Wesley, Dorothy Porter, 1905-1995

Dorothy Burnett Porter Wesley librarian, curator, and bibliophile, was born on May 25, 1905 in Warrenton, Virginia to physician Hayes Joseph Burnett and tennis player Roberta (“Bertha”) Ball Burnett. Wesley, the eldest of four children, grew up in Montclair, New Jersey. She graduated from Miner Normal School, Washington D.C. in 1925 with the intention of becoming a teacher. Wesley was a library assistant in the Miner Normal School library where she worked with librarian Lula V. Allan who encouraged her to pursue a career in library science. Wesley enrolled in Howard University in 1926 and received a BA in 1928. After graduating she began work as a full-time librarian at Howard University. In 1928 she enrolled at Colombia University’s School of Library Science and received a Master’s in Library Science in 1931. In 1930, Wesley began work as curator of the Moorland Foundation, now known as the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, at Howard University and worked to build collections documenting the African diaspora until her retirement in 1973. Under Wesley’s administration, the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center became a world-renowned institution for the history and culture of people of African descent.

After retirement, Wesley worked as a consultant for Radcliffe University’s Black Women Oral History Archive and authored several articles and books pertaining to librarianship and the African diaspora. Her written works include Early Negro Writing, 1760-1837 (1971) and Afro-Braziliana: A Working Bibliography (1978).

Wesley married artist and art history professor James Amos Porter (1905-1970) and had a daughter, Constance Porter Uzelac (1939-2012). After James Porter’s death in 1970, she married former Wilberforce University president and African American historian, Charles Harris Wesley in 1979. Dorothy worked with Charles on a variety of projects including research for a bibliography on abolitionist William Cooper Nell until Charles’s death in 1987. William Cooper Nell, Nineteenth-Century African American Abolitionist, Historian, Integrationist: Selected Writings 1832-1874 (2002) was later published by Constance Porter Uzelac in 2001. Dorothy Porter Wesley died in Broward County, Florida in 1995.