In the 1950s, Americans had plenty to worry about. Internationally, Cold War tensions were increasing; the Third World was decolonizing, often violently; and the nuclear arms race was heating up. Domestically, people feared communist infiltration into many of the nation’s organizations and saw evidence of this infiltration in every movement that caused local and national stress, including the rise of rock and roll, which infused a youth culture with subversive racial messages. The federal government, its elected officials, and its many agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, fed this paranoia.
Almost all Americans had televisions in their living rooms by the end of the decade, bringing them news of the excesses of McCarthyism—of much more concern to the nation’s library community in the 1950s than segregated public libraries—as well as visual images of racial mixing in the entertainment industry and the desegregation of sports at the collegiate and professional levels; evening news programs covered attention-getting footage such as the hostilities at Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957. Civil rights protests fit the bill nicely, and civil rights activists quickly discovered that “direct action” was a powerful way to spread images of Jim Crow humiliations across the South. But a reaction to this media attention was also evident in the growth of the Ku Klux Klan, the establishment of White Citizens’ Councils, the rise of shrill voices eager to defend the “southern way of life,” and the rhetoric of segregationists such as Robert Byrd, Orval Faubus, and George Wallace. The cacophony they raised tended to mute the voices of moderation, many of which remained buried deep in southern library communities.
Efforts to desegregate Jim Crow facilities such as buses, golf courses, and public parks after the successful Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 met mixed results. “The pattern was that in some places,” including Atlanta and Charlotte, both eager to lure new business and anxious about negative publicity, desegregation occurred “after hemming and hawing, and erecting a few roadblocks,” argues journalist Fred Powledge. Some “in the middle”—Mobile, Nashville, and Savannah, for example—“tended toward a little quiet, token segregation.” Others, however—often referred to as “hard-core” areas controlled by “segs”—took “segregation forever” positions, and the people who lived there, one Arkansas Gazette reporter noted, manifested an “ain’t no son of a bitch gonna tell me what to do” attitude. Among them were towns such as Baton Rouge, Birmingham, “and virtually anyplace in Mississippi.”1 Powledge could also have included in this group Memphis, Tennessee, and Greenville, South Carolina, the subjects of this chapter.
For many people the public library served as a refuge, a place to escape from life’s daily toil, an opportunity to transport oneself to some other place, at least for a while. And that’s what Jesse H. Turner thought in 1949 when he recommended that his new wife, Allegra, head to the local public library to divert her thoughts from a recent loss. Jesse and Allegra, black Americans living in Memphis, had just married that year. Five months after the wedding, Allegra’s sixteen-year-old brother died in a freak train accident, and Allegra went into mourning. Pregnant with her first child and unable to shake her deep depression, she agreed with her new husband that a visit to the Cossitt Library might do her good, and one day Turner dropped her off there on his way to work.
At the time, the Cossitt Library served as Memphis’s main library. It was an imposing yet beautiful red sandstone building, Romanesque in style, with a tall turret dwarfing surrounding buildings in downtown Memphis. Opening its doors on April 23, 1893, it was the city’s first public library and held a prime location at 33 South Front Street.2 In the 1930s, the Cossitt Public Library began bookmobile service. Although blacks made up nearly 40 percent of Memphis’s population by then,3 they could use neither the library nor the bookmobile.
Memphis’s black population instead was allowed to use the “LeMoyne” branch, opened in 1903 and located at LeMoyne College (now LeMoyne-Owen College), where the main library sent its discards to fill the small space.4 The LeMoyne branch closed in 1932. Three years later, the library system opened a “Negro Branch” in Church Park Auditorium, then moved it to an old converted store in 1937 and in 1939 to the small “Vance Branch Library.” Memphis blacks did not get access to a bookmobile for another fifteen years. But in 1949, if one were seeking a place of comfort with a variety of resources, a place of awe, Cossitt was it, and it was there that Allegra Turner sought solace.
Once inside, she went directly to the public catalog. As she ran her fingers through the cards, a library worker tapped her on the shoulder and asked why she was there. “Using the card catalog. What else?” she replied. Ordered to accompany the library worker, Allegra was led to a small area of the library marked off by a white picket fence and told to stand there while library personnel decided what to do with her. Eventually Allegra received an explanation. She was not permitted to visit the Cossitt Library; instead, she needed to visit the Vance Avenue Branch—the “colored” branch. There, at “her” branch, she could request a book that it did not have, which would then be sent from the Cossitt Library the next day. Allegra left the library humiliated and empty-handed.
