In Alabama, efforts to desegregate public library services took a variety of forms and followed several patterns, some violent, most nonviolent. All show in a variety of ways how civil rights activities swirling around them influenced the integration of public library services. They also demonstrate that some Alabama communities capitulated fairly easily to desegregating their public libraries when pressured by protesters; others held out as long as possible.1
MOBILE
Shortly after the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Mobile Public Library board affirmed its commitment to a segregated system. As in many systems, however, civil rights pressures and an evolving sense of fairness in the midst of Jim Crow life led the board to plan improvements for the black branch. “This branch library must be kept attractive if we are to keep the negroes from coming to the main library,” the library director had written in 1952. Days after the massive protests about segregated public library services in Memphis, the library board met on March 25, 1960, to discuss strategies for the possibility of similar demonstrations locally. Although board members hoped to avoid what they perceived as Memphis’s mistakes and deny demonstrators “any chance for publicity,” they nonetheless instructed librarians not to provide black people service, even if they were “orderly in behavior.”
A year later, several blacks entered the main library and requested service. On April 18, 1961, a “Citizens’ Committee” submitted a petition to city commissioners that cited a judge’s decision forcing integration of the Danville Public Library in Virginia and demanded all Mobile citizens be permitted “access to lounge, reading, and all other accommodations and facilities of the main library and all branch libraries, bookmobiles, et cetera, sans any form of proscription based on race, color, or creed.” As other black groups joined and pressure mounted, in early November board members sought the advice of city commissioners. In the interim, however, they instructed the librarian to “use his best judgment” in dealing with any sit-ins or demonstrations.
On November 8, twenty black youths walked into the main library, sat down at desks and in lounge areas, drank from library fountains, and tried to check out books. After a second day of sit-ins, Virginia Smith, the librarian at the “colored branch,” phoned director Guenter Janson to report that teachers at the black high school had told students the main library was now open to them. Worried that hordes of black students would show up at the library the next day, Janson called the board chairman, who met with the mayor on November 10. Desegregate, the mayor advised; he “saw no objection to bona fide use of the library by Negroes.”
At a hastily called board meeting November 13, the chairman recounted events of the previous five days, noted the mayor had recommended integration of the library system, recognized no legal standing to justify segregated facilities, and with Memphis and Danville in mind forecast increased numbers of black youths in the library in the immediate future. Caught between “the recent interpretations of the law by the Federal Courts” and “the long-established customs of this community,” after an hour’s discussion the board approved an interim policy opening the main library to black patrons for reference work and limited borrowing privileges. “The Davis Avenue Branch Library, which has recently been expanded, is designed to provide for the normal and reasonable needs of our Negro citizens,” they noted, expecting Mobile’s blacks to go there first and withdraw system books through its services. To obtain books that might be subject to “undue delay,” causing “undue hardship,” however, black people could use the main library and other white branches. The board authorized their librarians—all white—to decide what constituted undue delay and undue hardship.
Because Janson interpreted these instructions loosely, he facilitated the transition to integrated service. Without direct authority he began issuing library cards to blacks from the main library, all without publicity. Within months, the Wilson Library Bulletin reported in its March 1962 issue, blacks and whites were “using the library together in complete harmony.” Not all of Mobile’s white citizens agreed with the policy change, however. One complained about this “clandestine agreement with Negro agitation groups.” Another argued, “If we do not want integration in our schools we must not allow it in our other institutions.” A third—who on a visit to the library had discovered it “full of Negroes sitting at tables and pretending to do reference work!”—accused board members of being “brainwashed for integration.” Although he claimed he could obtain “thousands of signatures protesting this crime,” he apparently never acted on the threat. Most Mobilians appeared to have accepted integrated public library service as a fait accompli.2
BIRMINGHAM
Although the activities of Birmingham police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor and his allies earned the city a reputation for violence and police brutality against black people that bolstered Congress’s efforts to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Birmingham’s public library showed a different side of the city. By 1953 the city’s public library system supported two black branches, Booker T. Washington and Slossfield. In response to one white public library board member’s suggestion that local black leaders help increase the use of those branches, leaders organized a “Negro Advisory Committee.” The committee quickly mounted a publicity campaign that boosted circulation by 20 percent and the number of visitors by 33 percent. Bolstered by these successes, the committee sought to expand services and pressed the white board for more funds. One trustee suggested a central library for the black community. That would be an unnecessary and costly duplication of services, argued another board member, who then suggested desegregating the main library just for reference and research. To that a majority objected and postponed further discussion of the matter until “such a time as a ruling is handed down by the Supreme Court on the matter of segregation.” Obviously, they were waiting for the Brown decision.
