BCALA NEWS Volume 41, Issue 3
Summer 2014
59
J.A.: Are there any tributes to honor her today at the New York Public Library or at any other libraries?
E.W.: Sadly, no. The Washington Heights Branch just re-opened after a 4-year, $12 million dollar renovation. The NYPL did include a photograph of Andrews in a display after I contacted them, I’ve been told. A staff member at that branch would like to host a book party and the BCALA New York branch [N.Y. Black Librarians’ Caucus] offered to provide support.
J.A.: Talk a bit about Regina Andrews the activist. What were her causes and how did she fight for them?
E.W.: Andrews was active in two civic organizations: the National Urban League and the aforementioned National Council of Women of the United States (NCWUS). She represented both organizations as a United Nations observer. In the 1950s and 1960s she traveled to Germany, Italy, China, Japan, India, Thailand, Pakistan, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iran, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Liberia, Ghana, Senegal, the Ivory Coast, and Brazil talking to women about libraries. Through these travels she was also representing an image of African American middle-class womanhood.
J.A.: What were some of the topics she wrote about as a playwright?
E.W.: Andrews wrote three plays and two were produced by the Harlem Experimental Theatre. Two of her plays revolved around common tropes from the time period: lynching and passing. One play, Underground, was about the Underground Railroad and runaway slaves who successfully outsmarted the overseers sent to capture them. An unproduced play, The Man Who Passed, was about a man who decided to live life as a white man at great cost to his personal happiness. Her play, Climbing Jacob’s Ladder, was about a lynching. Andrews was influenced to write this play by her interactions with Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who was an acquaintance of Andrews’ father, defense attorney William G. Anderson. Wells-Barnett and Anderson unsuccessfully fought to prevent the execution of Anderson’s client by hanging. Andrews‘ plays have been published in recent anthologies and analyzed by scholars interested in African American female playwrights.
J.A.: Andrews lived into the 1990s. You deem Andrews the ‘‘Harlem Renaissance Librarian,” but what were some of her noteworthy activities and accomplishments in the latter half of the 1900s?
E.W.: For decades Andrews’ worked on a draft of a picture book about the history of African Americans in New York. She was never able to get a book contract in her lifetime but Howard Dodson and the Schomburg Center were able to get the book, The Black New Yorkers, published in 1999. Andrews retired in the mid-1960s but lived almost another thirty years. With her husband, attorney William Trent Andrews, Jr., she moved to her retirement home in Mahopac, NY and was active in the community there volunteering with exhibits at the local public library, in the church, and inviting international delegations to her home and even hosting singer Marian Anderson.
J.A.: What lessons can today’s library practitioners learn from the activities of Regina Anderson Andrews?
E.W.: In one of Andrews’ speeches she said, ‘‘we must be more than librarians.” I think she meant that the librarian’s work is not just restricted to the library building but she liked to reach out to the communities served by her branches. She brought the arts into the library by creating a theater company where plays were initially performed in the basement of the 135th Street Library. She later supported a theater company formed by Loften Mitchell at the 115th Street Library. She created the ‘‘Family Night at the Library” program where patrons were able to
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