Troy Swanson: Nicole, welcome to the show and thank you for talking to me.
Nicole Cooke: Thanks so much. It’s great to be back.
Troy Swanson: It’s good to have you and I can’t believe it’s been so long since we spoke on the show. Let me just congratulate you on the publication of the new book the Legacy of Black Women in Librarianship. I’m excited to talk to you about this collection and to learn a little bit about this history. But I thought that before we dive into the book, I think we should catch up a little bit. It has been since 2018, since our last conversation, which kind of blows my mind that it’s been that long and since our last discussion, you’ve been appointed the Augusta Baker Endowed Chair at the School of Information Science at the University of South Carolina, which is exciting. You’ve hosted podcasts, I know you are editing a series from ALA, and you’ve won some awards, so maybe you could give us the catch up on where you are and the work that you’re doing right now.
Nicole Cooke: Yeah, absolutely. I was joking earlier that COVID not withstanding, I guess it’s been what, six, almost seven years now. It’s gone by really quick. So when we last spoke, I was in the Midwest and then I was recruited to come down South. And I am, as you mentioned, the Augusta Baker endowed chair, and I always say that the chair position is the dream job that I didn’t know I wanted. And it’s just been really wonderful. When I was first approached about the position, I actually said no. Because Augusta Baker is known, or her legacy, if you will, is as a children’s librarian. She had a lot of influence with children’s literature and that’s not really my area. And my director at the time who recruited me said, yeah, that’s wonderful, that’s all very true, but she was also a black woman. She was also a librarian. She was also a teacher and a social justice advocate and a groundbreaking librarian, and he said, you fit that part of her legacy, and that’s what we wanna focus on at this time.
So once he put it that way, it was an easy sell. So when I got to South Carolina, honestly I didn’t know much about Augusta Baker, very little, and I think that has been really the impetus of my work since we last spoke. I’ve got all of these degrees and never really had a lot about library history and specifically never had much about black librarianship. So that’s kind of where I’m at now.
In terms of the Baker work, we do a lot of programming. When I got here, it was a semester before the lockdown for the pandemic, so I launched this work online and it is been really, really special because we’ve got folks all over the world who will listen to our webinars and our programs and express their appreciation for Mrs. Baker. And when we, maybe about two years ago, started saying, well, maybe we could do some of these programs in person. The online folks said, well, you’re not gonna forget about us. And indeed they were right. So we’ve had to kind of up our game a little bit with technology. We’ve started streaming some events and things of that nature. And certainly as you mentioned, I’m doing more writing, more editing. I’m working on having Mrs. Baker’s archives digitized and preserved here at South Carolina, so her legacy can be even more extensive than it already is. So that’s been really good.
I’ve been working with doctoral students and master’s students as I have in the past. You mentioned some awards. Listen, I’m always grateful to be recognized. I did receive a social justice award really pretty soon after I arrived in South Carolina, and that was a real pleasure to be recognized as, here’s this person coming in to do this social justice work, and she like almost just landed.
In 2024, I received the Lippencott Award from the American Library Association, and that was a big thrill too. Went out to San Diego to receive that. That one is interesting because it’s almost like a lifetime achievement award and I’m not done yet. You know, listen, if I could retire, I really would. Since I can’t, I still have stuff to get done, but that was really special. I was able to take my mom out with me to have her see me receive this award.
And it really relates to the book when we’re talking about black women librarians and you know, you’re talking about standing on the shoulders of those that come before you. So when you’re able to be honored and have that work recognized, it’s even more special to have some of the folks with you upon whose shoulders you are standing so they can see the impact of their work as well. So it’s been busy, but it’s been really good.
Troy Swanson: Yeah. With everything, we do it together. And you’re leading the way, so I appreciate it. Now, let me just also say on behalf of all of us in the Midwest, we’re a little unhappy that you’ve left, but also excited for your work and your leadership for sure.
Well, maybe we can turn to the book and talk a little bit. The Legacy of Black Women in Librarianship, could you talk about the origin story? Like, where does this come from and some of the gaps that maybe it fills?
Nicole Cooke: Yeah. When I was reflecting on all of this, not only for the book, but just to be able to have this conversation and some others about the book, I realized that I’ve been working on this trajectory, it’s probably almost 10 years if not a little longer. So the first thing that brought me into this work is at my previous institution, I studied a group of 30 black and brown masters students from 1970 to 1972. I just happened to see this picture. It’s a pretty striking picture in black and white of these students, and my first thought was, who are these people and why don’t I know about them? What happened to them, what have you? So that was probably a two or three year project, archival research, to study these people at the institution. And so that really was kind of the beginning for me to do this type of work.
