Core Curriculum : Contemporary Civilization

L. S. Alexander Gumby (1885-1961) was a Harlem-based amateur historian, book collector, and salon proprietor who compiled a remarkable series of scrapbooks documenting African-American life in the United States. Gumby started his collection in 1901 at the age of 16 and in 1910 began gathering the materials into scrapbooks. He devoted whole volumes to major figures such as Booker T. Washington, Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Josephine Baker. In addition six volumes labeled “Gumby's Autobiography” detail his life as an openly gay black man at the beginning of the twentieth century.

In his volume on W. E. B. Du Bois, Gumby pasted clippings of pertinent newspaper articles both by and about Du Bois, for example this May 1906 article from Outlook magazine, which compares Du Boise’s The Souls of Black Folk and Booker T. Washington's The Future of the American Negro. Its author notes that “Professor Du Bois is half ashamed of being a negro” whereas “Dr. Washington rejoices in the honorable record of his race.” Gumby has also clipped many of Du Bois's “As the Crow Flies” columns from the New York Star News. Also pictured here is a pamphlet that Du Bois produced for the United States Department of Commerce entitled What the Negro Has Done for the United States and Texas.