In her pioneering 1939 study of public libraries and black people in thirteen southern states, Eliza Atkins Gleason reported that public library services to blacks had taken several forms. In some urban areas—such as Atlanta, Birmingham, Louisville, Memphis, and New Orleans—separate system branches also functioned as community centers for a variety of activities. Several communities supported library stations at black grade and high schools. In a few areas—Winter Park, Florida; Jackson, Mississippi; and Raleigh, North Carolina—blacks largely supported their own libraries. Services to blacks at main public libraries varied. Very few offered full privileges; Covington, Kentucky, and El Paso and Pecos, Texas, were exceptions. Some, such as those in Fort Worth and Port Arthur, Texas, allowed blacks to withdraw books but not use reading rooms. Petersburg, Virginia, housed its separate black branch in the basement of the main library, and several libraries—in Boydton, Virginia, and Charlotte, North Carolina—offered full borrowing privileges through segregated reading rooms with separate entrances. Gleason’s findings showed that white attitudes toward blacks handling the same books they did were not uniform throughout the South.
Twelve percent of public libraries in the South provided some kind of services to blacks, who constituted 26 percent of the population. Whereas 44 percent of whites in southern states had access to some kind of public library services, only 21 percent of blacks did.1 A survey conducted in 1954, the same year as the Brown v. Board of Education decision, showed some improvement from Gleason’s study but not much. Fifty-nine cities and towns in the South provided local blacks free use of the main public library, twenty-four gave them limited services at those main public libraries, and another eleven served blacks in separate branches.2
“Usually Negroes are excluded as rigidly from the use of the library in one-library towns as if they had no rights at all,” noted a black Philadelphia Tribune columnist in 1951. “Typically it is only when the locality is big enough for at least one branch library do Negroes have any access at all to the public library facilities. . . . It is also typical that the ‘colored branch’ is definitely inferior to the main library (whose services are not available to them), in number and quality of books, in plant and equipment, services and personnel.”3 Particularly disturbing, many of the donated books passed to black branches by white central libraries not only depicted a national culture largely constructed by European Americans; they also often carried ideological justifications for Jim Crow laws and practices that black patrons were forced to endure. “From Washington, D.C., to the Gulf of Mexico and from the Atlantic Ocean to the westernmost fringes of Texas and Oklahoma,” noted black author L. D. Reddick in a 1954 magazine article, “the public places are few and far between where a Negro may sit down and read a book—even though his tax dollar has helped buy that book, erect the building which houses it and pay the salary of the librarian who may tell him curtly or apologetically: ‘We do not serve Negroes.’”4
Southern small-town public libraries were particularly resistant to serving local black citizens. In interviews for a 1963 national survey of public library access, one white librarian noted about southern small towns: “The people are so close and know so much about each other that their feelings run high. The only thing people have left is a social standing which puts them a shade above the Negroes. It will be awfully hard for them to accept Negroes as equals.” Said one small-town librarian who favored integration but refused to act: “We can’t do anything about it. We don’t care to be run out of the social structure.” Said another: “People feel as strongly about the library as they do about the buses, the lunch counters, the parks and so on. The majority does not want anything desegregated.”
A library board member said: “Regardless of what I may think, I work within the framework of the community leaders. . . . Our town is filled with a great many people still so provincial that they do not realize they are part of a very large world.” A black respondent recalled a conversation he had with two local white businessmen aboard a plane. Confessed one: “I could not exist if I did not belong to the White Citizens’ Council. It’s the most dominant political force. Everybody must belong or be boycotted.” That many white members of southern library communities were racist was also obvious. One library board member told an interviewer that racial tensions were caused by outsiders. “We’ve never had anything but pleasant relations with Negroes,” she claimed, because her community had “done everything to keep them happy.”
Blacks, of course, felt differently about segregated public library services in the South. “We play Uncle Tom on the outside and boil on the inside,” one told an interviewer. Said another: “Most Negroes [in this town] are obligated and afraid of economic pressure. . . . There are no Negro doctors or dentists and very few businessmen. The intellectual faction among the Negroes is very low. The school teachers are afraid of losing their jobs.”5 Most also cringed at the kind of humiliation experienced in the 1950s by black seventeen-year-old James R. Wright of Fayette, Alabama, who, because he had exhausted his school library, turned to the county public library—“a lovely building” in which his small town “took great pride.” He called and explained to the person who answered that he was a “Negro” and wanted to use the library. “This difficult and unusual question was immediately referred to the librarian,” he later recalled. “I remember, as if it were yesterday, her reply, in a very soft and mild voice, ‘I am sorry, we cannot allow Negroes to come here.’”6
Although library historians often celebrate the passage of the 1956 Library Services Act (LSA), the first federal legislation intended to fund some library services, they generally fail to acknowledge how it was used to reinforce midcentury segregated public library services. The act made it to President Dwight Eisenhower’s desk mostly because state librarians from the South convinced their representatives and senators (many of whom held crucial committee chairs) that the act would not curtail states’ rights because state library agencies would have authority to determine the distribution of funds. LSA funds gave state library agencies new power. Many bought bookmobiles to reach remote parts of their states with no library service; others issued grants directly to public libraries. In the South, however, service to blacks was a constant subtext in the allocation of resources, and in many cases southern state library agencies refused to tap this new federal funding to expand library services to blacks. As a teenager in the late 1950s, future novelist and National Book Award winner Alice Walker had read most of Shakespeare’s works, not because she could get them at the segregated public library in her hometown of Eatonville, Georgia, or through any bookmobile the state of Georgia purchased with LSA dollars, but because her father had rescued a collection of the Bard’s work from a trash heap at the white high school there.7
Long before presidential executive orders, Brown v. Board of Education, federal civil rights legislation, and LSA, however, black discontent with Jim Crow public libraries—and efforts to subvert their practices—surfaced frequently. In the late 1920s, for example, nineteen-year-old African American Richard Wright was trying to figure out how to access Memphis’s public library collections. As a sixth grader in Jackson, Mississippi, he had marveled at articles in the Chicago Defender reporting that “Lake Michigan Negroes” could not only go into public libraries, but they could also take out any book they wanted. Like most southern libraries, however, at the Memphis library, “Negroes were not allowed to patronize its shelves any more than they were the parks and playgrounds of the city”—except “to get books for white men.” Wright plotted.
