“America was founded on white supremacy and the notion of black inferiority and black unfreedom,” writes Leon F. Litwack in his seminal Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow.1 This legacy, which some have argued constitutes America’s original sin, has been evident—albeit seldom acknowledged—in American library history until well into the twentieth century. As slaves in the antebellum South, blacks were denied access to libraries of any sort. Their free brothers and sisters in the North, however, managed to create some library opportunities for themselves. Because most white literary societies would not admit them, early-nineteenth-century blacks in Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania organized nearly fifty literary societies that sponsored debates and reading rooms with small circulating book collections. Many were run by women; most did not survive more than a decade.
Although teaching “the Negro how to use his leisure time to advantage” formed one objective, the New York Garrison Literary Association’s 1834 charter noted, its circulating library “made available to many readers anti-slavery and colonization publications” and “books relating to the Negro and to slavery.” These information resources guided the society’s discourse. “The subjects of discussion generally relate to their own rights and interests and frequently result in decisions from which the prejudiced mind of the white man would startle and shrink with apprehension,” reported one observer of a Philadelphia Library Company of Colored Persons early-nineteenth-century meeting. These kinds of societies, he continued, were “numerous, united and bitterly conscious of their degradation and their power.”2
As education became compulsory, as literacy increased, and as improved technologies reduced the cost of printed materials in the first half of the nineteenth century, a new type of library appeared. In 1854 Boston opened a “public library” funded by local tax dollars. Its founders argued that democracy required an informed citizenry and that providing the public with good books containing practical information was a civic responsibility. Other communities followed Boston’s lead.
As northern public libraries grew in number after the Civil War, black experiences in some of them were positive. When, for example, Cincinnati built its new public library in 1868, the city’s “Colored School Board” petitioned trustees to admit black children. The building opened two years later, and residents over age fourteen (including “colored children”) could draw books as long as a “responsible citizen” vouched for them.3 And in the late 1890s a black Pullman railroad car porter specifically arranged his work schedule so that he would be in Boston every Sunday to use the Boston Public Library. “As far as the library is concerned,” he told an attendant, “one man has as good a chance as another.”4
In the South, postbellum Jim Crow practices affecting what minimal public library services existed in the late nineteenth century mirrored the kind of humiliating experiences other civic institutions exercised on black people. When the Colored National Liberal Convention met in the Louisville, Kentucky, Public Library auditorium in 1872, for example, none of the delegates were welcome in the library proper.5 And when a black man tried to buy a “first-class ticket” to a public library auditorium event three years later, the manager refused, saying: “I will allow no white person to occupy a seat in the balcony, nor is it fair to suppose that I will permit a black person to occupy a seat in the dress-circle or parquet. To preserve the dignity and character of the hall, I must have a separation of the races.”6
Why couldn’t blacks check out books in public libraries? a northern magazine columnist asked a southern librarian in 1891. “Southern people do not believe in ‘social equality,’” she responded. “The libraries in the Southern States are closed to the low down negro eyes,” one Florida white wrote in 1911. “All the mean crimes that are done are committed by some educated negro.” Under circumstances that in white people’s eyes confirmed black inferiority and baseness and through social practices effected what Litwack calls “ritualized and institutionalized subordination,”7 the few black libraries that did take root in the South often also functioned as subtle acts of defiance against prevailing Jim Crow norms.
As late-nineteenth-century Jim Crow practices spreading across the South choked their economic opportunities and limited their access to education, blacks turned inward to craft their own institutions, all providing some shelter from the often violent and constant indignities racism brought, all enabling a degree of social authority and acknowledging intelligence and independence they could not enjoy in larger southern society. In 1898 James A. Atkins, a Knoxville College black student forced to live at home because he could not afford dormitories near the college library, longed for a public library “in East Knoxville where I might run down a lot of additional information to various prescribed readings in our lesson texts. . . . A hidden intellectual hunger gripped me, with no chance to satisfy it.”8 It was this kind of hunger that led some southern blacks to establish lyceums, literary societies, and libraries in the late nineteenth century. Some people—black and white—who lamented the lack of public library services to blacks took matters into their own hands.
Because only whites could use the new Macon, Georgia, Public Library, for example, in 1881 blacks accessed a one thousand–volume subscription library that a local clergyman operated out of his house.9 Two years later, Memphis blacks established the Memphis Lyceum, where Ida B. Wells not only made friends, participated in readings, and listened to poetry, recitations, and music, but also honed the oratorical skills she successfully harnessed in later life as a leading civil rights activist and founding member of the NAACP.10 In a borrowed room of the White Rock Baptist Church in Durham, North Carolina, blacks organized a library of eight hundred books in 1913. Three years later, it moved into the Durham Colored Library built with $2,400 in contributions.11
In Alabama in 1940, the Savery Library at the historically black Talladega College established a “Community Library” service that included not only a children’s corner and teenage section in the library; it also sponsored a bookmobile service to black people in the city and county. Beginning in 1941, a bright blue bookmobile bearing the words “Free Library Service” in red letters visited city and rural schools, library stations, and preschools. “The reports of many phases of the extension work are filled with heart-warming stories of reading materials going into bookless homes,” noted a 1950s Savery Library flyer, “and of both city and rural persons drawing out their first book from a ‘public library.’”12
In 1950 the Delta Sigma Theta sorority, founded at historically black Howard University in 1913, raised enough money to purchase a bookmobile for blacks in northwest rural Georgia, the culmination of a five-year program to furnish books and reading material to the South’s underprivileged areas. The Georgia State Department of Education and the Georgia Library Commission expressed gratitude for the gift and accepted the bookmobile into its regular public services. Events celebrating the donation, however, took place not in Georgia but in New York City—headquarters for the Deltas. There an eleven-year-old girl cut the ribbon. “I am happy to launch the Bookmobile for the children, farmers, housewives and business people of Georgia,” she said, “and send you on your way with Godspeed.” Deltas promised that the bookmobile “would be available for the use of all the rural people,” not just blacks.13
In 1909 James J. H. Gregory of Marblehead, Massachusetts, who as a white Civil War Union soldier had seen the plight of southern blacks and recognized how they were being left behind in the turn-of-the-century public library movement, arranged with historically black Atlanta University to disseminate fifty libraries of thirty to fifty books each to southern sites (particularly educational institutions) located in communities where blacks were denied access to public libraries.14 In the 1930s, at twenty South Carolina locations, blacks had access to collections donated by a white clergyman befriended in his youth by a black schoolteacher. Because these libraries had been “founded on faith,” they were called “Faith Cabin Libraries.”15
By the beginning of the twentieth century, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie had begun issuing building grants to communities with inadequate libraries and library services. Between 1890 and 1919 he contributed $45 million to construct 1,689 public library buildings, a number of them in southern cities. To qualify, communities had to promise annual support of 10 percent of the construction grant and provide an adequate site. Even though many of them sported the title “Free Public Library,” Carnegie made no demands about racial restrictions.
