By 1965, public libraries in the South were no longer primary targets of demonstrations, sit-ins, and read-ins. When, for example, civil rights activists announced a three-month campaign in Bessemer, Alabama, in June and targeted the public library as its first site, they met no opposition. As “demonstrators” approached the circulation desk, the librarian registered them for borrowers’ cards without resistance and calmly explained library rules and regulations. One of them checked out his first library book, The Negro Protest.1 Before the end of the decade, racially separate state library organizations no longer existed, and by 1972, 90 percent of people living in the South—black and white—lived in public library service areas.2 The goal of integrating southern public libraries had been accomplished, but not without pain, anguish, and danger.
The history of desegregating southern public libraries shows mixed patterns. Some people in black communities across the South were repulsed by the concept of black branches from the beginning of the twentieth century; some welcomed black branches whenever they came. Although youthful 1950s and 1960s protesters were overwhelmingly local blacks and not “outside agitators,” they were nonetheless minorities even among their peers (high school and college) because they dared to risk their futures—if not their lives—by participating in the demonstrations. In addition, they differed from previous generations of blacks in the South.
Young people did not tolerate segregation as well as older generations and were more willing to challenge it. The generation that grew up after Brown sensed that nothing would change unless they changed it. They wanted a better world than their parents, and they rejected not only the practices of the white world in which they existed but also those of the black world they had inherited. Jesse Jackson’s relationship with his stepfather is a good example. “As the student movement grew throughout the South—the younger the potential volunteer, the more willing he or she was to take risks,” notes David Halberstam, “while the converse was generally true—the older the students, the more they had a stake in terms of career and career expectations, and the less likely they were to join up.”3 “The scenario of the drama,” Annie McPheeters later recalled, “was largely written and produced by our young people” not “willing to wait any longer. They wanted freedom now.”4
Unlike the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, the 1960 Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins, the 1961 Freedom Riders, and the 1963 March on Washington, public library protests seldom made front-page news, even in local papers. Generally they happened in the background of the larger civil rights movement, which by 1963 many Americans identified primarily with the activities of Martin Luther King Jr., who participated in very few public library protests. In some places public library protests increased racial polarization and civil disorder; in others they had the opposite effect. Except for CORE’s work in rural Louisiana in 1964, none of the civil rights organizations—CORE, the NAACP, the SCLC, or SNCC—can claim primary credit for desegregating southern public libraries. Protests were spontaneous, often loosely organized, yet in their willingness to sacrifice by going to jail and subjecting themselves to harassment to integrate public libraries, protesters found unity.
White community reactions to pressures brought by young blacks to integrate public library systems were also mixed. Some followed the lead of white power establishments and resisted vehemently, sometimes violently. On the other hand, some fought Jim Crow public library practices in myriad ways (seldom publicly) and for a variety of reasons, including a sense of fairness, fear of negative publicity, and a desire not to see the local public library close. As a group, southern white librarians were hardly unified. “Most white librarians” in Alabama, Toby Graham concludes, “were moderates and largely apolitical on the subject of race; they were neither fervent segregationists nor vocal supporters of civil rights. . . . Librarians’ attitudes toward blacks were as varied and as difficult to explain as the complex relationships between white moderates and blacks in the general population.” His conclusion that “most” Alabama public library directors “led their institutions toward integration only after the libraries became the subject of sit-in protests or federal pressure” is just as true for the rest of the South.5
Brown v. Louisiana (1966) largely marked the end of Jim Crow practices in southern public libraries. Understandably, in many libraries forced to integrate, many of the new black patrons who showed up at the circulation desk initially met a very chilly reception. Only time tempered that response. But even with these newly acquired rights to use public libraries, southern blacks did not rush to use library services in great numbers. “Negroes are not taking advantage of this great opportunity of using library facilities,” complained black Savannah State College librarian and civil rights activist E. J. Josey in 1962. “It is disheartening to note the many references made by directors of recently desegregated libraries that ‘there has not been any substantial increase in the use of the library by Negroes.’”6
Nonetheless, during the 1950s and 1960s, southern public libraries played an important role by functioning as sites for trial-and-error desegregation efforts to see what worked, and what didn’t. In most communities, desegregating public library systems worked faster than the desegregation of other public accommodations, especially in public education. In many cases, public libraries subsequently also became sites and symbols of reconciliation between the white and black races in the South, places where “the ghost of Jim Crow” seldom visited. In her analysis of 1950s and 1960s segregated recreational facilities in the United States, Victoria Walcott found that “whites no longer perceived” these facilities “as safe havens for families, and as a result most closed by the early 1970s. This fact demonstrates the limits of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Because racial inequality is deeply spatial, legislation cannot change the association of black-dominated spaces with disorder.”7 Walcott’s observations, however, do not apply to segregated public library systems, all of which are still open and now open to all.
