I think it's fascinating to think back on the impact it's had on those of us who have been working with it since it came, and about the whole process about how we got the collection here originally.

What's now the Archie Givens Sr. Collection of African-American Literature and Life was originally a private collection that had been put together over the course of a quarter of a century by a White, New York-based writer, playwright and teacher named Richard Lee Hoffman, who worked in a small college in Brooklyn, and who, in the early 1950s, when collecting African-American literature was an eccentric activity, to say the least--not many people were doing it in serious ways, and certainly not outside African-American communities--he began doing so. And doing it alongside people like Charles Blockson, another well known, Black bibliophile, who amassed a comparable collection during the same years.

Anyway, Richard Lee Hoffman spent, some 25 years of his life collecting first-editions of African-American poetry and plays and novels and short stories and popular culture materials and magazines and playbills and ephemera of various sorts, of letters and manuscripts and screenplays, etc. And they began with the very oldest work by an African-American author, 1773 edition of Phyllis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.

And they moved through, again, the earliest works of the, of the Revolutionary period, at the end of the, the 18th century; into early 19th century Abolitionist polemics and slave narratives, autobiographies by people like Frederick Douglass and Josiah Henson and Harriet Jacobs and Sojourner Truth; on to the earliest novels, works by William Wells Brown and Martin Delaney; the earliest Black literary magazine, the Anglo African Magazine, that was begun in New York in 1859.

On up to the, the 20th century and the era of the Harlem Renaissance. In part because Hoffman was New York-based, he was able to collect particularly effectively in the materials and the writers and the manuscripts around the Harlem Renaissance era. So the collection was, is marvelously rich with it. And one of the things that we glory in are the first edition volumes that we have that have intact book jackets, from an era that, that was known as the "Renaissance of the Illustrated Book, as well as the "Negro Renaissance" also, in which there was a tremendous collaboration between literary artists and graphic designers, painters, illustrators and so on.

This took place in African-American magazines, in book trade, in new lithographic innovations of the era and so on. And, again, the collection is rich with those kinds of materials also.

Professor Hoffman collected works right up to the 1980s. And so we have, again, materials that span the whole of, the whole caravan, as it were, of African-American literary and cultural life. And it's "literature" in the broad sense, not just poems and plays and fiction and so forth, but the materials also reflect the broadest cultural and social history. So there are a lot of works in the collection that deal with the, the histories of, of African-American musical forms, for instance, the blues and jazz and gospel, and biographies of performers in those fields.

And of, of historians, popular historians as well as formally trained academic historians. And the works of people from W. E. B. DuBois and J. A. Rogers on to contemporary historians are included in the collection also.

It's also a collection that is not only the works of African-American authors, about African-American life, but also the works of White American authors and European authors who wrote about African-American life and culture and character and different periods of our national history, that is a significant part of the collection. And also contains works from other authors of African descent from around the Black world, from the Caribbean, the French and English speaking Caribbean, and from Latin and South America, from places like Guyana and, and Colombia and, Trinidad and so forth. As well as the works of continental African writers. So we feel very blessed to have it here, and hope that the community feels blessed also.

Well, by happenstance--these things oftentimes do happen by serendipity--and the reality was that, Professor Hoffman had reached a pass in his life when he was considering retirement. And he had kept this private, this huge private collection in his apartment and in storage in New York City. And when he finally decided that, his retirement and an upcoming new marriage and family dictated that he, part with his collection, he began contacting major institutions with research libraries and special collections around the country, through a, an agent, a literary, West Coast literary agent called "Joseph the Provider."

And the notice went to the Special Collections of a division of Wilson Library, and it so happened that a student of mine, a very able young Black woman, was working in Special Collections then. And when she saw the notice for this collection, she immediately brought it over to me to take a look at. And as soon as I saw what this collection was, the description and so forth, I knew that this was a rare opportunity.

And we began a process then, a number of people on campus here now who were instrumental in this, in this, in this enterprise. The names are many, but Claudia Wallace Gardiner was, was one who helped mobilize the campus, and to get then-dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Fred Lukerman, and then-president Ken Keller, behind our efforts to, to acquire this collection.

