Librarians issued a clarion call for substantially more Black males in their field this past weekend at the American Library Association’s annual conference in Anaheim, Calif.
Black men make up a dismal 0.5 percent, or 572 of the 110,000 of the nation’s librarians. And about 1 in 10 Black librarians are men, according to figures in an ALA diversity report issued last year, which were discussed in the ALA conference panel “An Endangered Species: The Black Male Librarians.”
“The need for Black male librarians is crucial given the lack of diversity of our library organizations,” says panelist Dr. Alma Dawson, the Russell Long Professor in Library and Information Science at Louisiana State University. “There is a great need for Black males as reflected in crime statistics, low levels of literacy, and other areas. Black male librarians can make a difference.”
The stereotype pervading American society that a librarian is an old White woman with glasses steers Black males away from the profession, says Damon Austin, agricultural sciences librarian at the University of Maryland and one of the experienced Black library professionals who participated in the panel.
“The profession is seen to be a White female dominated profession,” adds Julius Jefferson, a researcher at the Library of Congress who organized and chaired the panel. “And the profession is not necessarily a lucrative one. It is a profession that is not seen as very sexy in terms of high-profile professions like being a lawyer.”
Another reason is Black males may not know that librarianships even exists as a career option for them, Dawson says.
Austin didn’t begin to see it as a career option until he was an undergraduate at the University of Florida, taking semesters off because he had to put himself through school.
“Those semesters that I was not officially enrolled I went to the library every day like it was my job,” says the researcher in Maryland’s College of Agricultural and Natural Resources. “I just educated myself on things that I found interesting and I learned the entire theory and structure of how libraries are constructed. That was really the start of it.”
