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“If I’m Fighting for Myself, It Is So That Whoever Stands on My Shoulders Can Go Further Than I”: Charlemae Rollins, Augusta Baker, Effie Lee Morris, and the Community Care Information Practices of Black Women Children’s Librarians in the Mid-Twentieth-Century United States
Journal article   Peer reviewed

“If I’m Fighting for Myself, It Is So That Whoever Stands on My Shoulders Can Go Further Than I”: Charlemae Rollins, Augusta Baker, Effie Lee Morris, and the Community Care Information Practices of Black Women Children’s Librarians in the Mid-Twentieth-Century United States

Alex H Poole
The Library quarterly (Chicago), v 96(3), pp 295-323
01 Jul 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/741172
Featured in Collection :   Drexel's Newest Publications

Abstract

20th century Bibliographic literature Black people Black women Books Business and professional women Children Civil rights Community Community health care Empathy Employed Women Frame analysis Freedom Freedoms Grass roots movement Information Information Seeking Information seeking behavior Intellectual freedom Librarians Library Personnel Middle class Mothers Professional Autonomy Professional women Selfknowledge Shoulders Women Working women
Relating the story of Black women children’s librarians Charlemae Rollins (1897–1979), Augusta Baker (1911–1998), and Effie Lee Morris (1921–2009), this article brings together and extends the scholarship on information practices (IPs), care, and the long Black Freedom Struggle. We argue that their information seeking, avoiding, using, creating, and sharing constituted foundational tools of community-engaged civil rights work. Further, we contend that Rollins’s, Baker’s, and Morris’s IPs represented acts of community care. More broadly, by fighting for and disseminating diverse, equitable, and inclusive books, these middle-class professional women acted as underrecognized grassroots leaders of the long Freedom Struggle. Based on these scholarly interventions, we set forth a new conceptual framework: community care information practices (CCIPs). Rollins, Baker, and Morris employed CCIPs in liberatory intellectual Freedom Struggle activities, namely creating bibliographies, developing and curating collections, writing books and periodical articles, and composing and sharing stories. Each of these endeavors promoted Black pride and self-knowledge, interpersonal respect, and interracial empathy.

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