For her husband, Jesse, this represented yet another in a string of humiliations he had suffered in his young life. He was born in Longview, Mississippi, in 1919 but moved to Tennessee to attend LeMoyne, a historically black college, where he graduated with distinction. In 1941 he entered the army. There, despite his intellect and education, he experienced racism in many forms, including his assignment to the cooks’ and bakers’ school, where blacks often received training as servants in the mess hall. Years later, his wife recalled of his army days, “he experienced injustice, consistent put-downs, trickery, and a deliberate waste of his brilliance.”5
After four years of service—during which time he resisted assignment to cooks’ and bakers’ school, was promoted to captain of an infantry company, and received a Bronze Star—Jesse began work on a master’s degree in business administration at the University of Chicago. It was there that he met Allegra. Frances Allegra Will was the second of eleven children born to Leo and Emma Amar Will of Louisiana. She had been valedictorian of her Baton Rouge high school class and, denied admission to Louisiana State University because of her race, instead earned a degree from the historically black Southern University. Like Jesse, she was working on a master’s degree at Chicago.6
With degree in hand, Turner returned to Memphis, not only because of his college years there but also because the new Tri-State Bank of Memphis had just opened in 1946. Founded by Dr. J. E. Walker (who also founded University Life Insurance) and his son, A. Maceo Walker, it was the first black-owned bank in Memphis and later played an important role in the civil rights movement. Plans for local sit-ins were hatched in the bank’s boardroom, and the vault was often kept open at night to provide bail money for protesters.7 Turner began work there as a cashier and eventually became its president. He was also the first black to pass Tennessee’s Certified Public Accountant exam and was active in the NAACP’s Memphis branch, eventually serving ten years as its president. During those early years Turner wrote letters to the editors of local papers, often quoting the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.” But in June 1949 Turner was just beginning his career and married life. Although he did not forget the insult to his wife, it took several years before he was ready to challenge the library’s Jim Crow practices. He first began his activism, as did many other black civil rights leaders, with less-threatening voter registration efforts, and by the mid-1950s he was raising money for the NAACP. In the meantime, the main public library had moved into a new facility in 1955.
On June 17, 1957, eight years after the public library insulted his wife, Turner left for work as usual. Allegra recalled that the “day seemed fairly ordinary.” But in late afternoon she turned on her radio and heard: “A well-dressed Negro man entered the front door of the main library . . . and requested a library card to borrow books,” but was turned away by Jesse Cunningham, library director for the past thirty-two years. Allegra then heard her husband’s name as the black applicant. When Turner got home that evening, he described to Allegra how shaken the library employees seemed at his presence. “I could have burst out laughing,” he said, “but I didn’t let on. Obviously, [the librarian] was hoping that I would just go away.”
To the Memphis media, Cunningham explained he had simply acted “on the custom that prevails in this community and the South,” and although admitting that no law prohibited him from granting Turner library privileges, hastened to add that the library board unanimously supported his decision. Board members’ average age was seventy; two were members of families that had served since the library was founded. Board chairman Wassell Randolph, who had succeeded his father, had been on the board for forty years. Initially he asserted this was the first time any black had asked for a library card, though later, in a deposition, he had to admit that since he began service on the board in 1917, “on four or five occasions Negroes had requested use of the library system.” Steeped in Jim Crow southern traditions, the librarian and board members found Turner’s request both startling and threatening. Once the story hit the news, Jesse and Allegra Turner received threatening phone calls: “Nigger . . . tell Jesse to have his mammy read to him.” “When did niggers start needing books?” “You niggers are getting mighty uppity.”
Local white newspapers seemed sympathetic to Turner. They reviewed his credentials to demonstrate why he might need to use the library and concluded that he required certain periodicals and reference works for his position as a bank employee and accountant. The librarian countered that he could get such works through the black branch “if he was a person really trying to do something and not trying to make a scene.”8 But Turner persisted. On July 15, 1957, attorney H. T. Lockard, local NAACP president, sent a letter to board chairman Randolph requesting that Turner and his children be given permission to use the main library and all its branches. He stated that the library’s denial was based solely on race. The board met on July 18, closed the meeting to the public, and deferred any action on Turner’s request. In October, Randolph sent Lockard a three-page letter asserting that “an investigation has been made to learn the wishes of the people of Memphis, as well as the legal questions,” and as a result, the board declined Turner’s application for a library card.
