Chicago native Regina Anderson Andrews (1901-93) was a librarian in the New York Public Library (NYPL) system for nearly half a century beginning in 1923 at the 135th Street branch (now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture) until her retirement from the Washington Heights branch in 1967. Andrews broke the color barrier by becoming the first African American supervising librarian in NYPL history. Her accomplishment was not an easy one. This article illustrates Andrews's groundbreaking career as a librarian and activist, including her fight, with W. E. B. Du Bois as a powerful ally, against the NYPL administration for opportunities for promotion and equal pay.

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"I'm American," Regina Anderson wrote in 1923 on her application for a position in the New York Public Library (NYPL) when asked to give her race. Three or four days after she completed the application at the main branch on 42nd Street, Anderson received a request to return to discuss her answers--this one in particular. Asked again about her racial designation and stating firmly that she was American, Anderson was told, "You're not an American. You're not white."

Like untold numbers of U.S. citizens, Anderson came from a multicultural background requiring a roadmap to follow. Her father, William Grant "Habeas Corpus" Anderson, a prominent criminal lawyer in Chicago, was the son of a Swedish immigrant and his American Indian wife. Her mother, Margaret Simons, was the daughter of Henry Simons, the son of an Arkansas Confederate general and an immigrant Jewish woman. Henry's wife, Regina's maternal grandmother, was the offspring of a Madagascar woman and an East Indian man. (1) Regina considered herself an American.

In December 1924, a year after the application incident, this "pert olive-skinned girl" would grace the cover of Messenger magazine's issue that featured "Negro women who are unique, accomplished, beautiful, intelligent, industrious, talented and successful." (2)

The NYPL hired Anderson, but because of her color, her interviewer told her, "We'll have to send you to Harlem." Besides determining her first assignment in the NYPL system, her perceived ethnic background and the stigma of being black--something she said she never had encountered in her hometown of Chicago--defined the opportunities open to her in her new employment. (3) Nevertheless, through the force of her personality and capability and her activism in the black community of Harlem, Regina Anderson would rise to become the first African American to head a branch of America's largest public library system.

Born on May 21,1901, in Chicago, Regina M. Anderson had had some library experience before applying for a job at NYPL. While a student she worked part-time as an assistant librarian at Wilberforce University in Ohio and then as a junior clerk in the Chicago Public Library. (4) Twenty-two years old when she arrived in New York City in 1923 on vacation, Anderson never returned to live in Chicago. In New York City she took a job first briefly in the Womrath Rental Library, an experience she said she "liked very much [because...