Although Jackson, Mississippi, received its first public library—a Carnegie building—in 1914, it was available to Jackson’s white citizens only. In 1938 several black community leaders petitioned the Jackson city commission to take over a small library they had started; it held 784 books, all donated by blacks.16 The petition failed. But in 1944 Pearl Sneed became head of the Jackson Public Library and began lobbying for part of a new municipal auditorium for blacks to include a room for a library. In the meantime, she “on numerous occasions permitted Negroes, who needed to make use of library resources, to use them in her office.”17
In the late 1940s, members of the white Jackson Junior League began a campaign to open a public library for blacks. With some assistance from the white public library board, the George Washington Carver Branch opened its doors in 1950. For twenty-one months the Junior League financed and operated the branch, but in late 1951 the board assumed responsibility. The following year a second library for blacks—the College Park Branch Library—opened, and in 1956 the Carver branch library moved into a new and modern structure. Blacks, who made up nearly 40 percent of Jackson’s population, could receive other materials from white libraries only through interlibrary loan.18
Sneed’s action mirrored those of a few other white, mostly female, librarians. To provide blacks access to collections without threatening the Jim Crow culture in which she operated, in the century’s second decade Gadsden, Alabama, public librarian Lena Martin evolved a practice later adopted by several public libraries in southern cities unable to afford a separate “colored” branch. Black teachers and students could use collections by directly contacting either her or Ruby Prater, a black maid who cleaned the library. By midcentury the library allowed blacks in the building (rather than serving them through the back door) but only at reference tables marked “Colored Only.”19
Although southern whites occasionally supported library services to southern blacks, that support was heavily circumscribed by local conditions. When Birmingham opened a public library in 1891, African Americans at first were allowed to use it. Seven years later, after black people raised funds for a library in the local high school, town officials formally denied them use of the main library. For years, black school principals pressed the white library board to extend public library service to black communities, but the city responded only after the principals raised over $4,000 and offered it to the board to jump-start library services if the city agreed to support the facility and pay for a librarian. What became the Booker T. Washington Branch Library opened in a vacant store in 1918. Washington, a leading civil rights activist and founder of Tuskegee University, had advocated for such a branch when he visited Birmingham in 1913.
Like most black branches, collections included periodicals and newspapers issued “by and for the colored people.” Like many black branches, its collections could not mix with other books in the system. (Not all library systems followed this model, however. In many, blacks and whites could share use of any books the system owned, although system spaces in which they handled books were separated by race.) “Books for the colored branch are to be held entirely separate and distinct,” a rule stated. And while the city paid the rent and librarian’s salary, it refused appropriations for acquisitions. To compensate, blacks raised money through local black schools, but when through their branch they requested books that were available only in the white library, the board created a new rule. If “the need of a loan is urgent the copy from the Central Library may be given to the Branch,” the rule read, “and a new one bought from the colored library book fund to replace it.” Thus, Birmingham’s blacks could handle books whites had touched; whites would not handle books blacks touched.
When the Washington branch librarian allowed one white to use the library in 1919, he was soundly scolded. “Do not permit a white person in the future to register at the Washington Branch,” the system vice director wrote him. “Colored members are not enrolled” in the main library, “nor should white ones join the Washington Branch.” Officials routinely underfunded the black branch, for years the only one of its kind in the state. And although “the black community provided the stimulus for the creation of the branch, whites took most of the credit,” library historian Toby Graham observes. “Their reports applauded their own enlightened behavior. . . . The spirit of reform that animated board members and administrators presumed a belief in white supremacy and an obligation to uphold southern mores.”20 In the 1930s the main library was still open only to whites, but library officials did hire a black librarian, located her in a back room, and through a back door she retrieved books requested by blacks who knocked and made requests. It is unknown if white patrons knew about this breach of Jim Crow library practice.21
In the early 1920s, in Georgia, ten-year-old African American Annie Watters climbed the two flights of steps necessary to enter the Rome Public Library. “As I was about to enter,” she later recalled, the librarian arose from her chair, adjusted her glasses, and said, “Go back; you cannot come in here.” Stunned, Watters stood still. “Finally, as I turned to go and with tears in my eyes and a heart full of hurt . . . [I] said, ‘I’m leaving now, but I promise that one of these days I’ll be back and won’t have to leave.’” So taken was Annie’s mother at her daughter’s rejection that she organized a group to petition the white library board for a “colored branch.” After several years the board agreed to open one in the basement of a black Presbyterian church.22 Young Annie would ultimately become a librarian herself and a strong civil rights activist, providing library services to segregated communities in Greenville, South Carolina, and later throughout the Atlanta area.
As the public library movement that Carnegie grants accelerated in the North after 1890 took root in the turn-of-the-century South, several urban southern public library systems agreed to open separate branches for blacks. Experiences were mixed. Ten years after Memphis’s Cossitt Free Library opened in 1893, for example, the city started a black branch as a joint endeavor with LeMoyne College, a black school founded in 1870.23 In 1903 the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, authorized a Charlotte Public Library for Colored People separate from an equally new white public library. It opened in 1906 with six hundred donated volumes.24 By the summer of 1916, the San Antonio Public Library weakly supported four library stations in black schools.25 In Beaumont, Texas, the public library opened a branch in 1929 for black people in a local black high school.26
Because it would “place Mobile [Ala.] before the world as the most liberal and fair-minded Southern City in America,” members of Mobile’s black middle class reasoned, they requested public library service in 1928. At first they wanted a room in the main library, but white citizens protested. “The question of the negro library is becoming acute,” the board chairman wrote white consultants Arthur E. Bostwick, St. Louis Public Library director and former American Library Association (ALA) president, and Carl Milam, one-time director of the Birmingham Public Library and the current ALA executive director. “The negroes themselves are very anxious to have it in . . . the rear of the main library and as nearly a part thereof as possible.” After Milam identified potential trouble between the races “in their going and coming” and Bostwick argued that black patrons would more readily see inequities in services leading to a “dissatisfaction with the whole arrangement” that a separate black facility would mask, the board decided on a separate “colored branch.” Mobile opened its Davis Avenue Branch on July 14, 1931, but three months later the branch lost all funds because of the Great Depression economy. To keep their library open, black people solicited donations, hosted fundraisers, and charged patrons a dollar a year for use. In 1932 the librarian also wrote the New York Times to ask its readers for donations of books and money. The branch survived until 1961, when Mobile desegregated its public library system.27
Blacks opened the Richard B. Harrison Public Library in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1935 with funds from the city, county, and local black people, who raised $500 by giving a play and soliciting donations. Within a year they had two thousand books and a circulation of eight thousand.28 After World War II, the branch started a bookmobile service to Raleigh’s rural environs. Without mentioning race or segregation of public library services in the state, bookmobile librarian Anne Robinson described several visits to black rural churches in a 1953 Bulletin of the American Library Association. At a bookmobile stop in a rural area, an elderly gentleman approached. Asked if he needed help, he replied: “Not today, Ma’am. I can’t read much, but I’ve heard so much about this here bookwagon, just thought I would come and see for myself.” Would he like to learn to read? “Yep, lady, I sho’ would,” he responded. He then joined a group of seventeen who met weekly at a local black Baptist church.29
Shortly after World War II, the Carroll-Heard Regional Library opened a “colored branch” in Carrollton, Georgia. Its origins demonstrate the limits Jim Crow communities placed on their citizens—white and black. White library director Edith Foster realized the only way she could serve blacks, who made up 20 percent of her service area, was to establish a separate branch. “I recognized that in setting up a dual library system I would be making my assignment painfully difficult as a few white citizens would be wary of what I was doing and some Black leaders outside the area might attempt to use the program to ‘stir folks up.’” She sought out local black leaders, promised “to buy only brand new books and not to put old and used books off on the Blacks,” won their approval, and then approached her all-white board, which also approved the initiative. But how to keep costs down? One board member suggested they get a war surplus building from nearby Fort Oglethorpe. Ultimately, the library acquired the fort’s telephone exchange building, which it dismantled and trucked to Carrollton. Local blacks raised $4,000 to complete the work, Delta Sigma Theta’s Iota Chapter threw in $450, and in 1948 the King Street Library opened.