One morning he approached a fellow worker. “I want to ask you a favor,” Wright whispered. “What is it?” “I want to read. I can’t get books from the library. I wonder if you’d let me use your card?” The white man balked. “You’re not trying to get me in trouble, are you, boy?” When asked what he wanted to read, Wright replied: “Mencken.” Eventually, the man agreed to the ploy but only after pledging Wright not to “mention this” to fellow workers. One day soon thereafter he gave Wright his wife’s library card. “That afternoon I addressed myself to forging a note,” Wright wrote in his autobiography. “Dear Madam: Will you please let this nigger boy—I used the word ‘nigger’ to make the librarian feel that I could not possibly be the author of the note—have some books by H. L. Mencken?” Wright then describes what happened next.
I entered the library as I had always done when on errands for whites, but I felt that I would somehow slip up and betray myself. I doffed my hat, stood a respectful distance from the desk, looked as unbookish as possible, and waited for the white patrons to be taken care of. When the desk was clear of people, I still waited. The white librarian looked at me.
“What do you want, boy?”
As though I did not possess the power of speech, I stepped forward and simply handed her the forged note, not parting my lips.
“What books by Mencken does she want?” she asked.
“I don’t know, ma’am,” I said, avoiding her eyes.
“You’re not using these books, are you?” she asked pointedly.
“Oh, no, ma’am. I can’t read.”
The ploy worked; the librarian delivered two Mencken books. Outside the library Wright wrapped them in a newspaper—in part to protect these treasures, in part because he knew white people might question his reading if they saw him with books by Mencken. Later, as an influential African American author, Wright recalled what this reading meant to him and in the process identified several reasons why Jim Crow whites so wanted to control black reading:
It had been my accidental reading of fiction and literary criticism that had evoked in me vague glimpses of life’s possibilities. Of course, I had never seen or met the men who wrote the books I read, and the kind of world in which they lived was as alien to me as the moon. But what enabled me to overcome my chronic distrust was that these books—written by men like [Theodore] Dreiser, [Edgar Lee] Masters, Mencken, [Sherwood] Anderson and [Sinclair] Lewis—seemed defensively critical of the straitened American environment. These writers seemed to feel that America could be shaped nearer to the hearts of those who lived it. And it was out of these novels and stories and articles, out of the emotional impact of imaginative constructions of heroic or tragic deeds, that I felt touching my face a tinge of warmth from an unseen light; . . . I was groping toward that invisible light, always trying to keep my face so set and turned that I would not lose the hope of its faint promise, using it as my justification for action.8
That Wright’s experiences in subverting Jim Crow public library practices replicated others is evident from surveys and interviews with black people that Charles S. Johnson conducted as part of Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal’s research on black Americans in the 1930s. One informant from Marked Tree, Arkansas, told Johnson: “They have a city library here, but colored people can’t take any books out. They won’t let colored people go there unless they was [sic] sent by white people. I go up there to get books for the family I work for and to take back books. I never got any for myself, but I read all I get for the boss’s family.” The wife of a black South Carolina school principal reported: “Negroes can’t borrow books under any conditions. We get them but we get them through a white lady friend who borrows them like she was borrowing them for herself and gives them to us.”9 These kinds of experiences not only illustrate the cultural context in which public library service to blacks existed in the early twentieth century; they also show the lengths to which black people had to go to subvert the Jim Crow world they were born into in order to obtain those services.
Although many black people used separate public library services in the Jim Crow South, some refused. In Virginia in the mid-1930s, every day on the way to his office, African American lawyer Samuel W. Tucker passed the whites-only Alexandria Public Library, a building constructed in 1937 with federally funded labor. Although a native Alexandrian, he had been forced to attend high school across the Potomac because of his color. There he also graduated from Howard University and read for the bar at the Library of Congress and the District of Columbia Public Library, both open to him. In March 1939, however, he and retired army sergeant George Wilson decided to test Jim Crow. They walked into the Alexandria Public Library, where Wilson asked for a borrower’s card. The librarian politely said no. The two men left. In May, on Wilson’s behalf, Tucker filed a writ of mandamus to force the library to issue him a borrower’s card. While waiting for a decision, he hatched a plot. That summer he recruited eleven young men and in secret meetings trained them for a nonviolent sit-in. On August 20 he told them to be prepared for action the next day.