Nonetheless, the Negro Advisory Committee pressed on. On February 25, 1954, members met with the board. Because no state law or local ordinance existed to mandate segregated public library services, they requested that the public library board integrate the entire system. “Without a single exception,” the committee later reported, “every Negro who was at this meeting first expressed the hope” of integrating the system. Barring that, however, the committee wanted a newer, larger central library just for Birmingham’s black community. What it got, however, were two new black branches, one opened in 1956, the other in 1957.3
In 1961, four years after Bull Connor and his allies had been elected on a platform committing Birmingham to remaining “the most segregated city in America,” local civil rights leader Fred Shuttlesworth sued the city in federal court to end segregation in city parks, playgrounds, and theaters. When the court ruled in his favor, city officials vowed to close recreational facilities rather than integrate. Upon being asked whether the city would also close schools and libraries, one commissioner responded, “If they integrate, it will be at gun point.” In June 1962, black teenager Lola Hendricks entered the main library to request a book. Librarians refused to serve her “because she was a Negro.” They advised her to use the “colored” branches and informed her that if the book she requested was not part of their collections, she could request branch librarians to obtain the book from the main library. The next month Hendricks filed suit in federal court to desegregate Birmingham public libraries; her suit was joined with that of other black Birmingham citizens demanding desegregation of all public buildings and an airport motel.
The following spring, motivated by Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. and others at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that “stirred your blood” and convinced many that civil rights were “worth dying for,” students at the historically black Miles College conducted sit-ins at four downtown lunch counters on April 3. Connor’s response with billy clubs and police dogs was captured by national media. Days later, Wyatt Walker—at the time, the SCLC executive director temporarily headquartered in Birmingham—recruited fair-skinned Addine “Deenie” Drew to pass as white and case the downtown library to prepare for a public library sit-in like those Walker had monitored in Petersburg, Virginia, three years earlier. Attired like a middle-class white in blue-and-white silk dress and hat, she entered the library unhindered, walked through reading rooms and stacks, and after noting all entrances and exits, left the building to call Walker at SCLC headquarters from a pay phone across the street. The experience was so traumatic, she later recalled, that she had to “look down at my feet and tell them to keep walking.” On April 9, she and several other black students entered the library and read undisturbed at desks. Whites stared but said nothing. When librarians took no action, the students left quietly.
Disappointed that they had provoked no incident, Walker planned a second sit-in the next day. On the morning of April 10, he told twelve students in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church basement to approach the library that afternoon at the same time but from different directions and asked Shelley Millender to speak for the group once they got inside. As they did, two white men approached Millender. “I was really afraid that day,” he later recalled, hoping if violence occurred, the media would be there to photograph the incidents. He was unaware the two men were newspaper reporters Walker had tipped off. They followed him into the library and photographed him as he spoke to librarians at the circulation desk, where he asked to join the library. Birmingham had a library for Negroes, the librarian said; Millender should go there. Millender and the librarian then had “quite a little skirmish in terms of rhetoric,” Millender later recalled, and when it was finished, he sat at a desk with several other students. Police came but, after several phone calls and much muffled conversation, refused to arrest them. Forty-five minutes later, the students left “voluntarily and without incident or disturbance,” library director Fant Thornley later told his board, despite the fact they had to walk through a crowd of young whites. Although several whites in the library uttered remarks such as “It stinks in here” and “Why don’t you go home?” the students left without incident.4 “We were there to get arrested,” Millender said; when that did not happen, the students saw no purpose in staying.
