Day 104, Friday, June 28, 2024: Armada, Michigan to Greenville, Ohio
- Mark Carl Rom
- Aug 18
- 10 min read
Carnegie libraries visited: Detroit Main, Divie B. Duffield, Edwin F. Conley, Herbert Bowen; Hudson, Bryan, and Greenville, Michigan
Days sober: 374
It is morning in Detroit; it doesn’t feel like President Reagan’s Morning in America. I listened to about ten minutes of the presidential debate before turning it off to preserve my mental health. Biden’s performance was cataclysmically catastrophic. It’s hard to imagine how any but die-hard Democrats would vote to keep him in the Oval Office another four years. As worried as I am about Biden, Trump would be far, far, worse. I could live with his policies, as wrong-headed as they are. Policies can be reversed by a subsequent administration, even if all the damage they cause can be hard to undo.
What scares me most about Trump is passion for corrupting our constitutional republic. A couple of matters trouble me most. He constantly degrades the institutions essential for self governance: the criminal justice system, electoral processes, the press, and, yes, even institutions of higher education.
The last is more personal, so let me share my views. As a political science professor, one of my highest priorities was to be politically neutral, and I worked hard on this. I often polled my students at the end of the semester as to whether I was a Republican or Democrat. Informed students, even if they had not attended my class, should answer “Democrat” by default, as higher education has far more professors who are Democratic than Republican. My students were reasonably split on this question, with many stating that they were uncertain. It was easy for me to compare and contrast, say, Reagan and Carter or Obama and Bush. (Pro note: see how I even alternated which party’s President I listed first?). All Presidents seek to expand their power. Both parties seek to gain electoral advantage. Each party acts in its own self interest as well as for what they believe to be the greater good. And so forth. I can understand and respect why some professors never tried to hide their partisan biases, under the principle that it is a professor’s obligation to be open with their students about their beliefs. I rejected this principle, in large part because I was concerned that students would either mimic my views to curry favor or, if they opposed them, doubt my ability to grade them fairly.
Trump’s democratically destructive behavior made it increasingly difficult to maintain this posture of neutrality. So finally I came out, in just about the softest way possible. Making what should be considered a non-partisan statement, I proffered that I would be willing to vote for a candidate only if they agreed to respect the outcome of the election. That’s a low bar. America has a long tradition of candidates fighting hard, and often dirty, to win the election. Once the votes are counted, however, the candidate with the most votes claims victory and the ones with fewer votes concede, even if grudgingly, defeat. (I’m thinking about you, Al Gore and Hilary Clinton.) A candidate who does not comply with this most basic of obligations is unworthy of office. By this standard alone, Trump is unfit.
When a professor takes an almost milquetoast stand like this, Trump responds: See, the radical leftist marxist professors are against me. Universities are corrupt. Courses are rigged. By making it nearly impossible to remain neutral – even though my “respect the outcome of elections” criterion is prima facie non-partisan – Trump pushes faculty to make statements that seem to favor one party over the other, even if such statements were not partisan before he came along. Moreover: Trump commits crimes, courts hold him to account, and Trump says “see, the courts are radical, corrupt, rigged.” Trump says or does something that any previous presidential candidate would have been ashamed of, journalists report this, and Trump repeats “fake news, radical, corrupt, rigged.”
Restless, I packed up early. I slept about fifty miles north of Detroit and was still able to finish taking pictures of the four Carnegie libraries in the city by seven in the morning. The parts of Detroit I passed through did not lift my spirits. On all sides, it was as if the neighborhoods had no memories of their prosperous times. [Note: as I revise this section in August 2025, the New York Times has just run the article “Downtown Detroit is Back”]
Carnegie invested heavily in Detroit’s libraries: $750,000 was given in 1901 (worth about $29 million in 2025) to construct a central library and eight branches. At the time, Detroit’s population was already approaching half a million, and the application grant application process was well-formalized. Only four of these libraries – Main, Herbert Bowen (who served on the city’s library commission at the time the grant was given), Edwin Conely (also a library commissioner), and Divie B. Duffield (likewise)– survive. Three were demolished and two have been converted to other public uses.
