Wesley, Dorothy Porter, 1905-1995

Dorothy Burnett Porter Wesley (1905-1995) 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 worked as 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 graduation from Howard University in 1928, Wesley began work as a full-time librarian at Howard University. In 1928 Wesley enrolled at Colombia University’s School of Library Science where Wesley 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. Books authored by Dorothy Porter Wesley 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.

Dorothy Louise Porter Wesley (May 25, 1905 – December 17, 1995) was an African-American librarian, bibliographer and curator, who built the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University into a world-class research collection.

Porter was born Dorothy Burnett in Warrenton, Virginia, the first of four children of Dr and Mrs Hayes J. Burnett.

Porter received a B.A. from Howard University in 1928. She studied at Columbia University, earning B.S. in 1931 and M.S. in 1932 in library science. She was the first African American to graduate from Columbia's library school.

She was appointed in 1930 and over the next 40 years was key to building up what is now the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center to be one of the world's best collection of library materials for Black history and culture at Howard University.[3] Her limited budget meant that she sometimes asked publishers and book dealers directly to donate specific books to the library. She developed a world-wide network of contacts that reached from the USA to Brazil, Mexico and Europe through friends including Alain Locke, Rayford Logan, Dorothy Peterson, Langston Hughes, and Amy Spingarn. The collection is thus international and in many languages and includes music and linguistics as well as literature and scholarship by and about Black people.[3] In addition, she was instrumental in ensuring scholars such as Edison Carneiro and statemen like Kwame Nkrumah and Eric Williams visited the university to increase student's interest in their African heritage.

In addition, the collection required a new cataloging system that she developed as well as expertise to assess the materials. Earlier librarians, notably Lula V. Allen, Edith Brown, Lula E. Connor and Rosa C. Hershaw had started to develop a system suitable for the library's materials. Porter built on this to highlight genre and authors rather than use the conventional Dewey Decimal Classification which lacked appropriate class-marks. When Arthur Spingarn agreed to sell his private collection to Howard University, the university's treasurer required an external appriasal of its value. Although Porter requested someone from the Library of Congress to do this, they lacked expertise in the subject area and asked her to write the report, that they then signed, and which was accepted by the university treasurer.