Charlemae Rollins, Augusta Baker, and Effie Lee Morris: The Librarians Who Transformed Children's Books

How did Black children's librarians challenge racist stereotypes in library collections during the civil rights era? For much of the twentieth century, children's books on American library shelves featured caricatured Black characters, minstrel dialects, or no Black presence at all. Three women made dismantling that status quo their life's work.

Charlemae Rollins at Chicago Public Library, Augusta Baker at the New York Public Library, and Effie Lee Morris in San Francisco each built careers around a simple, radical premise: the books available to children shape their understanding of who matters. Working from the 1930s through the 1980s, they developed bibliographies, collection policies, and storytelling programs that functioned as civil rights tools.

A July 2026 study in The Library Quarterly reframes their efforts as community care information practices, positioning their professional output within the long Black Freedom Struggle rather than treating it as routine library administration.¹

Why Black Women Children's Librarians Matter in LIS History

Library and information science history has long faced a tension between celebrating individual pioneers and recognizing the collective movements they built. Charlemae Rollins, Augusta Baker, and Effie Lee Morris have each been profiled in isolation, but treating them as separate biographies obscures a larger truth: their overlapping careers, spanning roughly the 1930s through the 1980s, form a coherent professional movement inside 250 years of American libraries.

A Cohort, Not Three Isolated Careers

Rollins entered Chicago Public Library in 1932. Baker joined the New York Public Library in 1937. Morris began her library career in the 1940s and eventually built children's services at the San Francisco Public Library. Their working lives intersected across roughly five decades and three of the country's largest urban library systems. They corresponded, cited each other's bibliographies, and trained the next generation of children's librarians. Reading them as a cohort reveals a shared program of reform, not three parallel accidents of talent.

Libraries Inside the Long Black Freedom Struggle

These careers unfolded during what historians call the long Black Freedom Struggle, the arc of Black organizing that runs from the early twentieth century through the civil rights and Black Power eras. Public libraries were contradictory sites within that struggle. Many branches were segregated or hostile to Black patrons well into the 1960s, yet Black neighborhood branches also functioned as gathering places, reading rooms, and staging grounds for community education. Rollins, Baker, and Morris worked within and against their own institutions at the same time, using professional authority to redirect collections, hiring, and programming toward Black children.

Countering a Stereotyped Print Culture

The children's books available to librarians during much of this period were saturated with anti-Black imagery: the pickaninny caricature, plantation nostalgia, dialect used for ridicule, and near-total erasure of Black protagonists in contemporary settings. Rollins, Baker, and Morris developed rigorous evaluation criteria, published booklists, and pressured publishers to change what they printed. Their work also anticipated what scholars now recognize as information services to diverse populations, a field that places cultural competence at the center of professional practice.

The scholarly anchor for reading their work this way is Alex H. Poole's 2026 article in The Library Quarterly (volume 96, number 3).¹ Poole names their approach community care information practices, a framework this article will unpack in the sections that follow.

Charlemae Rollins: Reforming Children's Book Evaluation at Chicago Public Library

Charlemae Rollins transformed children's librarianship from her post at the Chicago Public Library's Hall Branch, where she served for over three decades. Her relentless critique of racist stereotypes and her construction of alternative reading lists reshaped how librarians across the country evaluated and built collections for young readers.

A Pioneering Career at Hall Branch

Rollins began her tenure at Hall Branch in 1932, stepping into a role that placed her at the heart of the Bronzeville neighborhood, a vital center of Black cultural and intellectual life during the Great Migration. At Hall Branch, she observed firsthand the damage caused by books that depicted Black characters as lazy, superstitious, or comical. Rather than simply removing harmful titles, she embarked on a systematic project of documentation and education. She reviewed hundreds of children's books, corresponded with publishers and authors, and delivered lectures to librarians and parents, always insisting that the portrayal of Black life in children's literature must be grounded in accuracy and respect.

