Mayme Clayton’s Dream

… That Children Would Know that Black People Have Done Great Things

What does it take to establish a museum? The first thing would be a collection of something: art, books, automobiles. The second ingredient would be a motivated visionary and, finally, money. The Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum in Culver City meets the first two criteria, being the largest private collection of African-American artifacts in the world, thanks to the vision of assiduous collector Mayme Clayton, who for 40 years saved everything that related to the African-American experience’from rare and out-of-print books, personal correspondence of such leaders as Booker T. Washington and Pearl Bailey, to black films, photographs and even mementos of slave life. The museum didn’t come with an endowment; Clayton’s repository of more than three million items was collected on her librarian’s salary. As an academic librarian at UCLA, she was preternaturally drawn to books and other ephemera. In 1969, she helped establish the university’s African-American Studies Center Library, and began to buy out-of-print works by authors from the Harlem Renaissance. Her collector’s eye was always active. She rummaged through basements and garages, secured morgue photographs from The California Eagle, the Los Angeles-based African-American newspaper founded in 1879, and soon became known among the collector’s community. Her integrity in amassing a cohesive record of African-American history attracted others to entrust their collections to her. These special collections include the Lena Horne Scrapbook Collection, Marcus Garvey Papers and the Oscar Micheaux Literary and Film Collection. Michaeux was the most prolific black independent filmmaker in American cinema who produced and directed 44 feature-length films between 1919 and 1948. Clayton was a film buff who set out to find and store the largest pre-1959 black film collection in the world, which she complemented by collecting large, colorful vintage movie posters dating back to 1921. While the inveterate collector kept stashing away treasures in her garage from floor to ceiling, collectors and curators began to worry about the fragility of the materials and urged her to move them to a safer storage area. ‘I remember about 15 years ago, we went to see her collection,’ Pacific Palisades collector Bernard Kinsey recalls. ‘The first thing I thought is that this is a national treasure and we’ve got to get this stuff out of the garage. She had a signed copy of Phyllis Wheatley’s 1773 ‘Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral,’ and you could smell the mold.’ Kinsey and his wife Shirley have amassed their own collection, the Kinsey Collection, one of the largest private collections of artifacts tracing African-American history, which has been on a national tour for the last five years. Upon Mayme’s death in 2006, her son Avery took up his mother’s dream to place her collection for the public to view and study ‘by generations and generations hence.’ Avery consulted with a number of experts, including Kinsey, who taught him how to approach the project. ‘The first thing I said is let’s preserve the materials and then I said to inventory the collection items; it’s so important to have good records.’   The endangered collection was moved out of Clayton’s overcrowded garage and relocated to the former courthouse building around the corner from Sony Pictures in Culver City that Avery had convinced the city to rent for $1 a year. The materials were then decontaminated by freezing and finally cataloged, organized and placed on shelves awaiting public use. Avery inherited his mother’s energy and passion, and in 2001, he quit his high school teaching job to devote himself to the collection and to the museum. ‘Avery had a tremendous commitment and excitement and conveyed that effortlessly,’ says Sue Hodson, curator of manuscripts at the Huntington Library, who worked with him on the recent exhibit ‘Central Avenue and Beyond: the Harlem Renaissance in Los Angeles’ at the Huntington. ‘He had a real ability to sell his commitment to donors and politicians. He was tireless in his willingness and capacity to speak to groups. No matter if he was talking to one person or 500, the story always sounded fresh.’ Indeed, Avery was able to secure the museum space and raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations, plus a $250,000 federal grant with the help of Rep. Diane Watson. Sadly, Avery suffered a heart attack and died last Thanksgiving day at the age of 62. Plans for the museum continue under the direction of interim director Cynthia Hudley, a professor at UC Santa Barbara, who grew up in Los Angeles with Avery. She and the board of directors are making decisions about renovating the building and planning symposia, panel discussions and small exhibitions, such as the recent show at the Huntington. The job is daunting, says Kinsey, noting that the breadth and scope of the collection make it unique. ‘But, you have to focus, the museum has to decide what part of the collection will speak to the biggest audience. All of it is stuff unless you put it into context to make people understand the story or value. You have to develop a story.’ Huntington curator Hodson knows that there are many stories to be told. ‘There is so much material at the library, they can do more and more exhibitions,’ she says. For the Huntington show, Hodson and Avery selected stories that were not as familiar as those of the New York Harlem Renaissance. The exhibit focused on jazz, classical ballet, stage performance, literature and the colorful characters who made these stories. There was Herb Jeffries, 96, who was known as the singing cowboy, like Gene Autry. In fact, he and Autry were good friends. Thanks to the movies made by Clarence Muse and Spencer Williams, ‘Black children could go to a Saturday matinee and see the good guy as a black man, taking care of the bad guys and getting the girl,’ Hodson says. ‘Black actors were limited,’ Hodson says. ‘Hattie McDaniel, who won an Academy Award for her role in ‘Gone with the Wind,’ was limited to playing mammies and housemaids, which she didn’t mind. ‘I’d rather play one for $700 a week than be one for $7 a week,’ she’d quip. ‘Libraries like the Clayton have an important role,’ Hodson continues. ‘We must never forget these things.’ The museum will have a ‘soft’ opening in the spring. For more information or to make a donation to the Mayme A. Clayton Museum and Library, visit: claytonmuseum.org or call 310-202-1647.