BINFORD HARRISON CONLEY, PhD (1933-2011)

Historian & Archivist

The Conley Family’s first nationally recognized academic and intellectual was Binford Harrison Conley, PhD. He began his academic career with a high profile assignment at Atlanta University, established in the West End neighborhood of Atlanta by his great-great uncle, Reconstruction Governor Benjamin Conley in a land deal with John D. Rockefeller. Binford restored, organized, and cataloged the academic papers and artifacts of John Hope, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, W.E.B. DuBois, Horace Mann Bond, Whitney Young, Benjamin Mays, Sam Nabrit, and Henry McBey. An archivist without peer of the Black intellectuals of the ‘Atlanta School’ of Sociology, his work became the foundation of the Woodruff Library, a stone’s throw from Gov. Benjamin Conley’s final home before his death in 1886.

OrIGINS OF BINFORD CONLEY

Binford Conley was born in Huntsville, Alabama to Reverend Benjamin Conley and Effie Folkes. His father, Rev. Benjamin was the namesake of his uncle, Benjamin Conley, Governor of Georgia during Radical Reconstruction. Reverend Benjamin was a regional official of the Methodist Church, and built much of the organization in Northern Alabama. With his older brother Ed Conley, a stone mason, Rev. Benjamin constructed nearly three dozen churches Anniston, Alabama in the East, to Florence, Alabama in the Western edge of the state, all along the northern border with Tennessee.

Binford attended Councill Training High School, then one of the finest schools for Colored Children in the segregated South from 1900 until the school’s closure in 1965.

Conley attended Morehouse College during his undergraduate education, where he also took classes from Spelman professors. After Morehouse, he earned a Master’s degree in Library Science and Archive Management from the Atlanta University. He earned a PhD in Philosophy and Library Science from Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Morehouse College

Spelman College

Atlanta University

Rutgers University

KOREAN WAR YEARS

Enlistment: 1953-54

Branch: Army

Division: Artillery officer.

Highest Rank: Captain

Theater: South Korea

Like so many of his ancestors, Binford Conley, entered military service.

Also in keeping with tradition, his services was largely focused on logistics, serving as an artillery officer. He was honorably discharged, as a Captain, in 1957.

SOUTH CAROLINA STATE

NORTH CAROLINA A&T

In the twilight of his career, Dr. Binford Conley served as library director at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University.

From 1960 until 1963, Conley served as Head Librarian at South Carolina State University, expanding the the once meager collection to over 200,000 volumes. He was an early voice in memorializing E.E. Just, Benjamin Mays, and others who were graduates of South Carolina State’s defunct high school department. He was instrumental in raising money for the Miller F. Whittaker Library, which opened after his departure. The archives Dr. Conley organized made it possible to understand the importance of that school preparing intellectuals Earnest Everett Just (Class of 1893) and Benjamin E. Mays (Class of 1916), for their eventual success at the highest levels of academia.

HOWARD UNIVERSITY

In 1975, Conley later became Director of the Howard University Libraries and the Moorland–Spingarn Research Center. His revamp of the Moorland-Springarn Center made its debut during the 1976 Bicentennial Celebrations in Washington DC, as the world's largest and most comprehensive repositories for the documentation of the history and culture of people of African descent in America. Under Dr. Conley’s leadership from 1975 until 1983, the Moorland-Spingarn expanded to a full research center with more than 15,000 feet of manuscript and archival collections and nearly 250,000 bound books, journals, periodicals, and newspapers.