Because five could not overcome their families’ misgivings, only the remaining six showed up at the library the next morning, all dressed in their Sunday best. The first of the protesters entered the library and requested a library card application. When one of the assistant librarians refused him, he did not leave the library but went to the stacks, picked out a book, and sat down to read. The librarian was incredulous, but before she could react, another well-dressed young black male came in and asked for a borrower’s card. Once denied, he too headed for the stacks, picked out a book, and sat down at a table. This happened three more times, and while the sixth protester lingered in the library doorway, an assistant librarian ran to library director Katharine Scoggin’s office and shouted, “Oh mercy, Miss Scoggin, there’s colored people all over the library!”
Scoggin emerged from her office and told the men to leave the library, but they refused to respond and—although obviously nervous—continued turning pages. She then telephoned the city manager and the chief of police, who dispatched two officers. When the police officers arrived, they repeated Scoggin’s demand. None of the protesters budged, but nineteen-year-old Buddy Evans asked, “What would happen if we don’t leave?” “I would have to arrest you,” one officer replied. “We’re staying,” Evans unhesitatingly responded. True to his word, the police officer arrested the five young men and took them to jail, where they were charged with disorderly conduct. At that point, two to three hundred spectators and the local press had already gathered outside. The sixth young man, who had stayed outside the library, ran straight to Tucker’s office to report what he saw.10
In a packed courtroom the following day, Tucker moved for dismissal of all charges, arguing no law had been broken. “Every one of the lads” charged with disorderly conduct, the black Norfolk New Journal and Guide weekly newspaper observed, “was neatly dressed, intelligent in appearance, and conducted themselves as gentlemen should.” When Tucker pressed Scoggin in cross-examination, she admitted “she had had the young men removed because they were colored and not disorderly.” After Tucker got the arresting officer to say the same thing, the judge concluded, “There seems to be no evidence of disorderly conduct here, but it is a matter of constitutional privileges.”11
Yet the city still refused to open the library to black Alexandrians and instead began a series of delaying tactics. And because Wilson had not made a proper application, in mid-January the judge issued a ruling denying his writ of mandamus to force Scoggin to give him a library card. In the ruling, however, the judge noted, “There has not been introduced any evidence that the Alexandria Library Association has any regulation limiting the library’s use and facilities to the white race.” In this statement the black press found hope. “The decision, in all probability, means that all public libraries in the South, which now bar colored, can be forced to admit them,” predicted the Afro-American, a black Baltimore weekly newspaper.12
But these hopes were quickly dashed. On January 30, 1940, Tucker and Wilson again went to the library circulation desk to request borrower’s cards. This time Scoggin did issue cards, but they were valid only at the Colored Library, scheduled to open in March. Tucker was not swayed by the gesture or by the name: “I refuse and I will always refuse to accept a card—in lieu of a card to be used at the existing library.” Although he threatened future legal action, he became ill shortly thereafter, during which time a group of black Alexandrians met with city and library officials and accepted their proposal of a segregated library. And ultimately, the judge in the demonstrators’ case never ruled on the charges against the five youths.13
In Bartlesville, Oklahoma, white librarian Ruth Brown—for thirty years the public library’s director—was fired in 1950 for allegedly circulating “commie magazines and papers” such as the Nation, the New Republic, and Soviet Today, a library board chairman charged. But these charges were a ruse for the real reason she was dismissed: attempting to integrate the public library and the Bartlesville community by challenging local segregationist practices.14 In Macon, Georgia, WMAZ radio announcer Sally Veatch reported on a 1952 city council hearing that denied a request by local blacks for public library service. “I am ashamed that such a meeting was necessary . . . where Negroes must plead and demand access to books,” she wrote. “If I were a member of a group trying to get books to read, I think I would have broken down the doors of the city library a long time ago.” Unlike Ruth Brown, however, Veatch preempted her employer. She resigned from her job immediately after airing her complaint.15
White opposition to proposed public library services to blacks found many rationales. When a group of Calvert County, Maryland, residents rose in opposition to county bookmobile services that would include rural blacks in 1952, the Washington Post decided to investigate. Leading the opposition was seventy-nine-year-old trial magistrate William W. Duke, who had helped found the local public library in 1912. “A Negro will never set foot in that library as long as I have anything to do with it,” he told a Post reporter. But why resist bookmobile services to the rest of the county? he was asked. “The two angles to the question are that many of the Negroes in this county have a venereal disease, which can be spread by the exchange of books, and that a Negro is not above stealing a book from the library if he wants it bad enough.” Another person threatened bookmobile advocates: “If you get the bookmobile, we’ll burn it and all the books in it.” A local white high school principal disagreed. “Colored people are employed hereabouts to clean homes, prepare meals, serve at tables, make up beds and launder clothes,” he said. “I can’t see how handling books would be more dangerous.”16
In Montgomery, Alabama, white citizens had access to a public library as early as 1899, but its black citizens waited nearly a half-century for any kind of library service. In 1947 a faculty member at the Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes decided to challenge the white Montgomery Public Library. Shortly after he was denied service, sixty other Montgomery blacks requested similar service over a two-week period. Perceiving a troublesome campaign, the librarian argued to her board that because blacks pay taxes, they should have their own library branch. (Apparently, permitting them to use the white library was out of the question.) About the same time, the Montgomery Negro Ministerial Association began discussing a library for blacks. Initially the organization contacted the director of the Alabama Public Library Service Division, who offered to lend state library books if black Montgomerians started their own library.