We Build Together: A Bibliography as an Instrument of Change

Rollins's most enduring contribution is the reader's guide "We Build Together: A Reader's Guide to Negro Life and Literature for Elementary and High School Use." First published in 1941 by the National Council of Teachers of English, the bibliography went through multiple revised editions, including notably in 1948 and 1967. It listed recommended books that presented Black characters with dignity and realism, alongside a critical catalog of titles to avoid. Each entry included annotations that judged the title's authenticity, language, and illustrations. The guide was more than a purchasing tool; it became a curriculum instrument for teachers and a manifesto for inclusive collection development, embedding anti-racist principles into the everyday work of youth services.¹

Evaluation Criteria That Challenged Stereotypes

Rollins developed explicit criteria that remain recognizable in contemporary diversity audits. She asked whether a book treated Black characters as fully realized individuals, whether dialect was used merely for comic effect, and whether illustrations avoided grotesque caricatures. She also evaluated the historical and social context, demanding that books about slavery or Reconstruction acknowledge the humanity and resistance of Black people. Titles like "Little Black Sambo" and "The Story of Doctor Dolittle" were flagrant failures by these standards, and Rollins campaigned publicly against them, even as some colleagues considered such books harmless classics.

• Authenticity: Does the author demonstrate genuine knowledge of Black life rather than relying on minstrel tropes?
• Dignity: Are characters portrayed with the same emotional range and moral agency as white characters?
• Language: Is dialect used as a linguistic feature of a specific community, or is it deployed to mock and diminish?
• Visual representation: Do illustrations depict Black people as varied individuals, not as stock racial types?

A Lasting Influence on ALA and Early Children's Literature

Rollins extended her influence through the American Library Association. She served on the Newbery-Caldecott Award Committee and was a founding force behind the Jane Addams Children's Book Award, which honors books promoting peace and social justice. In 1957 she received the Grolier Award for her contributions to reading and children. Her work at Hall Branch, her bibliography, and her ALA advocacy together formed a model of librarian as cultural gatekeeper, one who refused neutrality and instead used collection development as a direct form of civil rights work. Her approach prefigured the awards and fellowships for children's librarians that today formally recognize this tradition of youth-centered advocacy, as well as the diversity standards and community engagement frameworks that inform much of contemporary youth librarianship.

Augusta Baker: Storytelling, Curation, and Representation at NYPL

Augusta Baker's career at the New York Public Library spanned more than three decades and fundamentally changed how American libraries approached children's literature about Black life. Her work combined the roles of practitioner, curator, administrator, and educator, creating systems and standards that shaped what generations of children could find on library shelves.

From Branch Librarian to System Administrator

Baker joined NYPL in 1937 as a children's librarian at the 135th Street Branch in Harlem, a position that placed her at the heart of one of the most vibrant Black cultural communities in America.¹ Her exceptional skill as a storyteller earned her recognition throughout the system, and in 1953 she was named the library's storytelling specialist. By 1961, she had risen to coordinator of children's services for the entire NYPL system, becoming the first African American to hold an administrative position at that level in the library's history.¹

Building the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection

In 1939, just two years after joining NYPL, Baker founded the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Children's Books about Black Life.¹ Named for the acclaimed author, poet, and civil rights leader, the collection had a clear purpose: to assemble positive, accurate, and varied portrayals of Black life for children.

Baker developed explicit selection criteria that books had to meet for inclusion. As she articulated in 1943, works needed to present an "unbiased, accurate, well rounded picture of Negro life in all parts of the world." This standard meant actively removing books that relied on stereotypical portrayals. Titles like "The Story of Little Black Sambo," which had been library staples for decades, failed to meet Baker's criteria and were removed from recommended lists.

The collection's principles became codified in her landmark bibliography, originally published in 1946 as "Books about Negro Life for Children." This resource was revised and expanded over the following decades, eventually retitled "The Black Experience in Children's Books" in 1971.¹ The bibliography gave librarians across the country a practical tool for evaluating their own collections.

Training a Generation of Practitioners

Baker understood that changing what children read required changing how librarians selected and presented books. She developed storytelling workshops and training programs that taught other librarians not only performance techniques but also critical evaluation skills. These programs trained practitioners to recognize stereotypes, assess accuracy, and present books about Black life with care and context.

Her expertise culminated in "Storytelling: Art and Technique," co-authored with Ellin Greene and published in 1987.¹ This volume became a standard text for library school students and practicing librarians, extending her influence well beyond her years of active service. After retiring from NYPL, Baker continued her work in storytelling and children's literature,² ensuring that her methods and standards would outlast her formal career.

