Kenneth Spencer Research Library

Spencer Research Library and the Gordon Parks Center have collaborated to create a pop-up display and small exhibition on the life, journey, and friendship of Gordon Parks and Langston Hughes.

The Gordon Parks Center in Fort Scott, with support from Humanities Kansas, curated an exhibition in 2023 exploring the connections between these two Kansas artistic luminaries and their local connections to the state.

This collaborative effort is inspired in part by a call by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) to highlight “African Americans and the Arts” in 2024. Working across collections and institutions, we have an opportunity to take a closer look at the varied histories and lives of African American artists.

Oftentimes, when we think of Black artistic movements, we often think of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s or the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. What is easy to overlook is the strong Kansas connection to both movements. Likewise, when we think of Kansas art and artists, it is easy to think of pastoral landscapes that capture the natural beauty of the prairie landscape and poetic descriptions of wildflowers and controlled burns. The linking of Kansas artists to these larger artistic movements that give rise to underrepresented voices in the world of arts and letters is not always so apparent. One of the most famous artists of the state is John Steuart Curry, the hand behind the Tragic Prelude mural painted in the rotunda of the capitol building in Topeka. But, did you know that another work by Curry, The Fugitive, was featured in an exhibition titled An Art Commentary on Lynching in 1935? Of the 38 artists whose work was included in the New York exhibition, Curry’s work was used on the cover of the exhibition catalog, designed to bring attention to the need for a nationwide anti-lynching law.

Two of the most recognized artists of the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movement have roots in Kansas. This is no coincidence. Kansas in the early 20th century fostered a certain creative intelligence in these young men that would translate to and be understood by a large audience. Both Hughes and Parks grew up in working class families. Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, just across the state line from Baxter Springs, Kansas. Before his first birthday, he was living between Topeka and Lawrence. Locally, he attended Pinckney School and lived on Alabama Street in West Lawrence (now referred to as Old West Lawrence). He worked for a time as a newsie, selling the Saturday Evening Post and briefly the Appeal to Reason, a socialist newspaper published out of Girard, Kansas. He stopped delivering the Appeal after being told by the local editor of the former that the latter would get him into trouble. His introduction to the social issues discussed in the Appeal would shape a sense of solidarity with working class folks. Fifty miles away from Hughes’ birthplace is the childhood home of Gordon Parks, born in Fort Scott, Kansas, where his father was a tenant farmer. While Hughes was an only child, Parks was the youngest of fifteen.

Both Parks’ and Hughes’ earliest writings were inspired by memories of their Kansas childhoods and drew upon stories about people they knew. Hughes’ first novel, Not Without Laughter, is based on his upbringing in Lawrence. In his first autobiography, The Big Sea, he reflected on the ideas that would become Not Without Laughter. He wanted to write about a typical Black family in the Midwest and about people he had known in Kansas. Yet, he felt like his family and upbringing was not typical. “I gave myself aunts that I didn’t have, modeled after other children’s aunts whom I had known,” Hughes wrote. “But I put in a real cyclone that had blown my grandmother’s front porch away.”

Parks drew on his own childhood while writing his first novel, The Learning Tree. Though set in the fictional town of Cherokee Flats with fictional characters, it closely resembled Fort Scott. When Parks later directed a film based on the story, he shot it on location in Fort Scott.

Kansas was not without racial bigotry. Both Hughes and Parks talked openly about being the subject of ridicule and name-calling and feeling fearful of violence. Despite the unpleasant realities faced during their childhoods, Kansas remained an important part of their lives. In Half Past Autumn, a retrospective of Parks’ work, he calls the state his touchstone:

“I looked back to the heaven and hell of Kansas and asked some questions…My memories gave me some straight talk. The important thing is not so much what you suffered or didn’t suffer, but how you put that learning to use.”

“There had been infinitely beautiful things to celebrate – golden twilights, dawns, rivers aglow in sunlight, moons climbing over Poppa’s barns, orange autumns, trees bending under storms and silent snow. But marring the beauty was the graveyard where, even in death, whites lay rigidly from Blacks. Twenty-odd years had passed when, with these things lying in my memory, I returned to Kansas and went by horseback to lock them firmly with my camera. Spring was wrapped around the prairies. Nothing much has changed – certainly not the graveyard.”

