Uptown by John Steptoe5/27/2023 Baker worked to collect titles with a positive depiction of Black children and families, writing and publishing bibliographies to help guide colleagues across the country to do the same. Her anti-racist work began just as she surveyed the material in her collection and its poor and shameful depiction of people of African descent, most notorious among them Helen Bannerman’s, Little Black Sambo. At the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Baker was put in charge of the children’s room at the 135th Street Branch (now Countee Cullen Regional Branch), where she cultivated the young minds of such luminaries as Audre Lorde and James Baldwin. This month we celebrate the life and work of pioneering librarian, Augusta Baker. Zami: A Biomythography (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1994), 22-23. Because that deed saved my life, if not sooner, then later, when sometimes the only thing I had to hold on to was knowing I could read, and that that could get me through.” Augusta Baker, the children’s librarian at the old 135th Street branch library… If that was the only good deed that lady ever did in her life, may she rest in peace.
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