As part of the southern Massive Resistance, in 1956 the Georgia state legislature adopted a resolution to void the Supreme Court’s Brown decision—ultimately an effort in futility—and incorporated an image of the Confederate flag on its state flag that it did not remove until 2001. But Georgia’s experiences in resisting civil rights activists were generally not as violent as those in other Deep South states. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference was born there in 1957, and in 1960 he returned to Atlanta to serve as co-pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church with his father. A year later, both the University of Georgia and the Atlanta public schools integrated.1 Although most efforts to desegregate public libraries in Georgia were nonviolent, as in Alabama none occurred in a vacuum. In some cases, integration of Georgia public libraries took place without demonstration; in others, the public library was one of several public and private institutions demonstrators included in a scattergun approach aimed at all local Jim Crow institutions. In yet others, protesters made the public library the primary target. The desegregation of public libraries in Savannah, Albany, and Columbus illustrate all three.
SAVANNAH
While Freedom Riders tested Jim Crow throughout the South in the summer of 1961, that July—without public announcement—Savannah desegregated its library system, including its central Bull Street Library in Savannah’s Victorian district. “The mayor said city and library officials decided to follow a precedent set by a number of southern cities, including Charleston, Atlanta, Augusta, Jacksonville, Greenville, and Macon,” the Savannah Morning News reported on July 21, 1961. At the time, the city was contesting a suit to force integration of the library by arguing that Savannah’s black people had never been denied access. “The library’s reference room has been used by Negroes for a number of years,” the News noted.2 Although integration witnessed no immediate increase in black use, “once access was granted,” his biographers note, future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas “became a Bull Street regular.”3
With one exception, 1962 was a relatively quiet period for public library protests across the South. The Greensboro sit-ins and their aftermath in 1960 and the Freedom Rides and their aftermath in 1961 had led to “a challenging period of adaptation and adjustment,” notes Raymond Arsenault, “a transitional era that saw the passing of old myths and the birth of new realities of race, region and democracy.” And in 1962 the federal government struggled to keep up with events forced the previous year by movement activists, which had been accelerated by the growing power of the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.4
THE ALBANY MOVEMENT
The exception to all this was Albany, Georgia, located in Dougherty County, three hours south of Atlanta and fifty miles north of the Florida border. Writing in 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois recalled that in 1860 the county represented “perhaps the richest slave kingdom the modern world ever knew. A hundred and fifty barons commanded the labor of nearly six thousand Negroes.” By the early 1900s, however, most of the barons had abandoned their cotton fields and left the area. Former slaves who still lived there, he noted, were “not happy.” Almost all were destitute. Many worked for pay, but their income barely covered family necessities. Few were able to save enough to own a home.5 In 1960 Albany, the county seat, had a population of over fifty-five thousand; more than two-thirds were black, a figure reflecting the legacy of a plantation era when slaves far outnumbered white owners. Singer Ray Charles was born there in 1930, and a large, illuminated revolving statue of him playing his grand piano now serves as the centerpiece for the prominent Ray Charles Plaza. Although the black population greatly outnumbered the white, Albany’s public library, built with Carnegie funds in 1906, was still not open to them when the Freedom Riders swept the South.
As in much of the South, the civil rights movement in Albany did not begin in the 1960s. For decades, various individuals and organizations met regularly to discuss how best to deal with the local Jim Crow laws and practices, but they accomplished very little. Then, in September 1961, several field officers from the newly organized Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee arrived in the area to recruit blacks to register to vote. Students from the historically black Albany State College (now Albany State University) and the local black high school played a major role in these efforts. “We moved into young adulthood in the midst of evidence all around us that the world we lived in could be changed if we were ready to confront and demand it,” Albany State student demonstrator Bernice Johnson Reagon later recalled. It had been seven years since the Brown decision, she noted, six years since the murder of Emmett Till and the Montgomery bus boycott, and four since federal troops forced the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. And when “the 1960 February 1 Greensboro sit-in led to an expanding student-led movement . . . it was clear” to her “that this was a movement with plenty of room for young people.”6 College administrators suspended many of the students for their participation in voter drives—another manifestation of the generational split among southern blacks—but in the process their suspensions freed them up to become even more involved. City clerks resisted the attempts at voter registration, both actively by requiring difficult literacy tests and passively by closing their offices when it suited them. SNCC next organized downtown picketing, then marches on city hall. As one participant recalls, “These efforts led to arrest—first small groups of school children then larger and larger groups of all ages.”7
On September 22, 1961, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) issued a ruling that desegregated all interstate bus transportation and facilities. Inspired both by the new ICC ruling and by the activism of Albany students, other members of the black community began to mobilize. “It was at this point that all of the then-known [local] Civil Rights organizations came together in a common cause, to put an end to segregation in Albany,” noted local black physician William G. Anderson. “The organizational meeting took place late at night on November 17, 1961, at the home of Dr. Ed Hamilton, a local dentist.” Instead of using the name of any of the participating preexisting organizations, the group decided to simply call itself the “Albany Movement.” For the next two years the movement staged protests and boycotts aimed at bus stations, lunch counters, and every other segregated facility in town, including the public library.