Two of Detroit’s librarians – Marjorie Adele Blackistone Bradfield and Clara Stanton Jones – have come to my attention, because others have previously highlighted their contributions. As I’m initially relying on secondary sources (Wikipedia), my knowledge is based only on the stories that the contributors thought worth telling there. Had they not shared this information with the public (and me), I would not be able to share it with you. History, passed from person to person.
Before I present Marjorie Bradfield and Clara Jones, allow me to talk about the sources that brought them to my attention. “Sheriff221” wrote the initial Wikipedia post for Jones and, it appears, that is the only post this person ever made (under that pseudonym, anyway), so I can’t help but wonder who this person is, why were they inspired to create a page for Jones, and why for Jones and no one else? The person who wrote the first entry about Bradfield goes by the nom de plume “skvader” (a fictional Swedish character with a head of a rabbit and a tail of a grouse). She (self-identified) is a librarian at Northwestern University with a Master of Library and Information Science degree, with interests in “library history, roadside attractions, and the inclusion of more women in Wikipedia” as well as writing Wiki profiles of deaf individuals even though she herself is not deaf. I contacted her through Wikipedia’s “Talk Page” and (un)surprisingly she wrote back the next day. Surprising: I’m cold calling a person and asking for a favor. Unsurprising: the kind of person I’m likely to cold call is the kind of person who is likely to respond. She gave me her real name – Violet Fox – which sounds like it could be another pseudonym, although it’s the name she uses on her resume, Linkedin, and her personal website, so it looks legit. One page on her website contains a long list of librarians she has written about. This will prove invaluable to my own research. Thanks, Violet.
In her posting on Bradfield, Fox cites the “Marjorie A. Blackistone [Bradfield] and Horace Ferguson Bradfield papers, 1931-1978,” held by the University of Michigan Bentley Historical Library. That source informs us that these papers contain Marjorie’s (unpublished) autobiography, which includes her reflections on “her first library jobs…the events that led her to the Detroit Public Library…[her] professional accomplishments, as well as challenges she faced as an African American woman in the library field.” I wrote to the Bentley Library to inquire about accessing this autobiography and, within hours, Diane Bachman, Assistant Director for Reference Services, and Carol Chee, Reference Assistant, wrote to me letting me know that they would digitize it and send it to me. For Diane, this is all in a day’s work, as her Linkedin profile states that she “proposed and began implementation of Reference transition from paper photocopying to pdf digitization.” I’ll acknowledge a bit of awe: I’m some random guy, not a patron of that library, making a time consuming request that they immediately offer to fulfill. Amazing.
Until I receive Marjorie’’s autobiography from Diane, I’ll have to content myself with the outline of her life that is already digitized. In 1938, Detroit hired Marjorie as its first African-American librarian. At the time, the city was still overwhelmingly white, with Blacks comprising less than ten percent of the population. Born in Washington, DC in 1911, Marjorie moved to Ann Arbor in 1934 to attend the University of Michigan, where she majored in French and joined the first historically Black sorority on campus, Delta Sigma Theta (ΔΣΘ).
Delta Sigma Theta was organized by twenty-two students at Howard University – some of them members of the original Black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha (ΑΚΑ) – in 1913 because they wanted to go in a different direction than AKA. The Alphas did not have a formal charter, for example, which meant that they did not have the legal authority to form (and so have authority over) other chapters; Deltas wanted one so they could (and they did). The ΔΣΘ also wanted a distinctively different visual image for their chapter, as some thought that the ΑΚΑ was too similar to the ΑΦΑ of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. One of the Delta’s main goals was to work to improve the political, economic, social, and educational conditions of those living within black communities. In 1937, the sorority began its National Library Project (its first nationwide effort) to bring books to the South, especially the rural south where Blacks had almost no access to libraries, through traveling libraries. Each Delta chapter was required to buy ten books for the library, and the Grand Chapter bought the baskets that would be used to drop the books off at the various deposit stations. Its first traveling library, based in Franklin County, North Carolina, had thirty-three books.
After graduating from the University of Michigan, Bradfield enrolled in the Columbia University School of Library Service where she earned a library science degree in 1936. After a two-year stint as a school librarian in Indiana, she married Horace Ferguson Bradfield, her college sweetheart who was by then a physician, and moved to Detroit where she was hired by the Detroit Public Library. Once there, she helped establish and then expand a collection of books by and about African Americans. Bradfield was especially passionate about the library’s E. Azalia Hackley Collection of Negro Music, Dance and Drama, which had been given in 1943 as a gift of Detroit Musicians’ Association, a local chapter of the National Association of Negro Musicians.
