ABSTRACT
IN AN 1839 letter to the editor of the Colored American~ a member of the Phoenixonian Society, a literary society formed in 1833 by African Americans in New York City, reported that another of the city's African American literary associations, the Phoenix Society, had "gone out of existence." The letter did not detail the cause of the literary society's demise, nor did it express tremendous sorrow over its disappearance. Rather, the writer's interest was practical: he wished to know what had happened to the Phoenix Society's library, which was apparently still intact and-at least in the opinion of the letter's writer-up for grabs. Reminding his readers that the bulk of the Phoenix Society's texts had been originally donated to the society "for the improvement of the colored population of this city," he lamented that "these books now are not subserving any high interest, or adding to the mental stature of that class for which they were designed." "I am connected with a Literary Society which has enrolled among its members a considerable portion of the young and active talent of our city['] ... a society that has done considerable ... [good] in the cause of Literature, and the members of which are putting forth exertions to improve their minds, and prepare themselves for usefulness among our people," he wrote. "This society has no Library, and as I hear the Library of the 'Phcenix Society' is to be given to some Literary Association, I have thought our destitute state a demand for this Library, and an inducement for us to put in our claims. The amount of good that the possession of this Library would effect among us, I will not pretend to calculate. Our destitute state, and inability to obtain books we sorely feel. Doubtless the influence of a good Library-such a Library as the 'Phcenix Society' are about to dispose of, would be salutary in the highest extent." 1 (See figure 4.1.)
Black Readers and Their Reading Rooms 101
Libraries such as the one this writer makes reference to are not commonly associated with African Americans in the antebellum United States. Indeed, our understanding of the relationships black Americans had with books, reading, and literary culture generally in the nineteenth century remains extremely limited. While we ,are familiar with the story of Frederick Douglass, who recounted in his 1845 Narrative how he contrived ways to "steal" literacy, first from poor and hungry white boys in the neighborhood in exchange for bread and then by challenging his associates in a Baltimore shipyard to write better than he, we are less familiar with stories that record the ways other African Americans from the same time period acquired and practiced their literacy. Douglass's life story is a testimony to his belief that literacy was the "pathway from slavery to freedom." 2 But what of those free blacks who, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, formed sturdy communities in the urban North? Although technically free, these individuals were subject to open hostility and discrimination, and they faced constant charges of innate black inferiority. Almost every social and educational institution and mechanism of support was closed to them except for those they founded for themselves. Of the literary practices of this population we know very little. But it is here we must look to understand the history of African American libraries. Critical attention to two institutions formed by free blacks in the antebellum North are crucial to this effort. One consisted of the reading rooms and libraries of small, independent literary societies and organizations interested in the advancement of black equality and civil rights. The other was the black press, an institution that initially replicated the function of a library by distributing reading material that would serve the needs of an increasingly literate black community.