As it turned out, we were the first institution in the country to contact the, "The Provider," the agent, "Joseph the Provider." And we got a 60-day, first-refusal agreement with them, which meant we had 60 days to make an offer on this collection, before it could be offered to anyone else. And so we went to work with the 60 days and high hopes, trying to mobilize the local community, the university and the community at large to help raise the funds to acquire this collection.

And that's the, the point at which the Givens family, Phoebe Givens and Archie and Roxanne and the whole group of, of energetic Black professional folks locally, shepherded in part by Ezell Jones, all banded together to, to mobilize community resources and to secure the collection.

Well, I was, you know, it's a, a dream, come true, of course. And as the collection ultimately arrived and we began opening up the boxes--l had, of course, seen detailed annotated descriptions from Professor Hoffman about what the collection held, but--yeah, if you're at all interested in books as, as cultural artifacts, and the, you know, the beauties and the mysteries of books and bookmaking and so on, there's nothing like opening the volumes themselves.

And seeing the texts, seeing, in many cases, the inscriptions. Because the collection's rich with inscribed copies of oftentimes fascinating notices by authors, to other authors, about themselves and about particular occasions and contexts. So it, it was a long, a long-standing epiphany for me and some of the other folks, to, to open these treasures.

The following is an excerpt of an interview for the documentary "Literature & Life: The Givens Collection." This excerpt features Dr. John Wright (University of Minnesota) discussing the literature of Frederick Douglass.

Douglass wrote three autobiographies in the course of his career, the first in 1845, called simply The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. A second in 1855 called My Bondage and My Freedom, and the third, late in life when Douglass was an elder statesman, the man very much a citizen of the world, called The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.

The first, the 1845 narrative, is a small volume, dense, powerful, carefully sculpted. Written while Douglass' career was, was comparatively young. And it would become a classic in its own time, and establish Douglass as an international figure.

But it's not nearly as rich in its discussions of the life of a slave as Douglass' second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom. Was, which again, appeared in the mid-1850s, after the Fugitive Slave Decision of 1850 and two years before the Dred Scott decision of 1857. A time when, again, rising sectional tensions over slavery were intense, and when African Americans were trying to ferret out, what their place in the body politic was.

And Douglass', the second autobiography of his appeared the same year as many of the classics of the American romantic movement appeared, the same year that Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables appeared, that Whitman's Leaves of Grass appeared, that major works by Henry David Thoreau, his Walden, a host of others appeared also. And Douglass' work, in retrospect, now, suffers not the least by comparison with the work of those American masters. And it offers, of course, a powerful alternative kind of voice. And a richly philosophical voice, as well.

One of the things that we oft-times don't acknowledge about the slave narratives, or don't pay much attention to, is the, the philosophical and the meditative qualities that go along also, of course, with the outrage and the protest against the institution of slavery. But Douglass' autobiographies are rich with philosophical insights about the psychology of both master and slave. And that's part of what gives them ensuring--, enduring power for readers today.

Well, slave narratives like Douglass', were part of an embattled literature. And African-American writers found themselves, in the, in the years before, in the immediate years before the Civil War, kind of triangulating the course between the works of northern White abolitionists, who created works, oft-times, again, opposing slavery but offering rather different views of African-American life and character. Among the best known of these Northern abolitionists' narratives, of course, was Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

On the other hand, from the South, a whole body of work had evolved, that we have come to call the "Plantation Tradition," alongside slave narratives. In part, defending the Southern way of life. Often pro-slavery views of the institution and its place. And so, slave narratives operated in between these counter-forces, and with their own independent views.

And African Americans, unlike many of the Northern, White abolitionist authors, did not view themselves, necessarily, as helpless victims, and void of, of energy and agency in their own right. And offered a somewhat different view of the

Psychological realities of slave life and the struggle for liberty, than appeared in the works of abolitionist writers like, like Harriet Beecher Stowe.