When the Montgomery Public Library director heard of it, she promised “duplicate copies and similar material” from the main library collection, but when she also added that her board was unlikely to provide funds, association members resolved to create their own library and formed a Friends of the Library group to move the project along. The City Federation of Women’s Clubs offered free space within their facility. The city then agreed to provide some financial support so long as the group was able to find a black librarian to administer the library. In August 1948 association leaders hired Bertha Pleasant, who, after being denied admission to the University of Alabama’s library school, had earned a degree from the Atlanta University Library School (opened in 1941, after Hampton Institute closed its school two years earlier). She was also a Montgomery native whose ailing mother still lived there. When Pleasant arrived, she quickly sifted through materials sent from the main library, pronounced them “junk,” and boldly protested to the board. With help from the Alabama Public Library Service Division, she instead selected her core collection from state library agency titles. On December 8, 1948, the Union Street Branch Library opened its doors to local black residents.
With help from the friends group and local women’s clubs, Pleasant was able to meet basic needs the main library board refused to fund. To generate more community interest, Pleasant wrote a library column for the local black newspaper and spoke on the local black radio station. In subsequent years she also opened deposit stations in black neighborhoods, started a story hour, and so successfully established services to local schools that her white board requested the city fund a bookmobile. When the city refused, black teachers carried classroom collections in their cars. But inadequate funding hurt—too many users, not enough materials. “You can go to the branch anytime at all,” the main library director wrote in 1952, “and find almost no books on the shelves of the children’s room.”17
That Montgomery blacks were not satisfied with their branch was obvious. As early as 1949, members of the Youth Council of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People went to the main library to ask for service. As Rosa Parks, secretary of the NAACP’s Montgomery Chapter, later recalled, because “the colored library did not have many books . . . a student who wanted a book that wasn’t there had to request it from the colored library, which in turn would order it from the main library.” And even if it was obtained from the main library, black patrons could not return a book there. For many, this was not only an insult but also an inconvenience because they lived so far away from the “colored” branch. Because their requests were ignored, students returned “again and again” over the next five years, but as Parks noted, “they were unsuccessful in changing the practice.”18 In 1955, however, Montgomery witnessed Parks and others engage in a yearlong bus boycott that represented a seminal event in the civil rights movement. Brown v. Board of Education, one legal historian concludes, “was enough for Parks and millions of others to expand their struggle against institutionalized humiliation into other crucial spheres of life.”19 The boycott also catapulted Martin Luther King Jr. into the public eye and was only resolved when the U.S. Supreme Court ordered integration of the public buses in 1956.
While many in the local white community were outraged by the Court’s decision, white Montgomery Public Library reference librarian Juliette Morgan saw things differently. In a letter to the Montgomery Advertiser, the city’s major white newspaper, she objected to the harsh treatment she had observed white bus drivers accord black riders: “Three times I have gotten off the bus because I could not countenance treatment of Negroes. . . . Twice I have heard a certain driver with high seniority mutter audibly, ‘Black ape.’” But for this letter to the editor Morgan paid a price. Segregationists “called her at the library. They called her at her home, where she lived alone with her mother. They threatened her. They harassed her. They insulted her with vulgar and obscene accusations,” noted a black Pittsburgh Courier columnist. Stress became so great that she took a leave of absence, but “she could not sleep, she could not eat. Death came and took her out of her misery.” “Plain murder,” the columnist called it. Publicly, the library profession hardly noticed. Two colleagues commemorated her in the Alabama Librarian, the state library association’s major journal; one noted she was an “ardent Democrat and liberal” and “often the eloquent spokesman for a growing group of progressive Southerners,” but neither mentioned her tragic experiences. Nor did any of the national library journals, including the Bulletin of the American Library Association, carry her obituary. What happened to Ruth Brown and Juliette Morgan undoubtedly had a chilling effect on like-minded white librarians across the South. Morgan was “the last white public librarian [in Alabama] to speak openly in favor of civil rights for black citizens during the movement years,” notes library historian Toby Graham.20
Despite these experiences, public library systems in several southern cities managed to desegregate without demonstration or violence before 1960. In 1947 black leaders approached the recently hired Nashville Public Library director, Robert Alvarez, about using the main library. They argued their branch was poorly supported (“only 1 book in 25 is readable,” Alvarez verified upon inspection), and because they paid taxes, because the city had 4,000 black college students, 400 black college teachers and administrators, more than 150 black clergymen, 7,500 black children in public schools, and four black publishing houses, the main library, they argued, ought to serve their information needs. It was up to the library board, Alvarez responded, and in his diary wrote on October 16: “I’m too much a newcomer to the South to try and influence their thought on the matter.”
When he brought their request to the board’s attention, two members were adamantly opposed. “They were sure that the Negroes were not interested in the library’s resources but only wanted to break down an old barrier and gain entry into another white institution long closed to them. . . . These gentlemen felt sure that the Nashville Negroes would overrun the main library once they got their foot in the door.” When the board considered a formal petition by prominent Nashville blacks several months later, board members “were of the opinion that now was certainly not the right time to make such a move—what with the South already seriously stirred up over President Truman’s civil rights program,” Alvarez noted. “As far as two members of the group were concerned, the time would never be right.”