Langston Hughes returned to visit Lawrence after many years as well. Later in life, he was invited to speak at the University of Kansas, which he had visited as a small child. During one of his return visits, Hughes donated a collection of personal books and manuscripts to KU Libraries.

Throughout this summer, Spencer Library will feature a panel-display exhibit from the Gordon Parks Center accompanied with archival materials from the Kansas Collection to tell the stories of Langston Hughes and Gordon Parks and show the impact of their time growing up in Kansas on their life and careers. Their cultural expression through visual art, performing arts, literature, films, and music preserves our history, retells our stories for the next generation, and inspires our futures.

The exhibition will be on display through August 16, 2024, in the reception area of Spencer Research Library. The library and exhibit are free and open to everyone. You can visit our website to plan your visit.

Phil Cunningham
Kansas Collection Curator

Over the past few years, before Juneteenth became a national holiday, KU Libraries gave employees the day off as a Day of Reflection. We used this time to reflect on what we knew and learn more about African American history, understanding the history of emancipation.

I grew up in Battle Creek, Michigan. It wasn’t as big as Detroit or Grand Rapids, but it was a large city with a number of companies that kept the city in business. Battle Creek is where the Kellogg brothers and Charles W. Post invented cereal. Those companies employed the majority of Battle Creek’s population. It is also the place where Sojourner Truth is buried.

Having this connection to the Underground Railroad where I lived, I became more interested in history.  However, we learned about emancipation only from one view. 

From junior high to college, many of my classmates were African American. I also had teachers, principals, and a high school counselor who were Black. It was only when I lived in and traveled around the country that I became aware of the lack of diversity in many communities.

Working at Spencer with our African American Experience collections, I have become more knowledgeable about history from the African American perspective.

When I began my research on Juneteenth, I could not find much information. A colleague mentioned that I should use “emancipation” as my search term instead. I wanted to learn the importance and history of the Juneteenth holiday. I found that emancipation celebrations were held on different days of the year in different locations. 

With Juneteenth becoming a national holiday, I hope it is a catalyst for people understand and learn more about African American history from their perspective. Juneteenth is more than a day off work. It is a day to celebrate African American history and U.S. history to the present. 

Researching our collections, I was able to find many documents on emancipation. This blog post is only a small sample from our holdings.

I encourage you to visit Spencer to see and touch the historical materials housed at the library. Spencer is free and open to the public. A reference librarian can work with you to find resources on emancipation, Juneteenth, and broader African American history in Kansas. See the library’s website for more information.  

See you soon!

Meredith Phares
Operations Manager

The Todd Family Photographs collection consists of thirty-seven photographic reproductions donated by Loretta Estelle Carraher. They depict three generations of her family, the Todds.

After they were freed from enslavement to a family in Platte County, Missouri, Adam and America Todd moved to Kansas with the Payne family, also freed from slavery. They raised six children, settling first in Leavenworth and then moving to Oskaloosa. Adam Todd died at the age of 98. America Todd died in 1920.

Below are a few images from the collection for you to enjoy.

Kathy Lafferty
Public Services

Check the blog each Friday for a new “That’s Distinctive!” post. I created the series because I genuinely believe there is something in our collections for everyone, whether you’re writing a paper or just want to have a look. “That’s Distinctive!” will provide a more lighthearted glimpse into the diverse and unique materials at Spencer – including items that many people may not realize the library holds. If you have suggested topics for a future item feature or questions about the collections, feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of this page.

This week on That’s Distinctive! we highlight a book from Special Collections titled Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction by Hallie Q. Brown. The book, published in 1926, highlights notable African American women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by, in the words of a Google Books summary, telling the stories of “[enslaved people] and social workers, artists and activists, cake makers and homemakers.” In so doing, it offers “unusual insight into female networks, patterns of voluntary association, work, religion, family life, and Black women’s culture.” The book highlights many notable figures such as Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Dinah Cox, Matilda J. Dunbar, and Martha Payne (mother of Daniel Alexander Payne).

