Though Provost Mark Schlissel P'15 declined a proposal Monday to fund an on-campus Civil Rights Library for Racial Justice, he gave the project's supporters a "detailed message of how to move forward," said Geoffrey Eaton, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Mid-Manhattan branch and a supporter of the project.
The proposed library, to be named in honor of Paul B. Zuber '47 P'80 and Barbara Johnson Zuber P'80, is intended to function as a dedicated home for the University's Africana Studies collection and other resources related to the African diaspora and civil rights movements.
Schlissel cited the pressures of "current financial circumstances and competing needs" on the University's budget in his response to the proposal. But in his message to Samantha Jackson GS, the author of the library proposal, he laid out a comprehensive list of ways that she, the Samuel M. Nabrit Black Graduate Student Association and the undergraduate Black Student Union could move forward with the proposal, Jackson said. Schlissel advised the groups to review existing Africana Studies collections, begin fundraising on their own and increase the presence of black students in the student groups advising University libraries, among other suggestions.
The proposal, which Jackson sent to Schlissel and President Ruth Simmons at the beginning of February, generated wide-ranging support both inside and outside the University. University Librarian Harriette Hemmasi — who noted that the new PhD in Africana Studies, instituted at the start of the academic year, requires the library to add a number of resources and take stock of existing collections anyway — has been one of the proposal's strongest supporters.
The library could be so much more than just a collection of documents, Jackson said. She described it as a tangible sign not only that the University recognizes and appreciates the contributions of its black graduates, but also that it understands its own role in perpetuating structural racism.
"The names that are remembered and the names that the University holds dear are written on walls, on chairs, on plaques, above rooms," she said. "But naming things after people who donate money is serviceable at best and dangerous at worst, because the people who don't have the money to donate … their histories aren't remembered."
She cited the example of Zuber, who was a key player in the fight for integrated public schooling in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s. "Despite Zuber's contributions to society, she said, his name is nowhere on the walls, and he is hardly commemorated as an alum. "No one at Brown knows about this," she said.
Jackson noted that other universities, including Harvard, have libraries similar to the one she proposed. She said the recent discovery of a 1961 recording of Malcolm X speaking on campus hidden in library archives highlighted the necessity for such a space at Brown.
"That's why we need a library like this," she said. "So people can research and archive and catalog these treasures that are so important not only to African-American culture but to American culture as a whole."
"We can't envision building a new library in the short term," Schlissel told The Herald, adding that even renovating a space in an existing library would cost "on the order of millions of dollars."
"But it's a sufficiently interesting and important area that it's reasonable to keep in our minds as we prioritize and strategize in the years ahead," he said. "The idea that we name things after donors is the way we make the University work. But I would be very discouraged to learn that African-American alumni felt that they were being treated differently than other alumni."
The provost's response "looks like good news to me," Jackson said.
As a member of the civic engagement committee of the NAACP mid-Manhattan branch, Jackson is "active, very active — she has quite a spirit and a drive to advance the history and culture of our people," Eaton said. When she brought him the proposal, he advised her not to ask for anything controversial and to present the library as an asset to the University. Eaton said he also is not disappointed by the Schlissel's response.
"It's a huge win," Eaton said. "You start somewhere, and once you're able to create momentum and build it into the course structure of the University, that's huge. It's not an end, but a beginning."
