Rare Books and Manuscripts

The Charles L. Blockson Collection of African-Americana and the African Diaspora contains materials relating to African American, African, Latin American, and Caribbean history and culture. The Collection focuses not only on African-Americana, but more broadly documents the African Diaspora, the pattern of human migration that reaches back hundreds of years and traces the movement of Blacks from their African homelands to areas around the world. Cataloging of the Blockson Collection, which was acquired by the University Libraries in 2006, began in the fall of 2007 and is ongoing, with nearly 6,000 books cataloged to date.

The Charles L. Blockson Collection Room is located on the 3rd floor of West Pattee Library and is open Mondays and Thursdays from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. and by appointment. Inquiries and requests for materials may be directed to the Special Collections Library or Sandra Stelts, Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, at (814) 863-5388 or sks5@psu.edu. For reference and/or instructional support, contact Sylvia Nyana, Social Sciences Librarian, at (814) 865-8864 or san17@psu.edu 

• Overview and highlights of the Blockson Collection
• How to search the Blockson Collection
• History of the Blockson Collection
• Hours and policies
• Related Links

Overview and Highlights of the Blockson Collection

The strength of the Charles L. Blockson Collection of African-Americana and the African Diaspora at Pennsylvania State University is its scope. This multidisciplinary collection include books, magazines, photographs, manuscripts, sheet music, postcards, record albums, and artifacts of the African experience in the United States, Latin America, Caribbean, and Africa date from 1632 to the present. Both non-fiction and fictional works cover a broad range of topics including art, literature, music, poetry, religion, science, sports, slavery, and the Civil Rights Movement. While the language is predominantly English, there are works in other languages and foreign-language translations such as Chester Himes’ La Reine Des Pomme (For Love of Imabelle, 1991), Richard Wright’s Jeunesse Noire (Black Boy, 1991), and Langston Hughes’ Japanese Jazu (The First Book of Jazz, 1960).

Areas of research in the Blockson Collection include, but are certainly not limited to, the following highlights:

• Discovery, exploration, and travel narratives: The earliest books of African exploration in the Blockson Collection include Africanus Leo, Ioannis Leonis Africani Africae, published in 1632; and Henri Justel, Recueil de divers voyages faits en Afrique et en l'Amerique, published in 1674. A rare item (known in only 14 copies worldwide) is the map-filled Travels in the Inland Parts of Africa: Containing a Description of the Several Nations for the Space of Six Hundred Miles up the River Gambia (1738) by Francis Moore. Also of importance is the 1822 edition of Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior of Africa. Works such as Tété-Michel Kpomassie’s An African in Greenland expand our conception by showing us that not only did European explorers and colonizers travel to Africa, but Africans also traveled to Europe and beyond. Zora Neale Hurston traveled to Haiti to conduct anthropological field research for her book Tell My Horse, and Langston Hughes recounted his extended period in Russia in Wonder As I Wander. Traveling often allowed African Americans to experience a freedom they did not feel in the United States.

• Africa: A glance at the Blockson catalog yields more than 400 books on Africa, including subjects as varied as dance, textiles, travel, agriculture and food production, drama, slave trade, business, biography, history, philosophy, empire, music, language, religion, missionaries, and art and jewelry. The Blockson Room also houses six African sculptural works, all gifts of Mr. Blockson in 2008:

  • Royal horn blower (West Africa). A horn blower calls upon neighbors and villagers to gather and hear the king’s message. Nearly three feet tall, the figure stands just inside the entrance to the Blockson Collection Room as though to announce visitors.

  • Dengese (Congo) figure, displaying the tribal custom of creating human figures with elongated extremities.

  • Luba, Zaire (Congo) figure, a wood carving of a Luba woman with a headdress. She is seated and holding a decorated pot.

  • Mother and Child figure from Nigeria (Yoruba People, wood carving). The mother is depicted in a kneeling position with the child clinging to her back. She holds a lidded vessel shaped like a chicken.

