Woman’s Suit Jacket

The woven fabric of this elegant jacket creates a checkerboard pattern in blue, white, and metallic gold thread. The jacket features a round neckline and three-quarter length sleeves. Vertical blue borders finish its front panels. On its horizontal edge, white thread and the checkerboard pattern yield to alternating rows of gold and blue. Fringe, also gold and blue, trims the bottom of the jacket, which falls at the hip.

The jacket belonged to renowned scholar-librarian Dorothy Porter Wesley (1905-1995), who organized and developed an unparalleled collection rooted in African American history that would become the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University in Washington, DC. She might have acquired the jacket and its matching skirt (1997.0020.0060b) while in Lagos, Nigeria between 1962 and 1964 to develop the National Library of Nigeria’s collection, a project commissioned by the Ford Foundation.