Effie Lee Morris: Expanding Access and Visibility in San Francisco

Of the three librarians examined in Alex H. Poole's 2026 Library Quarterly study, Effie Lee Morris remains the least documented in mainstream library history accounts, a gap that obscures a career of genuine national significance.¹

From Virginia to San Francisco

Born in Richmond, Virginia, on April 20, 1921, Morris built her professional identity through decades of work that stretched from New York to the West Coast.¹ She earned both her Bachelor of Arts (1945) and her Master of Library Science (1956) from Western Reserve University. Before arriving in San Francisco, she served as the first children's specialist at the Library for the Blind at the New York Public Library, a role that placed equity and access at the center of her practice from the very beginning of her career.²

In 1963, she became Children's Services Coordinator at the San Francisco Public Library. From that position she worked to extend programming beyond the library's walls and into neighborhoods that had historically been underserved by public institutions. A year into her role, in 1964, she established the Effie Lee Morris Historical and Research Collection of Children's Books, creating a permanent research resource at the library that anchored San Francisco as a serious site for the study of children's literature on the West Coast.³

National Leadership and Lasting Standards

Morris did not limit her influence to a single city. Her ALA student membership and broader leadership roles placed her among the first Black women to hold prominent positions in the association's children's services divisions. She served as president of the Public Library Association from 1971 to 1973, becoming the first African American to lead that organization.⁴ In 1968, she founded the San Francisco Chapter of the Women's National Book Association, adding an organizational infrastructure to her advocacy work.⁵

Perhaps her most durable contribution to the field came in 1982, when she helped shape the selection criteria for the Coretta Scott King Book Award, the award honoring African American authors and illustrators of children's and young adult books.⁵ By codifying what made a book worthy of recognition, she extended her curatorial judgment into a framework that would guide librarians and educators for generations. ALA recognized her career in 2008 with Honorary Membership, one of the association's highest distinctions.⁴

Connecting West Coast Work to a National Movement

The parallels between Morris, Charlemae Rollins in Chicago, and Augusta Baker in New York are not coincidental. All three women used their institutional positions to challenge the overwhelmingly narrow portrayal of Black children and Black life in mid-twentieth century publishing. Where Rollins produced bibliographies and Baker developed storytelling programs, Morris built collections, established evaluation standards, and created organizational structures that gave the work institutional permanence.

Morris also connected her library programming to the calendar of cultural memory. As early as 1946, she organized Negro History Week celebrations for children, embedding historical consciousness into programming at a moment when most public libraries offered nothing of the sort.¹ That early instinct, to treat children's library services as a site of both learning and affirmation, defined everything that followed in her career.

Three Librarians, Three Cities, One Mission

Charlemae Rollins, Augusta Baker, and Effie Lee Morris each worked from a different major public library system, yet their methods and goals formed a coherent professional movement. Across decades of the long Black Freedom Struggle, all three used bibliographies, collection development, storytelling, and publishing to reshape what children could read about Black life.

How These Librarians Evaluated Children's Books About Black Life

Augusta Baker's 1957 revision of Books About Negro Life for Children recommended 185 titles, a deliberately narrow list culled from a much larger field of print.¹ That ratio, the small number of books deemed worthy against the volume produced each year, tells you almost everything about how Rollins, Baker, and Morris approached collection work: rigorous, principled, and unwilling to stock a shelf simply because a book existed.

Tropes They Rejected

Across their bibliographies and selection notes, the three librarians drew a hard line against a recurring set of harms in mid-century children's publishing.²

• Racial caricature and minstrel imagery, including pickaninny illustrations with exaggerated features and mammy figures used as background comfort for white protagonists.
• Negro dialect deployed for comic effect, a specific target of Rollins in We Build Together: A Reader's Guide to Negro Life and Literature for Elementary and High School Use.
• Racist or paternalistic themes, which Baker flagged repeatedly in her selection work at the New York Public Library.
• Plantation nostalgia and the "exceptional Negro" narrative, in which a single Black character succeeds by escaping community rather than belonging to it.
• Tokenism and invisibility, the twin problems Morris named in A Mid-Century Survey of the Presentation of Black Life in Children's Books: either one Black child dropped into an otherwise white cast, or no Black children at all in books presented as universal.

