Black Authors Index

The "Black Authors Index" was a unique research tool created by Dorothy Porter, the first curator of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. Her index was the inspiration of and forerunner to this portal.

Porter who began working in Howard University's Carnegie Library in 1928, was tapped by the university's head librarian in 1930 to assemble a collection of books by black Americans. He was concerned, she said, about cultural memory loss. As Porter said in an interview shortly before her death "When I started building the collection, nobody was writing about blacks in history. You couldn't find any books."

It was during her 43 year tenure, that Porter began an in-house practice that continued until the 1990s of recording racial, ethnic, and national information about black authors in the Research Center’s Card Catalog. As a result, the Moorland-Spingarn catalog includes information on black authored or edited works printed on 14,122 catalog cards, listing 6,921 authors, editors, and composers, along with the titles to their works. The practice of creating Black authors cards appears to have ended during the early 1990s. Many of the names contained in these cards may be found in the portal.