And of course, in relationship to Southern Plantation tradition writers, whose works were, crucial in developing the mythology of slavery as a grand, benevolent regime of beneficent White masters who forded genially over docile and contented slaves, in ivory-pillared mansions with magnolia blossoms and all of the accouterments of Walter Scott historical novels, on display.

In the face of those kinds of images, the slave narratives had to offer a different kind of view. And it's a, it's a fascinating contrast. Indeed, Douglass himself, like many, many mid-century African-American Abolitionist writers and fugitive slaves were themselves powerfully influenced by these, same kind of historical novels and fictions that were coming from Europe.

Douglass' own name, "Douglass," comes from Sir Walter Scott's long poem, "The Lady of the Lake." And Douglass was the name of the Scottish rebel chieftain in Scott's "The Lady of the Lake." And Douglass took it for own, for his own, gave, gave, rejected his slave name, which was Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, for Frederick Douglass.

The following is an excerpt of an interview for the documentary "Literature & Life: The Givens Collection." This excerpt features Dr. John Wright (University of Minnesota) discussing the roots of the Harlem Renaissance.

Well, there were a number of things that took place after the turn of the century. It’s hard to recognize it now, but at the turn of the century over 90% of the Black population in this country lived in the former states of the Confederacy. Over 90%. And there were few large, Northern urban centers of African-American life, outside the, the old cities of the Eastern coast, Washington and Philadelphia, which had been the old culture capitals of this country.

But the country at large was changing dramatically, from a largely rural, agricultural society into an industrial and increasingly urban society. And New York City was increasingly becoming the culture center for the nation at large. And the book trade, and the rise of Tin Pan Alley, and the publishing industry and so forth, was a tremendous draw for young Americans of all sorts, including young people like then-young St. Paulite F. Scott Fitzgerald, who felt the need to go East to New York City.

Well, similar things were happening for African Americans. Only we were being pushed out of the South, by a combination of forces. A wave of economic catastrophes, of depressions and recessions, of crop failures and so forth. And by the, the rise of Jim Crow and of terrorist organizations like the Knights of the White Camelia, and the citizens' councils, and the Ku Klux Klan and so forth.

And the move north, what would become, called the Great Migration, just changed the social landscape of, of African-American life and of American cities. And large, urban Black communities began developing in northern cities where there had been only small enclaves before. And New York, New York's Harlem would become the biggest and best-known of these, would be literally transformed in the course of 15 years, from an originally Jewish community--although it of course goes back to Dutch origins in old New York--but to an increasingly African-American community. And a source of tremendous pride. Would become a "Negro Mecca," it would be called during the era, and a culture capital of sorts.

And it would become a tremendous magnet for young Black writers, writers from the Midwest, like Langston Hughes, for instance; writers from the South and the West would be drawn to New York to seek their fortunes and to, to try to, express themselves, whatever artistic medium was their chosen form.

Poets helped defined the beginnings of the Harlem Renaissance in a significant way. One dating point, oft-times, for the beginning of the movement was the publication of, of, of Jamaican émigré poet Claude McKay's famous sonnet, "If We Must Die," in 1917, which was a, a powerful protest against Lynching. That was, of course, a major concern of African-American communities in this country.

African-American newspapers, journalists, were absolutely critical as helping lay the ground and provide venues for Black writers, at a time when most of the major White publishing houses and literary magazines did not publish African-American authors. DuBois had become the editor of The Crisis, which was the organ of the NAACP, then a young and radical race-uplift journal.

And the organ of, of the Urban League, which is called Opportunity Magazine, again, began also in the teens. Both o, these organizations, again, had grown in part out of the, out o. the great migration, and the needs, increasingly, of Northern urban Black populations to grapple with the, the legal and the social and the economic realities of life in Northern urban cities. These, these, journalistic vehicles became mediums in which young Black poets and storywriters like Hughes and McKay and, and Zora Neale Hurston and many others began, began working.

There were also, there was also the influence of the, of the Black educational world. Of Southern Black colleges and universities, which, of course, had grown out of the, out of the, the Reconstruction, the post-Reconstruction era. And certainly in places like, like Howard University, which was the largest of these, in Washington D.C.--and which had the, the biggest aggregation of African-American intellectuals and thinkers in the country-- they, also were, were springboards for Black literary talents.

