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Women's History Month is a celebration of women's contributions to history, culture, and society. This annually declared month had its beginning as a single day, March 8, 1911. A school district in Sonoma, California built a week around Women's History Day in 1978. This led to a fifteen-day conference about Women's History in 1979 at Sarah Lawrence College. Gerda Lerner, an influential historian, along with National Women's History Alliance advocated for women to have more than a day of recognition. In 1980 Women's History Day became Women's History Week. By 1987 it had been allotted the full month of March. 

Women's History Month means celebrating the accomplishments of women and recognizing their contribution to society. In doing so we are able, as a society, to equip, empower, and encourage women to believe in themselves and the accomplishments they can achieve. Many school districts build their curriculums around the national months and having the month of March dedicated to Women's History promotes equality of the sexes in the classroom. Promoting strong, influential, women in history allows for a more rounded understanding of our past. This year’s theme for the month is “Women Providing Healing and Promoting Hope.”

Our book display on the second floor of the library near the elevators highlights the stories of influential women throughout history. Be sure to pay special attention to those books that focus and healing and hope. For example, A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America by Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson "chronicles the lives of black women from indentured servitude in the early American colonies to the cruelty of antebellum plantations, from the reign of lynch law in the Jim Crow South to the triumphs of the Civil Rights era." In another inspiring story of healing and hope This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace by Swanee Hunt shares “first-person accounts of twenty-six Bosnian women who are reconstructing their society following years of devastating warfare.” Medicine Women, Curanderas, and Women Doctors  by Bobette Perrone, H. Henrietta Stockel, and Victoria Krueger is literally about women healers. The book focuses on ten different women and their healing paths.

The display includes other inspiring stories of women. Deborah G. Felder’s The 100 Most Influential Women Of All Time: A Ranking Past And Present provides an good overview. Becoming by former first lady Michele Obama is an autobiography of this compelling woman’s accomplishments and the meaning she finds in her life. Tara Westover’s Educated: A Memoir tells the story of her life in a survivalist household and her quest for knowledge that eventually allowed her to attend Brigham Young University without any preceding formal schooling, highlighting what education offers. Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race has also inspired a major motion picture. In response to these women’s stories, Shetterly also founded The Human Computer Project, an endeavor that is recovering the names and accomplishments of all of the women who worked as computers, mathematicians, scientists and engineers at the NACA and NASA from the 1930s through the 1980s. Check out these books and others as you commemorate Women’s History Month.

During Black History Month, we often turn our attention to individuals who were “firsts.” Their accomplishments are not only significant in and of themselves, but because they paved the way for others to follow and opened people’s imaginations to how things could be. This week we remember, Hollywood's first Black movie star and the first Black man to win the best actor Oscar, Sidney Poitier. He was also one of the last members of the Golden Age of Hollywood when he died at the start of this year at age 94.

Poitier’s life itself was the stuff of a great movie. He was the youngest of seven children, born to Evelyn and Reginald James Poitier, Afro-Bahamian farmers on Cat Island in the Bahamas. Young Poitier was born three months premature in Miami while the family was there on business. Though not expected to survive, he beat the odds and returned with his family to the Bahamas. At age fifteen, he was sent to Miami to live with this brother’s family. A year later, to get away from the racism of Jim Crow era Florida, he moved to New York City to become an actor. After overcoming some initial difficulties, including his noticeable Bahamian accent, he joined the American Negro Theater.

Poitier’s breakthrough film was the 1950 production, “No Way Out,” where he played a doctor treating a white bigot. Despite his success, this was a difficult time. As he later reflected, “[Blacks] were so new in Hollywood. There was almost no frame of reference for us except as stereotypical, one-dimensional characters. Not only was I not going to do that, but I had in mind what was expected of me—not just what other blacks expected but what my mother and father expected. And what I expected of myself.” And what he expected of himself was, “To walk through my life as my own man.”

Many of his best-known films explored the racial tensions of America. You will find many of these in the DVD display on the fourth floor of the library near the elevators including: A Raisin in the Sun, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, In The Heat of the Night, and To Sir, with Love. (Portable DVD players can be checked out at the Library Services Desk.) His roles tended to reflect the peaceful integrationist goals of the civil rights struggle and for this he was seen as a noble symbol of his race. However, some African Americans thought Poitier betrayed them by taking sanitized roles and pandering to whites, despite his advocacy for the civil rights movement, including participating in the 1963 March on Washington.

Nonetheless, Poitier continued to walk through life as his own man. An excellent example of this is from the 1967 film “In the Heat of the Night” where he played a Philadelphia detective assisting with a murder investigation in small-town Mississippi. In one scene, Poitier’s character is slapped by the town’s most powerful citizen. Poitier insisted he would do the movie only his character could slap him back. He also had it written into his contract that this scene could not be cut. The scene was so powerful, it even got the attention of anti-apartheid leader, Nelson Mandela in South Africa.  

Poitier’s later career turned to directing and producing. He also went on to serve as the Bahamian Ambassador to Japan from 1997 to 2007. In 2009, President Obama awarded Poitier the Presidential Medal of Freedom, saying, "It's been said that Sidney Poitier does not make movies, he makes milestones ... milestones of artistic excellence, milestones of America's progress."