In advance of opening, however, Foster recognized “the possibility of an ugly problem that might raise its head.” Someone, she predicted, would ask, “Edith, are you mixing the books?” To prevent this, she had a “neat triangle” imprinted on the spine of every King Street Library book. As anticipated, at the library opening one white attending the ceremony asked if the system mixed the books. “I pointed to the books in front of us—all new, neatly processed and arranged. ‘See that triangle? That assures the Negroes that their books are theirs.’” Days later, a black post office janitor approached Foster outside the library one night, just as a streetlight came on over their heads. “You know what you are to my people?” he asked. “You are that light.”30
Public libraries in Mason-Dixon borderline cities often had different practices. From its 1886 opening, Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library allowed black people to access collections and services but not without some white protest. In 1910 a white woman complained to the Baltimore Sun of having to share reading space with ragged, dirty, and semiliterate black children. Weeks later, another white citizen suggested separate reading rooms. Library officials ignored their comments. In 1934, however, the Pratt established “Colored Men” and “Colored Women” washrooms because whites complained that they did not want to share the same facilities. “Pratt Library Stoops to Jim Crow,” headlined an article in Baltimore’s weekly black newspaper, the Afro-American. Except for the Pratt, the Afro-American reported in 1936, “there is not a single public library, not a swimming pool or public park in [Maryland], open to colored.”31
From its beginnings in 1898, the District of Columbia Public Library (DCPL) was open to black people. But segregated services were not out of sight. Of the eighteen “home libraries” the DCPL sponsored in 1910, seven were in the homes of “colored” people. “It is interesting to note that the best circulation figures were received from one of these groups,” the library reported in 1911.32 On the other hand, when the DCPL proposed to locate public library branches in local schools after World War I, the board of education—worried about potential race conflict—attempted to segregate them based on whether they were white or black schools. Blacks protested so vehemently that the board backed down. “If patrons go into the [central] public library to receive books without regard to color, why should the Board assume there would be any friction or conflict in receiving similar service at a branch library?” queried the attorney representing eighteen black civic organizations. “There is not and has never been any friction attendant upon children of the two races standing at the counter of the central library to receive books.”33
At the turn of the century, Atlanta obtained a Carnegie grant to build a public library. When the new building opened in 1902, Atlanta University professor W. E. B. Du Bois—in later life one of America’s leading black intellectuals but at the time working on his seminal The Souls of Black Folk, in which he rejected the accommodationism Booker T. Washington advocated—led several colleagues to a meeting with trustees to ask why “black folk” were not allowed to use a “free public library” serving a city of 53,905 white and 35,912 black people. “It was not pleasant going in,” he reported later to the nationally circulated Independent magazine, and although trustees were “polite,” people “stared and wondered what business we had there.” “Do justice to the black people of Atlanta by giving them the same free library privileges that you propose giving the whites,” he pleaded. It was illegal to tax blacks for services they could not use, he argued. “The spirit of this great gift to the city was not the spirit of caste or exclusion, but rather the catholic spirit which recognizes no artificial differences of rank or birth or race, but seeks to give all men equal opportunity to make the most of themselves.”
The board chairman responded, “Do you not think that allowing whites and negroes to use this library would be fatal to its usefulness?” Du Bois was puzzled. “The answer seemed to me so distressingly obvious,” he told the Independent, “that I said simply, ‘I will express no opinion on that point.’” One of Du Bois’s colleagues, recognizing the futility of their request, then asked if Atlanta’s black population would get separate public library services. The chairman said the city council would be solicited for sums “proportionate to the amount of taxes paid by negroes of the city” and that “Northern philanthropists” would be solicited to fund a library building. “Then he bade us adieu politely and we walked home wondering.”34 Du Bois later complained to the Waterbury (Conn.) American newspaper: “I am taxed for the Carnegie Public Library of Atlanta, where I cannot enter to draw my own books.” The American commented: “Is it possible to conceive a greater absurdity from the American point of view?”35 But Atlanta blacks responded differently. In 1904 Atlanta’s Sojourner Truth Club opened a Free Reading-Room and Library supported by contributions and “entertainments . . . at all times uplifting and elevating.” Speakers included Du Bois, whose Souls of Black Folk had been published the previous year; black suffragist and first president of the National Association of Colored Women, Mary Church Terrell; and Booker T. Washington, who himself had established a reading room and debating society for emancipated slaves in his hometown of Malden, West Virginia, in 1875.36
Not until 1920 did white Atlanta Public Library director Tommie Dora Barker press her board to build a branch for Atlanta’s black citizens with a $25,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation. A year later, Atlanta opened one in a black neighborhood known as “Sweet Auburn.” Besides the $25,000 Carnegie grant, the building fund received $10,000 from the city, $10,000 from the county, and $5,000 from the “white citizens of Atlanta,” the latter sum “raised entirely by letter” in “two days’ time.” The board expected to make the branch “a center for many activities among the colored people” and “the building itself a thing of beauty in their community,” Barker noted. “The yard will be planted with shrubbery and flowers, and we want the whole appearance of the building and its surroundings to set a standard for their homes.” As librarian, she selected Alice Cary, activist for black kindergartens in Atlanta and recently retired Morris Brown College instructor; Cary quickly hired two black assistants. By mid-decade, the branch was functioning as a community center in the neighborhood.37
Carnegie money enabled a number of public library systems in the urban South to provide services to black people. Some incorporated services to blacks within Carnegie buildings. In 1905 the Jacksonville, Florida, Public Library opened its doors in a new Carnegie building and designated a room on the second floor the “colored” reading room.38 In 1908 the Oklahoma legislature considered whether to amend Jim Crow laws to include public libraries. In Oklahoma City, for example, “the negroes take their seats at the reading tables and have all the same privileges as the whites,” and “many whites have made complaints.” Some worried that if the law passed, Carnegie would stop donating libraries in Oklahoma. A month later, the Daily Oklahoman noted: “The better element of negroes in the city are urging separate accommodations at the public library. They are asking it in an excellent spirit and the request should be promptly heeded.”39 On the one hand, the statement dripped with a patronization masking the racism the Jim Crow South rationalized. On the other, it reflected the limited options southern blacks had available to obtain public library services. And even minimal services were always at risk. In the Tulsa race riot of 1921, whites burned one thousand black homes, five hotels, thirty-one restaurants, twenty-four grocery stores, one school, and Tulsa’s black library branch.40
