Chicago Public Library, George Cleveland Hall Branch Archives

Biographical Notes

Dr. George Cleveland Hall (February 22, 1864 – June 17, 1930)

Dr. George Cleveland Hall, physician and humanitarian, was born on February 22, 1864 to James W. and Emmaline Buck Hall in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Hall received his primary and secondary education in Ypsilanti public schools. In 1882 he matriculated at Lincoln University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated with honors in 1886. Hall then attended medical school at Bennett Medical College in Chicago, Illinois and graduated in 1888 and began a successful medical practice in this city. He married Theodosia Brewer in 1894 and had two children, a daughter named Hortense and another who died as an infant.

George Cleveland Hall is arguably most remembered as a noted physician and chief of staff at Provident Hospital for thirty years and as a founder of the Cook County Physicians’ Association of Chicago. However, he also was an active participant in the development of African American civic life. In 1915, Hall was one of the five original members of the organization created by Carter G. Woodson, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH), and became its first president. The ASNLH was founded in Chicago, at the Wabash YMCA. In addition, he served as vice president of the National Urban League and the Chicago Urban League, as the chairman of the board of management of the Wabash Young Men’s Christian Association, organized the Civic League of Illinois, was involved with a number of other social and philanthropic organizations including the Y.M.C.A., Governor Lowden’s Race Commission, and the Municipal Voter’s League, and devoted his energies to securing funds for the endowment and development of his alma mater, Lincoln University, as well as Fisk University, Meharry Medical College, and Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes.

In 1926, Hall was appointed to the Board of Directors for the Chicago Public Library, becoming the second African American to fill this position. Soon after his appointment, he began to press for a full service library in Chicago’s growing Bronzeville community. His interest in having an accessible library branch for the patrons of Bronzeville fit into his lifelong interest to preserve and promote African American history and culture. He enlisted support from community organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons and the Chicago Urban League, and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, Chicago philanthropist and president of Sears, Roebuck, and Company and a long-time friend he met when both men worked with Booker T. Washington. Hall asked Rosenwald for help in securing a site for the library. Rosenwald was just completing the Michigan Boulevard Garden Apartments, a luxury housing complex for middle-class black Chicagoans. Rosenwald agreed to donate land he owned at 48th Street and Michigan Avenue, one block from the housing complex. In May 1929, the board approved the construction for the library, and hired Charles Hodgdon as the architect. On June 17, 1930, while the library was under construction, Hall died. The library board voted to name the library for Hall as a memorial to his tireless efforts.

Biography or History

Vivian Gordon Harsh (May 27, 1890 – August 17, 1960)

The first African American branch head in the Chicago Public Library and an early leader in the movement to preserve African American history, Vivian Gordon Harsh was born in Chicago on May 27, 1890 to Fenton W. and Maria L. (Drake) Harsh. The couple had one other child, Fenton W. “Pritt” Harsh Jr., a realtor and jazz musician. Her parents were both graduates of Fisk University; her mother was among the first women graduates of Fisk University. They were members of Chicago’s “Old Settlers,” an elite circle of the city’s early black families.

Harsh graduated from Wendell Phillips High School in 1908. The following year she began as a junior clerk for the Chicago Public Library, the only employer she would ever have. Beginning as clerk, Harsh slowly rose through the clerical ranks. By 1921, she had graduated from Simmons College Library School in Boston, and on February 26, 1924, she was appointed branch librarian at Hardin Square Library, becoming the first African American branch librarian for the Chicago Public Library.

As a young woman, Harsh was a socialite. As early as 1912, the Chicago Defender touted Harsh as a prominent attendee of social functions held by dentist and civil rights activist Dr. Charles E. Bentley and by Dr. George Cleveland Hall, director of medicine at Provident Hospital. Two decades later, both these men would play major roles in the birth of the African American history collection launched by Harsh.

While serving as a librarian at Hardin Square and later at the Abraham Lincoln Center, Harsh became active in the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH). These two elements in Harsh’s life began to merge in 1926, when Hall was appointed to the board of directors for the Chicago Public Library. Soon after, he began to press for a full service branch in Chicago’s rapidly expanding South Side black community and appealed to Julius Rosenwald, Chicago philanthropist and president of Sears, Roebuck, and Company, for financial support. Hall died before the library was completed, but in 1931, while construction was ongoing, the board of directors voted to name the branch library after Hall and appointed Harsh the head librarian.

