Florence Rising Curtis (30 September 1873–6 October 1944), librarian and educator, was born in Ogdensburg, New York, and was the daughter of Emeline Clark Curtis and Newton Martin Curtis, a Union brigadier general during the Civil War, a farmer and Treasury Department agent in the 1870s, and a Republican member of the House of Representatives for three terms beginning in 1891. She attended the Ogdensburg Free Academy and then in 1891 entered Wells College, in Aurora, New York, but left in 1894 to attend the New York State Library School, in Albany. While enrolled in the latter school Curtis began working in February 1895 as a cataloger at the Children's Neighborhood Library, in Troy, New York, and from November 1895 to June 1896 as an assistant librarian at the Diocesan Lending Library at the Cathedral of All Saints, also in Albany. She completed her degree requirements in 1896 but did not receive her diploma until 1898. For the next dozen years she was a librarian at various public libraries in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, including a stint from 1899 until October 1906 at the State Normal and Training School Library in Potsdam, New York.
Curtis's career path then led her toward training librarians. From 1908 until 1920 she taught at the Library School of the University of Illinois, in Urbana, and also was an instructor at the Indiana Public Library Commission's Summer School for Librarians. Curtis received both a B.A. from the University of Illinois and a B.L.S. from the New York State Library School in 1911. Six years later the University of Minnesota granted her an M.A. and in 1918 published her research calling for the establishment of libraries in such institutions as asylums, juvenile halls, prisons, and sanatoriums. Curtis served from 1915 to 1921 as the first secretary of the Association of American Library Schools. From 1920 to 1922 she taught English at government schools in China and the Philippines. After returning to the United States, she became the assistant director of the Drexel Institute Library School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1922 before being hired in 1925 as the first and only director of the Hampton Institute Library School.
In the segregated South, states only grudgingly funded public and school libraries for African Americans. Improvements in libraries at Black schools came from $1 million in aid donated by several northern educational foundations. An American Library Association study early in the 1920s found that 72 percent of southerners lived in areas without libraries and that, except in a few of the larger cities, the African American population in the South completely lacked access to libraries. Determined to develop more libraries for African Americans, the Carnegie Corporation, on advice from the American Library Association, the General Education Board, and the Julius Rosenwald Fund, in 1925 granted Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (later Hampton University) funds to found the Hampton Institute Library School. Accredited by the American Library Association, Hampton was the first school for African Americans to offer a bachelor's degree in library science. The Carnegie Corporation selected Hampton both because it already possessed a library of 55,000 books and two trained professional librarians, and because Hampton's administrators were white. Influenced by the American Library Association and the Carnegie Corporation, the school selected Curtis as director based on her "broad experience and the tolerance which comes with it."
The school opened in the autumn of 1925 with four pupils, all Black female librarians from the South, two of whom received diplomas the following year. Initially students needed only a high school diploma and one year of college to enter the library school, but by 1934 Hampton accepted only students who had completed four years at the collegiate level. Curtis, who both directed and taught at the school, modeled a curriculum focusing as much on practical problem-solving as on theoretical studies. She encouraged students to institute programs at the libraries for which they worked and to draw up lists of books, including children's materials, suitable for their patrons' needs and interests. A grant of $16,000 from the Rosenwald Fund enabled Curtis to visit Black colleges to examine their library needs and to encourage them to develop modern library facilities. Based on her visits, Curtis prepared, and the Rosenwald Fund published, a list of recommended college library books.
In March 1927 at Hampton, Curtis convened a conference of librarians and educators to design a program for creating and encouraging libraries in African American schools. The conference recommended launching model schools in each southern state and at teacher-training institutes at Black colleges in order to train librarians and teachers to use books in education. By December 1927 five colleges had established book funds and agreed to meet the conditions for establishing model programs: hiring a trained librarian; providing modern book-stacks, shelves, and reading room space; and allowing Curtis to approve their lists of books to purchase. These institutions became the first of forty-three colleges that received Rosenwald Fund grants for library development within the first five years. As the fund added new colleges, Curtis visited each to assess its needs, plan adequate library facilities and budgets, and select graduates to take Hampton's library course. As a result, Curtis noted, more Black colleges and schools received accreditation from the Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools of the Southern States.
Curtis served as vice president of the Virginia Library Association in 1932 and as president in 1933. She decided that she could give the greatest service to segregated southern libraries by helping to develop extension service programs for Black high schools and colleges, and in 1929 she first indicated to the General Education Board her desire to leave Hampton. In the mid-1930s, as Curtis approached retirement age, the Carnegie Corporation reevaluated its commitment to the library school. Carnegie had contributed more than 80 percent of the school's funding between 1925 and 1936, but Hampton had provided only about 9 percent. The corporation concluded that qualified applicants would be more interested in attending a library school located at an academically stronger institution. Over Hampton's objections, the corporation endorsed a plan to move the school to Atlanta University (later Clark Atlanta University). The Hampton Institute Library School closed on 29 May 1939. During the fourteen years the school had been in existence, it had graduated 183 librarians, the largest number of whom took positions at four-year colleges.
Florence Rising Curtis, who never married, returned to Ogdensburg after her retirement and died of a cerebral hemorrhage on 6 October 1944, while visiting her sister in Richmond, Indiana. She was buried in the Ogdensburg (later Ogdensburgh) Cemetery.
Sources Consulted: Birth and death dates from Indiana State Board of Health Bureau of Vital Statistics Death Certificate, Wayne Co.; biographies in New York State Library School Register, 1887–1929, James I. Wyer Memorial Edition (1959), 23, Bohdan S. Wynar, ed., Dictionary of American Library Biography (1978), 108–109, and Arthur Clinton Gunn, "Early Training for Black Librarians in the U.S.: A History of the Hampton Institute Library School and the Establishment of the Atlanta University School of Library Service" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1986), 74–79 (quotation from Sarah C. N. Bogle to W. S. Learned, 24 July 1925, on 75, portrait on 78); Curtis materials in American Library Association Archives at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and in Hampton University Archives; publications include Curtis, The Collection of Social Survey Material (1915), The Libraries of the American State and National Institutions for Defectives, Dependents, and Delinquents (1918), "The Contribution of the Library School to Negro Education," Library Journal 51 (1926): 1086–1088, and "Librarianship as a Field for Negroes," Journal of Negro Education 4 (Jan. 1935): 94–98; S. L. Smith, "The Passing of the Hampton Institute Library School," Journal of Negro Education 9 (Jan. 1940): 51–58; Lucy B. Campbell, Black Librarians in Virginia: The Story of the Hampton Institute Library School, 1925–1939 (1976), 1–27; obituaries and funeral announcements in Ogdensburg Journal, 6, 7 Oct. 1944, and Ogdensburg Advance, 8 Oct. 1944; memorial in Library Journal 69 (1944): 1060.