BOOK POWER

CARLA SAYERS TABOURNE ’69

Thanks to Carla Sayers Tabourne ’69, Bard’s Stevenson Library is now home to an important holding of books on Black history and culture. The collection, housed in the new Carla Sayers Tabourne ’69 reading room, was assembled by Clarence LeRoy Holte, who worked at Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (BBDO) from 1952 until he retired in 1972. (BBDO is said to have been the inspiration for the TV show Mad Men.) Holte’s original library of some 8,000 volumes on the history and culture of Africans and people of African descent in Europe and the Americas was considered one of the largest and most valuable of its kind. It was exhibited at the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1977, after which it was sold to Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria. Holte continued to seek out and buy important books, and he eventually gave more than 1,000 volumes each to his daughter, Helen, and her best friend, Sayers Tabourne.

It’s fitting that these scholarly books have found a home at an institution of higher learning; Holte’s interest in documents of Africa and the African diaspora was born as a student at Lincoln University, some 50 miles west of Philadelphia, the first degree-granting historically black college and university (HBCU) in the United States. After a classmate from Nigeria spoke in great depth about the history and culture of West Africa, he asked Holte to share the history of Black people in America. Holte was embarrassed to admit that his high school education included almost nothing on the subject, and that experience set him on a lifelong search for what he called the “knowledge of his people.” He told Ebony magazine that his acquisitions were, “designed for scholarly research, for I have concentrated on primary sources, going back beyond the works that are commonly known to the public.”

On Saturday of Commencement and Reunion Weekend 2024, Sayers Tabourne, College Archivist Helene Tieger ’85, and President Botstein gathered with alumni/ae, faculty, and friends to dedicate the reading room. Also present was Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, who received an honorary doctor of humane letters degree at Commencement later that day.

The earliest title in the collection dates to 1839 (Sketches of the Life and Character of the Rev. Lemuel Haynes by Timothy Mather Cooley); nearly 80 percent is made up of first editions; some were written by well-known figures such as James Baldwin and Adam Clayton Powell, while others are quite rare; many were signed by the author; and nearly two thirds of the more than 1,000 volumes are new to the Stevenson catalogue.

These important volumes are a reminder that the struggle for human and civil rights, fair treatment, and free expression extends beyond America’s borders and back in time to long before Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream. They will help scholars defend against the cooptation, revision, and erasure of Black history—of American history—by those who have traditionally controlled the narrative. Being in the presence of the remarkable work Holte put together during his lifetime, and that Sayers Tabourne has shared with the Bard community, makes it clear that Africans and people of African descent don’t need their humanity restored, it was always there. As Dylan C. Penningroth writes in his book Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights, a book Holte would certainly have added to his collection, “Their humanity . . . should be taken as given.”