What “investigation” the library board made is unknown, but it is clear that the board received at least one response, a twenty-seven-page diatribe dated August 1957. The letter, listed today in the library’s records as authored by a black person (an assertion hard to document and difficult to believe), is unsigned. “We . . . negroes,” its author claimed, “want you real white people to know that we are not for all of this trouble.” The author refers to “negro trash leaders” fomenting the trouble, claiming “we do not want intergration [sic].” He also lambasts black leaders, claiming Jesse Turner “actually hates white people” and has “the big head” because of his education. He says that black people “owe it to the southern white people for our being so prosperous and makeing [sic] it possible for us to be educated, and we are so narrow that we do not apreciate [sic] what the white people have done for us.” Turner “has said so many times . . . he will try killing all of old white so and so’s.” Remarkably, he says “it is unfair for us to want you all to give us the best jobs and place us above your white people this is not in keeping with the Bible and the teachings of Jesus.” Regarding race itself, the author says that some blacks “are frying our cursed nappie hair straight . . . . We know all other races look better than our black race but if the Bible is right we know it is—we should stay in our race.” He chastises whites, writing, “You all should stop calling our negroes miss mrs. and mr. for they are carrying this to [sic] far. . . . White people should call us by our names as you use [sic] to do [sic] Old Black Turner want you all to call him Mr.”9
This diatribe became part of the library board’s record and, if indicative of other responses, provided the board with ample support to deny services to the black population. But board chairman Randolph pointed out that the black branch would furnish any materials to black citizens upon request. “The . . . library facilities are available equally to all citizens,” he wrote, “but, for convenience in management, and to avoid regrettable incidents which have no relation to the circulation of books,” blacks would have to continue to use the black library branch. Randolph also noted that “the records show that books are available at the [black] Library in excess of the use of them.” Furthermore, having both black and white library users share a reading room is not “conducive to harmonious relations amont [sic] the people of our City. Forcing people to associate together against their will is the antithesis of freedom.” He continued: “For almost a hundred years, Memphians of all races have lived together in growing peace and harmony. Helping hands have been extended from one to the other whenever occasions have arisen, and the public advantages and opportunities furnished our Negro citizens have been gratifying, although Negroes pay a very small and disproportionate part of the cost of these benefits; and the almost complete experience with these shared blessings has shown that self-respecting Negroes and self-respecting White people do not commingle socially. Each prefers his own group.” Randolph concluded by saying, “Sadly, recent events have opened wounds which we thought were healed. . . . The library directors . . . are unwilling to increase the tension or widen the breach now so painfully apparent” by permitting Turner to use the library.10 The board’s decision came weeks after white mobs had prevented black students from integrating Central High School in Little Rock and a month after racists dynamited an integrated school in Nashville.
On January 3, 1958, Turner’s attorney responded with a brief letter. After speaking with his client and “several other interested persons,” he wrote, “we decided that the request made by Mr. Turner can and ought to be granted without any difficulty at all.” He asked the board to reconsider.11 Shortly thereafter, several white faculty members from Memphis universities and colleges appeared before the library board and presented petitions favoring integration signed by seventy professors from Memphis State University, which had begun a “gradual desegregation” program in 1955; sixty-five from the University of Tennessee’s Medical School, located in Memphis; twenty-nine from Southwestern (now Rhodes) College; and eighteen Christian Brothers College students.12 The petitions noted that “such cities as Nashville and Chattanooga in Tennessee, Miami, Florida, and New Orleans, Louisiana, have opened all public library facilities to equal use by all their citizens without difficulty or disturbance.” In June the library board voted to stand by its original decision: “In our opinion, the necessity for adhering to this position is greater than when the [first] letter was written, by reason of the increasing public interest involved.” The board chair added that plans were in the works for an “extensive research library” to be added to the main library; it would be available to all residents, black and white, although the reading room and all white branches would remain white.13
On August 15, 1958, Jesse Turner filed an NAACP-financed class action lawsuit against the library. The suit named the librarian and the board of directors as defendants. Hoping to defuse the situation, Memphis Public Library director Cunningham’s newly chosen successor, C. Lamar Wallis, announced that blacks could use the reference section of the main library because “their” own library lacked one, but other sections of the main library and all the white branches would remain off-limits. However, the new rule would not take effect until more than a year after Turner filed his lawsuit.
Turner’s complaint alleged violations under the due process and equal protection clauses of the U.S. Constitution. He sought no money damages but instead asked for a “permanent injunction enjoining defendants from enforcing their policy . . . of denying [Negro citizens] the right to use the library facilities and services made available at the main municipal library . . . and at other branches of the Memphis Public Library.”14 The complaint was signed by five attorneys, three from Memphis—H. T. Lockard, A. W. Willis Jr., and R. B. Sugarmon Jr.—and two from New York who had dedicated their careers to civil rights: Thurgood Marshall, who in 1967 became the first black justice to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, and Constance Baker Motley, who in 1966 became the first black female federal judge. During the 1960s these two New York attorneys played key roles in civil rights litigation by traveling throughout the South to represent other plaintiffs willing to challenge segregation. This was their first, but not last, suit involving the desegregation of a public library.