  • Queen Mother figure from Nigeria (bronze head) with an elaborate headdress and neck piece.

  • Terra cotta reproduction from Mali. A seated man wearing a necklace and bracelets.

• The African Diaspora: The Diaspora was the movement of Africans and their descendants to places throughout the world—predominantly to the Americas. The Diaspora refers particularly to Black Africans who were enslaved and shipped to the Americas by way of the Atlantic slave trade, with the largest population in Brazil. The number of enslaved Africans forcibly carried across the Atlantic between the 15th and late 19th centuries by European traders is almost impossible to calculate, but some scholars put the departure figures for the Americas as high as 11.8 million. The Blockson Collection documents this migration with materials on not only North America but on South America and the Caribbean as well. Haiti is particularly well represented, beginning with the 1805 volume of Marcus Rainsford’s account of the Haitian Revolution of 1791 to 1804, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti. Letters and documents by Toussaint Louverture, a leader of the Haitian Revolution to abolish slavery and secure native control over the colony, await cataloging. The collection contains books about Afro-Latin civilization and culture, including folktales, literature, politics, cooking, dance and ritual, household structure, slavery, and abolition and emancipation movements.

•  Slavery: Slavery has been a defining experience for Africans in America, and the Blockson Collection contains over 300 volumes that introduce readers and researchers to the subject. There are historical studies, slave narratives, biographies, and works of literature, including a number of editions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its imitators. Other topics include Black slave owners, the abolitionist movement, the Underground Railroad, slave revolts and escapes, and African and Caribbean slavery. Also in the collection are documents and artifacts, including letters of slave sales and manumissions, and a set of 19th-century iron shackles from Bristol, Rhode Island, an important American slave center.

• Civil Rights and Black Power: The Blockson Collection documents the turbulent and important period in African American history during the 1960s and 1970s when African Americans refused to sit at the back of the bus, insisted on being served at lunch counters, and marched in the streets for social change. In addition to autobiographies and biographies of the central figures of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement (Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and Malcolm X, for example), the collection includes sweeping historical accounts of this time period in works such as the acclaimed Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965 by Juan Williams.

• Photography: Among the rareties in the Blockson Collection is Julia Mood Peterkin’s Roll, Jordan, Roll (1933) with photographic studies by Doris Ulmann, in a special edition of 350 copies with a proof print signed by Ulmann. Peterkin’s text, about poor Black tenant farmers of the South, is accompanied by 90 of Ulmann’s spectacular full-page, copper-plate photogravures. Other photographic studies include Frederic Ramsey’s Where the Music Started: a Photographic Essay (1970), a guide for an exhibition of photographs taken in the Deep South between 1951 and 1960, where Ramsey made field recordings and conducted interviews with musicians; and works by Gordon Parks, known for his contributions to activisn, filmmaking, photography, and writing, such as Gordon Parks, A Poet and His Camera (1968). Also included in the collection are reference books and bibliographies of Black photographers from 1840 to the present.

• Religion: Notable for documenting the diversity of the religious experience, the Blockson Collection includes historical studies of African religions as well as African American experiences. There are materials on African religions in Trinidad, the Rastafari movement in Jamaica, Black women preachers, spirituals, mysticism and magic, Black Preaching and Black Power, the African Baptist Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and studies of such major figures as Martin Luther King.

• African American women’s literature: The collection includes the critically acclaimed fiction of a wide range of contemporary African American women writers who are particularly known for giving voice to the Black experience, including Alice Walker (The Color Purple), Toni Morrison (Beloved), and Gloria Naylor (Bailey’s Café). Additionally, the collection features the groundbreaking fiction of the first African American woman science fiction writer, Octavia Butler, and more popular works such as Barbara Neely’s domestic detective series. One of the most notable works is a signed copy of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), by Phillis Wheatley, a former slave and the first published African American poet.