Qualities They Required

The positive criteria were just as specific. All three looked for respectful, natural language in place of dialect played for laughs, and contemporary, realistic Black settings rather than antebellum or folkloric backdrops.³ They wanted authentic family life, a range of Black experience across urban and rural settings and across class, illustrations that rendered Black features with dignity, and stories in which Black children acted, chose, and led rather than serving as objects of pity or comic relief. This kind of principled, community-centered selection work connects directly to broader conversations about cultural competence in library science and what it means to serve all readers equitably.

Books They Championed and Removed

On the recommended side, the librarians consistently supported work by Black authors writing from inside the communities they depicted. Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps appear across their lists, particularly Hughes and Bontemps's Popo and Fifina and Hughes's poetry for young readers, both of which met the standards for language, setting, and child agency. Later authors working in the same tradition benefited from the shelf space these librarians had already fought to create.

On the removed side, longstanding classroom staples that leaned on dialect humor or plantation settings, most famously Helen Bannerman's Little Black Sambo, were pulled or quietly not replaced. The absence was the argument.

Questions to Ask Yourself

Community Care Information Practices: A New Framework for Understanding Their Work

The work of Charlemae Rollins, Augusta Baker, and Effie Lee Morris was never neutral, and a new theoretical framework finally names what they were actually doing. In a July 2026 article published in The Library Quarterly, researcher Alex H. Poole introduces the concept of community care information practices, or CCIPs, a framework that recasts the everyday professional activities of these three librarians as deliberate acts of civil rights activism carried out through the tools of librarianship.¹

What the CCIP Framework Means

At its core, the CCIP framework identifies a specific category of information work: practices like bibliography-making, collection curation, storytelling, and publishing that are performed not as routine tasks but as intentional expressions of community care. Poole situates these practices within the long Black Freedom Struggle, the broad arc of activism, resistance, and cultural self-determination that stretches across the twentieth century and beyond. Under this lens, a bibliography is not simply a reading list. It is a political document that asserts which stories deserve attention. A curated collection is not just a shelf of approved books. It is an argument about whose lives matter enough to be represented on library shelves.

Poole's framework challenges a longstanding assumption in library and information science: that professional practice is, or should be, ideologically neutral. By documenting how Rollins, Baker, and Morris used standard library tools to advance racial equity, the CCIP model reveals that neutrality itself can function as a barrier to justice when collections, programs, and services fail to reflect the full range of human experience.

Four Core Practices, Three Librarians

Poole highlights four information practices that define community care work in children's librarianship.

• Creating bibliographies: Rollins compiled annotated reading lists at Chicago Public Library that identified books portraying Black life with dignity and accuracy, giving teachers and parents concrete guidance for selecting respectful literature.
• Developing and curating collections: Baker built the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection at the New York Public Library's 135th Street branch, assembling a dedicated collection of children's books that offered authentic depictions of Black characters and culture.
• Writing books and periodical articles: Morris published articles and professional commentary that advocated for inclusive children's programming, drawing on her experience leading library services for young people in San Francisco.
• Composing and sharing stories: Baker's celebrated storytelling hours at NYPL brought oral tradition into the library setting, using narrative performance as a vehicle for cultural pride and interracial empathy.

Each of these practices served a dual purpose: fulfilling a professional function while simultaneously advancing a vision of equity and representation.

Why This Framework Matters Now

The CCIP framework carries significant implications for contemporary library and information science. For decades, the profession has grappled with questions about neutrality, asking whether librarians should advocate or simply provide access. Poole's research offers a clear historical precedent: three of the most influential children's librarians in American history understood their work as advocacy from the start.

For practitioners in youth services librarianship today, the framework provides a theoretical foundation for equity-centered collection development, programming, and community engagement. Rather than treating diversity as an add-on or a checklist item, the CCIP model positions care for underrepresented communities as a core professional competency, one with deep roots in the history of librarianship itself.

For MLIS students and educators, Poole's article, published in The Library Quarterly (Volume 96, Number 3), is a valuable addition to coursework on LIS history, social justice, and cultural competence in library science. It demonstrates that the field's most powerful tools, from a well-chosen booklist to a carefully told story, have always carried the potential to reshape how communities see themselves and each other.

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Challenges and Barriers Black Women Children's Librarians Faced

Despite holding advanced degrees and producing nationally recognized scholarship, Charlemae Rollins, Augusta Baker, and Effie Lee Morris each navigated a profession that constrained their authority at nearly every turn. The obstacles they encountered were not incidental; they were woven into the institutional fabric of American librarianship throughout the mid-twentieth century.

