When Dr. John Wright was a freshman at the University of Minnesota in 1963, there were fewer than 100 Black students on a campus of more than 40 thousand.

African-American history was similarly missing in the classroom, but that wasn’t new to Wright. Throughout his K-12 education, he’d never been assigned a book by a Black writer. It was “a complete void.”

“We were literally invisible in the curriculum,” Wright said. “What I learned was largely on my own and from my grandfather’s family library.”

Facing the absence of his history and culture in education, Wright would become a leading figure in the founding of the Department of African American and African Studies at the University of Minnesota, and would influence the trajectory of another young student, Davu Seru.

At the time, Black students had to find their own history and each other, and they learned “to not move alone,” said Seru, who worked with Wright during his time as a doctoral student here.

Today, Seru is curator of the Archie Givens Sr. Collection of African-American Literature and Life, the archive Wright helped bring to the university in the 1980s. The collection documents the cultural achievements and contributions of African Americans, containing over 8,000 books that span over 250 years of American history.

Last year, the Givens Collection unveiled a new exhibit to commemorate its beginnings, “The Circle Unbroken: Celebrating 40 Years of Community Stewardship and the Givens Collection,” currently on display at Andersen Library through January 30, 2026.

The Circle Unbroken tells the story of the collection’s founding in 1985 and the coalition of community members who worked together to make African-American culture visible for millions of Black Americans who, like Wright, were eager to see themselves in the pages of history.

The exhibit was curated by Seru, and designed and illustrated by Darren Terpstra, a project specialist and exhibit designer at the Archives and Special Collections. It is open during regular library hours (9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday; and 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Wednesday and Thursday).

Keeping time and moving through history

“The Circle Unbroken” is designed after the Ring Shout performance from the Gullah Geechee culture of South Carolina. During the Ring Shout, participants form a circle and dance counterclockwise while signing spirituals. A community elder stands in the middle of the circle and pounds a staff against the ground to keep time.

Likewise, the exhibit cases form a circle, and the history of the Givens Collections unfolds as you move counterclockwise through the exhibit, and a tall case stands in the center, representing the staff.

The center case has three tiers: the bottom shows the “business” of slavery, the middle displays the early development of the African-American literary tradition, and atop is the “muse of the exhibit,” said Seru, the first book published by an African American in the United States, Phillis Wheatley’s 1773 collection, “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.”

“I choke up just about every time I talk about it,” Seru said. “She was an enslaved person when she published it, and she did it before the age of 20.”

Wheatley, from West Africa, was enslaved and brought to the colonies when she was just 8 years old, but by age 10, she’d learned the classical Greek and Latin literary canon, in their original languages. As a teenager, she’d become a premier neoclassical poet.

Her poetry collection is the book Seru most wants to put in the hands of anyone who comes to the Givens Collection, especially young kids. He loves telling them about her life, what she was able to accomplish, and what her memory, as a revolutionary-era poet appealing to the Founding Fathers three years before the Declaration of Independence, represents for us today.

“This case is the staff that helps us keep track of time, as we move through this circle and the history of activities that great enterprising people, with an African value system, took up,” he said.

Building a Black studies program and archive

The exhibit embodies a non-linear view of history, with past, present, and future all feeding into one another. Though the story of the Givens Collection could start in many places, here it starts in 1984, when Wright returned to the university to chair the Department of Afro-American and African Studies.

Wright had been a key figure in the department’s founding 15 years prior. In the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, members of the Afro-American Action Committee took over Morrill Hall and issued seven demands to the university, which Wright drafted. This action led to the creation of a Black Studies program in the fall of 1969.

In 1973, Wright accepted a teaching position at Carleton College while working on his dissertation, and over the next decade, he created and chaired an African American Studies major, and formed connections with Historically Black Colleges and Universities, like Howard University and Atlanta University.

“Almost all these places had very strong archival collections of African-American literature, culture, and history. So my interest in archives of that developed during those years,” Wright said.

In the fall of 1984, Fred Lukermann, dean of UMN’s College of Liberal Arts, asked Wright to chair the Department of African American and African Studies in 1984, and Wright agreed on the condition that the college would support efforts to establish an archive of African Americana.

As Wright settled into his position, a young student named Amy Russell, who Wright had helped land an internship at the Libraries’ Rare Books and Special Collections, contacted him excitedly about a collection of African-American literature that had appeared on the market. It was one of the largest private collections in the country at the time, owned and maintained by Richard Lee Hoffman, a white Brooklyn-based playwright and community college teacher.

Hoffman had spent over 25 years collecting first edition literary classics, ephemera, pamphlets, and playbills linked to the Harlem Renaissance, especially. There were over 3,000 items in his collection, and Hoffman wanted to find a home for it at a major university, where it could be properly preserved and conserved.

Wright and Lukermann made their case to then-President Ken Keller, and he agreed to provide a loan to purchase the collection. So in 1985, the archive, initially called the “Black Studies Collection,” came to the university.

“I immediately saw the need to use our new Black Studies Collection both to pursue the AFRO Department’s community outreach mission … and to build a coalition of local community leaders,” Wright said.

While the department now had a collection, they still needed to raise money to repay the President’s office for the loan. Wright contacted a few close friends – Mary Hicks, Claudia Wallace-Gardner, and Ezell Jones – to build a fundraising network of business, civic, and community members, which came to be called the Patrons Council.

Wallace-Gardner and Jones quickly reached out to the living Givens family members: Archie Givens Jr., Roxanne and Phoebe Givens. The three were successful business leaders with strong community interests, who in 1972 created a family foundation, named for Archive Givens Sr. two years before his death, to support K-12 education.

