Blockson began collecting in his teens, ultimately creating a pool of items that scholars and researchers from around the world have been exploring for decades. The collection of more than 30,000 items is made up of books, manuscripts, sheet music, letters, pamphlets, journals, newspapers, broadsides, posters, photographs, statues, busts, and rare ephemera. For instance, it contains first-edition works by Phillis Wheatley and W.E.B. Du Bois, African Bibles, correspondence between Haitian revolutionaries, Paul Robeson’s sheet music and thousands of taped interviews and radio programs.
Not only will the collection receive a new curator in the fall, but construction will also begin before the end of the year on a larger and more prominent space for the collection in Sullivan Hall — the building where it is currently stored. It is being housed in separate rooms totaling less than 2,000 square feet. But after construction is completed, the collection will be moved to a single, 3,000-square-foot room.
“The Blockson Collection’s new home will be the kind of large, welcoming, open and well-lit space that the collection and the scholars who use it deserve,” Hart says.
--Associated Press
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