Howard University, where Sterling Brown would, would go up and later teach. And L. A. Locke, and so forth. Literary magazines like Stylus began. Stylus was a journal that L. A. Locke, again, philosopher-esthetician had begun, where Zora Neale Hurston, began writing, early in her career. All these things helped, open up the terrain for young Black writers, again, in the years, following the First World War.

That’s a fascinating question, for several reasons. For one, because by the, the post-World War I years, leaders like James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B. DuBois were then men well into their middle years. Both Johnson and DuBois were born in the 1860s, and they were shaped largely by the 19th century and by Victorian culture and Victorian literary ideals and models.

And yet they became, in some ways, a shepherd for a movement that was devoted to the young. To the youthful. To writers like Langston Hughes and McKay and Jean Tomer and Hurston and George Douglas Johnson and Gwendolyn Bennett and so many others, who, saw themselves much more as in the "modern" mode. And allied in some ways with, with avant-garde, writers and writing and outlooks. And with somewhat different views.

There was an "old guard" and the "new guard" tensions, differences, a generational difference in some ways, that played itself out in the, in the Harlem Renaissance. And in many of the journals, and in a good deal of the writing.

The following is an excerpt of an interview for the documentary "Literature & Life: The Givens Collection." This excerpt features Dr. John Wright (University of Minnesota) discussing Paul Robeson.

In the Givens Collection here at the University of Minnesota, we have works by Paul Robeson himself, Here I Stand, for instance, as well as collections of essays about Robeson, and of course, his granddaughter Susan Robeson's, The Whole World in His Hand, which is a marvelous collection of photos tracing Robeson's entire career. We also have some ephemera relating to Paul Robeson, some playbills of Robeson performances, certainly the famous performances as, Brutus Jones in, O'Neale's Emperor Jones. And of course, Robeson's record-breaking performance as Othello, on the Broadway stage and the London stage.

We also have, in that connection, the 33 1/3 LP recordings of Robeson as Othello, with Jose Ferrer as Iago, and Uta Hagen as Desdemona. To, again, to help flesh out and give Robeson's, living voice, its place in the Givens archives also.

I think there is--Robeson's impact, of course, on African-American life, was profound, as an artist and as a writer and thinker. And now that in recent years we have been able to recover, through some extended scholarly studies of Robeson's life and the growing body of work about him, much of what had been lost about his career, I think, you know, his import looms even larger.

Well, Here I Stand, of course, you know, helps document what's still a not well-understood facet of African-American political and intellectual life. That is, the place of, of, of radical social-political thought and action, and the place of socialism and communism in African-American life. In part, because Robeson, along with Angelo Herndon and Richard Wright and W.E.B. DuBois and a list of many others as well, who, again, we have, represented in the collection--Harry Heywood and others also-- it's a fascinating period of African-American life.

And the, the, the 20s and 30s were a period during which the romance of the Russian Revolution and of the, the possibilities for inter-racial brotherhood devoted to radical transformation and, and the achievement of, of, of social justice, was, was richly manifest in African-American life. And that would remain so, at least until the Stalinist era, until the horrors of the Stalinist era began to disenchant, understandably, American political radicals generally, African Americans among them.

But, at least some of the underlying principles of the, of the, of the romance of the left and of communism persisted for African-Americans, even after the disenchantments of Stalinism had passed. And certainly in Paul Robeson's career, and in DuBois' and Richard Wright's, the commitment to, to, to radical political change, to revolutionary change, the idea of revolution, remained for many of these figures.

And of course, became, for them, again, a source of political persecution, particularly, of course, during the McCarthy era, an era in which, again, for instance, both W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson were pilloried by the McCarthy, by the McCarthy committees, and, in which Black literary figures like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, were, publicly, humiliated.

The following is an excerpt of an interview for the documentary "Literature & Life: The Givens Collection." This excerpt features Dr. John Wright (University of Minnesota) discussing Black Arts Movement.