Garrett Hohmann is our new Public Services Librarian. He oversees activity at the Library  Services Desk and supervises the library's student assistants. He also teaches in the library's information literacy program and assists students with research questions.

How can you assist students?

I’m here to help whatever way I can. Research, tech help, finding the right way to write something – I’m always willing to take a stab at anything we might not know the answer to. Trying is the way!

How long have you worked at Loras?

I started at Loras in late January 2022, so its currently my third week here! I am really loving the environment and people so far. No dirty looks so far anyway.

Why did you choose the Library as a career/vocation?

Libraries have always been special to me. They’re a safe space, an information hub, a communal center, and a lot more. I started working at the Carnegie-Stout Public Library on a whim (5 years this month!) and things started to click. I realized it was a calling, and that it was the profession for me. Books, media, quietness (mostly), and space to learn are all great, but the people are what keep me coming back.

What is a book you would recommend? 
Griffin & Sabine (823.914 B22g) by Nick Bantock. Years ago, I came into the Loras Library specifically for this title and was mesmerized by the creativity and mystery of this little book.

During Black History or African American History Month, we take the time to remember and celebrate the lives of African Americans and their contributions to American society. This week, we focus on bell hooks, author, professor, and social activist, who recently died in December. A powerful voice in mending the rifts caused by ignorance, prejudice, past and present hurts, hooks advocated that the end goal of feminism and antiracism is the communal healing.

bell hooks (née Gloria Jean Watkins), 1952-2021, was a Black feminist writer who laid the foundation for Black and working-class women’s voices to be heard. She grew up in a small town in Kentucky with her father, a postal worker, her mother, a homemaker, and her four sisters and one brother.

She entered the school system during the turmoil of the Brown v. Board of Education trial. Her early education took place in segregated schools. Once the state integrated its educational system, however, she moved to a white-majority school where she was forced to face complex racial and gender hierarchies. Despite being exposed to the atrocities of white-supremacy, her tight-knit Black community taught her to find community among the oppressed, draw strength from those connections, and resist from the margins.

She continued her education at Stanford University, graduating with a degree in English literature in 1974. During her undergraduate education she began writing Ain’t I a Woman, titled after the famous speech by Sojourner Truth. Next hooks attended the University of Wisconsin, completing her Masters in 1976, and then went on to earn a doctorate in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1983.  

Her teaching career began in the midst of her studies, first teaching ethnic studies in 1976 at the University of Southern California. She later taught at Yale, Oberlin, and the City College of New York. In 2004 she returned to Kentucky as a professor in residence at Berea College, where the bell hooks Institute was established in 2014 as a center for her writing and teaching.

Dr. hooks’ first book was a collection of poems published in 1978 titled, And There We Wept. This was the first time she used her pen name, bell hooks. The name pays homage to her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. hooks insisted her pen name remain in lowercase in order to stress the importance of her words and the substance of her books, instead of herself.

Works by hooks emphasize the importance of community and healing which was established in the young bell hooks through her Black community. Her voice resonates so deeply because she sees the end goals of feminism and antiracism as being a communal healing.

If you are interested in more information, check out the display on the second (main) floor of the Loras Library across from the elevators. It includes works such as: Salvation: Black People and Love, Black looks: Race and Representation, Bell Hooks' Engaged Pedagogy: A Transgressive Education For Critical Consciousness, Killing Rage: Ending Racism, and Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood. The display also includes many of her essays published in edited collections.

At the end of January, the American Library Association (ALA) announced it annual children’s and young adult book awards. The oldest of these awards are the John Newbery Medal (est.1922) and the Randolph Caldecott Medal (est.1937). For decades, however, an African American had received neither honor; this would not happen until the mid-1970s.

To correct this lack of recognition of the contributions and achievements of African American authors, librarians Glyndon Flynt Greer and Mabel McKissick along with publisher John M. Carroll initiated the idea of a new award at the 1969 ALA conference. The award was named to commemorate the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr. and to honor Coretta Scott King, “for her courage and determination to continue the work for peace and world brotherhood.” It is given annually to outstanding African American authors who “demonstrate an appreciation of African American culture and universal human values."

The first Coretta Scott King Award was presented in 1970 to Lillie Patterson, for her work Martin Luther King, Jr.: Man of Peace. In 1974 the award was expanded to honor illustrators as well as authors. This was also the year the Coretta Scott King Book Award seal was created by world-renowned artist and professor at Spelman College, Lev Mills. The seal design, which you can read more about here, represents the ideals and commitments of the Kings that the book awards seeks to honor. The Loras Library Pre-K Collection contains over fifty of the Coretta Scott King Award winners and honors, many of which are currently display by the first-floor elevator.

In 2010 the Coretta Scott King Awards were expanded again to include the Coretta Scott King–Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement, named to honor also beloved children’s author Virginia Hamilton. Hamilton, it should be noted, was the first African American to win the Newbery Medal. The 2022 winner of Coretta Scott King–Virginia Hamilton Award is Nikki Grimes and you can see a selection of her books available in the Loras College Library here.