3528 Browsing in libraries

When I visit a city, I try to make a stop at the public library. Often I can't get inside because I get up too early and am on my way to or from the coffee shop! But today, you can visit some of the most fabulous libraries on line. I keep a link at the left to the New York Public Library. In the early days of my career in the mid-1960s, when libraries were just beginning to figure out how computers could help store and access information, the card catalog of the NYPL had been photocopied and bound into huge volumes. It was a good source for slavic material, as I recall, so I would often take my handful of slips and cards into the huge reference room of the University of Illinois Library (I used to get very light-headed and thought it was excitement but later learned I had atrial fibrillation), write out the transliteration, and search the many possibilities of the authors' names. This was called doing an "authority search," and if you found the author, you made a little check mark. NYPL was considered a reputable authority and we trusted the toiling, underpaid librarians who had worked the decades before us.

February in the United States is called Black History month, and I'm awfully tired of the same old PSAs I've been hearing on the radio. Someone has not put much thought into the historical riches, particularly poetry, literature and music, that are available on-line. ("Hello! There are topics other than slavery and misery to show accomplishments!" she says to the radio.) I went to the NYPL home page and typed in "poet" in the search window, and received a huge number of photographs of African-American and Afro-other literary figures. I looked through the photos and selected this woman, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture:

I then went to Google and looked up her biography and some of her poetry. She had a very interesting life (born to free parents in 1825 and raised by a relative) and received an education far better than most white women of her time. I really enjoyed her poem about Moses, which you can find and read, but she also wrote several novels and this essay was included in a Unitarian sermon source, still worthy of being read today:

True and False Politeness [by F.E.W. Harper]

False politeness can cast a glamour over fashionable follies and popular vices and shrink from uttering unpalatable truths, when truth is needed more than flattery.

True politeness, tender as love and faithful as truth, values intrinsic worth more than artificial surroundings. It will stem the current of the world's disfavor, rather than float ignobly on the tide of popular favor, with the implied disrespect to our common human nature, that it is a flaccid thing to be won by sophistry, and satisfied with shams.

False politeness is an outgrowth from the surface of life. True politeness is the fair outflowing of a kind and thoughtful life, the sweet ripe fruit of a religion which gives to life its best expression and to humanity its crowning glory.

True politeness is broadly inclusive; false politeness narrowly exclusive. …

True politeness has no scornful epithets for classes or races, who, if not organically inferior, have been born under, or environed by inferior conditions. Humanity is God's child, and to fail in true kindness and respect to the least of His "little ones" is to fail in allegiance to Him.

Contemptuous injustice to man is treason to God, and one of the worst forms of infidelity is to praise Christ with our lips and trample on the least of His brethren with our feet,-to talk sweetly of His love, and embitter the lives of others by cold contempt, and cruel scorn.

Beyond the narrow limitations of social lines are humanity's broader interests…

If today you believe that your faith is simple and vision clearer than that of other forms of belief, should not the clasp of your hand be warmer, the earnestness of your soul greater, and the throbbings of your heart quicker to clasp the world in your arms and bring it nearer to the great heart of God and His Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ?