Phil Lapsansky, 83, of Philadelphia, historian, social activist, former chief reference officer for the Library Company of Philadelphia and former curator of African American history, died on Tuesday, April 9, at the Rittenhouse Acute Care Center at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
A native of Seattle, Lapsansky was active in the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the mid-1960s. He arrived in Philadelphia in 1966 and spent 41 years, from 1971 to 2012, building the Library Company’s African-American history collection into what Inquirer reporter Stephen Salisbury called in 2012 “one of the finest collections of African-American archival materials in the world.”
His first assignment was to raid the library’s shelves — “stack-ratting,” as he called it in a 2012 Inquirer article — for materials related to Black life and history. He discovered a treasure trove of long-neglected documents, letters, pamphlets, newspaper articles, images and rare books. He spent the next 40 years organizing the materials into a collection that has grown to 13,000 titles and 1,200 images, and making them available to everyone.
“Lapsansky transformed the way African-American history is studied, not just at LCP but throughout academia,” his Library Company colleagues said at his retirement celebration in 2012. Carol Smith Rosenberg, professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, told the Inquirer in 2012, “He taught all of us to go beyond the bounds of traditional history and read sources that we have too often ignored.”
An avid reader who earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Temple University, Lapsansky served as the Library Company’s chief reference officer, overseeing the reading room from 1979 to 2008. He compiled reams of material, wrote dozens of reports and articles about the collection, organized popular public exhibitions and appeared on C-SPAN TV, producing history shows featuring researchers, conferences and seminars.
He is a valuable guide to historical information, and many authors have honored his contributions in their publications: He became a curator in 2008, and in 2012, more than 50 colleagues, friends and admirers authored a 179-page publication called “Phil Lapsansky, Appreciations,” documenting the impact of his work.
“It was the unwanted child of academia. Now African-American studies is everywhere.”
Lapsansky in 2012 speaking about growing up African-American.
Lapsansky was active in politics and the national labor movement in Seattle in the 1950s and 1960s, and became an active member of the civil rights movement in Mississippi in 1964. His vigor in fighting for voting rights and other issues led to him being slandered by political opponents and harassed by the police, the FBI and others.
He wrote articles about his experiences for national distribution and became director of the news and tape program for the Freedom Information Service, a clearinghouse for civil rights groups that he helped found. He later wrote opinion pieces for the Inquirer on prejudice in the arts and on the banning of assault weapons.
“He was a genuinely kind person,” his daughter Charlotte said, “and he masked that with a sharp wit.”
Philip Sanders Lapsansky was born on March 30, 1941. He attended the University of Washington in Seattle for a time but dropped out to experience the revolutionary world of Latin America and counterculture life in New York in the 1950s and 1960s. He received his bachelor’s degree from Temple University in 1973 and has lived in West Philadelphia for almost 60 years.
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He met Emma Jones in Mississippi, married her in 1966, and had two children, son Jordan and daughters Janet and Charlotte. Because interracial marriage was illegal in Mississippi, they were married in Wisconsin.
After his divorce, he married Bernice Andrews in 1986 and married her in 2012.
Lapsansky and his wife were foodies and avid readers, and spent many years exploring the city’s restaurants and bookstores together. Lapsansky was an inventive cook and loved movies of all kinds, watching South Park and Seinfeld on television.
In eulogies, family and friends spoke of his “wit, crude jokes and gallows humor” and said, “He had a vocabulary that rivaled any literary master, yet could make a sailor blush.”
He often said he was proud of being self-taught, and his ex-wife said he “combined humor, risk-taking, kindness, fierce loyalty, boundless intellectual curiosity and creativity.”
He doted on his children and grandchildren, always choosing the perfect gift. “He took a genuine interest in each of us and loved to brag about our accomplishments and activities,” his daughter Janet said.
Lapsansky is survived by his wife and children, three grandchildren, one brother, his ex-wife and other relatives. He donated his body to the Penn School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania for research.
A memorial service will be held at a later date at the Library Association of Philadelphia.
Donations in his name may be made to the American Civil Liberties Union, 125 Broad St., 18th Floor, New York, NY 10004, the Southern Poverty Law Center, 400 Washington Ave., Montgomery, Ala. 36104, and the African Americana Collection at the Philadelphia Library, 1314 Locust St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19107.
