Regina Anderson Andrews, Harlem Renaissance Librarian

Ethelene Whitmire

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780252081309
  9780252038501
• eBook ISBN:
  9780252096419
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The first African American to head a branch of the New York Public Library (NYPL), Regina Andrews led an extraordinary life. Allied with W. E. B. Du Bois, Andrews fought for promotion and equal pay against entrenched sexism and racism and battled institutional restrictions confining African American librarians to only a few neighborhoods within New York City.

Andrews also played a key role in the Harlem Renaissance, supporting writers and intellectuals with dedicated workspace at her 135th Street Branch Library. After hours she cohosted a legendary salon that drew the likes of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Her work as an actress and playwright helped establish the Harlem Experimental Theater, where she wrote plays about lynching, passing, and the Underground Railroad.

Ethelene Whitmire's new biography offers the first full-length study of Andrews's activism and pioneering work with the NYPL. Whitmire's portrait of her sustained efforts to break down barriers reveals Andrews's legacy and places her within the NYPL's larger history.

1. Chicago

The Beginning

In 1923, when Regina, as a librarian, decided to remain in New York City, it seemed like the most obvious thing to do would be to seek employment at the largest library system in the city—the New York Public Library. Although Regina lived with family in Chicago and had a good job at the Chicago Public Library, she decided she wanted something different, or perhaps she was escaping from a tragedy back home. Regina was also finding “it difficult to fit into the comfortable and complacent middle-class society that was expected of Negro young ladies.”¹

Three or four days after she completed the application at the main branch, she received a request to return for an interview. One could imagine that Regina was probably very nervous as she entered the 42nd Street Branch library on Fifth Avenue, an imposing beaux arts building designed by architects John Merven Carrere and Thomas Hastings. The edifice had existed only for a little over a decade, opening May 24, 1911, when Regina arrived for her appointment. No doubt she was impeccably clad, as usual, and her waist-length hair was most likely pinned up since Regina “combed it very high on her head in a Spanish fashion.”² In fact, she possessed long hair for her entire life. Although the current style was bobbed hair, Regina’s father paid her to keep it long. She entered the building by passing through the two gigantic lion statues, nicknamed either Leo Astor and Leo Lenox or Lady Astor and Lord Lenox at that time. They are now known as Patience and Fortitude, after being renamed by then mayor Fiorello La Guardia during the Depression to reflect the characteristics that he suggested New Yorkers needed during this difficult time.

Regina had been described as “a beautiful, beautiful girl”³ and “a pert olive-skinned girl.”⁴ In fact, the next year, in December 1924, she graced the cover of the Messenger: World’s Greatest Negro Monthly. At the beginning of that year, the magazine declared that it would “show in pictures as well as writing, Negro women who are unique, accomplished, beautiful, intelligent, industrious, talented and successful.”⁵ Regina fit that description. On the cover she posed in a three-quarter profile and looked very elegant with her hair loosely styled in a nonlibrarianlike bun with curly bangs covering her forehead.

Instead of focusing on her previous library experience at Chicago’s Hyde Park High School, Wilberforce University, and the Chicago Public Library, the personnel administrator was most concerned about her race. He asked her, “What do you mean where you have here under race and religion you have American?”

Regina replied, “Well, I always considered myself an American. I don’t know what else I could be.”

He asked her, “What is your background?”

Like untold numbers of U.S. citizens, Regina came from a multicultural background requiring a roadmap to follow. Her father, William Grant Anderson, a prominent criminal defense attorney in Chicago, sprang from the union of a Swedish immigrant and his American Indian wife. Regina’s maternal grandfather, Reverend Henry Simons, was the son of an Arkansas Confederate General and an immigrant Jewish woman. Henry’s wife, Regina’s maternal grandmother Lucinda Reynolds, was the offspring of a Madagascar mother and an East Indian father.⁶ Regina considered herself an American. She explained her complicated history to her interlocutor.