At a quickly assembled board meeting the next day, Thornley said he “did not feel that the students had any bona fide desire for library service” and that they “were merely part of the demonstrations taking place throughout the City.” At the same time, however, he wanted board approval of his actions the previous day and guidance for what he perceived would be inevitable future sit-ins. “At some length” the board discussed alternatives, and although it rejected any use of the library “for sit-in demonstrations or for the agitation of racial incidents,” it approved Thornley’s actions and unanimously passed a resolution that “no persons be excluded from the use of the public library facilities” because of race. Their decision came days after local elections had turned Bull Connor and his allies out of office and brought white moderates in and the day before Martin Luther King and 132 other protesters were arrested by Connor (still in office) for violating an injunction preventing them from staging demonstrations—“a flagrant denial of our constitutional rights,” King called it. The same day twenty-five young black people were arrested, three for sitting-in at a local restaurant and nine for frequenting the counter at a bakery. In subsequent weeks, millions of television viewers across the county watched visual images of Connor’s minions using fire hoses and police dogs on black demonstrators. While incarcerated, King wrote his famous Letter from the Birmingham Jail. Then, on September 15, the nation was shocked when four adolescent black girls attending Sunday school died in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Subsequent riots led to the deaths of two more black youths.5
By “quietly desegregating” in the midst of a violent summer, the Birmingham Public Library actually functioned as a lone mediating site for facilitating racial reconciliation. Perhaps board members approved the effort to counter the national image of violence Connor had helped create for their city; perhaps they feared cameras capturing and the national news media reporting on similar violence in their library. At a July 18 board meeting, Thornley reported “a distinct increase in the number of Negroes using the [main] library facilities,” particularly the formerly white branch closest to the black neighborhood. When Thornley testified at the Hendricks case hearing on December 3, he reported that the Birmingham Public Library was an integrated institution. Because the media—national and local—judged this civil action not “news,” it largely ignored the library in its coverage.6
MONTGOMERY
In the wake of the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and 1956, local white politicians ramped up efforts to defend local Jim Crow practices. Many joined the local White Citizens’ Council as the city braced against inevitable pressure to desegregate civic spaces. In 1959, for example, rather than obey a federal court order, Montgomery filled the municipal swimming pool with cement, closed its fourteen parks, and sold animals from the local zoo. But these actions did not prevent demonstrations. In February 1960, as students from the all-black Alabama State College marched on the capitol, nine split off to challenge the segregated snack bar in the Montgomery County Courthouse. When turned away by security officers, they proceeded to the public library. There librarians referred them to the “colored branch,” and although they permitted the students to apply for borrower’s cards, librarians refused them any other services.7 For the time being, however, civil rights activists chose not to challenge the Montgomery Public Library’s segregated services.
On May 21, 1961, three weeks after Harper Lee of Monroeville won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel To Kill a Mockingbird (which every generation of high school and college students since has been assigned as required reading), Freedom Riders supported by the Congress of Racial Equality, who were testing a recently passed interstate commerce law prohibiting segregation in transportation facilities, arrived at Montgomery’s Greyhound bus terminal. By previous agreement, local police allowed a crowd of two hundred white segregationists shouting, “Git them niggers,” to club, kick, and pummel exiting Riders, some of them into unconsciousness, including Freedom Rider and future congressman John Lewis. In the melee, John Seigenthaler, special assistant to U.S. attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, sent there to diffuse a potential riot, was struck in the head with a pipe. He fell to the ground, where he remained unattended and unconscious for hours. Police showed up an hour later to restore order. By then the damage had been done. Once again photos of the beaten Freedom Riders ran in newspapers, and film footage showed on television sets across the country.8 The city remained tense for months.
In early 1962, Robert L. Cobb, a Booker T. Washington High School student, was working on a scrapbook for a Spanish class. Although he was not a member of the NAACP or the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA)—a local civil rights organization that had spearheaded the bus boycott seven years earlier—he had received MIA training in nonviolent civil disobedience. On a pretext that neither the school library nor his local black branch library had a particular book about Mexico he wanted, on March 15 he and four other well-dressed friends met at Martin Luther King’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and took a taxicab to the white library. One stood outside the modern new building, while Cobb and three others entered. “May I help you?” said a librarian in a loud voice as they entered the door, adding, “We do not serve Negroes in this library.” Polite but undeterred, they quickly scattered. Some sat at tables; others used the card catalog. Cobb “went straight to the History Department,” he later recalled. “I looked for a book on Mexico; I looked at Latin American books.” Then he took some notes, returned the books, “went to the news room and started reading a magazine.” After fifteen to twenty minutes, library director Farris J. Martin Jr. approached him and his friends and invited the five teenagers into his office for a “closed door meeting.”