Marjorie returned to the University of Michigan to earn her Masters in Library Science (1940) while continuing to work for the Detroit library. She left library work in 1950 to raise a family, returning in 1964 to serve most of the remainder of her career as the Head Librarian for Detroit public schools. She was active in the NAACP, the Urban League, and the ALA. She retired in 1980. In Bradfield’s 1999 obituary in Detroit’s Free Press, her son David (a Michigan state judge) remembered that Marjorie’s early years in the Detroit library “were filled with subtle and not-so-subtle discriminatory practice. But she had an iron will.” I eagerly await her autobiography.
Bradfield is notable for one other act. Based at least in part on her recommendation, in 1970 the Detroit Public Library hired Clara Stanton Jones, a graduate school contemporary of Bradfield, who had been employed by the library since 1944, as its head librarian.
Clara Jones was not only the first woman, and the first African American, to be hired to lead the Detroit library system; she was the first such person to lead the library system of any major American city. Those were not her last first: in 1976 she was the first Black woman to be elected as President of the ALA.
Jones was not promoted Detroit’s head librarian without controversy, nor was her eight years in that position problem-free. When she was appointed, two members of the library board resigned and a chief administrator quit in protest. The Friends of the Library, which had offered to supplement the head librarian’s salary, reneged on it. As Maurice Wheeler wrote in Library Journal,
The detractors who imagined that a barrage of racial epithets and insults, backroom conspiracies, and carefully orchestrated counter-measures could derail her, found themselves outmatched. They misjudged her and they misjudged the times. They were outmatched in wit, in intellect, and in class.
She was on friendly terms with the auto unions and in Motor City that was quite useful; her appointment was also supported by local progressives. [For more on her tenure, see “Clara Stanton Jones: Stirring the Waters in the Detroit Public Library,” Renate Chancellor, Libraries: Culture, History, and Society (2022) 6 (1): 81–101. https://doi.org/10.5325/libraries.6.1.0081 Permission sought. Also: "Clara Stanton Jones interviewed by Marva DeLoach," in Women of Color in Librarianship, pp.29- 57. ed. by Kathleen McCook, Chicago: American Library Association Editions, 1998. ILL Request 8/15/2025]
I’ll need to come back to Jones. Right now, I feel the need to move on.
If Certs were a library (the once-popular breath mint, which contained no actual mint, was discontinued in 2018, not least because it contained trans-fat laden oil) the Carnegie library in Brian would be two, two, two libraries in one. From one side, the original Carnegie face still shines. From another, a courtyard sits below a green and white glass box. The interior is entirely modern; I’m sitting in the original part of the building, which retains the original hearth and (electrically updated) light fixtures, and otherwise is filled with a piano, scattered leatherish reading chairs in green, orange, and blue, a few tables for working, one woman reading and me. It’s quiet, with the only shushing sound coming from the air conditioning. [Two women’s organizations helped create this library. The Taine Club and the Mutual Improvement Club, and I’ll also come back to write about them.]
I avoid the interstates whenever I can so that I can see more of the country and also drive through the towns that the interstates have bypassed. Whenever I pass through a town, and check to see whether they have a library and, if they do, I stop by. Many are forgettable – at this point, I have taken pictures of over 700 libraries, so my standards for memorability are pretty high – and others are delightful.
As I passed through Van Wert, Ohio, I discovered the delightful Brumback library. Completed in 1901 as the first library in the US serving an entire county, it’s a cathedral with a round corbeled tower with battlements, or so I have heard. It was financed through the generous contributions of John Brumback, one of the town’s leading businessmen. The generosity was not his alone. In 1890 the local ladies had formed the Van Wert Library Association. They sold library subscriptions for $3 and raised money through public events. By 1890 they had bought 600 books, hired a librarian, and rented a room that was open to subscribers. In 1896 the city council approved a small tax to support the library. The funds raised were enough to support the small library, not expand it. Brumback’s bequest in 1897, which included a provision that the library serve the entire county, made construction of this secular cathedral possible.
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