Other cities also used Carnegie grants to open separate black branches. “We do not allow negroes to draw books from or to read in either branches or central library,” the New Orleans Public Library director wrote a colleague in 1909. “We have been very fortunate in the enforcement of this regulation; comparatively few negroes have applied for library privileges and these have been very politely told that we regret we have no arrangements that permit negroes to borrow from the library.”41 In 1912, however, Carnegie donated $50,000 to New Orleans, half for a main library addition, the other half for a “colored branch”: “Our board fully realizes the need of this provision,” wrote the board president, “just as . . . other southern cities have had similar need.”42 By the early 1940s some blacks were permitted to use the main library but only in the librarian’s office—and away from white patrons—while he watched; they were not permitted to use the card catalog. After World War II, library officials did allow “adult colored persons” to use one table in the main reading room—not without grousing, however. “The negroes in this community are receiving too much rather than too little,” complained one white patron, “and to a sizeable extent they are not taking care of what they receive.”43
In Savannah, Georgia, a Free Public Library for Negroes opened in 1906, funded by city money and subscription fees. Within a year it had twelve hundred volumes, many donated by whites. By 1910 Carnegie had approved an application by Savannah’s black community leaders for a $12,000 grant, and the city agreed to provide the necessary $1,200 per year to support it. Locals only had to come up with a site. The quest to purchase a library site took four years, however. For several months, officials sold buttons reading, “Let’s Have the Colored Public Library” and encouraged people to wear them on the streets as evidence they had contributed. Regularly, the black weekly Savannah Tribune carried announcements of concerts, plays, and direct appeals for funds, at the same time reporting contributions as small as twenty-five and fifty cents; many whites also contributed money and books. The building finally opened in 1914.44 Over the years, the library provided a welcoming and safe environment for Savannah’s blacks. “I loved the Colored Branch of the Carnegie Public Library,” Pulitzer Prize–winning author James Alan McPherson later wrote about his childhood experiences there in the early 1950s.45 So did future U.S. Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas. As a grade school student, he regularly visited the library in the late 1950s. “I was never prouder than when I got my first library card, though the day when I’d checked out enough books to fill it up came close.”46
In 1914 the Gainesville, Texas, Public Library opened, designating a reading room “on the lower level . . . with separate entrance” for Gainesville’s blacks, who were expected to raise money for the books to be housed there. The room was never used for that purpose, however; instead, ten years later, local officials authorized a branch in the Gainesville Negro School.47 “A beginning has been made,” the white librarian wrote in her diary. “We will give these Negroes something worthwhile yet.”48 With a Carnegie grant, Nashville opened the Nashville Negro Public Library in 1916.49 At about the same time, Carnegie donated $15,000 for a public library for Houston’s “colored residents.” Local blacks raised funds to buy the lot and furniture and build the sidewalks.50 In 1920 Dallas opened its first black branch.51
Yet not all Carnegie building grants for black branch libraries were successful. To Mound Bayou, Mississippi—a “widely known negro town” of a thousand founded in 1887—Andrew Carnegie donated $4,000 to erect a brick public library in 1909, the Savannah Tribune proudly reported. What the Tribune did not mention, however, was that Charles Banks—friend of Booker T. Washington (who had recommended the grant to Carnegie), director of the local bank, and a local political “boss”—failed to fulfill Mound Bayou’s obligation to allocate 10 percent of the gift for acquisitions annually. In 1916 Banks’s political rivals complained to Carnegie that after the building opened in 1910, it was rented for four years to the local Masonic Benefit Association (Banks was the association’s secretary-treasurer). It also hosted a few public meetings and a local school but, as late as 1917, had no bookshelves and no books, except for a small collection the school supported. When queried, Banks attributed the problem to Mound Bayou’s “financial difficulties and embarrassments by reason of the advent of the boll weevil as far back as 1912, and then in 1914 the War breaking out paralyzed the entire cotton section.” Eight years after Mississippi’s governor removed and replaced all Mound Bayou officers (including Banks) for failing to hold local elections, the City Federation of Women’s Clubs petitioned to reopen the building as a public library and promised to run it.52
When construction of a Carnegie-funded building in Little Rock, Arkansas, was well under way in 1909, black leaders approached trustees to open “a Negro Library” in the black community. Trustees balked. According to board member Samuel W. Reyburn, son of slave owners, he and Carnegie’s secretary argued about whether blacks should be admitted to a building that Carnegie funded. To resolve the problem, they agreed to wait until Booker T. Washington met with Carnegie in New York. At the meeting Washington apparently recommended separate libraries, probably because he recognized that if they were not separate, Little Rock blacks would likely have access to no library services at all. Feeling victorious, Reyburn put his own spin on the agreement: “Carnegie aid for the [Little Rock] library for whites alone we owe to Booker T. Washington.” Not until 1917 did Little Rock’s black community get a separate branch (not funded by the Carnegie grant a decade earlier), but the central library regarded it as little more than a deposit station for books and tended to ignore it.53
“Through a veil I could perceive the forbidden city, the Louisville where white folks lived,” wrote Blyden Jackson—the first black professor the University of North Carolina tenured—of his childhood experiences there in the twentieth century’s second decade. “It was the Louisville of the downtown hotels, the lower floor of big movie houses, the high schools I read about in the daily newspapers, the restricted haunts I sometimes passed, like the white restaurants and country clubs, the other side of windows in the banks, and, of course, the inner sanctums of offices where I could go only as a humble client or a menial custodian.”54 Among the very few institutions within the “forbidden city” that welcomed black people, however, were “colored branches” of the Louisville public library system. “I have just come from Louisville,” Booker T. Washington wrote Carnegie’s secretary in 1909, “where I had the opportunity of inspecting the Branch library provided for the colored people in that city from Mr. Carnegie’s gift. It is a model in many respects.”55
Initially, however, the model was not universally accepted by Louisville’s black community. “When we first opened a colored branch [in 1905], there were some of our race seriously opposed to the project,” recalled an assistant librarian. “The segregation idea was repulsive, and they did not give the work their support.” On the other hand, she argued, “those of another race cannot know our wants, our habits, our likes and dislikes as we do. . . . It would be impossible for them to give us the service that one of our race can give in an atmosphere where welcome and freedom are the predominant elements, and this is surely the condition in the colored branch libraries in Louisville.”56
Like whites across the country, blacks perceived public libraries as important civic institutions that helped create an informed citizenry and offered myriad opportunities for self-improvement, and they eagerly wanted to benefit from the public library movement. Equally as important to black people as books and periodicals, however, was the library as a place in a Jim Crow South where in “public” parks they often found signs reading “No Dogs and Niggers Allowed.” For black and most diaspora people, “place” had special meaning. Places they could access easily and safely constituted “points of sociability where bonds of trust and collaboration were established and maintained,” notes historian Ira Berlin. “More than an attachment to . . . [a specific geographical site], the concept of place spoke to relationships, often deeply personal. . . . In such places, men and women knew one another and knew one another’s kin and near kin. . . . Intimacy made for belonging.”57 Like black churches, black branch libraries became safe and welcoming places.