Although the students refused to give Martin their names, Cobb later recounted their interaction: “When we walked in he shook hands and he said, ‘I admire what you are doing’ . . . but he said according to the Commissioners, that this library . . . would not be integrated, that anything we said outside these closed doors, that he would deny.”9 But the kindness did not last long. The director told them “if we . . . try to integrate the library he would automatically have the [black] branch library closed.” Martin then ordered Cobb and his friends out of the building and threatened to call the police. When the teenagers requested library cards instead, they were told to wait in the newspaper reading room. After fifteen minutes nothing happened, so they left. Three police officers arrived immediately thereafter.
“We have an excellent new Negro library in Montgomery that provides access to any book desired,” Mayor Earl James told the Montgomery Advertiser, the city’s major newspaper, when he heard of the incident. “In view of this fact, today’s action can be deemed only outright provocative race agitation and harassment.” The mayor made no mention of the fact that the black library held fourteen thousand volumes, the main library sixty-five thousand, and because Montgomery’s blacks had no access to a card catalog listing volumes in the main library, they could not determine what was there to request. Nor did he note that in 1961 the Montgomery Public Library annual book budget was $7,554. Of this $3,454 went to the main library, $2,400 to the bookmobile (which served only whites), and $1,700 to the black branch.10
Cobb reported his experiences to his father, a longtime employee of the Virginia Carolina Chemical Company, who quickly contacted local black civil rights attorney Charles Conley, a 1955 graduate of New York University’s School of Law. Called by one NYU law professor a “radical threat to the status quo,” Conley had become well-known in the civil rights movement and served as legal advisor to both Martin Luther King Jr. and his immediate SCLC subordinate, Ralph Abernathy. (Conley later became Alabama’s first elected black judge, and Abernathy became president of the SCLC and a leader in the civil rights movement.) Conley’s law office on Bainbridge Street— informally known as the “Executive House” because it served as the business center for many of the battles against discrimination—was walking distance from King’s church. Because of the violence directed at civil rights leaders, Conley’s wife, Ellen, feared for his life and often acted as his chauffeur for late-night office hours. “I’d always insist on getting out of the car first,” she said. “If a bullet was coming, it would get me. Chuck had important work to finish.”11
Conley agreed to represent Cobb free of charge because neither he nor his father could afford legal representation. An informant quoted in FBI files said the city wished to settle out of court; the city attorney knew library segregation had no legal foundation and recognized that the judge reviewing the case was likely to rule against Montgomery. “City leaders offered to integrate their public library with a minimum of publicity, just as Mobile had done,” the FBI informant noted, “but Cobb’s lawyer insisted on a public trial” to “further the larger movement for equal access to public facilities.” Nonetheless, the informant said, both sides worried that “if the library were integrated after a public court battle, the potential for interracial violence at the city library would be greatly increased.”12
On April 27, 1962, in the midst of a gubernatorial campaign manifesting what one historian describes as “the politics of rage”—and in which candidate George Wallace, after losing the previous gubernatorial election, vowed “no son-of-a-bitch will ever out-nigger me again”—Cobb filed a federal class-action lawsuit against the Montgomery Public Library board, city commissioners, library director, and others. He asked the court to declare that any law, ordinance, or practice of segregation in the public library be deemed unconstitutional. The mayor called Cobb’s action “race agitation and harassment.” The library director continued to maintain that an “ordinance forbids integration of the library.”13
Cobb was fortunate to be living in a jurisdiction where Frank M. Johnson Jr. served as federal district court judge. Johnson grew up in rural Alabama, oldest of seven children, son of a farmer and teacher. His father later became a probate judge and served as the only Republican in the state legislature. They lived in the remote hills of Winston County in northwestern Alabama. “Long a Republican stronghold, the county rejected slavery and tried to secede from the state after Alabama left the Union in 1861,” the New York Times noted in Johnson’s obituary. “Styling itself the ‘Free State of Winston,’ it tried to remain neutral in the Civil War, and eventually sent more men to fight for the Union than for the Confederacy.”14 Johnson graduated at the top of his University of Alabama law school class and entered law practice in 1943 after serving in the army, where he was wounded twice in battle and received a Bronze Star. He had a solid reputation as a criminal defense attorney, became involved in Republican politics, and served as a U.S. attorney for northern Alabama. As an Eisenhower appointee, he arrived on the bench in 1955, one year after the Supreme Court decided Brown. Three weeks later, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a public bus. “Johnson’s first major ruling was to join the majority on a three-judge panel that struck down the Montgomery bus-segregation law as unconstitutional,” the Times reported. “He would use that reasoning again and again to create a broad mandate for racial justice in Alabama and across the South.”