• Children’s and young adult literature: Charles Blockson has had a long-standing interest in children’s and young adult literature and has himself written children’s books, including the most recent, The Ballad of the Underground Railroad, with illustrations by Francine Still Hicks (2008). The collection includes both gorgeously illustrated picture and storybooks for children under ten and compelling fiction for pre-teen and young adult readers. They tell stories about the struggles and contributions of African Americans from slavery to the present day. Even the stories for the youngest readers acknowledge racism and injustice while concurrently highlighting the strength and beauty of African Americans. Authors who are primarily known for their work for adults have also made important contributions to children’s and young adult literature. For instance, poet and playwright Langston Hughes wrote several books for children, including the charmingly illustrated Book of Jazz. Novelist James Baldwin recounted his childhood story in Little Man, Little Man. Collaboration has also been an important hallmark of several striking children’s books, as when visual artist Tom Feelings combined his stunning illustrations with the poems of notable poets such as Maya Angelou in the picture book My Soul Looks Back in Wonder, and poet Ntozake Shange and visual artist Romare Bearden teamed up for I Live in Music. The collection also includes a selection of folk tales from Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States.

• African Americans in sports: Many volumes are devoted to documenting the enormous historical struggle that African American players faced as they challenged the color barrier in sports. For example, there are books on the Negro Leagues in baseball, a separate league for those players prevented from playing in the major leagues because of their race. Historical studies of African Americans in sports contextualize the more personal accounts and studies of individual athletes, such as boxers Jack Johnson and Joe Lewis, baseball legends Jackie Robinson and Hank Aaron, first PGA Black golfer Charlie Sifford, track and field star Jesse Owens, and tennis champion Arthur Ashe.

• Autobiographies and memoirs: The tradition of African American autobiography begins with the 18th-century African American slave narrative, Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustava Vassa, the African (1789). Such first-person accounts, including the later autobiographical writings of W.E.B. DuBois, provide a remarkable window into the experiences of African Americans throughout history. Letters are often revealing in the same fashion. For example, historian Farah Jasmin Griffin selected and juxtaposed the 19th-century love letters (found in the Connecticut Historical Society) between two women, Rebecca Primus and Addie Brown, in Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends. The letters, written between 1859 and 1868, illuminate their confrontations with prejudice, the struggles to educate newly freed slaves, the challenges faced by Black women wage earners, and Reconstruction-era politics.

• African American poetry: Among the highlights is a signed copy of Langston Hughes’ The Weary Blues (1931), wherein the speaker describes an evening of listening to a blues musician in Harlem. With its diction, its repetition of lines, and its inclusion of blues lyrics, the poem evokes the tone and tempo of blues music. The poetry in the Blockson Collection includes the melodic cadences of some of the best African American poets, including Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Ntozake Shange, and Quincy Troupe. It also includes the work of Ishmael Reed, who is primarily known for his satiric fiction but who also has written extensive poetry. Other major figures represented are Paul Laurence Dunbar, Rita Dove, Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, and James Baldwin. African poets like Wole Soyinka are also represented, as are studies on the oral tradition in Africa.

• Sheet music: The sheet music collection, with its often colorful cover art, provides insights into African American history through Negro spirituals, slavery songs, emancipation songs, blues, jazz, barbershop songs, vaudeville songs, and piano rags. Early 20th-century Black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, is represented, as well as H. T. Burleigh’s arrangement of a collection of Negro spirituals. The sheet music also provides important documentation of the derogatory and stereotypical representations that circulated throughout the United States—for example, in “coon songs” and minstrelsy. In addition to the sheet music, the Blockson Collection’s performance programs often give valuable details about casts and characters of theatrical events, musical comedies, concerts, vocal recitals, church performances, and operas such as George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.

