Value of African American memorabilia on the rise

By Karen Juanita Carrillo

The importance of collecting African American books and memorabilia was once again spotlighted following the October 2006 passing of Dr. Mayme Agnew Clayton.

Dr. Agnew Clayton's forty years of painstaking collecting and storing of more than 30,000 rare and out-of-print books, films, photographs, music, and other memorabilia - all while she worked as a librarian at the University of Southern California (USC) and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) - led to the creation of the Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum (MCLM).

Now organized under the umbrella of the Western States Black Research and Educational Center, the Los Angeles, California based MCLM, according to its website, "maintains the largest and most academically substantial privately held collection of rare and out-of-print books, documents, films, music, photographs and memorabilia on African American history and culture in the United States."

The collection is the first such record of African American archives on the West Coast. Typically, Harlem's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Howard University's Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, and the Atlanta, Georgia-based Auburn Avenue Research Library on African-American Culture and History have been the recognized centers for those who wanted to find archives on African Americans.

As those who knew her will attest, the establishment of the MCLM in Los Angeles is an expression of Dr. Agnew Clayton's personal effort to "ensure that children would know that Black people have done great things."

The value of African American memorabilia is being continually recognized by institutions as well.

The University of South Carolina recently paid $35,000 for a first edition of Phillis Wheatley's 1773 book of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, the book is one of less than 100 known copies still in existence. Because Wheatley was originally from Gambia but enslaved and brought to the United States at around the age of 7 or 8, the 1773 publication of her book in London was celebrated as one of the first books written in English by a person of African descent.

 The value of a first edition Wheatley book has nearly doubled since 1998, when the same book sold for $19,550. Because the book is so rare and so prized it will be housed in the university's Thomas Cooper Library, but the university has also graciously posted a fully-searchable digital version of the book on its website here.

A first edition of Frederick Douglass' 1855 book My Bondage and My Freedom was meanwhile found in upstate New York during a Ronald McDonald House garage sale in the town of Henrietta, New York this past October.

The book is valued at $400, so the organizers of the garage sale confessed to being confused about how the book could have been left for sale. The Ronald McDonald House regularly receives donations from estate sales, and many think the book may have been lost within a larger donation. Glen Jeter, the owner of an area McDonalds franchise, bought the Douglass book and says he plans to donate it to the Rochester, New York-based Frederick Douglass Resource Center.