During his nearly forty years on the bench—first as a district judge, then as a federal appellate judge—Johnson ordered the desegregation of schools, parks, depots, airports, restaurants, restrooms, and other public places as well as the Alabama State Police. For his positions he received “mountains of hate mail and scores of threatening telephone calls,” the Times reported. “Crosses were burned on his lawn twice. His mother’s home was firebombed. . . . For nearly two decades, federal marshals protected the judge and his family.” George Wallace, a law school classmate, once called him an “integratin’, carpetbaggin’, scalawaggin’, baldfaced liar” trying to usurp the governor’s executive powers. In 1967 Johnson’s portrait appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, and in 1995 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Despite his reputation in the area of civil rights, however, “almost every lawyer who tried a case before him attested to his fairness.” In 1993 Johnson received the American Bar Association’s first Thurgood Marshall Award as the person “who most exemplifies Justice Marshall’s spirit on behalf of protecting civil rights.” The Montgomery federal courthouse is now named in his honor.15
In the suit, Cobb was seeking full integration of the city’s public library system. At the same time, he argued for integration of the museum (where he had also been turned away) that was housed in the same building. In response, the defendants argued that they did not operate a segregated library or museum but that Cobb and his friends were turned away because they did not have library cards for the main library and were not museum members. Johnson disagreed. “It is apparent to this Court . . . that the main Montgomery Library . . . and the Montgomery Museum . . . are presently being operated upon a racially segregated basis.”16 Nor did Johnson accept the argument that the plaintiffs would have been permitted to use the main library and museum if only they had library cards or museum membership. “There was no evidence that any Negro had ever been permitted use of the museum,” he noted, and the evidence “indicated that ‘possibly’ there was one member of the Negro race who held a library card which authorized the use of the main library facilities”—this in a city of 150,000 people, one-third of whom were black. Johnson did not note that shortly after Cobb filed his lawsuit, the museum board had amended its constitution to read, “Any white person of good moral character may become a member.”17 Apparently, the board wanted to make explicit what had previously only been implied.
After hearing testimony on both sides of the case, on August 7 Johnson issued an opinion: “All parties recognize the law is well settled,” he noted, “that if the public authorities discriminate . . . in the operation of . . . the Montgomery Library . . . so as to exclude any race . . . then such action is in violation of the Constitution.”18 Johnson referred to “a case almost exactly like” this one decided in Danville, Virginia, in 1960.19 In that case the court held that segregation in public libraries was unconstitutional. Thus, Johnson granted Cobb’s motion for an injunction that prohibited all defendants from making or enforcing any distinction based upon race in the services or facilities of either the library or the museum.
The day after Johnson ruled, city commissioners met in secret with the museum and public library boards. One commissioner not only wanted to close the main library; he also wanted to close the “colored branch.” The mayor said he was “besieged with calls urging him to close both the library and the museum.”20 Ultimately, however, officials settled on another “solution.” That evening, “several men and women were seen lugging heavy chairs and tables down a flight of stairs and out of sight shortly after sunset.”21 Montgomery’s WSFA-TV caught the activity on camera. Tables and chairs were also removed from the black branch. When reporters asked the library board chairman why workers were removing furniture, he commented, “Maybe they’re going to wax them (the floors). We’ll just have to wait and see.”22
The next day, both libraries opened without furniture. In the black branch, “kids made a mockery of it,” the librarian said, and brought folding chairs and typewriter tables from home. The press—black and white—also chuckled. The Philadelphia Tribune condemned “the idiocy of Montgomery white folk in their ‘cut-off-the-nose-to-spite-the-face’ move” but teased that a pleasant by-product of the order “might be improved posture for the new reader who no longer can slouch in his chair or hunch over his book while reading.” “Standing Room Only,” teased the Montgomery Advertiser in a story headline. It reported that “a large number of whites” used the library that day but no blacks. Several days later, the Advertiser noted, “Besides chairs and tables, magazines and periodicals have been removed from racks at the library.” At 11:15 a.m. on Saturday, August 11, however, Cobb entered the main library and asked for a borrower’s card; librarians issued him one immediately and without resistance.23
Letters to the Advertiser showed little consensus with library board actions. One writer thought the decision sound. “Just let whoever wants a book go there and get it and take it on home and read it.” Ignore the “library situation,” advised another. “A fire fanned will blaze; let alone, it will vanish away.” Harold Anderson, a lifelong resident of Montgomery whose family had lived there for four generations, lamented that “Montgomerians have been made the laughing stock of newspaper readers from Mobile to Moscow” and assured the Advertiser that like “the great majority of our responsible citizens,” he was not “pro-integrationist” but a “pro-tolerationalist” for “all public (not private) facilities to be for the use of all law-abiding citizens regardless of race, color, or creed. . . . Please put the library tables and chairs back.” “A good library is a direct reflection of the cultural level of a community,” said one woman. “Limit the use thereof in any way to any segment of the population and consider the image produced. Not such a pretty picture of Montgomery, Ala., in August, 1962, is it?”