In the summer of 1931, several months prior to the opening of the Hall Library, the Rosenwald Foundation granted Harsh a fellowship to supplement her studies at the Graduate Library School of the University of Chicago and to tour African American collections in other cities. With this fellowship, she visited New York Public Library’s Schomburg Collection, Fisk University Library, and Atlanta University Library. Harsh returned from her trip determined to establish a Special Negro Collection at the George Cleveland Hall Library and began acquiring books, pamphlets, clippings, and photographs on African American history and literature from friends in the ASNLH. Among the first donations to the Special Negro Collection were approximately two hundred books from the private library of Dr. Charles Bentley.

As the Hall branch librarian, Harsh set high standards of service and fostered wide community interest in books and reading. She was often described as a “professional perfectionist.” She tirelessly worked to expand this collection throughout her career as head librarian at Hall Library despite indifference from the Chicago Public Library’s administration regarding the Special Negro Collection. Donations from library patrons and a series of Rosenwald Foundation grants supported purchases; friends who traveled to other cities were encouraged to collect black history books, pamphlets, and brochures and add them to the library’s resources. In 1933, Harsh launched the Book Review and Lecture Forum (BRLF), a semimonthly event designed to bring library patrons together with speakers on topic of black history, literature, and current events. Speakers included such notables as Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps, Gwendolyn Brooks, Horace Cayton, William Attaway, Margaret Walker, Alain Locke, and St. Clair Drake. Harsh encouraged the writers who spoke at the BRLF to help build the Special Negro Collection. Langston Hughes, for example, was a frequent visitor to Hall Library and donated the typescripts and galley proofs of his autobiographical work The Big Sea. Other speakers including Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, and Horace Cayton, used the Special Negro Collection as a research site for their own writings.

Throughout her life, Harsh remained active in the ASNLH: she served on committees that organized its national conventions, directed its membership drives, and planned its programming. Harsh also served on the board of the Parkway Community Center and participated in the work of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Young Men’s Christian Association, Young Women’s Christian Association, the Du Sable History Club and was a member of Grace Presbyterian Church. In addition, she supported professional organizations, holding memberships in the American Library Association, the Illinois Library Association, and the Chicago Library Club, among others.

After a serious illness and a period of depression, Harsh retired from the Chicago Public Library on November 10, 1958. Colleagues recalled that Harsh found retirement difficult. Many have noted that Harsh was especially disheartened over what she viewed as neglect of the Special Negro Collection since her retirement and appointment of Ollye Marr Coffin as the new head librarian at Hall branch. Two years later, on August 17, 1960, Harsh died. Though she was only survived by her brother – never having married nor having had any children – her funeral was crowded with friends and library patrons.

Institutional History

On January 18, 1932, George Cleveland Hall Library opened on Chicago’s Southside, in the heart of the African American neighborhood named Bronzeville. The library opening followed a rigorous campaign by Dr. George Cleveland Hall, a member of the Chicago Public Library’s Board of Directors and a co-founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) who had long advocated for a full-service library in Bronzeville, an area booming with African American migrants from the South. Hall’s interest in having an accessible library branch for black patrons on Chicago’s Southside fit his lifelong interest in preserving and promoting African American history and culture.

Hall’s campaign to establish a Bronzeville branch of the Chicago Public Library began almost immediately upon his appointment on the Chicago Public Library’s Board of Directors in 1926. He enlisted the support of community groups and leaders from the ASNLH, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons (NAACP), and the Chicago Urban League, among others. Hall also appealed to Julius Rosenwald, Chicago philanthropist and president of Sears, Roebuck, and Company, who agreed to help secure the site for the library, close to the Michigan Boulevard Garden Apartments (also known as “The Rosenwald”) that Rosenwald financed for middle-class blacks Chicagoans. Hall died before the library was completed, but in 1931, while construction was still ongoing, the board of directors voted to name the library in his honor and selected Vivian G. Harsh, who had worked in the Chicago Public Library system as a branch librarian since 1924, to direct the new library.

Like Hall, Harsh was a dedicated member of the ASNLH and as head librarian she was determined to create a library that served the needs of Chicago’s diverse and growing black community. Specifically, Harsh desired to build a Special Negro Collection, a research collection that would preserve and disseminate African American history. Among the 20,000 volumes available on opening day were approximately 300 donated books on African American history and literature. That small beginning grew into the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, the oldest and largest Black history collection in the Midwest.

