Culture Keepers

Focused on a brighter future and keen on preserving the past, the Black Caucus of the American Library Association (BCALA) held its fifth national conference in sunny Fort Lauderdale, FL, August 13–16. With the conference theme of "access," nearly 1000 librarians from across the country attended three days of informative sessions and networking.

Featured speakers included attorney Willie Gary, profiled on 60 Minutes for his legal prowess and financial success; Ilyasah Shabazz, daughter of slain Nation of Islam leader Malcom X and author of the memoir Growing Up X (Random House); and CEO of the National Urban League Hugh B. Price. Conference organizers Florence Simkins Brown (North Miami Beach PL, FL) and Wayne Crocker (Petersburg PL, VA) were delighted that despite economic travails and budget cuts, attendance had remained steady from the last conference in 1999, with official numbers settling at 922.

"The conference was well attended," said Lorna Peterson (associate professor, School of Information and Library Studies, SUNY at Buffalo). "There were good programs featuring good authors," she added while expressing a desire for more research-based panels in the future. "This is a very important and necessary conference. And, overall, it was a very good one."

Conference programs ran on four tracks, with sessions focusing on access to the profession, leadership, archives and preservation, and children's services, including "marketing" education and literacy efforts.

Price, himself the son of a librarian, got the conference rolling by impressing the gathered librarians with a stirring talk at the John Tyson luncheon and lecture series. He told those in attendance that they are poised to make a critical difference in the lives of African Americans. Price said that for African Americans there was first a "revolution" for freedom, then for equality in the eyes of the law, and that a third revolution was now underway, centering around education. "The third revolution is the development revolution," Price said. "If we are to survive and thrive as a people, librarians are most equipped to lead that revolution."

Price's talk followed an invocation by Andrew P. Jackson (Sekou Molefi Baako), director of New York's Queens Borough Public Library's (QBPL) Langston Hughes Community Library and Cultural Center, whose refrain might well have been the underlying if unstated theme of the conference: "I care, and I'm willing to serve." That theme was embodied by the winner of the inaugural John Tyson Emerging leader award, Khafre Abif, executive director of the Langston Hughes Library, Children's Defense Fund, at the former Alex Haley Farm in Clinton, TN. At the presentation, Abif's nine-year-old son, Kazembe, shared the spotlight with his father by becoming the "youngest member of the BCALA."

A special focus at this year's conference was on recruiting, retaining, and nurturing new librarians. With a looming shortage of librarians already a key issue at this year's ALA annual conference in Atlanta and an underrepresentation of African Americans in the profession as a whole, recruiting is clearly an important part of BCALA's agenda. Librarians said there "were more library schools exhibiting and recruiting than expected" but that there were still more jobs than applicants at the conference placement center.

The program also featured panels on recruiting, including one that assembled three young librarians from the Chicago Public Library—Keisha Garnett, Keisha Jordan, and Portia Latalladi—all of whom spoke about their path to librarianship. Moderated by Chicago PL's Roberta Webb, the young librarians talked about what led them to the library profession. While they acknowledged that pay for librarians was indeed problematic—and many in attendance offered strong support for ALA President Mitch Freedman's initiative on salaries—they noted that the best thing about librarianship is the job itself. Librarians in attendance suggested mentoring efforts were also effective in attracting new librarians and should be expanded.

In another session, librarians gathered to discuss the impact of technology on the African American community. And while all agreed that more African Americans are getting connected to the Internet and own computers, they still lag woefully behind the rest of the population. Teri Weil (East Maryland State Univ. Lib., Princess Ann) argued that while one could say that the number of African Americans using the Internet has risen fourfold since 1997, from ten percent of the population to 40 percent, government statistics show that the figure is still well below the percentage for the white population using the Internet.

Librarians and panelists, including QBPL's Jackson and Jane McGinn (Southern Connecticut State Univ., New Haven), suggested cultural and economic reasons are at the heart of the problem. "For many the Internet is not considered an immediate [need]," noted Weil. "It's not rent, and it's not food."

All in attendance agreed that librarians can play a central role in addressing the issue. "First," said Weil "librarians must acknowledge that there is a problem and get involved." Libraries, she stated, should seek grant funding for training programs and to build relationships with other community organizations to increase access to technology.

Leadership was another major theme of the conference program, with a session attended by nearly 100 members featuring ALA's Satia Orange, Cleveland PL's Andrew Venable, and Florida's Broward County Library System director Samuel Morrison. In addition, both former ALA executive director William Gordon and his successor, Keith Fiels, were on hand, with Gordon delighting a packed room with "40 years'" worth of observations on leadership. His talk, while drawing a great many laughs, was loaded with cogent observations. Gordon shared his top ten list of the do's and don'ts of leadership, stressing honesty, integrity, and flexibility.

In one well-attended and well-presented panel session entitled "How To Market Your Library," Andrea Lewis (Anne Arundel County PL, MD), along with Marcy Pride (Maryland State Department of Education) and Baltimore-based consultant Pat Fisher, detailed the history of a recent groundbreaking, successful cooperative Maryland state campaign to "connect parents and caregivers of children from birth to age five to public library services."

With grant money from the Library Services and Technology Act, a task force put together a statewide marketing project. After numerous challenges—like working with an unwieldy 27-member task force—the "Maryland Public Libraries—It's Never Too Early" campaign was rolled out. The effort entailed everything from training librarians to crafting programs and managing a massive PR campaign. As a result, all libraries in the state reported improvement, both in the number of parents taking advantage of library services for their children and for the librarians themselves, who reported an "increased sense of accomplishment."

With the conference firmly focused on what lies ahead for African American librarianship, securing a brighter future, librarians said, requires preserving the past. In that regard, African American librarians face a massive challenge and one that needs action. Over the course of the conference there were a number of sessions that focused on preservation issues, including digital archive initiatives.

One session, "Preserving Cultures," summed up the archival issues at hand and detailed new problem-solving efforts. Librarians are particularly concerned about how little is currently known about the wealth of important historical materials pertaining to black history that is moldering in attics or being put on the curb.

Brooklyn College's Chantel Bell captured the challenge of black librarians in discussing her effort to archive the records of Brooklyn's large Caribbean population. Through her efforts, which include archiving as well as offering archival advice, she is attempting to keep the history of a vibrant community from being "permanently lost."

Taronda Spencer, a librarian from Spelman College, Atlanta, joined Bell in detailing her efforts to collect archival materials from the offices of the nation's historically black colleges and universities. And Lela Sewell (Howard University's Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Washington, DC) discussed her work both in creating an African American Dance archive and in attempting to create, with Steve Fullwood at New York's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, an archive to document the rise of hip-hop as a dominant cultural and social art form. However, the hip-hop archive, remarked Sewell and Fullwood, has run into numerous setbacks, including a lack of funding and a fundamental lack of support from hip-hop artists and moguls.

In addition, Fullwood discussed his work on a black gay and lesbian archive at the Schomburg Center. He says that through both neglect and suppression within the community, the legacy of cultural contributions from African American gays and lesbians were almost completely erased. The archive has begun to save these important artifacts. Fullwood quoted Marcus Garvey, saying "that a people without a history is like a tree without roots," and implored librarians to become involved in archival efforts. "If we don't protect our history," he cautioned, "nobody will."