“The latest childish maneuver in regard to the ‘race problem,’” a Methodist pastor called it. Reopen the parks and restore “all necessary library equipment,” argued another. “To take an opposite course will lead to a long night of ignorance and bigotry for our city.” “I consider the removal of chairs and tables from the library a direct insult to the intellectual community of Montgomery and I find the suggestion of closing the library so absurd and irrational that it cannot be dealt with logically,” wrote a white high school senior. “Alarming and a sad commentary on the state of civilization in the city of Montgomery,” noted a lifelong white resident. “My heart grows cold with the thought that the public library, one of the most important educational assets of Montgomery, might be closed,” wrote another woman. “Let us not be blind; keep the library open.”
Others disagreed. “Hurrah!” cheered one, “for removing the tables and chairs and reading matter from the library. Now let’s go further and close and lock the doors.” Said another, “As saddening as the thought is to me, I, for one, would close the doors as tight as the parks and I would never open them again so long as the order to integrate was on the books.” “This library move is the first subtle advance,” wrote the executive secretary of the Montgomery Citizens’ Council. “If we capitulate, the complete rape will occur by fall school time.” “If we continue such tactics” to accommodate “those who would change our way of life,” argued a white physician, “what is the ultimate plan in regard to public rest room facilities?” “The solution for the pseudo-intellectuals who wish to force the taxpayers of Montgomery to support integration against their will, is to form a private corporation to build and maintain a private library to be used by Negroes and whatever type of white person who wish to integrate,” sniffed a Montgomery housewife. “Us pore [sic], ignorant, prejudiced un-Christian, white people can buy our own books, and loan them to other whites who feel as we do.”24
“A little integration is like a little pregnancy,” an Advertiser columnist argued. He recommended to “the gentlemen who propose the integration of our children” the appointment of a “Colored Culture Committee” to conduct “ladies of like hallucinations” through black sections of New York City and Washington, D.C. “If their hallucinations survive these two jolts of shock therapy, let the gentlemen wait huddled in a Washington back alley while the ladies kneel in a Washington church, fully realizing that if they find themselves stabbed, robbed, and raped, it will be of some comfort to them to know that it was only the outward manifestation of an inner desire, aroused by the constant teasing of ‘modern woman’s’ semi-nudity.” Another white male saw the library “incident” as “just another assault upon the white man’s civilization.”