Harsh also assembled a talented staff of black women professionals: Charlemae Hill Rollins, Arlene Morrell, Esther Wilson, Edith Allman Gans, Ellyn Askins, Nina Roberts, Marian Hadley, Dagmar Bell, Consuelo Young, Doris Evans Saunders, and Bessie Benson. Rollins, like Harsh, was dedicated to creating collections and programs that celebrated African American history and culture. She served as the first children’s librarian at Hall and remained in that position until her retirement thirty-one years later. Rollins began her library career as a junior library assistant at the Hardin Square Branch. From her earliest years as a librarian, Rollins devoted her energies to the elimination of racism in children’s books and the creation of texts that would “help young people to live together with tolerance and to understand each other better.” She also organized children’s literary clubs to encourage them to learn more about their identity; repeatedly wrote to publishers seeking information on black culture and life; collected newspaper and magazine articles and clippings about African Americans; and instituted “Appreciation Hours” at Hall Library where teachers were invited to bring their classes to hear stories about African American achievements.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Hall Branch Library became a magnet for Chicago’s African American writers, artists, scholars, and the general public. In October 1933, Harsh launched the Book Review and Lecture Forum at the library, a semimonthly event designed to bring library patrons together with speakers on topics in black history, literature, and current events. The forum ran for the next twenty years, attracted an impressive constellation of African American presenters, including Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Horace Cayton, William Attaway, Alain Locke, and St. Clair Drake.

Many of these speakers used the Special Negro Collection as a research site for their own writing. They also helped build the collection. For example, when the Federal Writers Project study called The Negro in Illinois was discontinued in 1942, study director Arna Bontemps who frequently used the Special Negro Collection and the library as the research project’s headquarters donated the project’s research files to Harsh. Another Works Progress Administration’s (WPA)-funded study, a wide-ranging survey of African American history materials in Chicago-area libraries called the Chicago Afro-American Analytical Union Catalog, was also placed in the collection.

The Hall Library celebrated Negro History Week regularly by featuring exhibits, programs, and recommended book lists. The February 1945 Negro History Week, for example, included a roundtable discussion of the fate of African Americans in the postwar world and a huge exhibit featuring key African American figures such as Crispus Attucks, Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, George Washington Carver, and Marian Anderson. The library also fostered education on a variety of other topics. In the 1930s, classes were held in French, public speaking, social psychology, and Spanish. During World War II, Hall Library held “discussions of how to grow a victory garden of vegetables and fruit to supplement wartime food rations, canning exhibits that demonstrated ways to deal with that produce when it matured, book drives for sailors, and flag-raising demonstrations.” And in the years immediately following the war, Harsh organized forums on the problems of black workers, hosted conferences on independence movements in Africa, worked with the black history radio series, Destination Freedom and helped found a group called Fun at Maturity (FAM), a social and educational group aimed at older patrons of Hall Library.

By the 1950s, as residential shifts and neighborhood deterioration impacted Chicago’s black community, Hall Branch Library experienced difficulty reaching community members. In the 1950 annual report Harsh stated that “there is a very definite need for some method of communication between adults living in the community and the library. There undoubtedly are potential borrowers residing in the area who are not yet aware of the library in their midst.” Specifically, she argued that while new residents knew the library existed, they were unaware that the library offered extra services, such as community programming, book clubs, and educational courses. Consequently, the committee that organized the Book Review and Lecture Forum ceased to function in 1954 and the use of Harsh’s Special Negro Collection declined.

In November 1958, Harsh retired from Hall Branch Library. With her departure, many of the programs that characterized the library as a community institution, such as the Book Review and Lecture Forum, lapsed entirely. In a 1959 Chicago Daily News article, her successor, Ollye Marr Coffin, expressed a desire to further increase the impact of the library upon Bronzeville and resume the Book Review and Lecture Forum. However, she failed to fulfill her promises and, in fact, did just the opposite when she closed the Special Negro Collection to the public and retired it to the library’s basement.

In 1989 the Children’s room at Hall was dedicated in honor of Charlemae Hill Rollins. Mayor Richard M. Daley attended, as did librarians from around the country who had known Rollins. Today, Hall Branch Library is a full partner in the Black Metropolis Project, a DePaul University-based cooperative program to document the rich history of the neighborhood, involving young people of the community in the effort.