Introduction to the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection with Curator Melissa Barton

Melissa Barton, one of the two curators of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters in the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Library, offers an overview of the collection.
Visit the Beinecke Library website (beinecke.libra...) to read more about this collection and to access the digital library with tens of thousands of images of African Americana material that have been digitized.
The James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection is one of the premier collections in the world documenting the literary, artistic, cultural, intellectual, and political activities of Black Americans. With more than 13,000 volumes and hundreds of linear feet of manuscript material, not to mention thousands of pieces of sheet music, photographs, ephemera, and sculpture, the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection is among the Yale Library’s most consulted collections.