On November 22, the day after the ICC ruling took effect, black Albany students staged a sit-down demonstration in the bus station to test the law. Five were arrested for sitting in the “Whites Only” section. Three days later, the Albany Movement held its first mass meeting in Mt. Zion Baptist Church (at this writing, the home of the Albany Civil Rights Institute); hundreds attended. When the five students were tried two days later, the black community marched in protest. Then, on December 10, nine Freedom Riders arrived. All were immediately arrested as they tried to use the white waiting room and restroom in Albany’s train station.
Thereafter events escalated. On December 12, 267 college and high school students were arrested for protesting the arrests. On December 13, more than 200 were arrested for marching on city hall. Movement leaders convinced Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, and other well-known civil rights leaders to come from Atlanta to Albany to speak to the protesters. They arrived on December 15, planning to stay for a day or two. The next day, however, they led more than seven hundred protesters from Shiloh Baptist Church to city hall. On their third pass around the city square, they were met by police armed with billy clubs and loaded guns. Police chief Laurie Pritchett, dressed in a clean, freshly starched white uniform, picked up a bullhorn and announced, “You are all under arrest for unlawful marching without a permit.” No one resisted. No violence ensued. When the local jail was filled to capacity, the remaining prisoners were loaded onto buses and transported to jails in nearby counties.8
King and Abernathy’s presence in the movement as representatives of the SCLC, as well as SNCC’s and the NAACP’s subsequent involvement, brought to Albany the much-needed organization and attention that carried the movement forward. At its beginning, movement organizers had no clear plan and no specific immediate goals. As a result, their protests were aimed at nearly every aspect of segregation in Albany. For the next few years the Albany Movement followed the patterns of other southern communities—many individuals arrested, and several churches hosting mass meetings burned to the ground.
As part of this scattergun movement approach, on January 9, 1962, ten suspended Albany State students attempted to integrate the all-white Carnegie Library. Initially, four black men and one black woman entered the library, approached the assistant librarian, and asked for permission to check out books. They were told they needed to go to the black library branch. When they responded that the black branch did not have the books they wanted, library director Virginia Riley emerged from her office, apologized that the black branch did not have the materials they wanted, but said she could not assist them because “no colored people have gotten books here before.” When she asked them to leave, they did. Later that afternoon, a second group of five black students made the same attempt. Some entered the reading room; others went into a reference room crowded with white students. Riley told them they could not use the library and suggested they lodge a protest with the library board of trustees. The black students again left peacefully.9
The next day eight more students entered the library, sat in the reading rooms, fingered through the card catalog, and drank from the library fountain. Again Riley refused to serve them; she advised them to direct their protest to the library board of trustees. She also noted that if the black branch did not have the materials they needed, the main library would send the materials there. After she asked them to leave the library three times, they left peacefully. Almost simultaneously, the board of directors received a telegram signed by fourteen black people who claimed they were being “denied the right of education” and asked to use the library in lieu thereof. At the time, Albany was in the process of building a new $25,000 black branch library.10
Although many in Albany could recall several times when black students from Albany State College and nine other black Albany schools were permitted to use the library without incident before 1960, the movement changed the dynamic. As a result, the library board became intransigent. City officials apparently believed that providing a new black branch—a small, redbrick, single-room building in the predominantly black part of town—would resolve the issue. Like most other black branches, however, its holdings were meager compared to the white library. As for interlibrary loan service, one user noted that it took “two or three days” for the black branch to get a requested book from the white library. “If you have a lesson assignment to get out, it can be an awful lot of trouble.” Although the white main library had a bookmobile, it did not serve the black population. Director Riley, a twenty-year veteran at the white main library, told a black Baltimore Afro-American correspondent, “We have a segregated system here in Albany and we expect them to take out books through their own branch.”11
But library protests remained part of the larger movement. As the year went on, protesters appeared to gain ground across a number of fronts. Newspapers around the country paid regular attention to the situation in Albany. In March a bus boycott stopped bus service. In July, King, Abernathy, and others returned for their trial. Charged with parading without a permit, disturbing the peace, and obstructing the sidewalk, they were sentenced to forty-five days in jail or a $178 fine. To make their point, they chose jail. Their cells were in the city hall basement. “This jail is by far the worst I’ve ever been in. It is a dingy, dirty hole with nothing suggestive of civilized society,” King reported. “The cells are saturated with filth, and what mattresses there are for the bunks are as hard as solid rocks.” King and Abernathy were placed in one cell, but “conscious of the fact that he had some political prisoners on hand who could make these conditions known around the nation,” King noted in his autobiography, “the Chief [Pritchett] immediately ordered the entire cell block to be cleaned.”
