A nearly 100-year-old Black history collection finds a new home at the Baldwin Hills Branch Library

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

The Baldwin Hills Branch of Los Angeles Public Library is now home to a nearly 100-year-old Black history collection containing thousands of historical records and items.

The Dorothy Vena Johnson Black History Collection is named after the poet, educator and co-founder of the League of Allied Arts and contains 2,300 items including newspaper clippings, magazines, photographs, biographies, autobiographies, nonfiction, scholarly texts, multi-volume sets and about 25 rare items found only at the Baldwin Hills Branch, according to Jené D. Brown, the director of the library’s emerging technologies and collections division. 

The library held a ceremony Saturday where they unveiled the collection, whose origins date back to 1927 when Miriam Matthews, the first Black librarian employed by the LA Public Library, began documenting and archiving California’s Black history to ensure its preservation, according to the library. 

“I’m glad it’s still being recognized and acknowledged,” Danielle Durkee, Matthews’ great niece said after attending the ceremony. “She always bought us books, she always had us involved in everything the library had to offer. So that’s what I was exposed to growing up.” 

Baldwin Hills is considered a part of LA’s Black cultural hub and the collection will be more visible and accessible at this location, library officials said during the ceremony. But it’s not just about changing locations, it’s about protecting the legacy of Black stories and placing the collection within a community that will honor it the most. 

“We have insisted that Black history is not a footnote but an essential and enduring part of the American story. This is why this collection matters,” said guest speaker Lura Daniels-Ball, president of the Our Author Study Club of Los Angeles. 

The Los Angeles Public Library displays a timeline at the Baldwin Hills Branch Library outlining how the Dorothy Vena Johnson Black History Collection began nearly 100 years ago.

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LaMonica Peters

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The LA Local

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The collection moving to Baldwin Hills was also an opportunity for the library system to recognize the people who were determined to preserve LA’s Black history for future generations. 

“(Matthews) recognized that our shelves did not represent the communities she was serving,” City Librarian John F. Szabo told The LA Local. “She saw it as such an important thing to develop a collection not only of books and ephemera, but of photographs that told not only the history of African Americans in Los Angeles but of Black history from everywhere.” 

The collection was renamed in 1971 and, until 2025, it was housed at the Vernon Branch Library on Central Avenue where Matthews once worked,  according to Brown, the library’s emerging technologies and collections director.  

Heather Hutt, LA City Council District 10 councilmember, was also in attendance at Saturday’s ceremony. She told the crowd she used to work in the downtown library and that her family loves books. 

“If you get a chance to really look at the collection, share that with other folks so they know what’s happening right here at the Baldwin Hills library,” Hutt said.