Thomas Fountain Blue, branch library director and himself the son of slaves, recognized this need quickly. In his 1906 annual report he noted, “One of the features of the [black] library is the attractiveness of the quarters.” He particularly addressed “the front yard with its well kept lawn and flower bed. . . . It is not only supplying the intellectual wants of the people but it serves as a permanent object lesson in cleanliness and order.” The branch also hosted a boys’ reading club, “to acquaint the boys with some of the best authors and to create a taste for wholesome literature,” and a children’s story hour, at which “new ideas are formed and unconsciously a taste for reading is acquired.”58
In addition, Blue instituted a training class for black librarians where apprentice students learned the essential skills of librarianship, such as cataloging, classification, and the development of collections. Like the broader world of American librarianship, black women more than men sought to become librarians, in part because it was one of the few emerging professions that welcomed them, and they would work for less than men. Unlike white library school students, however, Blue’s students directly observed the benefits of “library as place” for black society and, after they completed his training program, took his ideas about librarianship to positions in Carnegie-funded “colored branches” opening up across the South in the early twentieth century.59
That Blue’s branch library had quickly become a community social center was obvious. Not including the wildly popular story hour, in 1910 the library hosted 657 meetings, “an increase of 313 percent over last year in this phase of activity.”60 So successful was this branch that the library system used Carnegie money to open a second in 1914. For the dedication ceremony, local poet Joseph S. Cotter Sr. read a poem he had written for the fifth anniversary of the first black branch:
The Story Hour
Ef you want to play at livin’
So’s to keep you spry an’ sweet,
Ef you’d ketch de gist o’ wisdom
As it sparkles in defeat;
Ef you’d have a tip in pleasure
Whar de worth outstrips de bids,
Heah de lady tell de stories
To de kids.
Some is settin’ on dey haunches,
Some is leanin’ on dey hands,
Not a single one gits tired
Kase dey roams in fairy lands.
Dey plays hide-an’-seek wid nations,
Deys de ’arth an’ heaven’s hybrids
As de lady tells de stories
To de kids.
Now you needn’t talk like big folks,
An’ you needn’t spruce so fine,
An’ you needn’t long for rubies,
An’ you needn’t pause to dine,
For all dis will come by dreamin’,
Whilst yo’ eyes one wakeful lids,
Whar de lady tells de stories
To de kids.
An’ you think you rule in China,
An’ you dream you own Japan,
An’ you bow befo’ de cradle
In de blessed Holy Lan’,
An’ you see de Grecian temples,
An’ you climb de pyramids
When de lady tells de stories
To de kids.61
The new building had three classrooms and an auditorium for 350. Like the “Eastern Colored Branch,” the “Western Colored Branch” quickly developed into a social center. “During a single month,” a 1914 pamphlet announced, “as many as 93 meetings have been held” in the two branches, including a baby clinic, Sunday school teachers’ training classes, story hours, and meetings of the Ministers’ Alliance, Boy Scouts, Boys’ Basketball Club, Community Chest Committee, Inter-Racial Committee, Bannecker Reading Circle, Dunbar Literary Club, Douglass Debating Club, Wilberforce Club, Manhattan Athletic Club, Orphan Home Board, Parent Teachers Association, Girls’ Library Club, and the Urban League. “The citizens are made to feel that the buildings belong to them, and that they may use them for anything that makes for their welfare.”62 “Our white friends could do us no greater service than build us a library,” said one black community leader. Said another: “There are more colored people reading in Louisville now than in any time since the days of freedom. This opportunity has been given them by the Public Library.” By 1915, locals called the library “the greatest social center for the colored people of that end of the city.”63
The “library as community center” that Blue crafted in Louisville not only became an institutional imperative linking “colored branches” across the nation; it also served as a model for all public libraries. Little wonder, then, that when he became the first black to speak at an American Library Association conference in 1927 (more than a half-century after ALA organized), he chose as his topic “The Library as a Community Center”:
The library community center . . . has contributed to the public peace by providing a public meeting place, free from political and partisan influences, . . . has contributed to the public welfare by providing for social workers, representing different denominations, a suitable meeting place free from sectarian bias, . . . by providing for our boys and girls a suitable place for amusement and recreation, without which many would be denied this privilege. . . . It has contributed to the educational, professional, business, and social uplift of the community in that it has provided for teachers, doctors, and businessmen and women an acceptable meeting place, where they can hold their conferences and discuss problems under pleasant and cultural surroundings. . . . It has been a means of reaching other groups and making new readers. Frequently strangers who come to attend a meeting remain to join the library.64
Southern Workman, organ of Virginia’s historically black Hampton Institute, agreed. “These branches have become the centers of much of the educational and civic life of the colored people of Louisville, the chief source of inspiration to tens of thousands of Negro boys and girls,” and “an outstanding illustration of interracial cooperation in a public utility which provides equal service and gives general satisfaction to all concerned.”65 When the editor of the Philadelphia Tribune, a black weekly newspaper, visited both branches in 1928, he found “a host of young people poring over books” and “Negro literature and Negro art well represented.”66
These kinds of library-as-place experiences were replicated elsewhere. Although black leaders in Greensboro, North Carolina, obtained a $10,000 Carnegie commitment in 1904, squabbles over where to locate the building delayed its construction until 1924. Once erected, however, the library quickly became a community gathering place. As the “only Carnegie Library for Negroes in North Carolina,” a 1928 Greensboro Daily Record article concluded, the community need it filled “is shown by the manner in which they throng the building. Oftentimes, the building is filled to overflowing with all chairs occupied, and those who cannot find another place sit on the steps.” Elementary and high school students used its collections after school and especially on Saturdays. Adults attended book review, world affairs, and film forums during the week. At various times in its history the library also served as headquarters of the Greensboro Art Center, monitored a teen corner, sponsored a lecture series, and hosted three nursery school groups every week and an afternoon story hour for grade school children. A Heritage Club met monthly to discuss community issues and black history. Several black newspapers informed them. One patron later recalled reading there the weekly Norfolk Journal and Guide, “one of those papers” that kept her informed about “what was going on” in southern black communities. “The real value of any library to its community,” noted the librarian in 1956, “lies in activities which do not readily lend themselves to quantitative reporting.”67
