The African American (AAS) Reading room sits between the stacks on the B-Floor of Princeton University Library’s (PUL) Firestone branch. Though obviously named for the academic department on campus—which began as the African American Studies Program in 1969 and became a department in 2015—the history of the African American Studies Reading Room dates back to the Civil Rights Movement.

According to Steven Knowlton, Librarian for History and African American Studies, a wave of student protests demanding the creation of Black studies departments swept across the United States in the mid- to late-1960s. Though establishing academic departments was usually the major demand of protests and sit-ins, establishing or curating library services were also among the calls to action. 

“By 1966, increasing enrollment of African American students to Princeton University, accompanied by an increase in research on Black studies topics, led University Librarian William Dix to conclude that additional resources would be needed to improve the African American collection,” Knowlton wrote in the article “A Rapidly Escalating Demand: Academic Libraries and the Birth of Black Studies Programs.” 

Between 1966 and 1969, the Library fundraised $32,250 ($312,237 in 2024 prices) to provide funds to build the collection, which included “newspapers and clipping files in microfilm, bibliographies, and ephemeral material for vertical files.”

Dix also appointed Ann Slevin as part-time curator of the “American Negro Project.” At the time, materials were housed near the reference desk, where Slevin spent part of her work time.

The establishment of a physical space for African American Studies followed during in 1966, when a separate reading room was created on the third floor of Firestone Library. In this location, It housed 3,000 books, along with reference books, newspapers, periodicals, and library catalogs.

Moving to B-floor

The AAS Reading Room and its accompanying collections lived on Firestone’s third floor for more than 40 years. According to Literature Bibliographer John Logan, the room was moved to the Library’s B-floor in the summer of 2015, amidst PUL’s planned 10-year renovation of Firestone Library. 

The next year, when Knowlton began his tenure at PUL, he worked to make the room and its collections into a browseable and functional study space, as it was when it existed four floors up. 

“Initially, when the AAS room was moved to the B-floor, the books in the room were not specifically selected to be there,” Knowlton said. “Instead, after the tragic death of Claudia Tate, a beloved professor in the English and AAS departments, her personal collection was donated to Firestone. Books that Firestone didn't own were added to the main collection, while the duplicates were put in the AAS Reading Room.”

To revise the room, Knowlton would take inventory of all of the related reference works and bibliographies in PUL’s stacks to find items for consideration for the space. Several hundred books were added to the space. Materials in the AAS Reading Room include encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other reference works; touchstones of Black literature; collections of primary source documents; and current issues of scholarly journals in African American Studies.

“Now, as new titles that are appropriate get published, I buy two copies: one for the general stacks and one for the Reading Room,” Knowlton said.

Student Response

Whether on the third floor or B-floor, the AAS Reading Room has been a staple for student scholars.

Published in the “Program for African-American Studies Alumni/ae Concentrators’ Memoirs,” Bryan Taylor ’73 *84 wrote that the Library and AAS department were the origin of his love of research. 

“I loved studying in the library, looking for rare and old books, making notes, thinking about what was written, putting them into my own words,” Taylor wrote. “My hope for the program is that it continues to grow and have the same type of positive impact on many young people that studying the great offerings has had on me.”

Current students also find solace in the AAS Reading Room. Kyrah Potter, a senior in the AAS department, wrote the bulk of her junior paper and senior thesis in the room, the latter of which focuses on “the intensified victimization of Black American and Palestinian victims of state violence, and the compounded grieving process for their loved ones.”

“I primarily use the AAS reading room when I need to spend long periods working on independent research and writing,” Potter said. “The selection of books in the reading room has added a lot of value to it and I frequently find myself reaching for them while writing.”

Avery Danae Williams, a junior in the AAS department, similarly uses the space to concentrate on readings and papers in her major. Her junior paper discusses Black Disability Studies. 

Her paper “puts Tricia Hersey's book, ‘Rest is Resistance,’ in conversation with Black disability justice activism in the 20th and 21st centuries and a term used in the disability/chronic illness community called ‘crip time,’ the flexibility and extra time needed to complete tasks,” Williams said. 

Williams added, “Being surrounded by scholarship from different Black intellectuals, like Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou, reminds me that my contributions to conversations on disability studies (a predominantly White field of study) are valuable.”