Dorothy Burnett Porter Wesley: Enterprising Steward of Black Culture

The printed text of Dorothy Porter Wesley’s oral history interview with Avril Johnson Madison, read at p. 25 on 2026-09-30. Asked why she modified the Dewey system, she says that Dewey “had one number” for slavery (326) and “one other number” for colonization (325, “as I recall it”), that at “many of the white libraries” every book by a Black author, “whether it was a book of poems by James Weldon Johnson, who everybody knew was a black poet, went under 325,” and: “Why not take the whole Dewey Decimal System and put a book by James Weldon Johnson, the poet, underneath the number for poetry? You see? So that’s what I did. I did adapt the whole system to the whole collection according to what the subject was.” Supersedes the Smithsonian secondary as the text UNSEARCHABLE quotes.