And in 1936 the husband of a recently deceased white teacher of black children in Winter Park, Florida, asked friends and families to help start a library for these children to commemorate his wife. The response was generous, including a city promise of $360 annually. When the “Hannibal Square Library” (the name was taken from the section of town where blacks lived) opened in 1937 with fourteen hundred books, it quickly became a community center, where children called the librarian “Mother” and played board games, Boy Scouts met weekly, and the local Benevolent Society, Sewing Society, and Colored Woman’s Club all organized. “While these are not library activities,” reported one library periodical in 1952, echoing a professional orthodoxy that undervalued library as place, “who can doubt that these gatherings sponsored by the library have been fruitful influences in these manifestations of community spirit?” The article included two photographs of children using the library but failed to mention that Winter Park also supported a public library to which its black citizens had no access.68
While two-thirds of inhabitants of thirteen southern states had no local library service in 1932 (three-fourths in rural areas), services to black people were worse: 89 percent had none.69 A 1935 federal survey showed that only 94 of the 509 public libraries in these states served local black people; half of them were in Kentucky, North Carolina, Texas, and West Virginia.70 Alabama’s 18 public libraries included two black branches, Arkansas’s 19 had one, Florida’s 44 had four, Georgia’s 53 had five, Louisiana’s 16 had three, Mississippi’s 22 had two, South Carolina’s 53 had four, Tennessee’s 34 had five, and Virginia’s 46 had eight.71
Yet during the Great Depression public library services to black southerners actually improved, partly because of philanthropy, partly because of federal government intervention. To expand public library services beyond “colored branches” in urban systems, the Julius Rosenwald Foundation built on earlier efforts to construct schools for southern black children. Rosenwald, president of Sears & Roebuck Department Store, established the foundation in 1917 “for the well being of mankind.” He donated millions of dollars to a variety of causes but had a particular interest in improving the lives of black people. By 1932, when its school-building program ended, the Rosenwald Fund had spent over $28 million to open nearly five thousand new schools—fondly known as Rosenwald Schools—which subsequently served 663,615 students in 883 counties of fifteen southern states. Rosenwald-funded library services to black southerners grew out of this program in the form of demonstration projects. Between 1928 and 1935, these projects expanded public library services to 140,459 blacks. They also increased book circulation to rural blacks by 579 percent.72 In Aberdeen, Mississippi, for example, one Rosenwald agent helped local black communities open a public library containing three hundred volumes in 1938. “The Rosenwald Fund, the local white Women’s Club, and various colored groups and individuals have added to the collection,” she reported.73
Between 1925 and 1930, the Louisiana Library Commission ran its Rosenwald library demonstration projects through black public schools. Headquarters for Webster Parish (over 50 percent black) was the town of Minden, which supported eight separate stations that in 1930 had 981 registered borrowers (460 were schoolchildren). “Students from the illiterate classes are coming into the library asking that their branch be continued through the summer so that they will be able to carry on their work and read when the schools open again next fall,” reported the Rosenwald agent. “Negro preachers are using the library largely for sermon material and getting their congregations to read the books they tell about.”74
In 1931 the Rosenwald Foundation offered officials in Charleston County, South Carolina, five years of funding, up to $20,000, for a library that would provide service to “white and colored with equal opportunities for both and with facilities adopted to the needs of each.” As a result, the Charleston County Free Library opened its Dart Hall Branch with thirty-six hundred books, but because whites shunned it, the facility quickly became known as the “Colored Branch” and served blacks exclusively.75 Rosenwald funding also supported a black branch and rural library stations in Walker County, Alabama, between 1931 and 1936. Although local officials used funds to support a bookmobile and driver to rural white populations, they denied similar funding to black communities, thus forcing the black librarian to use her personal car to carry books to rural black patrons. This service, argues library historian Toby Graham, represented Alabama’s “first thorough and systematic attempt to provide library service to rural blacks.” In 1936 one black Alabama high school principal noted that library services improved the “everyday intelligence” of library users. To prove it, he noted that before the service began, 46 percent of his graduates who subsequently attended college ranked in the “first and second division in their classes”; thereafter, the number jumped to 90 percent.76
Through New Deal programs such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the federal government also made funds available for library projects that reached southern black people. As early as 1934, librarians at the Durham Colored Library in North Carolina used these funds to transport books in their cars to the county’s rural black residents. In 1941 federal funds enabled the library to purchase a half-ton Chevy “with revolving bookshelves.”77 Thomas County, Georgia, used WPA funds to inaugurate its first bookmobile service to rural blacks as a demonstration project.78 In South Carolina, the WPA provided funds for staffing and two bookmobiles, one run out of Lancaster’s black high school, the other out of the Phillis Wheatley Negro Branch of the Greenville Public Library.79 Librarian Annie Watters McPheeters, who had been refused library service as a child, later recalled: “I have fond memories of those [bookmobile] stations, one in particular. It was under a large spreading oak tree near a country church. . . . I could see [people] coming down the road and across the field. The books they were returning were carefully wrapped in newspaper or in a brown paper bag for protection while they worked in the field or elsewhere. To watch them as they left with their selections from the bookmobile gave me an inner joy hard to explain.”80
The WPA also conducted a library program, but because funded activities were run through local white communities, Jim Crow governed decisions about allocating resources. After efforts failed to interest WPA officials in establishing a black branch in Luverne, Alabama, Dalzie M. Powell complained to a WPA supervisor. Petition them again, she was advised. She did; 209 blacks registered their desire for service, she noted, and a local black school was ready to house a collection. Again officials ignored her. Tired of being “put off,” she once again complained to the supervisor: “It is hard for a Colored person to get anything here.” The county had three white public libraries but would not fund a small deposit station for blacks. Again the supervisor advised persistence, but Powell was never able to extract funds from WPA officials.81
Although the federal government established the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in 1933 primarily to provide flood control and navigation on the Tennessee River, it also used funds to improve the lives of the valley’s poor rural people. Establishing library services at dam sites under construction was a part of that effort, and in 1934 Mary Utopia Rothrock, a white librarian who had obtained a Carnegie grant in 1918 for a black branch for the Knoxville Public Library she directed, became TVA supervisor of library service. During the Depression, she opened twenty-six regional TVA public libraries. Consistently, however, she ran into local Jim Crow practices. Although eighteen blacks “made frequent use” of the otherwise all-white Wilson Dam Library, it was the exception. Of its seventeen deposit stations—most located in schools—only four served blacks.
