What Dorothy Porter’s Life Meant for Black Studies

By Kara Bledsoe via https://daily.jstor.org

Dorothy Porter, a Black woman pioneer in library and information science, created an archive that structured a new field.

For more than 150 years, Howard University has been associated with the highest caliber of scholarship on the African diaspora. Howard’s legacy as a hub for the intellectual exploration of Blackness is widely appreciated in the Africana subset of academia. Lesser known is the woman who conceived and facilitated the development of Howard’s wealth of archival resources into one of the primary centers for the study of people of African descent. The story of Dorothy Porter Wesley, a pioneer in the field of library and information science, is also the story of the triumphant beginnings of a new discipline. As a result of Porter’s vision and dedication, Black special collections began to occupy more prominent roles in their institutions, allowing engagement with historically marginalized narratives through the palpable past.

The Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, an administrative unit containing the libraries, university …

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