He replied, “To us you’re not an American. You’re not white.”⁷

* * *

The day in Chicago was “cool and generally fair.”⁸ In the Hyde Park section, rain patted the roof of 4609 Vincennes Avenue, a two-story house rented by a lawyer and his artist wife. William and Margaret Anderson lived with their three-year-old son, Maurice Barton; one-year-old daughter, Mildred Viola (assuming she was still alive); Margaret’s younger sister, Kathryn Simons, a stenographer; her older brother, Eugene Simons, a porter for the railroad; and a servant, Mary Watson. Under the category of “race,” the entire household was designated as black. The majority of the neighbors were white immigrants from England and Germany, although the Andersons were not the only black residents. The neighborhood had two physicians, a shoe store clerk, a musician, clerks, a stenographer, a clothing salesman, a mercantile office worker, and servants. From the time of her birth into the Anderson household on Tuesday, May 21, 1901, Regina Mathilde Anderson would come to view herself in nonracialized terms.

Regina described her maternal grandfather as “[t]all with a splendid physique, with long white hair and beautiful blue eyes.” Margaret’s father, Henry Simons, was listed as mulatto on the 1870 Census, black on the 1910 Census, and white on the 1920 Census. Her mother, Lucinda, was also described as mulatto. Their daughter Margaret Helen Simons arrived in 1876, the sixth of seven children. Margaret would be listed as a mulatto on Regina’s revised birth certificate. Racial designations for both sides of Regina’s family would continue to be confusing and represent the difficulty that the U.S. Census recorders had in designating race.

Regina once described her mother as a, “well known china painter—World’s Fair.”⁹ As a teenager Margaret exhibited her work at the Columbian Exhibition in 1893.¹⁰ Regina later recalled that her mother was “a beautiful artist.”¹¹ In a 1980 letter, Alfreda Duster, Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s daughter, informed Regina that, “I have the beautiful china set your mother painted by hand for my mother’s wedding. As I heard it—she painted the sugar bowl, creamer, teapot and a few place settings commissioned by the Ida B. Wells Woman’s Club, and each year another place setting until the set had at least 6 place settings. There may have been more than that, because when I was in California a few years ago, my Aunt Lil had one of the dinner plates.”¹² Pictures of Margaret as an adult show her as a stout, full-figured, big-boned woman who possessed her father’s full cheeks, in contrast to her sister Kathreen, two years her junior, who was sharp-featured. Variously called Katherine, Kathreen, Kathryn, or Kate, she would often live with and figure prominently in the life of her niece Regina. Margaret would raise two children into adulthood and would suffer the tragic loss of two daughters.

* * *

Regina’s father William Grant Anderson was only a few days old when an enumerator for the 1870 Census visited his household. He was born on April 27, 1870, in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was designated a mulatto on the 1870 Census with the rest of his family and later listed as Brown on Regina’s revised birth certificate. William’s father, Alexander, owned a barbershop, and his wife Sarah’s occupation was listed as “keeping house.” Family lore hinted that Regina’s grandfather was a Swedish immigrant—but evidence suggested that he was born in Louisiana. Perhaps an earlier relative was born in Sweden, which accounts for a derivation of their last name. William was Alexander and Sarah’s seventh child.

In 1880 several family members were living in St. Louis, Missouri. Sarah was now a widow and thirty-seven years old—somehow seemed even younger than she was a decade earlier. Lacking literacy skills and as the new head of the household, Sarah supported the four children who still lived with her by “renting furnished rooms.”¹³ William, listed as “Willy,” was ten and had three sisters, ages thirteen, nine, and four. Eventually, Sarah, William, and a few siblings made their way to Chicago, either in 1880 or 1882. Regina described her grandmother:

I have a faint memory of the Indian Grandmother who had left New Orleans with her small son and two baby daughters to seek a new home, first in Missouri and then in Illinois. I can remember my great awe and curiosity over this Grandmother’s long silences as she spent her last years in a hard backed chair, by the fire. Seldom speaking or sharing in the new life of her grown son and his family, she lived to see them securely settled in the Hyde Park area of Chicago. She too, was there, but some part of her had long ago returned to the land of her Fathers.