The Black Arts Movement was the second major cultural movement among African-Americans in this century. It's a movement that was initially defined by its promoters, first and foremost by LeRoy Jones, who would become Amiri Baraka and Larry Neale, who together edited an anthology called Black Fire in the mid 60s, a movement they saw as the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power Movement.

It’s a movement that grew out of the turmoil taking place across this country, in the wake of the failures of the civil rights movement, which were becoming increasingly apparent, as the civil rights movement moved, in the late 50s and early 60s, from trying to desegregate Southern lunch counters and accommodations and so forth, into the North, the American North. And found barriers of a wholly different and in some ways more intractable sort.

And the spirit of Black Power, which also linked African Americans to a worldwide rebellion against imperialism and colonial domination throughout the Black world. All these things helped set the stage for the Black Arts. Which was in some ways a movement that we can compare very directly to the Harlem Renaissance, but differentiate in important ways also.

Some of the connectives have to do with the sense of tradition that the Harlem Renaissance provided the Black Arts era authors. And for people like LeRoy Jones, the living presence of someone like Sterling Brown was a direct kind of connection. The living presence of Langston Hughes, again, who survived as "the dean of African-American poets," as he was often called, into the 1960s, to find his own career and writings in some ways revitalized by the generation of young poets coming of age in the 60s.

I mean, Hughes' last volumes of poems included ''The Panther" and "The Lash," which were allusions, again, to the Black Panthers and the White backlash. Hughes' late-50s experiment with jazz, Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz! Which took up the dirty dozens, a more volatile form of folk vernacular as a means for political comment. Also looked ahead to the use the Black Arts writers would make of the dirty dozens, and its rhetoric of confrontation as models for poetic and dramatic experiments. These were some of the ties with the, with the older period. And the Black Arts movement, like the Harlem Renaissance could a movement across the arts. And the performing arts, theatre, music, drama, would be at the center of this, his new explosion of, of creativity.

The following is an excerpt of an interview for the documentary "Literature & Life: The Givens Collection." This excerpt features Dr. John Wright (University of Minnesota) discussing the work of Gordon Parks.

We actually have a, a shooting script of The Learning Tree in the Givens collection, which makes for some fascinating comparisons with the, with the final version of the film that was released, because there are some significant changes. But The Learning Tree is also a text that invites us to look at the ways in which Gordon Parks has used the elements of his own autobiography, and reshaped them fictionally. Because there are some profound differences, between that part of Gordon Parks' life that The Learning Tree deals with, that is, his, his adolescence and early manhood, and the treatment of that same period in A Choice of Weapons, which is "straight" autobiography.

And there are some, some fundamental, re-orchestrations of his life experiences, that's taken place in The Learning Tree, that, hasn't received much attention, but I think certainly invites a closer look. Some of it has to do precisely with Gordon's experiences as a young man in, Minneapolis and St. Paul. and which in some ways have been re-shaped, for the, the telling of the tale of the protagonist of The Learning Tree, who is like Gordon Parks in many ways but different from him in some significant ways also.

In what ways?

Well, he's a, in some ways, a much more sheltered adolescent than Gordon Parks himself was. The protagonist of The Learning Tree, while he has momentary immersions in the world of, of the roadhouses and brothels of, of Kansas, again is quite a different character from Gordon Parks himself, who had a much more worldly and forcible and lengthy immersion in that part of Black community life here in the Twin Cities than The Learning Tree reflects.

Well, The Learning Tree is, is basically a story about the transition from innocence to experience. And it also ends, again, in early manhood, with the young boy, again, from a rural, in some ways ideally agrarian kind of environment, just poised to, to go into the world of the, of the modern city, the complex world of the modern city. Gordon Parks' later works are not about, the world of the innocent. It's the world of a man of the world. Of a citizen of the world, of a cosmopolite, of a very sophisticated artist and activist and thinker. And, I think, we get a dramatically different kind of experience in Gordon Parks' later, autobiographies, and in, in, Voices in the Mirror and To Smile in Autumn, than we experience in The Learning Tree, or even from A Choice of Weapons, which was the first of the autobiographical series.