Examples abound. Twenty years after the Birmingham Public Library desegregated, the city’s first black mayor opened a new building that contained a large civil rights archive, including the papers of Eugene “Bull” Connor—“part of our history,” the mayor commented at the dedication, “but one we’re proud to have moved away from.”8 The black literature collection Annie McPheeters worked for years to build at the Atlanta Public Library’s Sweet Auburn Branch eventually became the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, “the first library in the Southeast to offer specialized reference and archival collections dedicated to the study and research of African American culture and history and of other peoples of African descent.”9 In 1996 the Broward County Public Library system in Florida began plans to build an African American Research Library and Cultural Center in the black community. “An exciting, ambitious concept,” Fort Lauderdale’s Sun Sentinel called it, to consist of seventy-five thousand books by and about African Americans housed in a “community cultural center” with a three hundred–seat auditorium and multiple exhibit spaces to host authors, artists, actors, dancers, and musicians.10 It opened in 2002. In 1999 John Lewis, a 1960s Freedom Rider, SNCC organizer, and since 1986 a Georgia congressman, returned to the Troy Public Library in Alabama, to which he had been denied access in the 1950s, to sign copies of his award-winning book, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, published the previous year.11
In 2006 the widow of Michael Schwerner—who, with fellow civil rights workers James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, was killed in 1964 by Ku Klux Klan members in Philadelphia, Mississippi—donated money to the Neshoba County Public Library’s Collier-Mars Civil Rights Collection, established several years earlier by a multiracial Philadelphia coalition that led efforts to bring one of the killers to trial and convict him in 2005 for his part in the murders. The collection was named for the black minister who bravely delivered Chaney’s graveyard eulogy and a white woman who had immediately denounced the murders and as a result lost her local business.12 Whereas forty years earlier a Mississippi public library was often a place that divided races, now, in Philadelphia, it was a place to bring them together. Two years later the Jackson Public Library renamed its South Hills Branch after Richard Wright. As a child in Jim Crow Mississippi, Wright had been denied access to any public library.13
In Georgia in 2008 the Columbus Public Library hosted “381 Days: The Montgomery Bus Boycott Story,” an exhibit circulating public libraries across the South and the rest of the country that marked the fiftieth anniversary of Rosa Parks’s arrest. Fifty years earlier, the library had itself been segregated.14 In 2015 a six-panel mural depicting the 1965 Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, march completed by George Washington Carver High School students in the mid-1990s found a home outside the Rufus Lewis Regional Library on Mobile Highway, which fifty years earlier marchers had passed.15
While the public library as a place in the South offered platforms for racial reconciliation after 1965, the library profession as a whole does not appear to have internalized into its collective memory the deeply painful experiences desegregating public libraries brought to black Americans. As part of the “Libraries and the Life of the Mind in America” series of lectures the ALA hosted for its centennial year, in 1975 eminent black historian John Hope Franklin—who in the 1950s had to turn down luncheon invitations from fellow researchers at the Library of Congress because nearby restaurants denied him service—delivered an address entitled “Libraries in a Pluralistic Society.” American librarians “have many reasons to be pleased with their contributions to the life of the mind in the United States,” he said, but Franklin also reminded his audience that Carnegie had been complicit with local southern whites who segregated their public library services. And “until the recent cases involving public education and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” he noted, “public libraries in the South and in the ghettos of the North were not serving in a manner to promote the healthy growth of a pluralistic society.” He concluded by calling on the profession to recognize its flawed history as a way to help it live up to its high ideals.16
Yet less than two years later, the ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom (OIF) released The Speaker, a film that depicted a high school group’s contested decision to invite a controversial but fictitious eugenicist (based on the real-life Stanford University scientist William Shockley), who believed black people were genetically inferior to whites, to speak on their campus. When ALA executive board members previewed it in early 1977, “not a person moved,” recalled Robert Wedgeworth, the ALA’s first black executive director. Reaction was so intense that it “pitted friend against friend; colleague against colleague.”17
On one side were members who argued the film represented a good way to generate discussion about the importance of defending intellectual freedom. They were led by Judith Krug, a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, native who had received a library science degree from the University of Chicago in 1962 and spent several years as a reference librarian in the Windy City before becoming the ALA’s first director of the newly created Office of Intellectual Freedom in 1967. She held an absolutist position on people’s right to free access to information—no matter how controversial—and a commitment to link that position with ALA policy and librarianship’s professional practice. She did not, however, have any personal experience in southern Jim Crow practices as a librarian or patron nor any direct experiences with the way the ALA had addressed the issue of segregated public library services before 1960.
On the other side were members who said the subject of the film was probably racist, certainly highly insensitive. Among those leading this group was ALA Black Caucus organizer E. J. Josey, born and raised in Norfolk, Virginia, and from 1959 to 1966 chief librarian at the historically black Savannah State College. At the 1963 ALA conference, he had objected vehemently when the ALA sought to honor the Mississippi Library Association’s journal and cited the fact that no black Mississippi librarians were allowed to be members of that association. Another was Clara Stanton Jones, Detroit Public Library director, who, as the association’s first black president, presided over the 1977 conference. Jones had grown up in the 1920s in segregated St. Louis, in the 1930s was educated at historically black Spelman College in segregated Atlanta, and spent the early years of her professional career serving as an academic librarian at Dillard and Southern Universities, both historically black colleges, in segregated New Orleans.