This type of work can be really hard especially when you’re talking about people of color, because inevitably you’re gonna stumble upon the racism that they encountered, the difficulties that they went through, and those 29 or 30 black and brown students went on to be major leaders in librarianship. And why aren’t there stories more well known?
So from there, in 2022, I was the special guest editor of a issue on black women librarians for the journal Libraries: Culture, History, and Society. I was the first guest editor for the journal, and my issue was the first double issue that they produced. And the reason that we had to produce a double issue is because I had almost 70 people who wanted to write about black women librarians. It was amazing. You put a call out and you hope you get, maybe five or six people.
Troy Swanson: I’ve been there, and then you start begging when you don’t get ’em.
Nicole Cooke: And you’re like, please, please. Yeah, but they just kept coming in and the only people I turned down is if I had multiple people wanting to write about the same person. But outside of that, we had 10 articles that were published and then we had maybe about 20 or so blog posts. I gave people the option, and it’s on the Library History Roundtable’s blog. They’re a round table of the American Library Association. And I gave people the option to say, do you wanna write a longer piece? Or if you want, you can write a shorter piece. Because the thing about archives is sometimes there just isn’t enough. Like, we can get a little piece of the story, but we can’t get the whole story. So we had a lot of people that wanted to participate, which really did my heart good.
One of the things I really wanted to do with the articles in this special issue is to bring people in who are not necessarily scholars or academics, but these are librarians and library workers who have been impacted by the person or the librarian that they wrote about. I really wanted to get that dimension to it. A lot of this is very regional and really just stories you wouldn’t have heard otherwise.
So I still had articles and librarians left from that special double issue, and that’s really where the book came into play, and shout out to those chapter authors who have sat with me for literally years while I tried to get this book up and running. I would send them updates, please don’t pull your chapter, it’s gonna come out. They were excellent sports, great authors, and really did a bang up job, I think, in talking about these black women librarians that you now see in the book.
So, in terms of the gap, I have my master’s degree, I have a PhD, and I didn’t study library history. Like I mentioned, I never heard about Augusta Baker. I never heard about most of the women in the special issues or in the book. And if I haven’t heard about it, I’m wagering that a lot of other folks have not heard these stories, and so part of it was a personal goal to learn more about these stories. Certainly I wanted to bring these histories into the classroom and into my research and into my speaking. And it was also partially a way to have homage to a lot of these women upon whose shoulders I stand.
We mentioned the Social Justice Award. Certainly Augusta Baker was a social justice advocate from the thirties and forties. I’ve read quite a bit, really anything I get my hands on about her, I will read. I had a fellowship at the New York Public Library this spring in the branch that she used to work in and thinking about what it was like for her as a black woman to go into certain branches of the New York Public Library system where they told her you can’t come in the front door, you have to go in the back. And that she still prevailed and that she wound up working there for 37 years and when she retired, she was the head of all of children’s services for all of the branches.
So it’s kind of that thing where if I have a bad day, it’s like, oh, hush ’cause what would Augusta have done? What did she go through? And just so many of those stories. So I think having this type of collection that I think is fairly accessible that can be used in library and information science, also education, and a lot of the women in the collection have other vocations or had other disciplines, like for instance Anne Bethel Spencer was a poet. Sadie Delaney worked in medical libraries. So the book can actually be given to those professions as well.
Troy Swanson: And especially the nice thing with it being a collection is people can dive into the chapters that may connect. Some of these stories may be floating out there. I mean, obviously with Augusta Baker, where University of South Carolina made an endowed chair, clearly some of those stories have been carried forward. But by having it written and as a piece and being findable, pulling it all together. It’s a really nice collection.
So maybe we can offer some highlights. You’ve already started this a little bit, but you’ve talked a little bit about Augusta Baker, but maybe we could go a little deeper and help us understand her work and the importance that she brings.
Nicole Cooke: Yeah, for sure. When Mrs. Baker retired from the New York Public Library after 37 years, she came to Columbia, South Carolina, where the university is, and she came to the school that I now work in, and she was a storyteller in residence, which I don’t know that I’ve ever heard that position before. Sounds really cool. And in researching about her, she said that she didn’t teach classes per se, as I do, her job was to teach other people how to tell stories. So a lot of the pictures that are in her archive are of her telling stories to children, or she’s training other librarians how to tell stories.
I’ve met one person that was personally trained by Mrs. Baker and they say that Mrs. Baker was very, very particular about how she wanted stories to be told. It was kind of the Baker method and Mrs. Baker didn’t believe in props, no puppets or anything of the sort. She really focused on the connection between her and her audience. So she did that for 14 years.