The Turner v. Randolph lawsuit progressed slowly, but what appears to have moved it to a conclusion more quickly were a series of protests begun throughout the South. Memphis was not immune. In 1958, for example, a year after the Little Rock fiasco, the mother of eight-year-old Gerald Young decided to enroll her son at Memphis’s Vollentine Elementary School, an all-white school. He was denied admission. Although the Brown decision had made new law, it did not provide remedies, nor did it furnish a timetable for integration. Later the Supreme Court made it clear that local authorities had primary responsibility for integration, with federal court oversight, but again refused to set deadlines for such action.15 As a result, many black communities had to follow the slow path of litigation to force change. And in Memphis, whites were in no hurry. Gerald Young’s experience ultimately led to a federal lawsuit filed on March 31, 1960.16 Not surprisingly, four of the plaintiff’s attorneys were the same attorneys representing Jesse Turner in his suit against the library.
Yet not all Tennessee cities resisted change as strenuously as Memphis. Some considered Memphis “among the four most segregated cities in the United States,” and it was often contrasted with its more progressive sister, Nashville. Although only 220 miles apart, “to the colored person who knows both cities well,” wrote the Baltimore black weekly the Afro-American, “the two are as far separated in racial outlook as Cleveland, Ohio, and Cleveland, Mississippi.”17 While blacks could not enter most of Memphis’s public libraries, well-known black poet and Fisk University librarian Arna Bontemps served on the board of the Nashville Public Library, which had integrated in 1948. Chattanooga had integrated its public library a year later.
Not Memphis, however, where it was difficult to find any whites willing to speak out against segregation.18 In August 1958 a local white merchant wrote to library director Cunningham “commending” him for his “stand on the mixing of the races for Library use.” The NAACP “and others are pressing harder every day and we must endeavor to resist,” he argued. “I am sure that most all White People want the Library facilities maintained as they are.” In response, Cunningham reassured him that the “Library Board is definitely committed to the continuance of our policy” but added, “Of course, with a Supreme Court like we have in this country most anything can happen.”19 In December another unsigned diatribe, this one twenty-nine pages, arrived from the same unknown “negro” author, arguing it was God’s plan to keep the races separate. In late 1958, when C. Lamar Wallis became the new library director, some wondered whether he would resist efforts to integrate the library; previously, in Virginia, he had been director of the integrated Richmond Public Library. They need not have worried. In a letter written several years later, he assured the city attorney that although his “personal stand . . . is one of moderation, . . . I have a personal dislike for the methods of the NAACP and am perfectly willing to do battle as the Board directs. . . . My sympathy is with legal resistance.”20 He continued his resistance throughout the litigation.
Public protests escalated. In September and again in December 1958, black residents tried to use the Memphis Public Library. In both instances they left after being refused service. On March 19, 1960, however—six weeks after the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins that catapulted the student sit-in movement into the national consciousness, one month after similar sit-ins at lunch counters in Nashville and Chattanooga, and one day after protesters conducted sit-ins at Memphis lunch counters—forty-one black demonstrators (mostly college students) were arrested at the main white library and one white branch and subsequently jailed, all charged with disorderly conduct, loitering, and breach of the peace when they refused to leave. Among those jailed were five representatives of black newspapers covering the sit-in, including two editors. Bond was set at $352.21
Prior to the trials of the library sit-in defendants, hundreds of blacks stood outside the police station singing the national anthem. Many entered the courtroom two hours early. The judge cleared the courtroom of two hundred black spectators before the trial began, allowing only enough to fill available seats. Of the forty-one defendants arrested, thirty-seven were convicted of disorderly conduct and fined $25; one black newspaper editor was fined $50 for “disturbing the peace” by talking to the demonstrators as they sat in the library. The judge called the scene “a mass demonstration that breeds contempt for the law, an open invitation to mob rule, to violence,” and affirmed, “I am not going to stand for it.” He insisted race had nothing to do with his position. As the defendants left the police station, they filed out through a double row of police holding billy clubs.22