• Postcards: The Blockson Collection of postcards dates from 1903 to the 1970s and provides opportunities to study the visual representation of African Americans. Though shocking to us now, many of the cards glorify slave culture and include such stereotypical activities as eating watermelon and riding alligators. Images of mammies, “coons,” and “pickaninnies” associate Blacks with servitude. Black labor in the agricultural south is depicted through an emphasis on cotton fields, cotton gins, and cotton production; other cards illustrate the cutting of sugar cane and the picking of peaches and peanuts. There are also depictions of religious activities such as baptisms. From the later 20th-century, the postcard collection contains famous art works, scenes from Africa and the Caribbbean, important historical sites and cultural figures, and Black Pride cards from the early 1970s.

• Josephine Baker Collection: Josephine Baker (1906–1975) began her career as an entertainer on Broadway and ultimately because an international sensation in Paris, renowned for her exotic performances as a jazz singer, dancer, and actress. Her performances in the 1920s (perhaps most famously, her banana skirt costume) highlighted the primitive and sensual images of African Americans that her European audience fancied. She became a French citizen in 1937 and during World War II was active in the French Resistance. She was also later active in the American Civil Rights Movement and was the first African American to integrate an American concert hall. The Blockson Collection contains posters, magazines, programs, photographs, records, sheet music, and a rare edition of Baker’s book written for children, La Tribu arc-en-ciel (1957).

• Paul Robeson Collection: Paul Robeson (1889–1976) was an All-American football player and professional athlete, writer, lawyer, basso profondo concert singer, actor of stage and film, and a wide-ranging activist for trade unionism, peace, integration of major-league baseball, social justice, and civil rights. He was the first major concert star to popularize the performance of Negro spirituals and was the first Black actor to portray Shakespeare’s Othello. His legacy and dedication to African American civil liberties has inspired Charles Blockson. The collection houses artifacts from Robeson’s formidable career, including posters, programs, photographs, and Robeson family letters.

• Sculpture in the Blockson Collection: The Blockson Room houses a number of sculptural works, including African figures, all gifts of Charles L. Blockson in 2008:

  • Bronze head of Charles L. Blockson, sculpted from life by Antonio Salemme, 1990. One of three by the artist. Another is displayed at the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple University in Philadelphia.
  • Bronze head of Paul Robeson by Antonio Salemme (1892–1995), sculpted from life in1927. One of five by the artist.
  • Royal horn blower (West Africa). A horn blower calls upon neighbors and villagers to gather and hear the king’s message. Nearly three feet tall, the figure stands just inside the entrance to the Blockson Collection Room as though to announce visitors.
    Dengese (Congo) figure, displaying the tribal custom of creating human figures with elongated extremities.
  • Luba, Zaire (Congo) figure, a wood carving of a Luba woman with a headdress. She is seated and holding a decorated pot.
  • Mother and Child figure from Nigeria (Yoruba People, wood carving). The mother is depicted in a kneeling position with the child clinging to her back. She is holding in front of her a lidded vessel shaped like a chicken.
  • Queen Mother figure from Nigeria (bronze head) with an elaborate headdress and neck piece.
  • Terra cotta reproduction from Mali. A seated man wearing a necklace and bracelets.

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 How to search the Blockson Collection

Researchers may search the growing holdings of the collection by starting at the Libraries home page, clicking on the CAT, and selecting “Advanced Search.” There are three ways to search for topics:

• Choose the “Keyword Search” and type in a keyword and “Blockson.” For instance, “Civil Rights and Blockson” or “Africa and Blockson;” or
• Choose a keyword option (author, title, subject, etc.) and then, from the dropdown menu “In Library,” choose “Special Collections Library;” or
• Click on "Advanced Search" and select “Special Collections” in the “In Library” box, choose “Rare Books & Mss, Blockson Collection” or “Blockson Collection Vault” in the "Location" box, and type your keyword search terms. [Clicking the “Search” button with no search terms will bring up a complete list of the Blockson Collection holdings as unsorted titles.]