According to Britannica, author Hallie Q. Brown was an

“American educator and elocutionist who pioneered in the movement for African American women’s clubs in the United States. In 1893 Brown was a principal promoter of the organization of the Colored Woman’s League of Washington, D.C., which the next year joined other groups to form the National Association of Colored Women. In 1893 she was appointed professor of elocution at Wilberforce University, but her teaching duties were limited by her frequent and extensive lecture tours, notably in Europe in 1894–99. Her lectures on African American life in the United States and on temperance were especially popular in Great Britain, where she appeared twice before Queen Victoria. She was a speaker at the 1895 convention of the World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in London and a representative of the United States at the International Congress of Women there in 1899. Browns other works include Bits and Odds: A Choice Selection of Recitations (1880) and First Lessons in Public Speaking (1920).”

Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction is a part of the Howey Collection within Special Collections at Spencer Research Library. The Howey Collection houses many books that originate from the Gerritsen Collection. Spencer’s copy of this volume originally came from the library of physician and women’s activist Aletta Jacobs (1854-1929) and her husband C. V. Gerritsen, who collected books, pamphlets, and other materials on women’s issues. Acquired by the John Crerar Library of Chicago in 1903, the Gerritsen collection was purchased with other Crerar Library materials by the University of Kansas in 1954. The collection was microfilmed and is now available digitally through subscription to libraries worldwide.

A digital copy of the book can be found at Documenting the American South, or the library’s physical copy can be viewed in the Reading Room, Monday through Friday between 10am and 4pm.

Tiffany McIntosh
Public Services

The Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) founded the annual February celebration of Black History in 1926 and identified Black Resistance as the theme for 2023.

From Spencer’s African American Experience Collections, I selected the following items to highlight how Black Resistance is an integral part of Kansas history.

With their baby, William, Mr. David and Mrs. Rebecca (Brooks) Harvey escaped from chattel slavery in Van Buren, Arkansas, by joining a unit of Union soldiers who were going to Kansas. Although the family experienced being separated by accident for two months, they successfully reunited in Lawrence, Kansas, and found employment as tenant farmers on land owned by the state’s Douglas County Sheriff. Within five years, the family saved enough money to buy fifteen acres of land in Douglas County. There they built a home and established their farm. Eventually their farm covered more than two hundred acres.

Kansas is where the family’s four children grew up. William attended business school before spending the remainder of his life working on his family’s farm. Sherman graduated from the University of Kansas in 1889; he then taught in Lawrence public schools and later earned a law degree from KU. Frederick established a medical practice in Kansas City, Kansas, after earning his medical degree from Meharry Medical School in Nashville, Tennessee. And, Edward graduated from KU, worked in Washington, D.C. as a clerk for Congressman J. D. Bowersock, and retired to the family farm while serving as an active leader in Douglas County farm organizations and other civic other civic groups.

In 1866, the 3rd Annual Convention of Colored Men convened in Lawrence, Kansas, as citizens and taxpayers to advocate for their civil rights, i.e. their right to vote and to serve in the state militia and on juries. The assembled men concluded:      

“We are among you. Here we must remain. We must be a constant trouble in the State until it extends to us equal and exact justice.”

Unwilling to be denied better economic and political opportunities, African Americans like the Saddler family shown below migrated from Kentucky, Tennessee, and throughout the nation to Nicodemus in Graham County, Kansas, the nation’s first African American town west of the Mississippi River.

George Williams – the son of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Williams, a prominent farm family in Pratt County, Kansas – filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against the railroad after he was denied access to a train after presenting his ticket to the conductor. Agreeing with a lower court’s findings, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled in 1913 that the train conductor’s action was due to an honest misunderstanding, not racial discrimination. See Williams v. Chicago, R.I. & P. RY. Co. ET AL., 90 Kan. 478, 1913.

At the 1920 Kaw Valley Convention of the African American Baptist Church in Bonner Springs, Kansas, the Women’s Home and Foreign Mission Society delivered a written protest against a highly visible “For Whites Only” sign displayed in “a public place of business”:

“This unsightly inscription is one of the first things that greets the eyes of every self respecting citizen which is a disgrace to the good name of Kansas and its splendid citizenship.”

Deborah Dandridge
Field Archivist/Curator, African American Experience Collections
Kansas Collection