During the first half of the twentieth century, a group of collectors and creators dedicated themselves to documenting the history of African American life. At a time when dominant institutions cast doubt on the value or even the idea of Black history, these bibliophiles, scrapbookers and librarians created an enduring set of African diasporic archives. In building these institutions and amassing abundant archival material, they also reshaped Black public culture, animating inquiry into the nature and meaning of Black history.

Laura E. Helton, assistant professor in the Department of English and Department of History, has written Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History (Columbia University Press, April 2024), which tells the stories Black collectors who created the first enduring set of African American archives: bibliophile Arturo Schomburg, scrapbook maker Alexander Gumby, librarians Virginia Lee and Vivian Harsh, curator Dorothy Porter, and historian L. D. Reddick.

Scattered and Fugitive Things traces acts of collecting in Black public culture between 1910 and 1950. The book highlights the social life of collecting and creatively draws on overlooked sources, such as book lists and card catalogs, to reveal the surprising risks collectors took to establish Black archives at a time when dominant institutions cast doubt on the value or even the idea of Black history.