A year later, however, after the most vocal opponents of integrated services left a board meeting, Alvarez addressed those remaining: “Excuse me. May I say just one thing more? Lately, we’ve been having a few Negroes come to the main desk asking to borrow a book. Would anybody here mind if we just gave them the books they wanted and let them go on their way?” As they hurried themselves to leave, the remaining six quickly (and probably absent-mindedly) responded, “No, go ahead and do it.” “And with that,” Alvarez wrote in his autobiography, “the bars came down and our main library at long last was open to every member of the community. It was my single most exhilarating moment in Nashville.” To this decision he gave no publicity and trusted word of mouth to spread news of the policy change. Slowly the number of black visitors increased until one day a desk attendant “rushed into my office to announce that there was a young black man sitting in the reading room.” What should she do? “I could see no harm in the young man’s being there in the reading room, so I told the lady to just go about her business and let him stay. So that was the end of that, and I don’t recall ever catching any flack from anyone.”21
And it was at the Nashville Public Library, David Halberstam writes, that black civil rights activist Jim Bevel “found a wealth of books on Gandhi” a decade later. “It was a treasure trove for Bevel. . . . With the blessing of the librarian, who, he said, encouraged him to share these otherwise virginal books with his friends, he walked out of the library with them and started circulating them among his friends. The Bevel Lending Library, it was called.” Among friends who had access to the “Bevel Lending Library” was John Lewis, U.S. congressman from Georgia since 1987 but in 1960 an American Baptist Theological Institute student who, along with several teenage friends, had been turned away from the public library in his hometown of Troy, Alabama, several years earlier because he was black. In the next few years Lewis would become chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, receive a serious beating as a Freedom Rider in Anniston, Alabama, in 1961, and serve as an organizer of the March 7, 1965, march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma that became known as “Bloody Sunday,” when he was again beaten. This time, however, the violence was caught on camera and played again and again on evening newscasts across the country.22
When Richmond, Virginia, opened a public library for blacks in 1925, the black weekly New Journal and Guide complained it was “far out of the reach of the colored people; too far, in fact to be of any service to them.” The Journal advised readers to use the library of the YWCA Phillis Wheatley branch instead. Six years later, the city announced it would allocate $16,000 for a “colored branch” in a renovated building three times larger than the Wheatley branch. “When completed,” the Journal reported, the Rosa D. Bowser Branch of the Richmond Public Library (named after a revered black Richmond teacher) “will be equal to any in the South with the possible exception of those found in the Louisville system,” but the new location, the newspaper noted, was still miles from black neighborhoods. Not until 1934 did it open, however, and only with the help of federal funds that employed six persons to do the renovation.23
Dissatisfied with these services, two years later several black citizens sued in federal court to desegregate the main library, but their suit lost on default. Then, in 1946, the black YMCA’s Professional and Business Men’s Council requested that the Richmond City Council desegregate the library system. The council listened and on March 12 petitioned the Richmond Public Library board to open the main library to “all Richmonders.” On April 14 the library board discussed the petition but deferred action. Rumor had it that board members wanted to solicit the city attorney’s legal opinion. The black weekly Richmond Afro-American reported that some citizens believed the petition would be “dismissed summarily,” but others had higher hopes because several individuals “regarded as liberals are library board members.” The Afro-American also noted a story published the previous week in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the city’s major white newspaper, complaining that the Bowser branch had been underutilized: “However, the story made no mention of the fact that the branch is miles distant from thousands of citizens who are expected to use it.”24
On May 28, despite a city ordinance that remained on the books forbidding use of the central library by any but white citizens, the board voted seven to two to integrate the central library system and all branches, except for black children under sixteen. “Whereas it has been brought to the attention of the city library board that the Negro citizens of Richmond are from time to time in need of library facilities that are not met by the Bowser Branch,” the board resolution read, “therefore be it resolved that the facilities of the Dooley central library be made available to all adults of Richmond, subject to the regular rules of the library.” But because facilities were “inadequate to accommodate the city’s Negro children,” the librarian told the Times-Dispatch, he announced plans to open several new branches in local neighborhoods to address youth library needs. “The transition now being made represents all that can be absorbed by present space or facilities at the central library.” Weeks later, the board announced plans to open two new branches in black neighborhoods. Not everyone was happy with this arrangement, however. In subsequent months the number of white patrons coming to the central library “decreased sharply,” one black newspaper reported.25
In 1942 black community leaders asked the Louisville Free Public Library Board of Trustees for more “liberal service.” Populations had shifted since the system assigned them two branches in 1905 and 1914, they argued, and even though the board had provided a place for them at the central library in the 1930s if materials they requested were too rare to risk transportation, blacks wanted more. In response, the board gave black readers full access to Reference Department shelves while “continuing to maintain separate seating accommodations for them.” Then, in April 1952, the Louisville Free Public Library abandoned segregated services and without incident voted to admit blacks to the central library and all its branches. Elsewhere in Louisville, however, Jim Crow prevailed. Schools and housing remained segregated, and places of amusement such as bowling alleys, skating rinks, and many hotels continued to exclude Louisville’s blacks.26
In late 1953 Albert Dent, president of the historically black Dillard University in New Orleans, quietly contacted colleagues who had successfully and peacefully desegregated library systems in Dallas and Fort Worth and asked their advice. He then contacted a local “Catholic, a Jew, and a Protestant” and, along with a white integrationist, conspired to have them approach the New Orleans Public Library board to request that New Orleans integrate its public library system. He himself refused to be part of the delegation. A month later, three clergymen approached the board and urged its members to follow models of integration set by Dallas and Fort Worth. On the board sat Rosa Keller, a white liberal on the issue of race whom the mayor had appointed a year earlier; she immediately began agitating for an integrated system at every meeting. Just as persistently, however, the board refused to vote on the issue and instead, in May 1954, dished it to the city council and mayor, who—knowing a decision on Brown was imminent—quickly passed it to the city attorney for a legal opinion.
