Hutson, Jean Blackwell
Hutson, Jean Blackwell
September 7, 1914
February 4, 1998
Curator and later chief of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library for thirty-two years, Hutson was responsible from 1948 to 1980 for developing the world's largest collection of materials by and about people of African descent. She also publicized the poor physical condition of the building in which Schomburg's rare materials were stored. The result was a new climate-controlled building, quadruple the size of the old, which opened in September 1980.
Jean Blackwell was born in Summerfield, Florida, to Paul and Sarah Blackwell. Her father was a farmer and produce merchant and her mother a teacher. From the age of four she lived in Baltimore, where she graduated from Douglass High School as valedictorian in 1931. After three years at the University of Michigan, she transferred to Barnard College, graduating in 1935. She received a master's degree in library service from Columbia University the following year, and in 1941 a teacher's certificate, also from Columbia. After twelve years of working at various branches of the New York Public Library, Blackwell came to the Schomburg Collection on a six-month assignment in 1948. She was married to Andy Razaf, the song lyricist, from 1939 to 1947, and to John Hutson, a library colleague, from 1952 until his death in 1957. She stayed until 1980, when she was named assistant director of collection management and development for black culture for the research libraries. She retired in February 1984.
Hutson lectured on black history at New York's City College from 1962 to 1971. Invited by Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's president, she was at the University of Ghana from 1964 to 1965 to help build their African collection. She held memberships in the American Library Association, the NAACP, the Urban League, and Delta Sigma Theta sorority. She was a founder and first president of the Harlem Cultural Council. Among many awards, Hutson received an honorary doctorate from King Memorial College in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1977, and was one of the seventy-five women portrayed in the photographic exhibition "I Dream a World" in 1989. She was honored by Barnard College in 1990 and by Columbia University's School of Library Service in 1992. The State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo offers a library residency program named for her. On January 28, 1995, at Hutson's eightieth birthday celebration, the Schomburg Center named the main reading room for her to recognize her contribution.
See also Archival Collections; Schomburg, Arthur
Bibliography
Jean Blackwell Hutson: An Appreciation. New York: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 1984.
Smith, Dinitia. "Jean Hutson, Schomburg Chief, Dies at 83." New York Times (February 7, 1998): B18.
betty kaplan gubert (1996)
Updated by author 2005