William, as the oldest child and the only son in the house, probably felt responsible for helping his mother to support the family.¹⁴ He was very young to be doing the types of jobs that he did. Regina recalled visiting her father in Chicago around 1942 to watch him “win a terrific case.” After court, Regina’s father showed her his name inscribed, “on an old stone hitching post dedicated to the newspaper boys who delivered their papers despite the famous blizzard.”¹⁵ He also worked as an office boy before leaving to attend school. William “was regarded as an exceptionally bright scholar and was the recognized leader of his class.”¹⁶ Eventually, he was able to study shorthand at the West Chicago Evening School and mastered this skill in three months. He sought a job at a law office as a stenographer and clerk when he was just fifteen years old. At twenty-one he was appointed as the official stenographer for the Probate Clerk’s Office, “one of the highest political honors which has ever been bestowed upon the Colored race in the State of Illinois, and coming from the Democrats, the event is all the more important.”¹⁷ William was awarded this position by undertaking “a competitive exam … resulting in his favor.”¹⁸ His future offspring, Regina, would also gain a position by taking an examination and did not have to deal with the vagaries of racism to obtain a job in Chicago.

William made his first political speech during the 1888 26th Presidential election when Republican Benjamin Harrison was elected over Democrat Grover Cleveland. William was called “a champion of the Colored man’s rights, and argued upon the broad theory that a division of votes of Afro-Americans between the Republican and Democratic parties would result in an effort being made to secure them by both parties.” The reporter suggested “his past career to other young men for emulation.”¹⁹ A stenographer by day, William worked toward his law degree at night. He was admitted to the bar in 1896—the year he married.

There was no doubt that William was quite a catch. A sketch of William shows a handsome young man sporting a mustache probably worn to make him look more mature. He appeared to be light-skinned with receding semicurly hair. He was a self-made man rising from a working-class family. He might not have been attractive to African American women who came from a long line of middle-class or upper-class college-educated people because he lacked a strong pedigree as the son of a barber and an illiterate mother. Nevertheless, his salary was impressive and his ambition was to be admired. Margaret was also considered quite a catch according to their wedding announcement, which called her “accomplished” and “a most popular and worthy young woman, well known throughout the state.”²⁰

Regina’s parents wed on Friday, June 12, 1896; William was twenty-six years old, and Margaret was twenty. The wedding and reception lasted nearly the entire day and spanned two states. Six hundred invitations went out for the wedding and the reception, and they were married in Margaret’s father’s church in Marion, Indiana, at 10 o’clock in the morning; her father, Reverend Henry Simons, officiated. The wedding was predicted to be “the event of the season.” Attorney Fred W. Burrows served as William’s best man. The article did not mention who served as Margaret’s maid or matron of honor—most likely one of her sisters. After the wedding, the couple, family, and members of the wedding party hopped on the 12 o’clock train for the one hundred and fifty-mile ride to Chicago scheduled to arrive at five P.M. The wedding reception lasted from seven to ten that same evening and was held in William’s home on 3449 Dearborn Street. The next day the “happy couple” was off on a nearly two-week honeymoon visiting various midwestern towns, including “Waukesha, St. Paul, Minneapolis and Lake Minnetonka.” They would return to Chicago around June 23rd and presumably lived in William’s home for a few years before moving to 4609 Vincennes Avenue, where they resided when Regina was born in 1901.

The family lived in that house from 1900 to 1902 before buying an 1889 single-family home nearby at 530 East Forty-Fifth Street.²¹ The new neighborhood consisted of mainly white residents. The Andersons were the only people of color on their block, and they were now listed as mulattoes. Their neighbors’ occupations consisted of grocer proprietor, another lawyer, clerks, sales lady, servants, salesman, engineer, and a physician. By 1910, the household consisted of both parents, twelve-year-old Maurice, nine-year-old Regina, a new sister, Mercedes Alice, who was five, and Aunt Kathreen, who now worked as a teacher. Sister Mildred Viola appears to have died, since she is no longer listed on the Census. Although the household now had three children, there was no longer a servant to help Margaret, whose occupation was listed as “artist,” and William, who continued his work as an attorney.

Regina described her memories of growing up in Chicago: “I remember the deep winter snows soon grimy with coal dust and the far flung odors of the stock yards in sultry summers. The heat of the dry summer days was cooled by Lake Michigan.” She recalled nearby Jackson Park “with its rapidly deteriorating World’s Fair Building.” She continued, “There was Washington Park where my brother a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Chicago: The Beginning
• 2. Normal, Illinois; Chicago; Wilberforce; and Chicago Public Library
• 3. Harlem Renaissance Women and 580 St. Nicholas Avenue
• 4. Marriage
• 5. The Harlem Experimental Theatre
• 6. The New York Public Library
• 7. International Flights
• 8. Mahopac, New York: Endings
• Notes
• Index
• Illustrations