PROFESSOR
The Harlem I grew up in is commonly portrayed as a neighborhood where abandoned lots replaced lawns, and broken glass and needles replaced flowers. But my Harlem also had bookstores. I walked past Lewis H. Michaux’s National Memorial African Bookstore on 125th street regularly, by its first location on 7th (a younger generation would call this Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard), and by its second when it had to move to a corner spot to make room for the State Office Building where former President Bill Clinton would open an office. “Knowledge is Power and you need it every hour.—Read a Book,” was a missive that I read daily on the signage hanging above the store. Not far away on Lenox (now referred to as Malcolm X Boulevard) was Harlem’s Liberation Bookstore owned by the late Una Mulzac. Its architecture was similar to so many storefront bookstores—a central door in the middle of two bay windows displaying books. In one window a tall vertical sign called, “If you don’t know, learn” and its complement in the other window responded, “If you know, teach.” These messages apparently stuck with me. Knowledge is power that must be shared so that we know, as Gwendolyn Brooks writes in “#Blackout Poem: “I Am A Black (Kojo),” “We are graces in any places.”
“
We are graces in any places.
Valerie Babb with summer scholars of the “Culture and Community at the Penn Center National Historic Landmark District” on the Retreat House dock, Penn Center, St. Helena Island, South Carolina.
AUTHOR
It took me a while to realize that I don’t write because I am a professor; rather, I just got lucky enough to go into a profession where I can write. I am no Toni Morrison, but I feel the same inevitability she does, the same sense that I could not not write. Writing and research are my way of owning ideas and sharing them. They are my way of transferring the knowledge I gain in privileged spaces to spaces that may not share similar access. It is how I can let others know, for instance, about coming upon W. E. B. DuBois’s copy of David Walker’s 1829 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World in Emory University’s Rose Library, and tell of the faint pencil lines drawn alongside passages that we later see resonate with DuBois’s own writings. I can share a moment where marginalia in a personal edition becomes a conversation between two Black activists and thinkers, across time, whose points still remarkably resonate in our own times.
“
But writing was a thing that I could not not do at that point—it was a way of thinking for me.
public intellectual
“
Close up your books, get out of your seat/
Down the halls and into the street
My archives are everywhere—barbershops, community functions, a city’s outdoor murals, a basketball court, albums. All contain narratives that reveal human commonalities, complexities, and perceived truths. The richness, the insights of these narratives need to be shared. Their validity as archives as important, as lasting as those accessed in libraries, universities, and museums needs to be stressed.
Over the course of my professional career, I have been Professor of English at Georgetown University, Franklin Professor of English and Director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Georgia; a faculty member of the Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College; and Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities at Emory University.
I have taught a variety of classes, from “The Nineteenth Century American Novel” to “Whiteness and American Culture” to “Early Black Print Culture” and throughout it all, I have urged students to get out of the classroom, study all manner of archives, share what they have learned, and build a fair world.
PROFESSOR
The Harlem I grew up in is commonly portrayed as a neighborhood where abandoned lots replaced lawns, and broken glass and needles replaced flowers. But my Harlem also had bookstores. I walked past Lewis H. Michaux’s National Memorial African Bookstore on 125th street regularly, by its first location on 7th (a younger generation would call this Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard), and by its second when it had to move to a corner spot to make room for the State Office Building where former President Bill Clinton would open an office. “Knowledge is Power and you need it every hour.—Read a Book,” was a missive that I read daily on the signage hanging above the store. Not far away on Lenox (now referred to as Malcolm X Boulevard) was Harlem’s Liberation Bookstore owned by the late Una Mulzac. Its architecture was similar to so many storefront bookstores—a central door in the middle of two bay windows displaying books. In one window a tall vertical sign called, “If you don’t know, learn” and its complement in the other window responded, “If you know, teach.” These messages apparently stuck with me. Knowledge is power that must be shared so that we know, as Gwendolyn Brooks writes in “#Blackout Poem: “I Am A Black (Kojo),” “We are graces in any places.”
“
We are graces in any places.
Valerie Babb with summer scholars of the “Culture and Community at the Penn Center National Historic Landmark District” on the Retreat House dock, Penn Center, St. Helena Island, South Carolina.
AUTHOR
It took me a while to realize that I don’t write because I am a professor; rather, I just got lucky enough to go into a profession where I can write. I am no Toni Morrison, but I feel the same inevitability she does, the same sense that I could not not write. Writing and research are my way of owning ideas and sharing them. They are my way of transferring the knowledge I gain in privileged spaces to spaces that may not share similar access. It is how I can let others know, for instance, about coming upon W. E. B. DuBois’s copy of David Walker’s 1829 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World in Emory University’s Rose Library, and tell of the faint pencil lines drawn alongside passages that we later see resonate with DuBois’s own writings. I can share a moment where marginalia in a personal edition becomes a conversation between two Black activists and thinkers, across time, whose points still remarkably resonate in our own times.
“
But writing was a thing that I could not not do at that point—it was a way of thinking for me.
public intellectual
“
Close up your books, get out of your seat/
Down the halls and into the street
My archives are everywhere—barbershops, community functions, a city’s outdoor murals, a basketball court, albums. All contain narratives that reveal human commonalities, complexities, and perceived truths. The richness, the insights of these narratives need to be shared. Their validity as archives as important, as lasting as those accessed in libraries, universities, and museums needs to be stressed.
Over the course of my professional career, I have been Professor of English at Georgetown University, Franklin Professor of English and Director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Georgia; a faculty member of the Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College; and Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities at Emory University.
I have taught a variety of classes, from “The Nineteenth Century American Novel” to “Whiteness and American Culture” to “Early Black Print Culture” and throughout it all, I have urged students to get out of the classroom, study all manner of archives, share what they have learned, and build a fair world.