The next day, students from LeMoyne and S. A. Owen College—another historically black institution that merged with LeMoyne in 1968—returned to the library and to the Brooks Memorial Art Gallery, open to blacks only on Thursday, when whites were excluded. Police arrested thirteen at the gallery and ten in the library reading room.23 The arrests added to the total of sixty-four arrests in Memphis that week, consisting mostly of black students.24 Protests and sit-downs continued into April, with dozens more arrested, reflecting similar activity occurring throughout the South from Galveston, Texas, to Orangeburg, South Carolina, to Savannah, Georgia, to Tallahassee, Florida. Elsewhere in Tennessee, the federal government announced on April 25 that, under the provisions of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, voting discrimination practices in Fayette County (adjacent to Shelby County, where Memphis was located) would cease. And after racists bombed the Nashville home of a black civil rights activist and thousands marched to city hall in protest on April 19, the mayor told the crowd he thought all Nashville public facilities should be desegregated; they were on May 10.25
In July 1960, federal district court judge William E. Miller denied Jesse Turner’s motion for a summary judgment and set the case for trial in November, over two years after it had been filed. This decision may have been just the push the city needed. The city commission asked the library board to reconsider its “long standing policy” of segregation, but unwilling to make hard choices, on September 9, the board decided that the matter “be referred to the City Commission for decision.” Days later, the commission determined that the library should be integrated, and the library board agreed to abide by the decision. On October 13 the city commission, with the library board’s approval, issued a statement that “the facilities of the public libraries shall be made available to all citizens of the city.”26 It appeared Jesse Turner had won.
Six months later, library director Wallis reported that integration had been accepted by the public “except for one or two white persons who expressed distaste for the idea on the first day of integration.” He did not mention a letter from one white patron dated October 17, 1960, which included the patron’s library card, torn in half, with a comment that the “vast majority of your patrons feel as I do but are either too indolent or too hopeless to register a protest.” Wallis reported that he expected more blacks to register for cards at formerly white libraries. Although Memphis’s population was nearly 40 percent black, “of all persons registering since integration took place, 21% were Negroes.” Most of those registering, not surprisingly, were from schools at all levels, elementary to graduate college. And, the librarian reported, he had “only the highest of praise” for their “conduct”; they “have been polite, courteous, and understanding.”27
But another problem surfaced quickly. Memphis blacks could use all branches of their public library but not all the restrooms. The main library had two restrooms, one for whites, one for blacks (located in the basement and shared with the library’s janitors), mandated by section 3044.29, volume 2, of the Memphis Municipal Code: “Where buildings are used by both white and the black races, separate facilities shall be provided for each race. . . . Proper signs shall be affixed on water closets indicating those provided for each race.” Because the library board refused to budge on this issue, Jesse Turner refused to withdraw his lawsuit, so once again the parties returned to court, this time in late 1960.
The city raised several objections to Turner’s argument that the restrooms must be integrated. First they simply relied on the ordinance, arguing their hands were tied. Later they argued the ordinance was not only binding on them but also both reasonable and constitutional. They asserted that the incidence of venereal disease was much higher among blacks than among whites, and so toilets, which they insisted carried and spread the disease, must remain segregated. A third argument seemed exaggerated, though it was one that another federal court in Norfolk, Virginia, had accepted.28 They argued that the ordinance requiring separate bathrooms was binding only on those who actually built the library, but it did not require whites and blacks to use the separately built bathrooms: “There is no fine or penalty of any kind to be imposed upon anyone if a negro uses a white toilet or a white person uses a negro toilet. The Building Code simply says that the building shall be constructed with separate facilities.”29 The defendants concluded that the issue of separate bathrooms was so trivial that the court need not even rule on it.
Judge Miller disagreed. He noted that the “separate but equal” doctrine had by now “been generally swept away” in education, theaters, housing, parks, golf courses, swimming pools, restaurants, “and in many other areas.” Nor did he accept the “spread of disease” argument. He noted, first, that “venereal disease would not be expected to occur to any appreciable extent among that segment of the populations, whether white or negro,” that used the public library. Second, no reliable evidence existed that venereal disease could be spread by using the same toilet seat. Ultimately, he found no reason why restrooms should remain segregated.30 On August 18, 1961, Miller ordered that “all public restrooms . . . in all public library units” in Memphis and Shelby County be operated without discrimination based on race and that the defendants pay all court costs. Shortly thereafter, Jesse and Allegra Turner walked with their three sons to the formerly white main library and registered for library cards. Although by then their oldest child was only ten years old, all five were nonetheless proud to finally be able to use the public library on an equal footing. That fall, Memphis schools began desegregating.
