Events invite people to Drop Everything and Read rare Black literature at Lexington park

Shauna Morgan grew teary-eyed as she perused the books and magazines on the tables set up at Coolavin Park Saturday.

Among them were 1960’s-era copies of The Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP, and vintage issues of Golden Legacy, comic books featuring famous figures in Black history.

“It’s just really moving to see this,” Morgan said. “I feel like I’m also lamenting a little bit of the loss of Black publishing. It’s really overwhelming to me.”

The materials are part of a collection of rare, vintage Black literature brought out to the park by The People’s Porch, a mobile library archive project started by Nubia Lateefa, a Lexington woman on a personal mission to preserve pieces of Black history memorabilia and share them with her community.

Saturday’s event at Coolavin Park was the first of three Drop Everything and Read events to be hosted by The People’s Porch this spring.

“I’ve been collecting things my entire life,” Lateefa said.

But Lateefa said she started collecting historic Black literature when she went to the library looking for some titles by African-American historians John Henrik Clarke and Yosef Ben-Jochannan.

“I thought the library would have it,” she said. Instead, “they looked at me like I had three heads.”

“I just believe that Black people should have accessible archives,” she said. “There was nowhere that I could really get accessible stuff. So I just started getting my own stuff.

“Most of us aren’t going to be able to go to Washington, D.C. I’m willing to use my gift to do that work.”

Lateefa said she remembered the fun of Drop Everything And Read times during her school days, and she wanted to bring that to the park as she shares the collection.

“You have to create the culture of literacy,” she said.

The People’s Porch will be at Coolavin Park again from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. May 18 and June 8. FoodChain is providing snacks, and the Keeneland Library, along with Morgan, have donated books to be given away.

“I still need people to visibly see me,” Lateefa said. “Nobody is going to know that I’m here unless I make myself known.”

Lateefa was joined Saturday by family members who came from Elizabethtown and Winchester to be a part of the day.

Cheryl Richardson said she was wowed by the display.

“She’s just getting started,” she said.

Lateefa, who has degrees in history, said the preservation she’s doing has a long tradition in Black communities, dating at least to the 1800s, with the work of William Henry Dorsey, a Philadelphia artist and collector who compiled hundreds of scrapbooks of Black history during his lifetime.

“Who else was going to archive Black stuff?” she said.

She said her grandmothers also took pains to preserve their history, and because of them, she said, “I know what my grandparents looked like in the 1800s.”

“I come from a legacy of people doing that work, but nobody was calling them archivists,” Lateefa said.

She said it’s important for people to “practice preservation.” For example, she keeps fliers from events, knowing that “we don’t think that the things we’re doing in real time is important,” but, she said, records of those events sometimes become important artifacts later on.

“It’s really not mine. It’s for you. That’s why I’m collecting it,” she said of the archive. “All of these are teachable tools.”

Morgan, who teaches Africana literature in the English Department and in the Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies at the University of Kentucky, said that historically, “there was just such a strong tradition of Black publishing. ...Paris to Kingston, Jamaica, to New York to Chicago to Atlanta.”

She picked up a copy of Ebony Junior magazine from the 1980s.

“Everybody knows Ebony magazine, but Ebony Junior. ... I would love to see something like an Ebony Junior again,” she said.

She picked up a children’s book, “Tar Beach,” which she said was out of print at one point. “This is such a special book,” she said.

Lateefa replied that she’d found it and another title she’d been looking for on the same day at the Peddler’s Mall.

Morgan said she was “excited to see a program like this.”

“I hope that it continues and grows,” she said. “There’s just a few of us out here, but it shouldn’t dissuade us.”