Vivian G. Harsh
Vivian G. Harsh was a librarian who was also an historian — one who nurtured, collected, and disseminated African American history and literature on the South Side of Chicago at a time when few others were doing this work. Harsh was the Chicago Public Library’s first African American branch head and the originator of a famous collection of African American history and literature that contains everything from manuscripts by Langston Hughes and Richard Wright to the archives of Ebenezer Baptist Church and the personal papers of prominent black Chicagoans.
Wendell Phillips High School
Vivian Harsh was born in Chicago and attended Bronzeville’s Wendell Phillips High School (which would later produce numerous other famous alumni, from Sam Cooke to the first Harlem Globetrotters). She began working for the Chicago Public Library as a junior clerk in 1909. After receiving a degree in library science from Simmons College in Boston and climbing the ranks of CPL, she was appointed the head of the new George Cleveland Hall Branch Library in 1932.
Harsh was an active member of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, using her position at the Hall branch to promote its work and advance its goals. In February of 1926, the Association began celebrating Negro History Week, a precursor to today’s Black History Month. She began collecting books, manuscripts, and other materials relating to black history and literature, building up a “Special Negro Collection” that soon gained a national reputation as one of the best. The collection helped make the Hall branch into a gathering place for young black writers and intellectuals. Similarly, Harsh’s Book Review and Lecture Forum hosted speakers such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, and Richard Wright who visited to discuss and critique books.
By the time Harsh retired from the library in 1958, the Special Negro Collection had grown to 2,000 books, in addition to various other primary source materials—the fruit of her many years of hard work finding books, soliciting donations, and searching for the money to fund it all. Today housed at the Carter G. Woodson Regional Library in Washington Heights, the collection—the largest of its kind in the Midwest—is named in honor of its first collector: it is the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature.
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