author
Dorothy Porter Wesley
1905–1995
A pioneering librarian and bibliographer, she helped turn Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn collection into a major center for the study of Black history and culture. Her work also reshaped how libraries organized and made African diasporic materials discoverable for scholars and readers.
1 Audiobook
The Negro in the United States; a selected bibliography. Compiled by Dorothy B. Porter
by Dorothy Porter Wesley
About the author
Born in Warrenton, Virginia, in 1905 and raised in Montclair, New Jersey, she studied at Howard University and later became the first African American to earn a library science degree from Columbia University. That achievement was only the beginning of a career devoted to preserving and organizing Black history with care and ambition.
In 1930, she joined Howard University and went on to build the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center into a world-class resource for African American and African diasporic studies. She was known not just as a curator, but as a builder of knowledge: she developed classification methods and bibliographies that made it easier for researchers to find materials that many libraries had overlooked or mishandled.
She also wrote extensively, helping document Black literature, history, and art for future generations. Remembered as Dorothy Porter Wesley, she left behind a lasting model of what a librarian can be: a scholar, a guide, and a guardian of cultural memory.