Public libraries are social institutions whose mission is to serve everyone in the communities where they are inserted. Considering the Brazilian reality, composed mostly of black and brown people, the importance of literary reading for the reader’s formation and the representativeness of public library collections, this research penetrated such collections as to verify the presence of black men and women authors of Afro-Brazilian literature. It focused on the following variables: gender, date and place of birth, and the presence or absence of the authors and their works in the collections of fourteen libraries whose catalogues are available online. The descriptive research revealed that there is no proper incorporation of books of Afro-Brazilian literature in the collections of public libraries, compromising a democratization of the library that is not only longed for but indispensable. Thus, it is necessary to discuss a different formation and development of these collections,with a view to a ‘collection repair’that would decolonize the gaze, allowing access to the bibliographic legacy, mainly in literature, by black authors, so that public libraries can constitute democratic and representative spaces of Brazilian society
