A Bridge to Understanding Black America’s Experience

There is a yellowed, pre-Civil War document issued by a Florida savings and loan explaining how a landholder could mortgage his farm -- and the slaves who worked it as well.

There are brass insignia worn by Buffalo Soldiers who served in all-black units of the U.S. Army, from the Indian campaigns in the West to World War II.

There is sheet music from the late 1800s, when cakewalks and other popular music genres sketched a pleasing but mendacious tableau of the South’s poor but happy blacks.

And there is an example of the police identification card that, as recently the 1960s, African American hotel employees needed to work on Fort Lauderdale’s beaches. The card, bearing the worker’s mug shot and thumbprint, had a double purpose: Specific areas were deemed off-limits to people with dark skin, and the bearer was considered a potential thief.

“There’s a lot of history that needs to be brought up,” said Ronald C. Glass of the African-American Research Library and Cultural Center here. “So few people know it.”

The facility -- in one of Fort Lauderdale’s oldest black neighborhoods -- is one of the nation’s few publicly run, easily accessible collections of African American history. Now in its third year, the 60,000-square-foot center has become a source of reading material for community residents, a reference point for scholars, and a venue for cultural events and educational and job-training programs.

“It is one of the very few repositories of black culture and history that help people in this state understand and appreciate the black experience,” said Marvin Dunn, a professor of psychology at Florida International University who has just finished writing a book on African Americans in Florida.

“If I were starting a black Florida book today, instead of eight years ago, the first place I would go is to this facility,” he said.

For scholars and community members, the library is a place for unexpected discoveries.

In a corner of the special collections archive stands a worn red and white golf bag that belonged to Calvin Peete, America’s first major black professional golfer. The library possesses eight unfinished manuscripts by Alex Haley, author of “Roots,” plus a letter that longtime “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson sent Haley in 1977 along with a photograph that depicted the moment during the show that, in Carson’s words, “you told me one of my ancestors kept slaves.”

In the children’s room, young patrons can pore over hundreds of titles -- including anthologies of African American folk tales and the biography of former Los Angeles Lakers great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Symbols on the bookshelves reproduce Adinkra emblems from the Ashanti people of Ghana for ideals such as fearlessness and brotherhood. One of those West African symbols, representing dwennimmen -- or humility, strength, wisdom and learning -- adorns the building’s facade.

The Rev. John F. White, pastor of the Mount Hermon African Methodist Episcopal Church, said the center had proved itself to be a “wonderful community resource.” White has attended cultural events there, had his youth choir sing there and, along with many parishioners, cast his presidential election ballot there.

“It could be the one institution that could help galvanize our community into unity,” White said.

The facility was the dream of longtime Broward County libraries director Samuel F. Morrison, who modeled it after the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City and a similar facility in Atlanta.

Morrison wanted a literary center that also could serve as a venue for cultural events and community activities. His goals, he said, were to construct a bridge from the past to the future, to connect African Americans with other Americans and to make available a storehouse of knowledge that people could use to transform their lives.

At the 1999 groundbreaking ceremony, a high priest from Nigeria was there to consecrate the site, donated by Broward County. Three years and $14 million in public and private money later, Morrison’s brainchild opened its doors.

Inside are 75,000 books, manuscripts, artifacts and documents on Africa and African Americans; blues and jazz albums from the first half of the 20th century; and oral histories on race relations in South Florida. The special collection contains 15,000 rare volumes, including a history of Egypt and the Sudan printed in 1788.

A 5,000-square-foot gallery currently features an exhibit of masks and other African artworks -- including a large sculpture from the West African nation of Benin that depicts a male slave in chains.

Julie Hunter, executive director of the center, said that one child who visited the library left a piece of paper beside the statue that read “never again.” That vow has been incorporated in the plaque explaining that the chained, muzzled figure embodies the “grotesque spectacle” of those millions of Africans who were shipped across the seas to work on the sugar and cotton plantations of the New World.

In another ground-floor room, a brightly colored mural by South Florida artist Gary L. Moore relates episodes in the history of the African American communities of Broward County and South Florida -- including “wade-ins,” when civil rights protesters courted arrest by entering public beaches that had been reserved for whites.

The library and research center were used by 305,000 patrons during its second full year of operation; Hunter said she hoped to put much of the library’s holdings on the Internet so that readers and researchers everywhere could access them.

“For a researcher in African American studies, it’s a goldmine,” said Glass, one of the librarians. “If you stay in here for a month, you’ll be blown away.”

Unlike university collections, the library also draws many users from the surrounding community.

Hunter said that a young woman recently told her that after taking 16 classes at the library, she had found a job. “My beautician also told me she comes to the library to read her e-mails,” Hunter said.

Morrison, who retired soon after the center opened, said that every day he went for a stroll in the park next to the library. “My great joy,” he said, “is to go by there and see the parking lot filled.”