On May 21, four days after the Supreme Court issued the Brown decision, the city attorney advised the mayor that “no attempt be made to enforce segregation in any of the libraries.” When the board bowed to the inevitable, however, it was with the knowledge that the mayor and Dent had quietly worked out an agreement not to generate publicity about the decision. Instead, Dent later admitted, he had promised to “call the presidents of the Negro colleges and the principals of the Negro high schools” privately “and tell them, ‘Did you know the library is open to Negroes now? . . . If you have some students who want to go to the library, tell them to go.’” Concerning the desegregation of the New Orleans Public Library, “nothing was ever published in the newspapers,” Dent noted. Unaware of these behind-the-scenes agreements, Rosa Keller apologized to the mayor for having caused turmoil on the board, and the mayor then told her that he knew library desegregation was inevitable after the Brown decision. “Like other smoothly achieved victories of the 1950s,” one historian concludes, “the integration of libraries was facilitated by elite collusion—by the guarantee of little or no publicity, and by pressures applied by a strategically placed white elite.” Despite desegregation, however, in the main library and its formerly white branches, blacks still could only drink from the “colored” fountain and still were not permitted to use the bathrooms.27
When he returned home to Monroe, North Carolina, in 1945, after serving in the military, Robert F. Williams joined the NAACP. Because Monroe had no local chapter, Williams walked into a poolroom one day and laid NAACP literature on a pool table. Half those present in the room joined, and shortly thereafter Williams began recruiting laborers, farmers, domestic workers, and the unemployed. “We ended up with a chapter that was unique in the whole NAACP because of working class composition and a leadership that was not middle class,” he recalled in his 1962 book, Negroes with Guns. “Most important, we had a strong representation of returned veterans who were very militant and who didn’t scare easy.” The chapter decided to integrate public facilities in Monroe and Union County and, with the support of a Unitarian group of white people, started with public libraries. “In 1957, without any friction at all,” he wrote, “we integrated the public library.”28 Yet Williams claimed more than actually happened. More accurately, when the Winchester Avenue Recreation Center, which housed the black branch of the Monroe Public Library, experienced a fire on December 26, 1956, Williams requested that whites open the main library to black Monrovians for their use while the black library was being repaired. Once completed two months later, however, the library reverted to segregated services. The system did not integrate until the mid-1960s.29 In the meantime, Williams fled the United States in 1961 under seemingly trumped-up criminal charges. He lived in Cuba and China before returning eight years later. All criminal charges were dropped.
After World War II, a “Negro Women’s Voters League” formed at the Atlanta Public Library’s Sweet Auburn branch began a campaign to register voters and taught citizens how to use voting machines. The league then worked closely with the branch’s Friends of Libraries, the local chapter of the American Veterans Committee, the Atlanta Council on Human Relations (ACHR, led by Whitney Young, who would later become a driving force in the National Urban League), and the Atlanta Urban League to desegregate the system. On October 9, 1953, the ACHR petitioned the library board to open the main library to black patrons. The board appointed a committee to study the matter but for the next five years avoided making any decisions. At a May 13, 1959, meeting, however, Director John C. Settlemayer, recently hired from the Minneapolis Public Library and personally opposed to segregated services, told his board that black Atlantans had attempted to use the main library (several of white historian Howard Zinn’s black Spelman College students had specifically targeted the library for these efforts) and that when he reported these incidents to authorities, he was told by police no ordinance or law prevented them from being in the library. As a result, Settlemayer asked permission “to instruct the library staff to serve Negro borrowers by checking out materials to them quietly and quickly.” The library board delayed, but when the ACHR threatened to sue, it capitulated.
On May 22, Irene Dobbs Jackson, a black French professor from Spelman, “walked through the electrically operated door of the marbled and modern Carnegie Library . . . went to the front desk, and filled out a membership application. She turned it in, and the slim girl behind the desk handed her a new membership card.” As Howard Zinn describes it: “The girl’s voice was calm. But her hand trembled slightly, perhaps because Dr. Jackson was the first Negro ever to receive a membership card at a ‘white’ library in Atlanta.” On May 24, 1959, Mayor William B. Hartsfield—who as a young adult had self-educated in the Atlanta Public Library and who owed his office to thirty thousand black voters whom the Negro Women’s Voters League helped organize—issued a statement to Atlanta newspapers, which until that time were unaware the library had been desegregated: “The Board of Trustees . . . decided to leave this delicate matter of interracial use of the Main Library” to Settlemayer. That decision ended segregation in the Atlanta Public Library system.30
Others also desegregated quietly. In May 1962 in Alabama, for example, Huntsville Public Library director Richard J. Hovey informed his board he had been named in an “omnibus integration suit” in nearby Gadsden, where he had previously been public library director. He warned members that similar problems would come to Huntsville if they did not integrate the system. To avoid trouble, the board reversed its segregated practices. “There was no confrontation or angry words in our library,” one patron later recalled, “just a quiet changing of the status quo.”31
In 1950 William Hale Thompson, a black dentist from Newport News, Virginia, sued the local public library because he had been denied use on account of his race. On July 19, 1952, the city dropped its practice of restricting its reading room to whites only and desegregated its system. Rumor had it the decision was made to squelch Thompson’s suit.32 When the Miami, Florida, Public Library opened a new central building in 1951 at the same time it desegregated its system, few knew that several months earlier Rev. Edward T. Graham, pastor at the local black Mt. Zion Baptist Church, had written the board of trustees, “Please do not force me to bring an injunction against the opening of this very beautiful library.” Integration went smoothly but for minor complaints about blacks using water fountains at the central and one branch library.33