Both Josey and Jones had directly experienced the humiliations Jim Crow forced on their lives, and both had witnessed the ALA’s relative silence against segregated public library systems in the American South throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Perhaps it was these experiences that caused Josey to refer to The Speaker as “that goddamned film” and grounded Jones’s thinking when she accused the OIF of being “insensitive.” Together, they echoed the thoughts of many others who wondered why the OIF had chosen the subject, when other subjects would have served the purpose equally well. That Josey and Jones lived the history this book describes—and Krug did not—perhaps explains why. How else to explain Krug’s historically ill-informed response to a Chicago Daily News reporter who covered an ALA debate about The Speaker at its January 1978 midwinter conference? The association, she said, had “been front and center since 1940 in support of the First Amendment.”18
At its 2014 summer conference, thirty-seven years after the ALA showed The Speaker, the association hosted a program entitled “Speaking about ‘The Speaker,’” cosponsored by its Intellectual Freedom Committee, the Black Caucus, and the Library History Round Table. The association had arranged for two conference screenings of the film before the program, then followed it with a moderated audience discussion. “OIF is aware of the hard feelings—and even pain—the film and its controversy brought to many members of the association,” a preliminary program summary noted. “It’s our belief that a thoughtful reflection of the film and the controversy by those who were there, as well as those who have studied and otherwise considered the issues, can help ALA members, particularly those who are newer members, as we continue to discuss often difficult issues within the association.” Yet one member—who was also a member of the Intellectual Freedom Round Table, the Social Responsibilities Round Table, and its Feminist Task Force—would have none of it. “There is no way having this program can help but open old wounds,” she argued. “It was a very painful time for ALA and I, for one, see no reason to rehash this experience. It might be different if this would lead us to a better understanding of intellectual freedom and racism, but I doubt that it will do either of these things.”19
The stories we tell in previous pages are an undeniable part of southern, civil rights, and library history. We hope we’ve done an adequate job of filling a knowledge gap in southern and civil rights historical literature. As for library history, our purpose is broader. Several years ago, when we told a couple of colleagues from other institutions in the South that we were working on this book, one asked, “You mean southern public libraries were segregated at one time?” Another wanted us to lecture to his Intellectual Freedom class about the heroic defense he assumed that public librarians had put up against segregated services. Both had absorbed professional myths and assumed that librarianship’s twenty-first-century rhetoric about opposing censorship, defending intellectual freedom, and offering neutral service to all people characterized its entire history.
Although librarianship has moved away from the 1960s chronologically, the story we tell here directly challenges the profession’s collective memory of this subject and time period and provides essential information heretofore absent from our professional discourse. In 1995 Todd Honma addressed what he saw as “the invisibility of race in library and information studies” and concluded that over the years librarianship has by its silence been complicit in the formation and to some extent the perpetuation of systemic racism.20 John Hope Franklin’s admonition to develop “better understanding of intellectual freedom and racism” as subjects in contemporary professional practice is as relevant today as when he delivered it in 1975. Without coming to grips with a history that portrays both halos and warts, the library profession will always have difficulty seeing the limits of its ability to provide services, books, and other materials “presenting all points of view concerning the problems and issues of our times.”21
On July 11, 2010, four members of South Carolina’s “Greenville Eight,” who had conducted a sit-in at the Greenville Public Library fifty years earlier, met to celebrate and reminisce. “In this place of hope, 50 years ago we found rejection and degradation,” said Jesse Jackson, one of the protesters present. “We persevered—and now America is better off for it.” Margaree Crosby, another of the protesters, told a reporter: “Everybody asks me, ‘Well, were you afraid?’ I say, ‘No, I was not afraid.’” “I still stand for justice. I still stand for the right thing,” added Elaine Means, a third protester. When it was brought to their attention that the public library had no permanent marker to commemorate their act, Jackson expressed regret; he hoped that would be corrected.22
Over previous decades, members of the media (national, state, and local), local and state governments, business leaders, professional associations, and civic organizations of all kinds have apologized either for previous racist behavior or for doing little or nothing while black people were beaten, jailed, and sometimes killed for standing up for their civil rights. Library associations, including the American Library Association, have never done that—in large part, we suspect, because most librarians living today do not know the history recorded in these pages. It’s long past time that library organizations and individual libraries do something to recognize the kids—now senior citizens for those who are still alive—who literally risked their lives to integrate libraries. Perhaps libraries can start by posting a commendation on the wall next to a copy of a Library Bill of Rights that provided these young activists no support in the 1960s.