Mollie Huston Lee

Personal life and early career Born as Mollie Huston, Lee was born in Columbus, Ohio, on January 18, 1907, to Corrina Smith Huston and Rolla Solomon Huston, a private business owner and politician. As the only child of "learned parents," there were always books around the family home and growing up, Lee developed an interest in public affairs. She married her husband, Dr. James S. Lee, Biology chairman at North Carolina Central University, in 1935 and had one son, James S. Lee Jr.

While attending Howard University, Lee worked as a student library assistant under the direction of Edward Christopher Williams, the first African-American to receive a library degree in the United States. Lee acknowledged Williams as the inspiration for her future efforts as a pioneering librarian. Upon earning a Bachelor of Library Science from Columbia, Lee returned to North Carolina in 1930 and began working as a librarian at Shaw University. During her five-year employment at the Shaw University Library, Lee recognized the need among Black people in the surrounding community for a special African-American literature collection. She recognized that this need could be met through the services of a public library.

Librarian of the Richard B. Harrison Library

Despite making up a third of Wake County's population, African Americans did not have a library they could legally patronize before 1935. Mollie Huston Lee is credited as the founder and "literal builder" of Raleigh's first public library for African Americans. The meeting ultimately resulted in the formation of a biracial library committee, the first in the American South.

Lee also assisted in the training of future librarians. Library science students from Atlanta University, North Carolina Central University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill learned from firsthand experiences at the Richard B. Harrison Library under the direction of Mollie Huston Lee. She served as the supervisor of Negro School Libraries in North Carolina from 1946 to 1953. Lee was known as a "librarian's librarian."

During her 37-year career at the Harrison Library, she saw the library evolve from a tiny, one-room storefront library on Hargett Street to a $300,000 structure on New Bern Avenue. She retired from a 42-year library career on June 30, 1972, to "have fun and do some of the things [she had] not had time for."

Membership and honors

Mollie Huston Lee was selected as a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) library delegate, as well as a trustee of the State Library of North Carolina. Additionally, Lee was instrumental in the foundation of the North Carolina Negro Library Association (NCNLA) which dissolved once the American Library Association (ALA) and the North Carolina Library Association opened membership to African Americans. She was the second African American elected at-large to the ALA council, serving from 1950 to 1954, and in 1971, Lee represented ALA at the White House Conference on Aging. In 1971, Lee was the first African American woman elected "Tar Heel of the Week" as a result of her numerous professional and civic contributions to the state of North Carolina.

Publications Mollie Huston Lee's contributions to the field of library science include the following: Lee, Mollie Huston. 1944. Development of Negro Libraries in North Carolina. North Carolina Libraries. 3(2):4. Lee, Mollie Huston. 1955. North Carolina Negro Library Association, 1935-54. Library Service Review. 2(1):10-32.