The one thing that I really like to put out into the universe is that Mrs. Baker, along with Charlemae Rollins, who was also in the book, she was Mrs. Baker’s contemporary, but at Chicago Public Library. They both published bibliographies on the Black Experience in children’s books. And so they have both been documented as saying, we don’t like how our children are represented in these books, and our children deserve to see themselves in a better light. And so they took it upon themselves to publish these bibliographies. And this is really how they became so instrumental to the field of children’s literature. They had great influence on publishers, and Mrs. Baker was also a consultant on Sesame Street. So it’s all of these, how this works together.
What I like to remind people of is like, today we have the initiative We Need Diverse Books, which a lot of people gravitate to. They do amazing work, but Augusta Baker and her contemporaries were the original We Need Diverse books.
Troy Swanson: How great. And when I read that chapter, it made me think the role that librarians play and have always played of shining a light on authors and writers who are deserving. And this is obviously a powerful focus and a need at that time. What a great example for all of us.
Charlemae Rollins, you mentioned from Chicago, so I’m biased there being from Chicagoland, could you tell us a little bit more about her work?
Nicole Cooke: Yeah. She worked at what is now known as the Woodson branch. She worked with Vivian Harsh who was another legendary Black librarian. What wound up happening with Charlemae and lots of other of the Black librarians, they worked in Black neighborhoods because that’s just how things were at the time.
She was very instrumental with kind of Chicago’s version of the Harlem Renaissance. There were so many different writers that were coming through, like she knew Richard Wright and she knew some of the really influential key authors at the time. She and Vivian Harsh and their community of Black library workers in this branch, they kind of made it into a community literary salon, and they would have these authors come in and workshop their work because they were famous, but they weren’t famous like we know them now. And to your point, their inspiration and their collaboration with these writers really I think did influence what they were able to go on and do in their careers.
Charlemae was also a children’s librarian. Like I mentioned, also published bibliographies. The one thing about Charlemae, from my research, is that she was very socially attuned. So you’ll see pictures of her dressed as like the socialite that she was in her time, and it really emphasized this role that she had in the community. So while she was a community advocate in her role in the library, she was a community advocate writ large.
So it goes to show how these things work hand in hand and how librarians are able to be there for their communities in the way that they are is usually because they are a part of that community. And I think that that’s something that deserves recognition about, the work that we do in this profession. We do it because not only do we enjoy the work, but we are part of that community so we wanna make things better for everyone. And it just depends on how we do that. But I think she was a great example of how you did that.
Troy Swanson: Yeah, that’s great. How about Jessie Carney Smith?
Nicole Cooke: Yeah, Jessie Carney Smith. Dr. Smith was the head librarian, probably later director, at Fisk University in their library. Dr. Smith, I don’t even know how long she’d been there. It’s over 40 years until she retired. She received her PhD in library and information science at the University of Illinois, and she was one of the first Black people to do that. That was a huge achievement, and she really took that education and she took the opportunity that came with that education to really put Fisk on the map. So when you talk about Black librarianship, Dr. Smith is gonna come up particularly because she was working at a HBCU, a Historically Black College or University, and what she did for that library, for their archives.
The other thing that is particularly notable about Dr. Smith is her writing. She was a bibliographer for African American studies when it was still Black Studies. She wrote several volumes, so it would be notable African Americans, let’s say in education or just notable Black Americans. So she really took her sphere of influence outside of library science and talked about the importance of Black people all over.
So I remember whenever I had to write something about a Black person in the context of school, I remember going through her books that she edited and not necessarily understanding who she was. Now in hindsight, it is amazing that she put these encyclopedic collections together. That really are a tribute and a mainstay in Black history. So Dr. Smith is still with us, and I’m grateful that she’s able to receive her flowers in this way for the impact she’s had on Black history and also in Black librarianship.
Troy Swanson: Yeah. That’s fantastic. And you had mentioned Sadie Delaney earlier, but maybe dig in a little bit more.
Nicole Cooke: Sure. Yeah. Sadie Delaney. So when I was doing the research fellowship at the Schaumburg, which is a research division library of the New York Public Library, I went to study the librarians that used to work at the 135th Street branch. The 135th Street branch is now the Schaumburg. It’s on the same site, and Augusta worked there. So that’s really what drew me to that. But you had Sadie Delaney, you had Ella Baker, who was also in the book, you had so many other incredible, mainly Black women, because that’s how the profession goes, that started off at that branch and then went to other places.
So one of in particular is Sadie Delaney. She worked there for about four years. She was recruited to come down south and work at a medical library, and it was a medical library within a veteran’s hospital. And they needed the library pulled together so could actually be feasible, and they had heard of her and the work that she was doing. So initially she took a leave of absence from New York Public. And said, I’ll be back. I just wanna take a year and see if I can help them get things together. She loved the work so much, she never came back.