Perhaps inspired by his successes with the Memphis Public Library, Jesse Turner’s activism continued. His work with the NAACP had already led to the integration of Memphis State University in the late 1950s, and other NAACP lawsuits and protests sought to desegregate public bus transportation and other public accommodations throughout the city.31 After learning that a prominent black journalist had been denied service at the airport restaurant, in 1960 Turner filed a lawsuit against the City of Memphis and Dobbs Houses, Inc. He was represented by the same three Memphis lawyers as in his library suit.32 His effort to integrate the restaurant ultimately succeeded, but he had to take the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Not until March 26, 1962, did the Court vacate a lower court decision and order “a decree granting appropriate injunctive relief against the discrimination complained of.” Although the city argued that the restaurant was private and therefore not subject to the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause (which prohibits any state from denying equal protection), the Court held that the restaurant was “an integral part of a public building” and that segregation violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause.33
Jesse Turner died in 1989, but today in Memphis the Jesse H. Turner Park, the Jesse Turner Tower (at the Memphis Regional Medical Center), and the Jesse H. Turner Sr. Memorial Bridge all honor his memory. He was posthumously awarded the NAACP Walter White Award for his contribution to the civil rights movement. Allegra Turner was appointed to the Shelby County Library Board in the early 1990s, on which she served for twelve years.34 She died in 2008.
While home in Greenville, South Carolina, over Christmas break during his 1959 freshman year at the University of Illinois, Jesse Jackson went to the McBee Avenue Colored Branch, where, the white Greenville News noted, “Negroes are afforded . . . the best facilities and access to all the books the meager resources of the Library can afford.”35 Because Jackson could not find the titles he was looking for, however, the librarian wrote a note and sent him to the white main library downtown. “The lady there is my friend,” she told Jackson; “she’ll handle this for me.” But Jackson did not know this practice was hardly routine. “Because ‘an appointment’ has to be made by the McBee Avenue Branch librarian first,” Calverta Elnora Davis wrote in a 1958 Atlanta University master’s thesis, “it is rare that a Negro goes to the main library. . . . In 1956 only two African American males did this.” This “psychological barrier,” she argued, “should be eliminated.”36 Jackson was about to meet the “psychological barrier.”
When Jackson got to the main library and walked through the rear entrance, several policemen were talking to the librarian. She looked at his note and remarked, “It’ll take at least six days to get these books.” “Six days?” Jackson responded. “Couldn’t I just go back in the shelves and look for them . . . where nobody else would see me?” “You cannot have the books now. That’s the way it is.” “You heard what she said,” growled one policeman. Jackson stormed out the library’s rear door, walked to the front of the building, and looked up. “I just stared up at that ‘Greenville Public Library,’ and tears came to my eyes. I said to myself, ‘That thing says public, and my father is a veteran and pays taxes.’” Angry and humiliated, he decided to take action, or, in the civil rights jargon of the day, “direct action.” “When I get back home this summer,” he promised himself, “it’s gonna go public for real. I’m gonna use that library.” Although he did not notice, carved into the granite base of a monument to Confederate soldiers immediately in front of the library where he stood was the poem:
The world will yet decide
In truth’s clear, far off light,
That the soldiers who wore the gray and died
With Lee—were in the right.37
At the time, Greenville County supported five bookmobiles, but only one served black people and that exclusively.
During Jackson’s 1960 spring semester, however, local black high school students preempted him. On March 1, 1960, twenty entered the building, milled about the stacks, and read at tables. This was just a little over a month after the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins and a day before similar sit-ins in Columbia, South Carolina, that drew protests from five hundred students from nearby historically black colleges, two hundred of whom then marched to the city center. Rather than serve the twenty Greenville students, however, officials closed the library for the day. Two weeks later, seven students returned to do the same thing; this time they were arrested for disorderly conduct but were never brought to trial.38
That summer—while reports of sit-ins and demonstrations across the South filled newspaper columns—Jackson and five other students showed up on the steps of the public library on July 14, whereupon police told them they would be arrested if they entered the building. “And so,” Jackson later recalled, in order to avoid arrest, “we left.” But word about the incident spread quickly. “Third time this year that groups of Negroes have invaded the quiet of the public library,” the News and Courier, a white Charleston, South Carolina, newspaper reported.39 When Jackson returned to his neighborhood and told his clergyman his group had successfully avoided arrest, the clergyman responded, “But that’s the whole point!” Jackson clearly understood what he meant; two days later he told his mother, “Mama, now I know you watch the news, and I’ll probably go to jail this afternoon.”
