When Leadership Falls Short: The Crisis of Care in Library Work
Posted on in Blog Posts
Belle da Costa Greene Reimagined: A Different Take on Her Legacy
Posted on August 12, 2025 in Blog Posts
Authors:
Ashleigh Coren
The Morgan Library’s exhibition on Belle da Costa Greene offered an intriguing but complex examination of one of America’s most accomplished librarians. There are hard lessons we can learn from both Greene’s remarkable career and the exhibition’s approach to interpreting her story. I think the Morgan was successful in demonstrating the richness and complexity of Greene’s story, but its exploration of race and passing could benefit from more analysis.
While viewing the Belle da Costa Greene exhibition, I found myself drawn not to the expected parallels to novelist Nella Larsen or to the character Peola Johnson from the film The Imitation of Life (1934), but to Walter White, the civil rights leader who served as NAACP president for over twenty-five years. Born fourteen years after Greene, White shared her white-passing appearance yet openly identified as Black throughout most of his life. This comparison illuminates the central questions the exhibition raised but never fully resolved: How do we define Blackness? What are the implications of linking racial identity to physical appearance? And perhaps most importantly, can we posthumously claim someone as Black who actively rejected that identity during their lifetime?
The exhibition seeks to challenge tired tropes like the “librarian spinster”1 and “tragic mulatto”2 narratives. Rather than assume that Greene’s choices brought suffering, might we consider that they provided relief and opportunities? Let me be clear—there were always violent and destructive implications to racial passing that should not be understated. However, archival gaps, compounded by Greene’s destruction of personal papers, leave us unable to ever fully understand her story. This uncertainty should inform our interpretation rather than drive us toward definitive conclusions.
Belle da Costa Greene (1879–1950) was at one point one of America’s most well-known librarians, running the Morgan Library for forty-three years. She transformed J. Pierpont Morgan’s private collection and established the exhibition, research, and publication programs that continue today. Born Belle Marion Greener in Washington, DC, she was the daughter of Richard T. Greener—Harvard College’s first Black graduate—and Genevieve Ida Fleet Greener. After her parents separated, her mother changed the family surname to Greene, and from adolescence, Belle and other members of her family passed as white in segregated America.
Recommended by Junius Spencer Morgan while working at Princeton University Library, Greene became J. Pierpont Morgan’s private librarian in 1905. She managed and expanded his rare book and manuscript collection, organized exhibitions, and built relationships with dealers and scholars. After Morgan’s death in 1913, she continued to work with his son and became the first director of the newly public Pierpont Morgan Library in 1924, serving until 1948.
The Exhibition and Interpretive Choices
As someone fascinated by the intersections of gender and race, I found the Greene exhibition engaging and intellectually rewarding. Still, a few elements complicated my experience as a visitor. The exhibition’s opening room suffered from congestion issues that impacted visitor experience. Small labels and cramped quarters made it difficult to absorb the rich content, reminding us how physical design affects learning.
One of the exhibition’s most thought-provoking elements is its treatment of Greene’s racial identity. The consistent labeling of Greene as “Black” throughout the exhibition raises important questions about how we catalog and describe historical figures. When a historical figure chose not to publicly identify with a particular racial category, what are our responsibilities as educators in 2025 when teaching others about them? This reminds me of broader issues pertaining to metadata and cataloging—how do we place identification markers on individuals who might not have recognized themselves through those labels? It’s a question many of us grapple with when organizing and describing stories from the past.
The exhibition succeeds somewhat in illuminating the world of post-Civil War Black elites on the East Coast—in Washington, DC, Boston, and New York—who gained access to education and professional opportunities sometimes influenced by their skin tone. This context helps us understand that Greene’s story isn’t simply about individual choice; it reveals the complex layers of class and race in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The section of the exhibition exploring the subject of passing in Greene’s era provided valuable historical context through its inclusion of popular culture references like the film Imitation of Life, Harlem Renaissance literature such as Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), and legal cases like Rhinelander v. Rhinelander. While these examples demonstrate the social and legal dynamics of the period, they rely heavily on the tragic mulatto stereotype, suggesting these are the only narratives worth examining. The absence of figures like Walter White, who offers a markedly different perspective on racial passing, represents a missed opportunity to present a more comprehensive view of how individuals navigated racial identity during Greene’s lifetime.
Librarian Legacy and Labor
Of course, the best part of the exhibit highlights Greene’s professional accomplishments—the remarkable collections she acquired, the relationships she cultivated with librarians and rare book collectors, her oversight of library construction and renovations, and the exhibitions she curated. During her tenure, she added thousands of reference materials while maintaining a commitment to research and education access. She was a great mentor, fostering careers and earning deep respect from colleagues. All of these achievements deserve attention, but at the end of the exhibit, the curators made an interesting decision. They chose to highlight other Black librarians of the period, like Dorothy Porter and Catherine Latimer, who was the first Black librarian at NYPL while Greene was at the Morgan, without establishing any apparent connection between Greene and her contemporaries. Without such a connection, their inclusion felt odd as an epilogue. This curatorial choice prompted some questions: Did these women know of each other’s work? Why present this information separately rather than weaving it throughout the narrative? What does it mean to conclude Greene’s story by highlighting a community she may not have acknowledged during that time? Perhaps this conclusion reflects the exhibition’s greatest strength—leaving visitors with more questions than answers, which is exactly what meaningful exhibitions should accomplish.
For a recent nuanced discussion of complex historical narratives, check out the “Our Ancestors Were Messy” podcast, which explores the complications of interpreting Black historical figures and has a great episode on the Black elite of 19th-century Washington, DC.
Notes
- In popular culture and beyond, there has been a prevailing stereotype that women-identifying librarians are unpartnered, lonely, and repressed.
- A person of mixed race who, due to their ancestry, is destined to live a life of inequity and unhappiness. To learn more, visit: https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/mulatto/homepage.htm.
About the author:
Ashleigh Coren is a content strategist, educator, and curator based in the Washington, D.C. area.
Sign up for Toward Inclusive Excellence (TIE) new post notifications and updates.
Interested in contributing to TIE? Send an email to Fatima at Choice (fmohie-eldin@ala.org) with your topic idea.
Header image is a detail of This is Harlem by Jacob Lawrence. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © 2021 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. For more information, click here.