Together, the Patrons Council and the Archie Givens Sr. Foundation raised enough funds to repay the presidential loan. The following year, in 1986, Wright agreed, as chair of the Department of Afro-American and African Studies, to rename the Black Studies Collection as the Archie Givens Sr. Collection of African-American Literature and Life, in Archie Sr.’s honor.

“The foundation for many, many years was very critical in helping raise money for several of the projects we pursued,” Wright said.

‘Connected to all that is, without fear’

Wright served as the collection’s first curator, while continuing to chair the Department of Afro-American and African Studies. To promote the department’s outreach mission, he used the collection to support literary programs, and to establish teacher training programs and public exhibitions.

Since the collection had an array of first-edition texts from the Harlem Renaissance, and since Wright had been teaching seminars on the movement for years, it was easy to link the two together for their first summer teaching training institute. The seminar programs taught K-12 and community college instructors about the Harlem Renaissance and helped them finally bring that history into public classrooms, Wright said.

“It’s hard for people these days to recognize this, but here as elsewhere around the country, if you walked into a major reference library in 1970 and asked for materials on the Harlem Renaissance, the librarians would look at you in blank stares,” he said. “They wouldn’t have known what you were talking about.”

The Harlem Renaissance Summer Institutes program influenced thousands of students in the state and country, including the Givens Collection’s current curator, Davu Seru.

“My high school English teacher came here and studied with John Wright on the Harlem Renaissance, and then brought it back to us at North High in the 1990s,” Seru said. “I’m here because of that continuity.”

In 1997, the collection gained a new curator, Kathryn Neal, and Wright continued on as an advisor to the collection. They also began hiring graduate research fellows – eventually with endowed funding secured by Wright and Archie Givens, Jr. – and Seru would become the collection’s longest-serving Givens Collection Graduate Research Fellow.

“One of the objectives of the collection was to help train the next generation of African-American literary and cultural scholars, and to give them some kind of archival initiation,” Wright said.

Today, as Seru wanders the stacks, surrounded by history on all sides, he never feels overwhelmed, just connected and inspired.

“If overwhelmed, it’s in the sense of the sublime,” he said. “But connected is the word that comes to mind most, connected to history, connected to my ancestors, connected to all and to all that is, without fear.”

‘A candle in the dark’

As the Givens Collection celebrates its 40th anniversary, there’s much Wright and Seru are proud to have accomplished.

In the late 1980s, Wright and Colleen Sheehy, assistant director of the Weisman Museum, created the first nationally traveling exhibit on the Harlem Renaissance, “A Stronger Soul Within a Finer Frame: Portraying African Americans in the Black Renaissance,” which toured the country for three years and was seen by more than a million people.

The team formed relationships with Penumbra Theatre and later the Guthrie Theater, helping stage plays and other works by African-American writers, like August Wilson’s “Fences,” and brought distinguished speakers and writers to campus with the NOMMO African American Speaker Series.

In addition, Wright created and produced the Langston Hughes Project, a jazz and poetry ensemble that performed Hughes’ “Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods For Jazz,” across the country, from the Weisman Art Museum opening ceremonies all the way to Carnegie Hall.

Seru’s predecessor, Curator Cecily Marcus, gave the the collection a nationwide online presence with the Umbra Search project, a free digital library and archive of African-American history. With Umbra, anyone with a smartphone can access the Givens Collection’s digital holdings.

Currently, the collection and its community partners are co-hosting an intergenerational discussion series called Embracing Our Roots – alongside More Than A Single Story and Black Ink Publishing Arts Initiative – where young arts leaders and elders talk about significant milestones in Minnesota’s literary history.

Compared to when Seru was a fellow, there’s less activity with the collection, but that’s been changing since he became curator in 2023. The collection’s “spirit of interest has been revived,” he said.

“People seem very receptive to the story I’ve been telling about its history and its place in the broader history of African Americans in Minnesota. It’s an opportunity to collectively gather and do work, but it needs to be protected,” Seru said. “There’s just this really clear sense of togetherness and connectedness that right now we’re leveraging as best we can to secure the collection’s future at the Libraries.”

Seru is working to improve access for research and to grow the catalog of literary manuscripts and papers, particularly for living authors. But above all, Seru and Wright want to endow the curatorship, so that over the next 40 years, “there will still be a curator of the Givens Collection, and there will still be someone who’s an expert on African-American literature and cultural life, someone with ties to the community, someone people can trust.”

There are tangible threats to work that centers the voices of historically marginalized people, and speaks against the efforts to marginalize them, Seru explained. That work is essential to understanding American history, and it’s why the Givens Collection needs to exist.

“The Givens Collection is one of our candles in the dark,” Wright said. “We need rudders to help us navigate these very, very choppy waters … and people who have an alternate vision, both of our past and of our prospects for the future, and the need to rally behind the collection to help guide us to brighter visions of what lies ahead.”

As one of his final initiatives after retiring, Wright drafted an expansive $17 million funding plan, on behalf of the Givens Collection and the Department of American American and African Studies, which will fund lecture series, symposiums, artist residencies, and more. He submitted that plan to CLA, the UMN Libraries, and then-President Joan Gabel in 2022, and he hopes will garner coordinated official support and help keep the circle unbroken.

For those interested in attending future events, or donating to the archives, you can sign up for the Givens Collection’s mailing list or email Seru directly at serux001@umn.edu.