Witness to History: Lawrence Reddick's Crusade to Document the Black 20th Century

This blog post is part of the #SchomburgSyllabus series edited by Zakiya Collier, Digital Archivist, Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division. The #SchomburgSyllabus project archives Black-authored and Black-related online educational resources to document Black studies, movements, and experiences in the twenty-first century. In connecting these web-archived resources to the Schomburg Center’s own unique materials, the project honors and recognizes the source and strength of Black self-education practices, collective study, and librarianship.The #SchomburgSyllabus is curated by Schomburg Center staff and organized into twenty-seven themes to foster a greater understanding of the Black experience.

In June 1945, Lawrence Reddick, curator of the Schomburg Collection of Negro Literature, located at the 135th St. branch of the New York Public Library, placed a request in the New York Amsterdam News: he wanted readers to send him their mail. Specifically, he wrote, "the Library seeks to collect and preserve for history the thousands of letters that have been written by Negroes in the armed forces to their wives, sweethearts, brothers, sisters, and other friends in this country."

Reddick knew that without these primary sources, the Black experience of the Second World War—acts of heroism and valor, racism experienced in a segregated US army, and simply day-to-day life—could all too easily be erased from mainstream narratives. The Library was looking for letters that would "tell what the men have experienced in camps and on the fighting fronts, what they have seen and felt, how they have been treated and how they have treated others. Thousands of these letters are necessary so that a true history of the Negro in the war can be written."

The appeal, and others like it, placed in African American newspapers across the country, was a success: letters from servicemen and women who had been stationed across the European and Pacific fronts poured into the Library. Supplemented with Reddick’s own interviews of Black soldiers, the letters, which are currently held in the Schomburg Center’s Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books division, comprise what Reddick described at the time as "the most comprehensive documentation available of what the Negro GI thought about the war, the various branches of the armed forces, the home front, peoples and places abroad and his own participation in combat...and service of supply."

As Reddick hoped, the collection has informed many histories of the war, including books such as The Afro-American and the Second World War (1976) by Neil Wynn and Fighting for America (2005) by Christopher Paul Moore, as well as multiple articles by Reddick himself, including “The Negro in the United States Navy During World War II” (1947) and “The Negro Policy of the United States Army, 1775–1945” (1949), both published in the Journal of Negro History. In addition to its historical and scholarly significance, the acquisition of wartime correspondence marked an important moment for the library: while the Schomburg Collection—built on the seed library of Arturo Schomburg, which he sold to NYPL in 1926—already contained an array of formats, including books, pamphlets, prints, and manuscripts, it had never before widely solicited correspondence from the public.

In many ways, the project was an analog forerunner to the Schomburg Center’s web archiving program, which began in 2017 and again expanded the scope of formats the Library collects, adding websites, online audio and video files, and social media posts. Much as the letters provide a window into people’s experiences living through a world-changing war, the web archives are an effort to document our contemporary moment, with collections dedicated to preserving content people have produced online during the Black Lives Matter movement, the 2020 election, and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Lawrence Reddick (whose papers are also held in Schomburg’s Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books division) was a historian by training. Born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1910, he attended Fisk University where he studied under Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, and Horace Mann Bond, then earned his PhD in history at the University of Chicago. During the 1930s, he secured funding from the Federal Emergency Relief Agency, the New Deal program that preceded the Works Progress Administration, to collect oral histories of formerly enslaved people who were living in Kentucky and Indiana. The effort was later expanded into the nationwide slave narrative project conducted under the auspices of the WPA, and typified Reddick’s lifelong concern with documenting the lives of Black Americans.

Today, Reddick is perhaps best known for his involvement in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. He wrote the first biography of Martin Luther King, Crusader Without Violence (1959), traveled to India and Oslo with King, and was deeply involved in both the Montgomery bus boycott and the Southern Christian Leadership Council. But as the self-appointed historian of the movement, he never lost sight of the fact that the era he was living through needed to be documented for the future. He took copious, diaristic notes on meetings and protests, collected flyers and press clippings, and interviewed a raft of civil rights leaders, including Rosa Parks, Jo Ann Robinson, James Lawson, and Ralph Abernathy. When the bus boycott ended in December 1956, he had his students at Alabama State College ride the newly integrated buses and write reports on their experiences, generating a fascinating collection of firsthand accounts of a pivotal historical moment.

When Martin Luther King was killed in 1968, Reddick set to work again gathering reactions, hiring a news clipping service to send him coverage from newspapers around the world. In a letter expressing particular interest in articles from Africa, India, and Norway (places King had traveled to in his lifetime), Reddick wrote that "as the ‘official biographer’ of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and as the ‘historian’ of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, I have the responsibility of collecting as best as possible the responses of the world press to the assassination of our friend and leader."

Throughout these years, Reddick continued to teach. In 1960, he was fired from Alabama State, allegedly for having Communist sympathies, after a student sit-in led the governor to crack down on any sympathetic faculty. As he moved to other colleges and universities—Coppin State, Temple, Harvard, and Dillard—he was a witness to, and participant in, many of the protests and political struggles that roiled campuses over the next three decades. In 1970, Reddick joined the newly created Afro-Asian Institute at Temple University. Excited as he was about the "greatly expanded interest in what we call Black Studies," he soon found that the Library severely lacked relevant material, forcing him to bring many of his own books to class in a suitcase he referred to as "Doc Reddick’s traveling library." Unable to rely on the library staff, who, in his words, "know next to nothing about Afro-American studies," he and his students worked to develop their own comprehensive bibliography on the Black Revolution, attempting "to document the external as well as internal aspects of the Black Experience in America 1945–75 [with an emphasis on] what Blacks themselves said and did rather than what non-Blacks said and did to or about Blacks," a mission statement echoed in many of the reading lists and syllabi in the #Syllabus web archive collection. In planning the bibliography, Reddick noted that it should include not just books and articles, but reports of organizations ranging from the NAACP to the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee to the Nation of Islam; public documents from FBI, CIA, and other government counterintelligence operations against movement leaders and groups; and recordings of interviews, speeches, and music, including the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” and the Black Panther album Seize the Time.

Ultimately, Reddick’s political activism was inseparable from his work as a librarian and historian. As David Varel writes in his biography of Reddick, The Scholar and the Struggle, his career "underscores how black thinkers [of his generation] recognized the political nature of scholarship and worked tirelessly to refashion it for black liberation. For them, scholarship and political struggle were two sides of the same coin." Whether in the stacks, in the classroom, or on the streets, he remained committed to documenting the Black experience, so that, in his words, “a true history” can be written.

Collections discussed in the post include the Lawrence Reddick World War II project and the Lawrence Reddick papers, both available in the Schomburg Center’s Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division.

Ultimately, Reddick’s political activism was inseparable from his work as a librarian and historian. As David Varel writes in his biography of Reddick, The Scholar and the Struggle, his career "underscores how black thinkers [of his generation] recognized the political nature of scholarship and worked tirelessly to refashion it for black liberation. For them, scholarship and political struggle were two sides of the same coin." Whether in the stacks, in the classroom, or on the streets, he remained committed to documenting the Black experience, so that, in his words, “a true history” can be written.

Collections discussed in the post include the Lawrence Reddick World War II project and the Lawrence Reddick papers, both available in the Schomburg Center’s Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division.