Though the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library building remains closed to the public until further notice, the digital library remains open to all online … and now the building’s ground floor windows are a platform for sharing images from the collections, with a new display celebrating the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters installed on the exterior glass.
On the building’s east side, facing Hewitt Quadrangle, the new exhibition begins with text from the opening lines of Langston Hughes’s poem, “Let America Be America Again.” The poem by Langston Hughes was first published in Esquire in 1936 and, revised, in a collection of his poetry, A New Song, in 1938. The Langston Hughes Papers are the single most consulted archive in the Beinecke Library. Given by him beginning in 1941 and continuing throughout his life, they are part of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection.
