Surveying the Hill

A portion of Dr. Walter B. Hill, Jr.'s voluminous library was donated to the Sylvia Gaither Garrison Library. Dr. Walter B. Hill, Jr. was a commissioner of the Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture; the Senior Archivist in Afro-American History at the National Archivies and Record Administration in College Park, Maryland; a member of the Executive Council of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History; the Chief Historian for the African American Civil War Memorial; and the director of the Modern Archives Institute. He authored: Federal Records Relating to Civil Rights in the Post World War II Era and edited: The Book of Names.

The Walter Hill Collection consists of approximately 500 books and serials. The collection is eclectic and diasporic, containing information concerning people of African descent who live in Africa, the Carribean, Britain, and Latin America. The bulk of the collection, however, focuses on African American history and culuture.

Some of the items in the collection have high historic value for the library: The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., The Book of Names, which includes Robert Jones, an African American who fought in the Civil War whose historic papers the library owns, Federal Records Relating to Civil Rights in the Post-World War II Era, a book signed by Dr. Hill, David Levering Lewis' Pulitzer Prize winning work: W.E.B. Dubois, 1868-1919: Biography of a Race, Shades of Freedom, which was signed by A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom, signed by the legendary John Hope Franklin, and Dreams of My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, President Barack Obama's first book.