A Communal Exchange: The Special Negro Collection at the George Cleveland Hall Branch Library and the Writing and Preserving of the Negro in Illinois Manuscript

In 1940, the Illinois Writers Project (IWP) hired a team of workers to help research and compile a ‘Negro in Illinois’ manuscript, and before the program was shuttered in 1942, those workers often met and researched at the George Cleveland Hall branch library in Chicago. The Hall library, when it opened on January 18, 1932, was designed to be a community touchstone for the city’s rapidly growing black population. At its height, the library hosted bi-monthly book discussions and weekly black history classes based around the branch’s Special Negro Collection. Writers like those in the IWP as well as scholars, students, artists, and community members all utilized the Special Negro Collection for their respective projects, and in gratitude for this collection’s presence in Chicago, Arna Bontemps, one of the co-supervisors and writers for the project, decided to donate the unpublished manuscript material to the branch for the use of future researchers in 1943. This paper explores the textual transactions involved in the founding and use of the Hall branch’s Special Negro Collection and the ways it fostered a community-centric approach to history within the Black Chicago Renaissance. This approach inspired a series of exchanges of even more print material between former patrons and the branch during the subsequent decades, and this paper invites greater consideration into the role that preservation can play in shaping intellectual and artistic productions.