The Advertiser described these letters as “spirited and shrewd” but lacking understanding of “the total picture—the library taken with the city buses, the bus terminals and restaurants, the railroad depot, the lunch counters and trains, and all the facilities at Dannelly Field.” Although the “library’s vertical necessity” was “unrealistic,” it was “quaint enough for a tourist attraction. The condition won’t endure indefinitely. When the controversy goes dormant and the Negroes lose interest in agitating the matter, the whites probably will have the library largely to themselves and they will get tired of standing up.”25
At 9:00 a.m. on August 13—two days after Cobb had obtained his borrower’s card—twelve black youths entered the main library to register for their cards. To get in, they had to walk past Ku Klux Klan members milling about on the sidewalks and in cars cruising by. Minutes later, however, uniformed police arrived to keep the peace. At the top of the library steps, director Martin stood next to a detective in front of the door and allowed the youths to enter one or two at a time, “locking the door behind them.” Although Martin did eject a newspaper reporter and television cameraman who wanted to record what was going on inside, these new black patrons, the Advertiser later reported, were “generally ignored by white patrons.” Among the twelve was Robert Cobb, who used his two-day-old borrower’s card to check out a copy of Much Ado about Nothing. All week, black patrons came by the dozens to check out books. On September 24, FBI informants assessed that the danger of violence over the desegregation of the Montgomery Public Library system was over. Blacks were using the library without incident, and the matter was no longer discussed in the local media. Days later, the library board moved the furniture back into the libraries.26
Things were not the same at the Cleveland Avenue black branch, however, where whites employed by or stationed at Maxwell Air Force Base who used the branch were frequently harassed by other whites and where police stationed in front took down their license plate numbers. One officer asked a white patron why she had come to this branch; other white patrons were harassed by phone. Understandably, “they got scared and stopped coming,” the branch librarian reported. Perhaps because of this activity, use of the branch by blacks was also down. The absence of chairs and tables made it “difficult for me to study,” complained one patron before the furniture was restored in late September.27
ANNISTON
On September 15, 1963—the same day four black adolescent girls lost their lives to a bomb placed in the basement of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church—a white mob brutally attacked two black ministers with knives, clubs, and chains in front of the Anniston Public Library. Two years earlier the town had suffered national media attention when just outside the city limits whites stopped and burned a Greyhound bus carrying Freedom Riders.28 To recover from this negative publicity, town officials organized a biracial Anniston Human Relations Council (AHRC) and looked to it for recommendations to ease racial tensions. For Anniston’s blacks, desegregating the public library was high on the list. In June 1963, AHRC members contacted the library board. In July several black people entered the library to apply for borrower’s cards—an incident the board chairman later described as “a serious attempt to integrate the main library.” After receiving the applications, the board abdicated responsibility to decide about integrating the library by arguing that such matters “should be answered by elected officials of the city.” In the absence of a decision, a black minister entered the library in August to consult the Interpreter’s Bible. “I told him that our library was not integrated,” the acting librarian later recounted, and “therefore I could not allow him to use the books in the reading room.” Instead, she suggested an office outside the public area. “In other words,” the minister responded, “I cannot sit down in here and use” the book? No, she said. The minister then left.
The incident drew an immediate reaction. Fearing negative publicity and possible violence, the city commission advised the library board to desegregate, and at an August 22 meeting the board resolved that as of September 15 “all persons will be served by the library.” Heavily influencing the discussions leading to the decision was a desire “to avoid the horrible strife witnessed in Gadsden and Birmingham, the humiliating losing lawsuit that Montgomery experienced and the possible presence of federal troops.” In the interim, the board worked on a plan with AHRC to quietly integrate the library. After directing staff not to discuss integration with the press and guaranteeing the council that reporters would not be present, the board assured the mayor, “We do not anticipate any publicity in the absence of any problems.” On September 15, they had decided, Reverend R. B. McClain and Reverend Quintus Reynolds would enter the library at 3:30 p.m. and receive service.
By that time, however, white racists had learned of the plans and had assembled in cars and along sidewalks as McClain and Reynolds approached the library. “Where are you going?” shouted one as he grabbed McClain’s arm and spun him around. When McClain jerked his arm away, his assailant punched him. Ten whites joined the brouhaha, and while one began striking Reynolds with a chain, others beat and kicked the two ministers, who quickly bolted for their car, a half-block away. As they scurried for cover, about sixty more white men joined the melee, pelting the ministers with rocks and bottles and, once the ministers were inside their car, banging and shaking it. At that moment the ministers heard a crack as the passenger-side window shattered. Although they later surmised it was a bullet that had passed between them, they bolted from the car and ran toward police headquarters. On the way a black driver picked them up and took them to the hospital, where Reynolds was treated for two superficial stab wounds and both were treated for bruises and abrasions. While they received treatment, Anniston police arrived at the library and dispersed the crowd.
Hours later, black youths retaliated by attacking a white man. One struck the man over the head with a bottle, while others kicked him when he fell. “We decided to kill the first white man we saw on 15th Street,” one youth later explained. Shortly thereafter, three shotgun blasts shattered windows at a black restaurant. It was a sad conclusion to a day that moderate whites hoped would quietly integrate their public library—“as dark a Sunday as this community has ever known,” the Anniston Star, the city’s major newspaper, editorialized, expressing shock that two respected ministers were attacked by “white thugs who would be far more uncomfortable in a library than in a jail.” City officials publicly apologized to McClain, and the mayor visited a recuperating Reynolds at his home. The mayor offered a $1,000 reward for information identifying mob members who had assaulted the ministers, the Star added $500 to the sum, and the library board added another $100. “We are not going to let a bunch of hoodlums run the library,” the board chairman said. Although the chief of police promised to find the perpetrators, he wanted it known that “he did not approve of the integration of the public library.”