On January 10, 1957, black interior decorator Samuel C. Murray and his wife, Josie, entered the Purcellville (Virginia) Public Library to borrow a book on Austrian shades. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s sister-in-law had commissioned their services, but they had never fashioned such ornate shades; they hoped to find information at the library. “The librarian . . . told me I’d have to get permission” from the board chairman, Murray later said, but the chairman turned him down because “to lend him a book would not be in the spirit of the library’s founders.” Murray’s lawyer told the Washington Post: “There is no doubt about Virginia state law. It provides that libraries be free to all inhabitants.” Murray asserted: “If I didn’t pay my taxes they would sell my home. Since I do pay my taxes, I felt I should have the use of the book from the library which is paid for by my taxes.” Because of Murray’s pressure, library trustees asked the county board of supervisors two questions. If they integrated the library, “Would that have any effect on the appropriations usually given the Purcellville Public Library by the county?”; and would the additional federal funds promised to the county by the recently passed Library Services Act be affected? The county board responded that state law was clear: “If public funds are allocated to this library it must be operated on an integrated basis.” Days later, the city council unanimously passed a resolution demanding the library board obey the law. Trustees waffled. One worried: “It can even be a question of closing the library.” On March 21 trustees voted seven to five “to open the library to Negroes. They also voted in favor of providing Negroes with bookmobile service.” With a decision to “open these hallowed doors,” the Philadelphia Tribune noted, Purcellville’s black community now had access to valuable information in large part because Murray’s “unquenchable thirst for the know-how of making French drapes [sic] has made all this possible.”34
The Tribune did not report the backlash evident at the subsequent county board of supervisors meeting, however. Three petitions with 366 signatures supported a $6,000 appropriation for the library. “I feel that the Library should be run according to State law,” said a white Baptist minister. “Education is a matter of national security and the library is an integral part,” said another. But another petition bearing 44 signatures presented by the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties argued that the library budget “could be lopped off to keep the tax rate down.” Discussion that followed showed community discord. “I have not changed in opposing integration of the schools,” the library board chairman said, but a 1946 state law “provided library service to all people. . . . Negroes go into banks, stores, and other places of business.” Mrs. Clarence Robey, a trustee who organized the library in 1936 and was among the minority, argued against any appropriation: “I am ashamed of what the library trustees did to be the first in the State to vote for integration.” Better to appropriate state and federal moneys “for a library for Negroes,” she argued. At its meeting a week later, the board approved the appropriation; the library remained integrated, the first victory for the civil rights movement in Loudoun County, a local historian later labeled it.35
In 1945, Portsmouth, Virginia, built a new “colored public library,” to which the city allocated $1,000 for new books; in addition, the New Journal and Guide reported, “several sets of books have been transferred from the white library and hundreds of fiction books have been donated.” Named the Portsmouth Community Library, it differed from the Portsmouth Public Library, which grew out of a women’s club reading group in 1914 that began receiving city funding in the 1920s and always barred black people.36 On March 12, 1958, however, Hugo Owens, a black dentist who considered the “colored” library “totally inadequate,” asked for a borrower’s card at the main library. He was refused because he was black. On April 8, he and fellow black dentist James W. Holley (both men had been instrumental in desegregating the local golf course in 1956) sent one letter to the Portsmouth Public Library board and another to the city council, asking to make the library available to all the citizens of Portsmouth. On that day the board considered their request but took no action. The board chair later told the New Journal and Guide she did not know “if and when the matter would be taken up again.” On April 9 the Interdenominational Ministers Forum of Portsmouth endorsed the request to the city council, which considered it at an April 22 meeting but, like the library board, took no action.
The dentists pressed on, seeking to bring the library board together with the city council to discuss the issue. Both parties agreed to meet October 30, but on October 24 the public library board canceled because most members would be “out of town.” In the interim the city attorney issued an opinion that the Portsmouth Public Library was an independent entity, and because it was not owned or operated by the city, the board had authority to set its own policy. Owens and Holley persisted. In March 1959 they sent the board another letter requesting integration. This time the board ordered a study and, after completing it, promised to open the library to everyone as soon as it could find larger facilities, indicating it might be the post office when a new federal building was completed two years hence. Because Owens and Holley believed the board had “no intention of living up to its voluntary desegregation promise,” they chose another tactic. On November 25 they filed suit in federal district court for the “nauseating practice of denying the use of [central] library facilities” to Portsmouth’s black community, alleging that “the conduct of discrimination by the Portsmouth Public Library based on race is humiliating, embarrassing, and grossly unfair. This conduct tends to reasonably suggest and imply that your complainants and other Negroes are inferior.” Such conduct was “repugnant” and violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The court gave the defendants until December 23 to respond.37
On December 22, the library sought to void the suit. The board denied blacks use of the central library not because of race but “because the present library quarters are so small, cramped, and crowded as to make it impracticable to try to accommodate both races,” attorneys explained to the court. “When the library has become housed in the present Post Office building or in any quarters containing comparable space, use of the library facilities will be made available to all persons on a full and equal basis regardless of racial identity.”38
On February 17, 1960—sixteen days after the first Greensboro, North Carolina, lunch counter sit-ins—the federal district judge held a three-hour hearing on the case. “The question is can the court defer a constitutional right which has now existed since the Brown case?” the judge began. “Our defense, if you call it a defense, is a request for time,” the board’s lawyer argued. The librarian testified that she was willing to serve Negroes but was worried about the “heavy strain” their numbers would place on cramped quarters and especially the potential for trouble between black and white youths using the facility. To that the judge responded, “I have a little bit more confidence in teen-agers on these race problems than I do in adults.” But he also warned against demonstrations by “any organized group, or disorganized group, that comes into the library for the purpose of occupying all the chairs and remaining all the time. You just let me know,” he told the Portsmouth Public Library director, “and we’ll handle them without any trouble.”
