About Us.

The community centered in In Our Own Words is Black librarians and library workers within the United States. Black participation in librarianship dates back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, emerging alongside segregated public library systems and historically Black educational institutions. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), established beginning in 1837, played a critical role in educating Black teachers, scholars, and information professionals (Wiegand, 2015). Black churches, community schools, and freedom libraries also functioned as centers of literacy, civic engagement, and cultural preservation during segregation and the Civil Rights Movement.

Despite this long-standing presence, the labor and lived experiences of Black librarians have often been marginalized within official archival records. Traditional archival systems developed alongside colonial and state-building structures that privileged institutional documentation over personal testimony (Ghaddar & Caswell, 2019). As a result, the intellectual, emotional, and political labor of Black librarians remains underdocumented within formal professional archives.

Community archival scholarship challenges this absence by reframing archives as participatory and relational spaces rather than neutral repositories (Caswell, 2017, 2021). African American Community Archives theory further positions community members as stewards of their own cultural memory, recognizing oral testimony and lived experience as valid archival records (Keeton, 2025). Scholarship on embodied records similarly expands what counts as documentation beyond written institutional forms (Sutherland, 2019).

In Our Own Words responds to these archival silences by centering first-person testimony as historical record, contributing to a more community-authored understanding of librarianship’s history.