Remembering the Howard University Librarian Who Decolonized the Way Books Were Catalogued

Account of Dorothy B. Porter’s work building and organizing the Howard University collection that became the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, appointed 1930. Quotes Porter’s own oral history on the Dewey Decimal Classification then in use across the libraries she consulted: “Now in [that] system, they had one number, 326, that meant slavery, and they had one other number, 325, as I recall it, that meant colonization.” She continued that in many “white libraries,” “every book, whether it was a book of poems by James Weldon Johnson, who everyone knew was a black poet, went under 325. And that was stupid to me.”

Porter set the Dewey scheme aside and classified by genre and author instead, across art, anthropology, communications, demography, economics, education, geography, history, health, international relations, linguistics, literature, medicine, music, political science, sociology, sports and religion. Secondary source quoting a primary oral history; the oral history itself is held at Howard.