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History of the Blockson Collection

As a fourth grader, Charles L. Blockson began collecting historical items related to African Americans, at first searching through Salvation Army and Goodwill stores before graduating to more serious collecting venues like antiquarian bookstores. For many years, Blockson has been devoted to the recovery and preservation of Black history, forming not one but two great collections in the process. In 1984, Blockson donated to Temple University the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American History Collection, the result of many years that Blockson spent haunting bookstores, scouting out book sales, and otherwise following his interest with resolve. He currently serves as curator emeritus of the Temple collection.

More recently, but no less actively, Blockson has formed a second collection on Black history, which now forms part of the Penn State’s Special Collections Library. Acquired by the University Libraries in the summer of 2006, Penn State’s Blockson Collection focuses not only on African-Americana, but more broadly documents the African Diaspora, the pattern of human migration that reaches back hundreds of years and traces the movement of Blacks from their African homelands to areas around the world, most notably in South America (Brazil and Guyana, for example), the Caribbean, and, of course, in the United States.

In his 1988 memoir, Damn Rare: The Memoirs of an African American Bibliophile, Blockson writes that his love of books was spawned through his rich family background in African American culture, leading him to be one of our nation's leading African American collectors of African and African American books. Blockson has written several essays and books centered on African American history, especially in Pennsylvania, including Liberty Bell Era: The African American Story and The Underground Railroad. "The preservation of black history has become my lifework," says Blockson.

Born in Norristown, Pennsylvania, Blockson began his academic career as one of Penn State’s best athletes in track and field, as well as football. He is a Pennsylvania State University alumnus and holds an honorary doctorate from Villanova University. In the midst of his career, Blockson was a teacher for the Norristown Area School District, where he taught multicultural and diversity education in the state of Pennsylvania and was the first inductee into Norristown school district's Hall of Fame and Hall of Champions. Blockson went on to lecture and teach African American culture all over the world.

Blockson has been a friend to the Pennsylvania State University for many years and was most recently honored as one of the 2007 Penn State Distinguished Alumni. He has served on the Penn State Alumni Association's Alumni Council and the University Libraries Development Advisory Board. In 1981, he received an Alumni Fellow Award.

He is a recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and holds multiple honorary degrees. Blockson has also launched a project to erect sixty-four historical markers commemorating the contribution of African Americans to Philadelphia. He lives in Pennsylvania and has one daughter, Noelle.

Charles Blockson’s works include, among many others:

• Black Genealogy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977
• Pennsylvania's Black History (Philadelphia: Portfolio Associates, 1981)
• Hippocrene Guide to the Underground Railroad (New York: Hippocrene, 1984)T]
• The Underground Railroad (New York: Prentice-Hall Press, 1987) (Harrisburg, Pa.: RB Books, 2003)
• The Haitian Revolution: Celebrating the First Black Republic (Virginia Beach, Va.: Donning Co. Publishers, 2004).

The Charles L. Blockson Collection Room, located on the 3rd floor of West Pattee Library, was dedicated in October of 2007. Inquiries and requests for materials may be directed to the Special Collections Library or Sandra Stelts, Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, at (814) 863-5388 or sks5@psu.edu.

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Hours and Policies

The Charles L. Blockson Collection Room, 3rd Floor West Pattee Library, is open Mondays and Thursdays from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. and by appointment by calling (814) 865-1793.

Materials in the collection may not circulate; access is available only in the Blockson Room or in the Special Collections Library, 104 Paterno Library.

Photocopying and/or photographing of materials must be arranged with staff. Staff-assisted photocopies can be made for 50 cents per page. Decisions will be made on a case-by-case basis, depending on the condition of the material.

Tours are available by appointment.  For information, contact Sandra Stelts, Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, at (814) 863-5388 or sks5@psu.edu. For reference and/or instructional support, contact Sylvia Nyana, Social Sciences Librarian, at (814) 865-8864 or san17@psu.edu.

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