After 1936, the TVA began contracting services through existing library agencies. When the Huntsville Public Library contracted with the TVA that year to provide service to people working at the Guntersville Dam site, the three affected north Alabama counties had two whites-only public libraries, one in Huntsville and the other in Scottsboro. Three years later, with TVA funding, the region hosted thirty-six library stations, six public libraries, and a bookmobile, all serving whites only. At the dam site, TVA established a “basic negro deposit” station intended “to serve the needs of the employees in the recreation, general adult education and job training programs” that it located in its “Negro Recreation Hall.” Only with great effort did black people benefit in the three-county region, however. In 1937 a black minister employed by the WPA made sure TVA funds established a Jackson County–wide service that eventually boasted a thousand-volume collection housed in rented quarters in Scottsboro. From that center, volunteers delivered books to remote stations in rural black communities from their own cars.82
After the TVA withdrew funds for the Guntersville Dam site regional library service it ran through the Huntsville Public Library, the city abandoned service for black people. Dismayed, Dulcina DeBerry, a black, college-educated retired teacher and minister’s wife who had recently moved to Huntsville to care for her aging parents—and to whom a white library assistant had sneaked books in defiance of Jim Crow rules—met with the library director. He said some WPA funds were still available for library service to blacks but was not sanguine about how long they would last. In May 1940 he walked her through the black Lakeside Methodist Church basement, told her WPA funds would pay her salary as long as they lasted, then gave her a key and said, “Make something of it, if you can.” DeBerry immediately mobilized the local black community. In two weeks young men cleaned the room, a local girls’ club donated flowers, a minister’s wife donated a librarian’s chair, citizens lent tables and chairs and gave them a fresh coat of paint, and DeBerry’s nephew lined the walls with donated art posters. After the library opened in June with a small collection, a bookmobile service connecting it to the white main library supplemented its collections.
Following the “library as community place” model that Louisville’s Thomas Fountain Blue had established decades earlier, DeBerry quickly turned the basement station into a community center for local black people. Her Vacation Reading Club and Children’s Story Hour proved so successful that many in the black community called for a separate “Negro Library.” DeBerry harnessed the enthusiasm to set up an unofficial board of prominent black citizens, who helped her move the library out of the poorly heated church basement into an unfurnished room in a local school in November. Still, she received no funding from the white-run Huntsville Public Library. In February 1941, her board hosted a “Negro Book Week Musical” (which later became an annual event) to raise funds that provided essential furniture built by black craftsmen in a local workshop. A Rosenwald grant a year later brought in more books, but when WPA funds dried up in the summer of 1943, the library was forced to close. The Huntsville board of education came to the library’s rescue, however, hired DeBerry as a teacher at the school, and then absorbed the library as the black branch in Huntsville’s public library system.
Like many other black branches, it became the major resource for reading materials at local black schools. Teachers came to the branch library for books and periodicals and set up “reading corners” in thirty school classrooms. Because segregation laws and practices prevented the main library from providing separate bookmobile service to blacks, the main library’s director used the system’s one bookmobile to establish a separate Negro section with books selected from the Negro Library, thereby providing black readers with “books from their own collection” and honoring Jim Crow’s “no interracial touching” practices. In 1948 the library moved from its school quarters into a separate building, which it named the “Dulcina DeBerry Branch.” In the 1940s and 1950s, the black “public library movement” in Alabama “was, at its core,” Toby Graham argues, “an indigenous enterprise driven by the work of black civic and religious organizations, educators, clergy, business leaders, and librarians.”83 His observations about Alabama largely apply to black public library services across the rest of the South.
Hand-me-down books that white main libraries across the South gave to black branches—often “greasy, torn,” and “dog-eared,” like textbooks transferred from white to black schools—generally carried in them a gospel of white superiority that sanitized the nation’s racist history and, in what historian Leon Litwack calls a white “literature of nostalgia,” crafted imagined historical myths that caricatured blacks as naturally inferior, docile, and happy and sought to teach them subservience rather than independence. In her 1973 study of blacks in children’s fiction published between 1827 and 1967, Dorothy Broderick finds the overwhelming majority “condescendingly . . . racist.”84 Many black branch libraries worked to counter these mythical and racist narratives.
That many blacks hungered for black news was obvious. When Pullman porters smuggled copies of the Chicago Defender into southern states along north-south railroad lines, “negroes [would] grab the Defender like a hungry mule grabs fodder,” one early-twentieth-century black male observed. It was one of the few information sources that covered southern white atrocities and celebrated black accomplishments. Yet even here, Litwack notes, the black press showed a bias toward Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist creed, which advocated “economic uplift over agitation” and tempered “opposition to Jim Crow with appeals for racial harmony.” That exposure to black history and literature had an impact was also obvious. As a black adolescent in rural turn-of-the-century South Carolina, one man later recalled: “In my high school days Booker T. Washington meant more to me than George Washington; Frederick Douglass was more of a hero than William Lloyd Garrison; [poet Paul Laurence] Dunbar inspired me more than Longfellow.” Through them, he says, “I had identity.”85
Black people who patronized the integrated District of Columbia Public Library showed different reading preferences than whites. “Contrary to what one might suppose,” a Washington Post reporter noted in 1902, “the colored patrons take some very solid reading matter. . . . They have decided preferences for works from the pen of members of their own race,” such as Dunbar and novelist Charles Chesnutt, “and more particularly Booker Washington’s ‘Up From Slavery,’ which is in great demand.” And they “never tired” of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.86 When the Jacksonville, Florida, Public Library director analyzed the reading patterns of black patrons in 1906, he noticed they were mostly from the middle class and were predominantly young (he assumed the elderly could not read): “They are all anxious to read of what their own race is doing, what advances they are making, what conventions they are holding, especially if the accounts are by colored writers.” Black magazines “are thoroughly read, more thoroughly than some of the best of the popular periodicals.”87
From the day it opened under Thomas Fountain Blue’s direction, Louisville’s first black branch not only had open stacks; it also determined to collect black literature. The Colored American, for example, was the most popular periodical, Up from Slavery the first book withdrawn. Other popular authors included Chesnutt, Douglass, Dunbar, and Du Bois; patrons were particularly interested in Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, which struck a decidedly different approach to race than Washington’s accommodationist creed and probably sparked some lively debates in branch library meeting rooms.88
In 1920 a Biloxi, Mississippi, reporter noted that unlike the main library, “negro branch” patrons did not favor fiction. “The greatest demand is for books on handicraft,” the librarian told him.89 Similarly, in the late 1920s at the Minden black branch in Webster Parish, Louisiana, nonfiction out-circulated fiction five to four.90 Ironically, most black branch libraries had nonfiction circulation rates much closer to an ideal the American Library Association propounded in its rhetoric than did white libraries, which consistently showed fiction circulation rates between 66 and 75 percent.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin may have been a favorite in black public library branches in the South but not at white main libraries. In response to a 1903 Chicago Public Library patron survey that found Uncle Tom’s Cabin a children’s favorite, the Dallas Morning News responded, “There is no particular reason why the infants of Chicago should be urged to read” the book “unless the purpose is to begin to cultivate the sectional spirit at the cradle side.”91 “As long as ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ continues to be the primary volume in the family, school, and public libraries north of the Ohio and Potomac rivers,” complained an Atlanta Constitution columnist in 1928, “sectional enmities between the southern and northern people will endure.” Public libraries that stocked this “colossal libel upon the southern people” nurtured a “serpent of sectionalism.”92 When a student doing a thesis on Harriet Beecher Stowe asked for a copy at the main Savannah Public Library in 1931, a library attendant told her, “We have other works by Mrs. Stowe, but we have never had a copy of that one.”93 It is not known if a copy was in the system’s black branch; perhaps the patron was white and not inclined to visit it.
