Elizabeth Dowling Taylor - The Original Black Elite: Daniel Murray and the Story of a Forgotten Era

Upcoming Event
Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - 7:00pm to 8:00pm

Daniel Alexander Payne Murray (1852-1925) was born free to a former slave and joined the twelve-member staff of the Library of Congress in 1871. Ten years later, as Assistant Librarian, he helped  establish the core of the Library’s “Colored Authors’ Collection.” He also served as the first African-American member of the Washington Board of Trade, co-founded the National Afro-American Council, forerunner of the NAACP, and sent his children to Harvard and Cornell. In her second book, Taylor, author of A Slave in the White House and currently a fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, uses Murray’s life story to trace the rise of DuBois’s “Talented Tenth” after Emancipation, and its fall in the 1890s and following, when Jim Crow laws and the influence of white supremacist groups thwarted the social mobility of African American citizens.

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Washington, DC 20008
Non Fiction
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