On Saturday, July 16, he was part of a group of eight “neatly dressed” mostly college students—five of them women, two of whom had been arrested on March 16—who entered the library and staged a forty-minute sit-in. When they refused to leave at the library director’s request, the director called police. All were arrested for disorderly conduct, held for forty-five minutes, and released on bail paid by Jackson’s clergyman. The Greenville News identified all eight—including “Jeff” Jackson—and published two photos of the students awaiting release. “Students obligingly and playfully posed for photographs,” the News told its readers. “As far as I know,” their self-proclaimed lawyer, Donald Sampson, told a reporter, “we still have a bunch of illiterate white trash in the library that don’t know enough but to have these students arrested.” A few days later, the local NAACP chapter called a press conference to condemn Sampson’s words (he had already received a bomb threat) “attacking the dignity” of library personnel and to announce the NAACP’s chapter lawyer would also be representing the demonstrators.40
Jackson’s stepfather was not happy about the arrests, and his reaction reflects clear differences between generations of blacks—one that grew up in and negotiated life before 1950 in the Jim Crow South, the other from a restless generation that came of age after the Brown decision. “I just been watchin’ yawl down there at the jail talkin’ ’bout not being able to use the library,” Jackson’s stepfather said. “See that ’frigerator? Enough food in there for you? You ever had to go without a meal around here? Got enough clothes to wear? Thing is, when you out there talkin’ ’bout you got to go to jail ’cause you can’t get enough to read or eat someplace, that’s sort of a reflection on me and your momma. . . . I don’t think you ever quite thought how it could affect this family. So if you can’t adjust to the situation here, maybe you ought to just go away from here.”41 He could not, of course, foresee that his stepson would one day become one of the nation’s leading civil rights activists, ultimately receiving from President Bill Clinton the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. The Greenville library arrest was Jackson’s first among many.
The Greenville News found library protests contemptible: “The White people of Greenville County are not going to pay additional taxes to support an expanded institution which is going to be subjected to constant harassment simply because the equal facilities happen to be segregated.” Although Jackson could overlook this slight, he was stung by his stepfather’s words. Nonetheless, the library incidents in which he participated helped spark other demonstrations by black youths at Greenville lunch counters, swimming pools, and recreation parks that summer. “Our library sit-in,” protester Joan Mattison Daniel later recalled, “was a pivotal point in Greenville’s history.”42
At a hearing the day after their arrest, a judge decided to postpone the trial. About seventy-five black spectators then left the courtroom to conduct demonstrations at three local lunch counters. They were turned away at all three, but at the third site, white spectators exchanged words with Charles Helms, a white Atlanta student attending New York’s Union Theological Seminary who had been in Greenville for a month to help fight segregated public accommodations. A scuffle ensued, in which Helms lost his glasses. “I was slapped around,” he told the Washington Post–Times Herald, “but I’ve been hurt worse playing softball.” Nonetheless, police took him into protective custody.43 Leaders had described the demonstrations at lunch counters days earlier as “spontaneous,” then threatened to use the library arrests to file a federal suit to force integration of all of Greenville’s public accommodations. One leader noted he had used the integrated Spartanburg Public Library when he lived there and had received “the best of service.” He wondered why Greenville could not provide the same.44
On July 21 a “fist-swinging street fight” broke out on Main Street when a member of a group of white students struck one of thirty black youths demonstrating at local lunch counters. While a crowd of five hundred looked on, police broke it up and arrested three people (two black, one white). Days later, similar fights involving hundreds of white and black youths broke out at local drive-ins. Understandably, Greenville was nervous. “Time for level heads to take over,” the News editorialized, and although the paper worried about “the possibility of bloodshed,” it asserted that the white community’s “most important objective is to maintain segregated schools.” The “violence” resulting from demonstrations “does endless harm to that cause”; for that reason alone, the newspaper said, blacks needed to temper their “outrageous conduct,” and whites needed to exercise “more patience.”45
The editorial had little effect, however. Incidents continued, and as arrests and violence—including rock throwing and shooting at passing cars—increased, on July 25 the city council imposed a 9:00 p.m. curfew on Greenville residents under the age of twenty-one. “We cannot tolerate lawlessness,” the News editorialized in support of council action. Local NAACP leaders, also fearing bloodshed, repeated calls for a biracial community committee, which they had been advocating for years but whites had resisted. They nonetheless promised to use their influence to stop lunch counter demonstrations and “marches against the Greenville Public Library.” In its report about the curfew, the New York Times noted, “Race relations started deteriorating rapidly after the recent arrest of several Negro students for a sit-down demonstration in the white public library.”46
