Henry Proctor Slaughter

Henry Proctor Slaughter was born September 17, 1871, in Louisville, Kentucky.[1] His mother was a former slave who instilled a sense of pride in Henry by pointing out falsehoods in stories of slave life in textbooks and telling stories of the rebellions of enslaved people.[2] His father died when Slaughter was six, and Henry sold newspapers to support his family.[3] He graduated as salutatorian from Central High School.[4]

He studied at Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina, in the 1890s.[1] Slaughter earned two degrees from Howard University: a bachelors of law degree (1899) and a masters of law degree (1900), but he never practiced law.[1]

After graduating from high school, Slaughter became an apprentice at the Louisville Champion newspaper and began to write feature articles for other local newspapers.[5] In 1894 he became the associate editor of the Lexington Standard.[1]

Slaughter moved to Washington, D.C. in 1896, where he took a position as a compositor with the U.S. Government Printing Office, a role including designing forms and typesetting documents.[1] He would work at the GPO until his retirement in 1937.[5] He was the only African-American elected as a chairman of a section of the Typographical Union of the Government Printing Office, and was honored as the "Sixty-Year Man" by the union at age 86.[5]

In 1910 Slaughter became editor of Philadelphia-based masonic publication the Odd Fellows Journal, a role he shared with Arturo Alfonso Schomburg for many years.[6][2] Slaughter and Schomburg were close friends, visiting bookstores and galleries in Washington, D.C., together.[2] Slaughter served as a correspondent for multiple periodicals, including the Kentucky Standard, the Philadelphia Tribune, and the A.M.E. Church Review.[5]

Slaughter collected many rare books and other resources documenting African American history. Early in his collecting, he focused on documents about slavery, the abolitionist movement, and the Civil War; later his collecting tastes expanded to other eras and subjects of Black history and culture.[2] Slaughter purchased books from auction houses in Philadelphia and New York City, as well as from firms in England and Ireland.[5] He also bought books from the William Carl Bolivar collection, through which he obtained rare Haitian items.[2] Other items in the collection included accounts of Black secret societies in the United States, a full run of The Colored American newspaper, and the complete writings of Paul Laurence Dunbar.[2]

In the mid-1940s, his library contained approximately 10,000 books and 100,000 newspaper clippings, as well as pamphlets, photographs, and letters,[2] The collection filled three floors and the basement of his Washington, D.C. townhouse.[7] Dorothy Porter Wesley created an inventory of Slaughter's collection when it was sold to Atlanta University and moved from his house in 1946.[2]

Slaughter was involved in many fraternal organizations throughout his life. He was a Thirty-third degree Mason and served in leadership roles in multiple Masons and Odd Fellows associations.[5] He was a gourmet cook, and would prepare elaborate meals for annual meetings of the American Negro Academy.[2] During a 1915 meeting of the American Negro Academy, members founded the Negro Book Collectors Exchange, naming Slaughter as the president.[7] He belonged to an informal club called the "Labor Day Bunch," a group of Black men who would meet regularly to talk about books over gourmet meals; members included Slaughter, Schomburg, and Wendell Dabney.[2]

He served as secretary of the Kentucky Republican Club in Washington, D.C., for several years.[5] Slaughter was a committeeman at four presidential inaugurations: McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson.[7] He was also a religious man and served in a handful of church roles, including as a vestryman of St. Luke's Episcopal Church and superintendent of its Sunday school.[7]

Slaughter married twice: in 1904 to Ella M. Russell, who died in 1914, and again in 1925 to Alma R. Level.[5] He died in Washington, D.C., on February 14, 1958.[7]

• "Henry P. Slaughter Collection". radar.auctr.edu. Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library. Retrieved 7 November 2021.