As part of the work, she is a mainstay, she’s a very prominent figure in hospital and medical librarianship. Because if we are talking about diversity and how undiverse the field can be, it’s going to be even more undiverse in that genre of librarianship. One of the things that she’s primarily known for is what we call bibliotherapy. She’s considered one of the pioneers of that, and bibliotherapy is going to be essentially when you are working with someone and you recommend a book that you think might help them in some way. It’s more nuanced than what I’m saying, but there are bibliotherapists. There’s a great book Bibliotherapy in the Bronx that just came out., And bibliotherapy is used by licensed clinical social workers when they’re working with different populations.
Sadie Delaney was working with veterans, and what were the veterans going through? What were their interests? And it’s this idea that we learn through reading about other people and other experiences. We can gain empathy. We can decrease isolation because you are reading a story that reflects what you’ve been through. So, the social workers and the bibliotherapists give quote-unquote prescriptions for books, but it’s a way to open up discussion and other types of therapy, healing, et cetera. So Sadie Delaney is one of the pioneers of that work.
Troy Swanson: Wow. Fascinating. The power of stories, right? Stories to heal.
I think it’s really noteworthy that the word “legacy” is the first word of the title of this collection. It seems that through this book and through I think your work overall, the University of South Carolina, you’re carrying that legacy forward. And I guess maybe just to pull some ideas together, I was gonna ask you if you could reflect on the meaning of this legacy and maybe the wider work that our profession needs to do to move forward.
Nicole Cooke: Yeah, absolutely. It’s really rare, particularly in librarianship, to have an endowed chair position, and to my knowledge, the endowed chair that I have the pleasure of holding named after Mrs. Baker is the only one of its kind. So that’s a very tangible legacy, how she influenced people in different fields. I’ve yet to meet anyone who is not just effusive when talking about Mrs. Baker. That’s a very tangible legacy that I work very hard to maintain and to extend. I want people all over to know about the work that she did.
There are so many people whose stories I haven’t even gotten to yet because, this work continues that they’ve contributed so much. And I think that one of the things that we need to do better as a profession is to ask whose history are we learning? I mentioned that I had never learned about most of these people until I started studying them and literally digging through archives. We know about a lot of white librarians. We also know that libraries were segregated, although depending on who you ask, they don’t wanna talk about that, and I say, let’s talk about it. We have to talk about it. We can’t address it unless we can actually talk about it, and I think that’s part of where these stories come in.
The very western white version of librarianship that we really, continuing to this day, that’s only part of the story. There’s so much more to the story, to the profession that we don’t know, and one of the great things that’s come already since the publication of the book is folks from the other ethnic caucuses, so we call them NALcos now, National Associations of Librarians of Color. So there’s the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, the Chinese Association of Librarians, there’s APALA which is Asian Pacific Islander librarians. We have AILA, which is American Indian Library Association.
I’ve already had folks from other caucuses say, well, we need a book, and now that I’m in this very privileged position of working with ALA on this series, I’m like, well, let’s talk about it because yes, you do need a book because the book that I just edited is only part of the history. There’s still a lot of history that’s missing.
And to the point of the question, there are other legacies that we haven’t had a chance to explore and celebrate yet. So I would really ask folks, don’t just accept what’s given to you in terms of history and even formal education. There’s always gonna be something that’s not presented to you. There’s always something that’s oppressed or suppressed. And just keep asking what else is out there? What other research can I do? What other questions can I ask to flesh out the entire history of this great profession?
Troy Swanson: And it seems even with well-intentioned faculty members in a two year master’s degree, there’s going to be a limit to what we can get through. It’s still on us to go out and learn and to find it. I think the point about segregation really hits home to me. Even in America today, where we’re still such a segregated nation that maybe segregation as it was in the past isn’t quite the same, but still a lot of the libraries that we serve are still segregated in economic ways, in different ways, and so to carry that legacy, to think about how can we, in our roles now, break down and fight back against some of that. I think this book is so, so important. The book is the Legacy of Black Women in Librarianship. Where can our listeners find it if they wanna order it for their library?
Nicole Cooke: Yeah. Thanks for that. Essentially everywhere. It is certainly available on ALA Edition’s site, but it is on Amazon and other online booksellers. I know folks may feel a way about Amazon, but it is there. It is also possible to order from your favorite local bookseller as well.
Troy Swanson: Right. Fantastic. Well, Nicole, congratulations on your success over the recent years since we spoke last in 2018. And let’s not wait another six or seven years before we speak again. So thank you for your time.
Nicole Cooke: Yeah, you got a deal. Thanks so much.
Circulating Ideas 