Moorland-Spingarn Research Center

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The Moorland-Spingarn Research Center (MSRC) is recognized as one of the world's largest and most comprehensive repositories for the documentation of the history and culture of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and other parts of the world. As one of Howard University's major research facilities, the MSRC collects, preserves, and makes available for research a wide range of resources chronicling the Black experience.

The MSRC is named after Jesse E. Moorland, an alumnus and trustee of Howard, and Arthur B. Spingarn, learned bibliophile of writers who would be considered Negro in the United States.

In 1914, Moorland gifted his collection of some 3,000 books, pamphlets, and other historical items to the University

“

because it is the one place in America where the largest and best library on this subject [of the Negro and slavery] should be constructively established. It is also the place where our young people who have the scholarly instinct should have the privilege of a complete reference library on the subject.

”

Howard's board of trustees created The Moorland Foundation, a Library of Negro Life, and housed it as a special collection in the new library building recently donated by Andrew Carnegie.

In 1946, the Moorland Foundation purchased the private library of Spingarn and named it The Arthur B. Spingarn Collection of Negro Authors. The Spingarn Collection is maintained separately from the Moorland Foundation's other collections. The collection contains many rare editions, and expansive in its coverage of Afro-Cuban, Afro-Brazilian, and Haitian writers.

Among the most important foundations for the MSRC are the collections of Lewis Tappan, a noted abolitionist who organized the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and served as treasurer of the American Missionary Association; some 70 bound newspapers and several scrapbooks donated by John Wesley Cromwell.^[1] The center preserves the archives of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first intercollegiate Greek-letter fraternity founded for African Americans, and the papers of the fraternity's founder, Henry Callis.^[2]