Colleagues:
I want to encourage and applaud the "Librarians We Have Lost" initiative Kathleen started, but I also want to add a word of caution.
For my History Ph.D dissertation I chose a biography of a secondary figure in the Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft presidencies for several reasons: adequate body of personal and governmental primary sources to ground it; nobody had written a bio of this person before, and it was likely later to turn into a book to advance my career. But as I went into the research my dissertation advisor said: "In your portrait make sure to paint the haloes and the warts."
I have followed that advice ever since. It guided me while researching the Dewey biography, which was the fourth published in the 20th century, but the only one that addressed his racism, sexual harassment, and anti-Semiticism, which was so obvious from an analysis of his papers at Columbia University I could not understand how previous biographers overlooked it.
I fully understand the desire to paint the "haloes" in any biography, but there is a cost to pay for overlooking or ignoring the "warts."
Case in point. When Marilyn Miller edited a series of biographical sketches of youth/school librarians in 2003, only two of its over fifty authors had the courage to address issues of race. Many of the subjects covered managed racially segregated systems and libraries, or taught in segregated universities.
One of those authors was Jim Carmichael, whose sketch of Lucile Nix said she might have become an ALA president but for her racism. Despite this fact (certainly a "wart" in any credible biography), she was awarded the prestigious Joseph W. Lippincott Award in 1968. I could not help but wonder how Black school and youth services library leaders like Augusta Baker and Virginia Lacy Jones, who had fought the racist library practices Nix supported for decades, felt when she received that award.
So back to my word of caution. If we only concentrate on the "haloes" in this series, are we laying the same kind of groundwork Marilyn Miller laid two decades ago by creating a skewed body of information that overlooks "warts" that mark significant obstacles still perplexing our profession?
My last book, "In Silence or Indifference: Racism and Jim Crow Segregated Public School Libraries," carefully documents a history of the "warts" that most of Marilyn's authors deliberately overlooked. My Dewey experience repeated, as is the lesson I learned in 1974.
I know this "word of caution" will not be welcome to many, but I urge you all to give it some thought as you craft your histories for future readers.
Wayne