"The Ugly Side of Librarianship" by Musmann

I was rather dumbstruck that the very first African-American library degree holder was in 1900. At first glance this seems really surprising, but I wonder how many black people had acted as librarians without the degree much like the rest of the library population before the turn of the century. Especially considering the real changes that happened during the reconstruction era, I am surprised a black man or woman did not obtain a degree or some degree of success or notoriety for their work in libraries, because this was the time when the south actually voted black men to be U.S. representatives and government officials for their regions, though this trend did not last long. I wonder how much primary source evidence there is from black sources before the civil rights era concerning library work. The library assistants must have left some sort of record, and it would be intensely interesting to talk to their families and try to search out some kind of paper trail about their lives. I will never really know what it is to grow up scorned and maltreated, and therefore anything that could be found would be of the utmost importance in coming closer to understanding the black experience. Also, the book about Ruth Brown made me wonder about black librarians and especially about how they came to view the profession-what did they think of a professional community that proclaimed great democratic ideals but never practiced them?

On a more recent note, it would be very interesting to read something that a more modern black librarian has written about their experience and their reflections about American life in relation to the libraries. I would also love to see statistics about where minority librarians end up-are they mostly public librarians in certain neighborhoods of big cities, or are they concentrated in the research libraries or some other specialization? The composition of Madison’s own library school looks abysmally white and female, and I would have hoped that more progress would have been made on this front. This makes me wonder about the library school in Milwaukee, where there is a very large non-white population. Hopefully, they are graduating more minorities than this school, because the idea that Madison is ‘diverse’ is nothing more than a joke.