Segregation Inside the Profession

Even as public libraries positioned themselves as democratic institutions, the profession itself replicated the racial hierarchies of the wider society. Black librarians were routinely assigned to branch libraries serving Black neighborhoods, effectively limiting the scope of their influence. Rollins spent her entire career at the George Cleveland Hall Branch of the Chicago Public Library, a facility that served the city's South Side Black community. While each of these librarians transformed their respective branches into vibrant cultural hubs, the assumption that Black professionals belonged only in Black-serving spaces meant their expertise was siloed rather than elevated across entire library systems. Professional associations, conference circuits, and leadership pipelines were overwhelmingly white, restricting the networks available to Black women in the field. These structural barriers echo patterns that librarian promotion barriers have taken many decades to address.

Pushback Against Challenging Stereotypical Books

One of the most politically fraught aspects of their work was the act of removing or refusing to promote children's books that trafficked in racial stereotypes. Titles like "Little Black Sambo" and "Nicodemus" series books were enormously popular with white audiences, and questioning their place on library shelves invited backlash from publishers, colleagues, and administrators alike. Rollins, Baker, and Morris each developed criteria for evaluating how Black life was portrayed in children's literature, but applying those criteria meant confronting an industry and a profession that largely did not see the problem. Publishers had financial incentives to keep stereotypical titles in circulation, and white colleagues sometimes viewed these challenges as unnecessary or overly sensitive.

The Double Bind of Race and Gender

Librarianship in this era was a predominantly white, female profession. Black women working within it faced a compounding set of pressures: racial exclusion from the profession's inner circles and gendered expectations that women in service roles should be agreeable, deferential, and non-confrontational. Advocating loudly for representation in children's collections violated both sets of norms simultaneously. These librarians had to assert intellectual authority in spaces that questioned whether they belonged at all, while also performing the caring, nurturing labor that children's services demanded.

Structural and Emotional Costs

Beyond interpersonal dynamics, the material conditions of their work reflected systemic disinvestment. Branch libraries in Black neighborhoods typically operated with smaller budgets, fewer staff, and less access to new acquisitions. Professional development funding was scarce, and the emotional labor of constantly justifying why children deserved to see themselves reflected authentically in books was unrelenting. As Alex H. Poole's 2026 research in The Library Quarterly documents, these librarians poured personal resources into building bibliographies, writing articles, and curating collections that countered the dominant narratives of their time.¹ That work was not supplementary; it was essential civil rights activism carried out under the constraints of institutions that rarely acknowledged its value.

Legacy and Impact on Modern Children's Library Services

How did the work of Charlemae Rollins, Augusta Baker, and Effie Lee Morris shape the standards that children's librarians use today?

Their influence stretches from mid-twentieth-century reading rooms to award criteria, collection development policies, and ongoing debates about censorship and representation. Understanding this lineage matters for anyone studying or practicing librarianship in 2026, because the evaluation methods these women pioneered remain embedded in some of the profession's most recognized institutions.

The Coretta Scott King Award and Its Roots

The Coretta Scott King Award, founded in 1969 and first presented in 1970 to Lillie Patterson for "Martin Luther King, Jr.: Man of Peace," grew directly from the networks these librarians built.¹ Augusta Baker and Charlemae Rollins were among the founding group members who helped establish the award. Virginia Lacy Morris drafted formal selection criteria that reflected the same principles Baker and Rollins had long championed: accuracy in depicting Black life, well-drawn characters showing growth, clear plot structure, and age-appropriate style.²

The award became an official part of the American Library Association through the Social Responsibilities Round Table in 1982 and has since expanded to include categories for Author, Illustrator, the John Steptoe New Talent Award (established 1996), and the Virginia Hamilton Lifetime Achievement Award (established 2010).¹ Each of these categories continues to apply evaluation standards that echo Baker's insistence on authenticity and dignity in portrayals of Black experience. Author eligibility requires the writer to be African American, and the content must portray some aspect of Black experience, a direct descendant of the bibliographic criteria Baker codified during her decades at the New York Public Library.²

From Baker's Criteria to Today's Diversity Audits

Contemporary movements like We Need Diverse Books carry forward the same core concern that motivated Rollins, Baker, and Morris: children deserve to see themselves reflected honestly in literature, and libraries have a responsibility to make that possible. Baker's NYPL criteria for evaluating children's books about Black life can be seen as an early prototype for what libraries now call diversity audits. These audits assess collections for representation, accuracy, and gaps, precisely the work Baker, Rollins, and Morris performed by hand across thousands of titles. Cultural competence in library science owes a great deal to the frameworks these women built long before the term entered professional vocabulary.