On July 28, the NAACP filed suit in federal court to desegregate the Greenville Public Library on behalf of seven plaintiffs (although Jackson was not among them, he hardly faded from subsequent civil rights history) who also asked for a temporary injunction against the library’s segregated practices.47 Although the violence in Greenville diminished, black teenagers continued to conduct sit-ins at local lunch counters. Then, on August 10, executives of major variety store chains, including Woolworth, Kress, and Grant, all with branches in sixty-nine southern communities, announced they would be ending racial segregation at their lunch counters, in large part because local store managers had requested the action. The impact was immediate. Lunch counters in more than a hundred cities eliminated segregated services within a year of the Greensboro sit-ins. And in late August the Greenville city council lifted the curfew.48
On August 27, county authorities and county library officials named in the federal suit against the library filed a motion for dismissal. Six days later, city council members voted to close the main library and McBee branch until further notice. “The efforts made by a few Negroes to use the White library will now deprive White and Negro citizens of the benefit of a library,” said the mayor. “This same group, if allowed to continue in their self-centered purpose, may conceivably bring about a closing of all schools, parks, swimming pools and other facilities. It is difficult to see how such results could be of benefit to anyone.” The News supported the move, and worried about “an influx of mixed races and the renewal of strife” that integration of the library would bring. Plaintiffs’ attorneys saw the action as an effort to forestall integration. Ten days later, a federal district judge threw out the lawsuit, arguing that the plaintiffs had no case because the library was no longer in operation.49
As numerous complaints came in from whites and blacks about the closed library, on September 16 the mayor announced he would seek a meeting with the library and city council to consider the library’s future. Two days later, the Greenville News published a letter from Dorris Wright, president of the NAACP Youth Chapter and one of the plaintiffs in the federal suit, who pointed out several inequities between the McBee branch and the main library, particularly the number of newspapers at the main library inaccessible to McBee users. “The separate but equal principle is very expensive,” he argued. “Integration of the libraries is not only morally right, but it is also less expensive as well.” The same day the mayor met with the library board and city council.50
On the morning of September 19, and without prior announcement, all city libraries opened. “The board of trustees, with the approval of the city council, has ordered the city libraries opened,” stated the mayor. “The city libraries will be operated for the benefit of any citizen having a legitimate need for the libraries and their facilities. They will not be used for demonstrations, purposeless assembly, or propaganda purposes.” Although the mayor’s statement did not say the library was being integrated, the News noted, “the inference was unmistakable.” And while the newspaper welcomed the action, it also forewarned: “There is no cause for anyone to either gloat or complain that an integration ‘breakthrough’ has occurred. The Library simply isn’t in the same category of public facilities as parks and playgrounds, swimming pools and the like,” and especially the public schools. “Contacts and associations in the Library are brief and lacking in the intimacy which exists in parks, swimming pools, and schools. Each patron goes about his business in the same way as he does at the bank, the post office, or on the public bus.”51
That first day, “there was no outward show of racial friction as a dozen or so Negro youngsters and adults came and went, some checking out books, others reading or apparently studying and perusing the shelves,” wrote a News reporter. “Considerably more White persons were at the library during the day, and they went about their business as usual.”52 Greenville Public Library director Charles E. Stow wrote the Wilson Library Bulletin—a periodical widely read by librarians across the nation and published by the same company that issued the heavily used Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature—that he was “pleased that the library has been integrated, a step which I recommended several years ago. I feel it was extremely unfortunate that the library was closed and it is difficult for me to understand why that step was necessary, since it was reopened so promptly on an integrated basis.”53 He said nothing, however, about another type of segregation imposed on library users ten days after integration, when it was decided to force boys and girls to sit at separate tables—probably a reaction to the possibility that black males might sit next to white females.54
Memphis, Tennessee, and Greenville, South Carolina, both had a segregated public library system in the 1950s that local black citizens forced to integrate through the courts following the Brown v. Board of Education decision. In Memphis, integration was driven by a disgruntled veteran whose wife had been humiliated in 1949 when she was denied service. In Greenville, integration was compelled in 1960 by black high school and college students stirred to action by similar sit-ins protesting Jim Crow practices across the South. In both cases the public library system functioned as a local platform to mediate disputes—always reluctantly but mostly in nonviolent ways. In both cases, the successful resolution of disputes forced upon them resulted in libraries being one of the first local civic institutions to desegregate, while other public accommodations, especially public schools, remained segregated. And in both, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund took a central role in federal suits filed on behalf of plaintiffs and bore the brunt of white backlash.