On September 16, the board and AHRC desegregated the library. When McClain and a fellow minister arrived by car (Reynolds was still recuperating), board members met them and escorted them into the library. With twenty officers on site to prevent violence, the ministers applied for borrower’s cards and checked out books. Some whites stared; others shuffled in and out of the building to report to a larger white crowd about a half-block away. Within weeks, forty-five members of Anniston’s black community had borrower’s cards as the library weathered a mildly tense adjustment period. On one occasion the white librarian worried about large numbers of black teenagers who “monopolized” space as they tested their newly won library freedom; on another a white teenager scribbled, “Fight Integration,” on books and shelf labels.
In subsequent months, police arrested four white suspects in the beating of Reynolds and McClain and five black teenagers for subsequently beating a white man. Among the white suspects, two had prior arrests for race violence—one for assaulting entertainer Nat King Cole in Birmingham in 1956, the other for pistol-whipping two Anniston black women. A grand jury charged one from each group, but at their victims’ requests officials ultimately dropped charges against them.29
SELMA
“Here in Selma the Negroes are contented and happy,” one white resident wrote in 1948. “At present the Negro is sitting on top of the world.” Not so high, however, as to merit public library service. Although blacks occasionally were allowed to receive a book at the library’s back door from a black maid, Selma lacked a “colored branch.” Then, after Brown and the Montgomery bus boycott, Selma white leaders formed a Citizens’ Council to resist any local attempts at desegregation. Assuming she shared their racial sympathies, Carnegie Library board members (many were also members of the Citizens’ Council) appointed Patricia Blalock as director in 1963. But Blalock surprised them. In part worried about potential violence at her library, in part disgusted with Jim Crow practices, at her second board meeting she recommended integrated services. “They were all fine people,” she later recalled about her board members, “but they were just very strong about this.” She persisted, visited board members individually, and told each of the inevitability of integration. Montgomery and Birmingham had recently integrated their libraries, she noted, both after significant civil disturbances. “We need to get it done in a good way, and do it on our own.”
In early May 1963, Blalock received “unusual telephone calls” that led her to believe local blacks were planning demonstrations. At a regularly scheduled board meeting, Blalock pressed her case. “I think we need very badly to get this library integrated,” she argued, “and I don’t believe I can open up Monday until we’ve made a real decision.” Board members delivered their response just before the library opened Monday morning. Gathered with them that morning was the rest of the library staff. To avoid any disturbances, board members said, they would integrate, but “to help the community adjust to integration,” they would follow Danville and Montgomery’s examples by temporarily removing tables and chairs to minimize racial mixing. Only “as integration in the city progressed” would tables and chairs be returned. Because board members worried about “outsiders,” they also insisted on printing new application cards requiring two local references. Finally, they decided to close the library the week of May 13–19—ostensibly for an “inventory,” more likely to avoid potential sit-ins—and charged everyone at the library not to speak to the media or leaders in the black community. Although uncomfortable, Blalock agreed to their decision. The library opened Monday morning, May 20, vertically integrated but without incident. Initially few blacks came because most were unaware that Jim Crow had left the building. But six months later, by which time tables and chairs had reappeared, they were regular patrons.
Not without incident, however. One white woman “went into a tirade” when she saw blacks milling about. Better the library close than integrate, she groused. Another white tore up his library card and threw it on the floor. “What’s going on here?” said a third, who began shouting racial epithets before being conducted out of the building by a policeman Blalock had called. When others told the mayor to reverse the library board’s decision, Blalock offered to take the heat. “Just tell them I did it,” she told the mayor. “They can blame me. Tell them you didn’t have anything to do with it.” Eventually the tension dissipated. “You know, that’s not so bad,” said a man Blalock called “one of the worst racists in the world” when he saw black people lined up for borrower’s cards. When the man who had torn up his library card returned to check out a book two weeks later, Blalock presented him with the pieces she had taped together.30