Young people, journalist David Halberstam observes, found in the black branch history collections “for the first time the traces of an almost secret history of black life in America, a rich, conflicted, often suppressed, often ignored history of black men and women fighting white repression over this country’s entire history.” At Atlanta’s “Sweet Auburn” branch, librarian Annie Watters started an African American collection in 1934 and solicited autographed donations from touring lecturers such as Langston Hughes.94
Watters’s path to librarianship was not unlike that of most other female black librarians at the time. After graduating from Clark University in Atlanta in 1929, she took a job as teacher-librarian in a Rosenwald school in Simpsonville, South Carolina. From there she became director of the Phillis Wheatley Branch of the Greenville, South Carolina, Public Library system. After obtaining a degree in library science from Hampton Institute (when the Carnegie Corporation provided the institute with a grant in 1925 to start a black library school, the black Louisville training school gradually closed), she moved in 1934 to the Auburn Avenue branch of the Atlanta Public Library, where she spent the next three decades serving in various positions to improve library services to Atlanta’s blacks and participating very directly in efforts to desegregate the entire system in 1959. In 1940 she changed her name when she married Alphonso McPheeters. After her death in 1994, the Atlanta Public Library named its Washington Park branch in her honor.
At Atlanta’s Sweet Auburn branch in 1934, Watters secured a grant to fund several adult education programs, including discussion groups focused on Mahatma Gandhi. To ground these discussions, Watters purchased a number of books. Among their most devoted readers was a young Martin Luther King Jr., who “came to the library many times during the week.” She later recalled their interactions, which not only showed King’s reading interests but also manifested the value of library as place to Atlanta’s black community. “He would walk up to the desk and . . . look me straight in the eye.” “Hello, Martin Luther,” she would respond, always calling him by his first and middle names. “What’s on your mind?” “Oh, nothing, particularly.” For Watters that was the cue that King had learned a new “big word,” and between them they then had a conversation in which King used the word repeatedly. Another game they played involved poetry. Again, King would stand by the desk, waiting. “What’s on your mind, Martin Luther?” Watters would ask. “For I dipped into the future, far as the human eye could see,” he responded. Watters immediately recognized the poem and finished the verse: “saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that would be.” The Gandhi collection presented a problem, however, because King was too young to check out these adult books on his children’s card. To solve it, Watters told him to ask his father to get a library card, “and I would check the books out . . . on his father’s card. And that’s how I made it possible for Martin Luther to read those books on Gandhi. . . . And he read every one of those books that we had.”95
Ten years later, Annie Watters McPheeters noticed Maynard Jackson, a lad who regularly frequented the Sweet Auburn branch with a “big brown paper bag in his hand.” He regularly circled the children’s room, selected books he wanted to read, and put them on the table next to his bag. When, moments later, McPheeters heard paper rustling, she checked on Maynard, only to find him eating the lunch the bag contained. We do “not eat in the library,” she told Maynard, and we certainly do “not eat when we are reading books.” “Yes, Mrs. McPheeters,” he would respond, and closed up the bag. “Later on,” McPheeters recalled, “I would hear that bag opening again. . . . Maynard loved to eat while he was reading.”96 In 1974, Jackson was elected Atlanta’s first black mayor.
No matter the successes of library services to blacks, the white establishment nonetheless tried as best it could to control what black people could read in the Jim Crow South. Turn-of-the-century Confederate veterans’ groups, for example, carefully monitored school textbooks for what they perceived as negative accounts of the Civil War (which some called the “War between the States” and others the “War of Northern Aggression”). White southern librarians took note. When the American Association of Adult Education’s Marion Humble toured the South in the Great Depression to study rural library services, she noted that in Louisiana “books that describe the emancipated Negro are sometimes excluded from the school-community libraries for Negroes.” In Mississippi one librarian erroneously stated, “The circulation of books that portray social equality between Negroes and whites is illegal.”97 By the time of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, most history texts sold throughout the country reflected a tacit bargain between northeastern textbook publishers and southern textbook adoption committees that the Civil War be referred to as the “War between the States,” that blacks be depicted in illustrations only in subordinate positions, and that black and white children never appear together in the same photo. “Blacks were systematically imagined out of the nation’s story,” concludes textbook historian Joseph Moreau. “You got any niggers in your book?” asked a member of the Louisiana textbook adoption committee in the early 1960s, when visited by a Silver Burdett textbook salesman. “No, sir,” the salesman replied.98
Against tremendous opposition and with help from northern philanthropists such as Andrew Carnegie and Julius Rosenwald and Great Depression federal government programs such as the WPA—and only occasionally (and often reluctantly) with help from the southern white establishment and the library community that served it—black southerners struggled to establish the rudiments of public library services for themselves in the first half of the twentieth century. Although their accomplishments against Jim Crow opposition were significant, civil rights historians have largely overlooked them, and the American library community has largely forgotten the precedents they set. Because they were granted access to few public spaces, for example, black branch libraries evolved a concept of their public library as a social center in the first decade of the twentieth century that in the early twenty-first century librarians are now claiming as something new in contemporary public library practice.
As with traveling on public transit in the South before Brown—in which, historian Catherine Barnes notes, “southern blacks attempted only to equalize accommodations, not undo segregation”99—most African Americans who advocated expanded library services struggled to push the boundaries of the possible within the confines of Jim Crow public library practices. But ripples of protest did surface, and after Brown v. Board of Education they increased in number and intensity.