At the end of the hearing, the judge ruled. The Portsmouth Public Library must admit black people or close up “lock, stock, and barrel.” Any library using public funds had to serve all races, he said. “The sooner the good people of Portsmouth face up to it, the better off we’ll be.” The next day the judge announced the case would remain on the court docket for twelve months “to avoid any possible friction between the members of either race while using the library.” The Philadelphia Tribune complimented all parties. In its February 27, 1960, “Civil Rights Roundup” column, it noted that elsewhere in the South, “white and Negro youth were battling in the streets over a demonstration aimed at ending Jim Crow seating in lunch counters.” In Portsmouth, however, “integration made a quiet gain.”39
On March 1, African American sheet metal worker Linwood Williams walked into the Portsmouth Public Library, applied for a borrower’s card, and when approved, became the library’s “first card-carrying colored member,” the New Journal and Guide reported. In December 1961, three former board members of the Portsmouth Community Library were elected to the public library board by the city council. When the library moved into the remodeled post office in May 1963 (the Portsmouth Community Library had closed in 1962), it also had an integrated staff. “Dedication ceremonies” scheduled for March 17, a New Journal and Guide columnist wrote, “could become something of a Dixie model of desegregation.”40
Before 1960, pressures brought by outside forces such as presidential executive orders, Supreme Court decisions, federal civil rights legislation, and federal funding for library services supplemented pressures from black leaders in various locations across the South to initiate and improve their public library services. Sometimes the solution was the creation of a black branch; sometimes it was the integration of the whole public library system. And to reluctant local whites who wanted to avoid community disruptions such as bus boycotts, desegregating the public library sometimes served as a useful way to demonstrate to local black citizens and to the outside world the white community’s willingness to integrate local noncompulsory civic institutions without having to take the ultimate step—integrating public schools.
Few in the white community wanted to experience what had happened in Little Rock, Arkansas, where in 1957 Governor Orval Faubus defied a federal court order to desegregate the all-white Central High School and blocked nine black students from entering. White riots forced President Dwight Eisenhower to send in five thousand federal troops. Ironically, recalled Ernest Green, one of the high school protesters, “a year before we went to Central both the city buses and the public libraries were integrated without any problems,” thus demonstrating that segregationist communities differed in where they drew lines of no compromise regarding integrating local civic institutions.41
But many in the South’s white establishment continued to resist these forces and, specifically regarding public libraries, in ways both sad and repugnant to twenty-first-century readers. In 1956, for example, the Mississippi state legislature directed its Library Commission to spend $5,000 of its annual LSA appropriation for books on “ethnology”—a code word for tomes “proving” the inferiority of black people. Among books purchased was Judge Tom Brady’s Black Monday, an attack on Brown and argument for white superiority. “You can dress a chimpanzee, housebreak him, and teach him to use a knife and fork,” Brady argued, “but it will take countless generations of evolutionary development, if ever, before you can convince him that a caterpillar or a cockroach is not a delicacy. Likewise the social, economic and religious preferences of the Negro remain close to the caterpillar and the cockroach.”42
Another arena of conflict regarding public library materials was the depiction of any kind of race mixing. In 1958, for example, an Alabama state legislator decided that a newly published children’s book, written and illustrated by Garth Williams and entitled The Rabbits’ Wedding, advocated interracial marriage because the front cover depicted a black and a white rabbit. Williams, the white son of English artists, was already well-known. In his lifetime he illustrated more than eighty children’s books, including E. B. White’s Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series. At the center of the controversy were Alabama Public Library Service Division director Emily Reed and state senator E. O. Eddins of Marengo County, who in 1956—the same year Alabama legislators outlawed all NAACP operations within its borders—had solicited the federal government to resettle Alabama’s black people elsewhere in the country. Eddins was particularly disturbed with what he saw as books supporting integration and communism in Reed’s library collections.
In May, he took after Reed for stocking The Rabbits’ Wedding. “This book and many others should be taken off the shelves and burned,” he insisted at a committee hearing. When Reed refused, the controversy quickly went national. “Incredible that any sober adult could scent in this fuzzy cotton tale for children the overtones of Karl Marx or even Martin Luther King,” teased Time magazine. Even Alabama’s major white newspapers abandoned Eddins. “We haul many a prop out from under” the “cause” of segregation “when we allow ourselves to appear ridiculous,” argued the Birmingham News. Although Eddins quickly backpedaled, he continued to press for Reed’s resignation. In January 1960, Reed told the press she was taking another position in the District of Columbia Public Library system. “My leaving was not directly related to the incidents of last year,” she stated, but few believed her. As with Ruth Brown and Juliette Morgan, no one in the Alabama library community or from the American Library Association—including its Intellectual Freedom Committee—publicly came to Reed’s defense.43