Dorothy Porter

For forty years, until her retirement in 1973, Dorothy Porter built the collections focused on African American history at Howard University into the great Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. Trained as a librarian at Howard and Columbia Universities, she was renowned for her tenacity—discovering books, ephemera, and manuscript materials in private collections, from book dealers, in attics, and even in trash cans. In 1930, she married James Amos Porter, a painter and important historian of African American art who was a Howard faculty member. His portrait depicts his wife in front of a Haitian landscape, perhaps referencing their travels to that country.