Eliza Atkins Gleason
*Eliza Atkins Gleason was born on this date in 1909. She was a Black librarian, university dean, and administrator.
Eliza Valeria Atkins was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to Simon Green Atkins and Olenona Pegram Atkins. Her parents were educators; her mother was a teacher, and her father was the founder and first president of Slater State College, now Winston-Salem State University.
After receiving her bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois in 1931, she took her first library job at Louisville Municipal College (known initially as Louisville Municipal College for Negroes), where she soon became the head librarian, following her sister, Olie Atkins Carpenter, who was a librarian at this institution, as well. In 1936, Gleason received her master's from the University of California, Berkeley, and moved to Chicago, where she received her Ph.D. There, in 1937, she married Dr. Maurice Francis Gleason and had a daughter, Joy Gleason Carew, who is now a professor of Pan-African studies at the University of Louisville.
In 1940, from the University of Chicago. Her dissertation, The Southern Negro and the Public Library: A Study of the Government and Administration of Public Library Service to Negroes in the South was published in 1941 and was the first complete history of library access in the South, with a focus on African American libraries. She then was the director of libraries at Talladega College in Alabama. In 1941, Gleason established and became the first Dean of the School of Library Service at Atlanta University.
She created a library education program that trained 90 percent of all African American librarians by 1986. Gleason left Atlanta in 1946 to join her husband in Illinois, where he was setting up a medical practice after having served in the military. She was the first Black to serve on the board of the American Library Association from 1942 to 1946. After stints at Woodrow Wilson Junior College, Chicago Teachers College, and the University of Chicago, Gleason became an associate professor in library science at the South Chicago branch of the Illinois Teachers College in 1964. In 1978, she was appointed to the Chicago Public Library board and became the executive director of the Chicago Black United Fund.
Eliza Gleason died on December 15, 2009, her 100th birthday. In 2010, she was posthumously inducted into the University of Louisville's College of Arts and Sciences Hall of Honor. The American Library Association awards the triennial Eliza Atkins Gleason Book Award in her honor for the best book written in English in library history, including the history of libraries, librarianship, and book culture. Past recipients include Dr. Cheryl Knott, Christine Pawley, David Allan, Carl Ostrowski, and Louise Robbins.
