Much work belonging to the “archival turn” in African American studies centers on the ideological limitations of institutional archives and the possibilities of filling gaps in the historical record. For some scholars in this field, the “archive” is a metaphor for epistemologies of knowledge and violence against dispossessed people rather than a descriptor of actual archival records and the many hands associated with a collection’s assemblage and curation. Historian Laura E. Helton positions her new book, Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History, between the theoretical understanding of the “archive” and the archive in its more literal sense. With clear and engaging prose, Helton animates the inventiveness of Black librarians, scrapbookers, collectors, curators, and archivists who salvaged and preserved records of Black life by and for Black communities in the United States, from the New Negro movement to the early years of the postwar civil rights movement. 

Helton writes the lives of six Black individuals who spearheaded the creation of Black repositories in the United States, each of whom represents a distinct approach to collective Black memory work: Arturo A. Schomburg (1874–1938), L. S. Alexander Gumby (1885–1961), Virginia Y. Lee (1906–1992), Dorothy B. Porter (1905–1995), Vivian G. Harsh (1890–1960), and L. D. Reddick (1910–1995). Helton proposes that each figure offers a “model of intellectual practice—one that refuses to see Black history constrained or threatened and that, out of this refusal, makes something new” (p. 29).  The six people documented in the book preserved and created accessible archives for Black readers: “In African American history,” Helton writes, “collecting was not the cloistered pastime of a secluded bibliophile in ‘the company of his books’…. They made collections that both theorized and cultivated collectivity” (p. 9). In tandem with its contributions to African American cultural, literary, and intellectual histories, the book is helpful for scholars more broadly due to its original methodological approach. Helton uses unconventional archival documents, including card catalog records, as historical contexts for African American literary histories.

The first and second chapters detail two Black collecting and curating practices in the early twentieth century that model distinct epistemologies of history. In chapter one, Helton profiles Schomburg, a private collector and perhaps the most well-known individual in the book. Helton chronicles the collector’s acquisitions of “scattered and fugitive things”—books, pamphlets, papers, and curios of Black life in the United States and Black Diaspora. Despite its location in Schomburg’s home, this collection was anything but private; it engaged with many Black communities. Schomburg eventually sold his collection to the New York Public Library, ensuring the collection’s longevity, accessibility, and monumentality. In chapter two, Gumby’s scrapbooks of Black history and their display in his New York salon serve as a counterpoint to Schomburg’s more monumental archive. Assembled from cut-and-pasted articles and images from newspapers, Gumby’s “archival practice [was] committed to the continuous improvisation of history’s categories” and modeled a way of queering Black history (p. 73). 

Chapters three and four center on the risk-taking involved in making Black collections accessible to readers during the Jim Crow period. Chapter three chronicles the work of public librarian Lee, who began her position in the segregated Gainsboro Public Library in Roanoke, Virginia in 1928. In this role, Lee assembled a few hundred books by Black authors for library patrons. When administrators learned of the collection, they instructed her to remove it from the library. Lee instead moved the books into the basement and surreptitiously made them available to Black readers. In chapter four, Helton describes how Porter, the academic librarian at Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, took professional risks in reordering the Dewey Decimal System, which had previously classified books by and about Black writers under two numbers that signified “colonization” and “slavery” (p. 112). Unlike Lee, who concealed books from White administrators to make them accessible to Black readers, Porter reimagined lists and taxonomies that conceived of Black data as “not as the site of too much to know, but rather of too little” (p. 109). 

The final two chapters are case studies for communal forms of Black memory-making. Here, Helton’s insistence on collecting as collectivity is the most powerful. In chapter five, Helton profiles Harsh, the first Black woman selected as head of a special collections, who worked at the George Cleveland Hall Branch of the Chicago Public Library in the 1930s. Harsh’s work included organizing book clubs and the formation of the DuSable History Club. This club allowed many Black participants to engage with special collections materials and spaces, regardless of education. The group shared traditions of memorializing Black pasts and freedom struggles, both in the United States and globally. For example, on Independence Day in 1941, they journeyed to Sojourner Truth’s gravesite and paid tribute to the Haitian revolution. The club also offered a program on global Black history that was both pan-Africanist and anti-imperialist. 

The sixth and final chapter returns to the Schomburg collection and its first director, Reddick. Although his tenure was short, a notable project of Reddick’s involved soliciting correspondence from Black soldiers during World War II for inclusion in the Schomburg collection. Helton labels Reddick’s vision for collecting as riffing on “call-and-response” as an African American compositional technique. In contrast to Harsh, who urged autodidact historians to return and reimagine Black pasts, Reddick worked to ensure that ephemeral records of Black quotidian life were archived, preserved, and interpreted by the institution. These last two chapters also highlight a very minor weakness in Helton’s book: her theorization of collections and collectivity is partially undermined by how the previous chapters are organized. Each details an individual biography, and I believe that Helton’s argument might have benefitted from centering the collective struggles to form and interpret Black archival spaces.

The timing of Helton’s work could not be more prescient. In 2023, for example, the American Library Association recorded the highest number of challenged titles, with most of the banned books being by or about Black or LGBTQ+ lives. Helton’s book provides an intellectual model and history for African American freedom struggles to ensure underground access to censored literature, while her research provides contexts for understanding surreptitious archives as spaces of collective care.

Fallon Murphy, Boston University