.