The line from their era to the present is not always acknowledged, but it is direct. When librarians today evaluate whether a picture book handles race with nuance, or whether a chapter book relies on stereotypes, they are applying an evaluative tradition these three women helped formalize.

Gaps in MLIS Education

Despite their significance, Rollins, Baker, and Morris do not appear consistently in MLIS curricula. Many students complete youth services coursework without encountering their names or methods. The community care information practices (CCIP) framework, introduced by Alex H. Poole in a July 2026 article in The Library Quarterly, offers a conceptual vocabulary that could help fill this gap.³ CCIP reframes bibliography creation, collection curation, and storytelling not merely as professional tasks but as acts of community care rooted in the long Black Freedom Struggle. Integrating this framework into professional education would give future librarians both historical grounding and a practical model for equity-centered work.

A Model for the Current Moment

As libraries across the country face organized book challenges and censorship campaigns, the methods Rollins, Baker, and Morris developed carry renewed relevance. They demonstrated that thoughtful collection development for future librarians is not a neutral administrative function but a form of advocacy. They built selection criteria grounded in accuracy and community knowledge. They used storytelling to foster empathy across racial lines.

Contemporary librarians navigating contested collections can draw on these precedents. The question is not whether to make judgments about what belongs on the shelf; it is whose knowledge and whose care informs those judgments. Rollins, Baker, and Morris answered that question with decades of practice, and their answer still holds.

Common Questions About Black Women Children's Librarians

The contributions of Charlemae Rollins, Augusta Baker, and Effie Lee Morris continue to shape how libraries approach children's collections, representation, and community engagement. Below are answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about their groundbreaking work and its lasting significance.

Who was the Black woman librarian who changed children's literature?

Three Black women librarians were especially transformative: Charlemae Rollins at the Chicago Public Library, Augusta Baker at the New York Public Library, and Effie Lee Morris at the San Francisco Public Library. Each worked across decades of the twentieth century to reshape how libraries selected, evaluated, and shared children's books, insisting that literature reflect Black life with accuracy, dignity, and nuance.

How did Charlemae Rollins change children's literature?

Charlemae Rollins (1897 to 1979) developed rigorous evaluation criteria for children's books depicting Black characters and culture. Working at the Chicago Public Library, she compiled annotated bibliographies that guided librarians and publishers toward authentic representation. Her published writings and professional advocacy pushed the field to reject stereotyped portrayals, establishing a standard that influenced collection development practices across the country.

What impact did Augusta Baker have on children's literature?

Augusta Baker (1911 to 1998) served as a storyteller and curator at the New York Public Library, where she built collections centered on positive, accurate portrayals of Black life. She created reading lists and bibliographies that became essential resources for librarians nationwide. Baker also used storytelling as a tool for cultural connection, helping children see themselves reflected in library programming and materials.

What criteria did Black women librarians use to evaluate children's books?

Rollins, Baker, and Morris assessed children's books for accuracy of cultural detail, the presence of stereotypes, the quality of illustrations, and the dignity with which Black characters were portrayed. They rejected literature that relied on caricature or condescension. Their bibliographies and reviews served as practical guides, helping other librarians and educators distinguish authentic portrayals from harmful or superficial ones.

How did Black women librarians contribute to the civil rights movement?

These librarians treated their information practices as civil rights work. By curating collections, writing bibliographies, publishing articles, and sharing stories, they promoted Black pride and interracial empathy. Their efforts were embedded in the long Black Freedom Struggle, using library tools to challenge racism in children's literature and to ensure that young readers of all backgrounds had access to truthful, affirming narratives.

What is the community care information practices (CCIP) framework?

The community care information practices framework was introduced by Alex H. Poole in a 2026 article published in The Library Quarterly. CCIP reframes traditional library activities, such as bibliography creation, collection development, and storytelling, as acts of community care and civil rights activism. The framework draws on the work of Rollins, Baker, and Morris to show how information practices can serve equity, justice, and communal wellbeing.