Three days later, Pritchett arranged for bail, and King was released. Although King objected to being released while seven hundred others remained in jail, Pritchett responded, “God knows, Reverend, I don’t want you in my jail.” King recalled with some chagrin: “We had witnessed persons being kicked off lunch counter stools during the sit-ins, ejected from churches during the kneel-ins, and thrown into jail during the Freedom Rides. But for the first time, we witnessed being kicked out of jail.”12 Once again, Pritchett defused a potentially tense situation while at the same time minimizing negative publicity. That summer, demonstrations continued as leaders of the movement pressed the city commission to meet with them and negotiate a peaceful end to the protests. City officials repeatedly refused. Mayor Asa D. Kelley was firmly opposed to change and adamantly refused to “deal with law violators.”13
Protesting the Jim Crow public library remained on the movement’s agenda. On July 17, five black youngsters entered the white library and asked for library cards. They were refused and were instead directed to the newly built but much smaller black branch. Twenty others then showed up, but the librarian’s husband, who also worked there, stopped them at the door. As they left, one young woman promised him: “Don’t worry. We’ll be back.”14 A few weeks later, four black teenage boys entered the library and asked to borrow books. While a library worker called the police, the boys began browsing in the fiction room. When police arrived, they dragged the boys out the library door to the local jail, where they were charged with “failing to obey an officer.” Director Riley commented, “It does present a sad picture and I am very much distressed,” she told the Afro-American, “but I do think there are other sides to the picture.” She did not identify “the other sides,” however.
Frustrated by the continual protests, boycotts, and demonstrations, toward the end of July the city filed an action in federal court to permanently prohibit leadership of the Albany Movement from advocating additional demonstrations. By then, more than twelve hundred arrests had been made since the movement began in December 1961.15 On July 21, federal judge J. Robert Elliott granted a temporary restraining order banning the movement from picketing, parades, and other demonstrations and scheduled a hearing for July 30 to determine if an injunction should be granted. Three days later, an appellate court reversed the temporary order and encouraged Judge Elliott to schedule a hearing. Many years later, the judge maintained that his ruling on the restraining order had been “misunderstood” and that it was based on a threat against the life of Martin Luther King Jr.: “That was the truth of it. I did it to prevent violence.”
Elliott, a fifty-two-year-old Kennedy appointee, had served as a federal judge only a few months when the case was filed. He continued on the bench until 2000 and retired at the age of ninety as the nation’s oldest federal district judge. He was born in Gainesville, Georgia, to a Methodist minister and his wife. As a Georgia state representative and House floor leader, he was known for his “fiery oratory,” which, one Georgia journalist noted, “helped elect [Governor] Herman Talmadge—one of the South’s staunchest segregationists.” But when he took office as a federal judge, he swore to uphold the U.S. Constitution. “It was just a matter of doing the job, of doing what was the law,” he later commented, “and, therefore my views changed. They had to, and they did.”16 Now, though, his job was to determine whether the Albany Movement should be ordered to cease its protest activities. Given his past, movement organizers understandably viewed him as a “seg.”17
Hearings began on July 30 and ran for nine days. On August 1, President John F. Kennedy announced during a press conference that he believed the city of Albany should meet with the movement’s leaders. The same day, the U.S. Justice Department filed an amicus curiae brief on the movement’s behalf, clearly signaling that the federal government would be monitoring Albany events.18 For the hearings, the movement had the assistance of several well-known civil rights attorneys. Foremost among them was Constance Baker Motley. She questioned Mayor Asa D. Kelley about the segregated Albany library. He maintained that black people did not violate any law if they merely entered the white library, but “if their presence there tends to create a disturbance and there is a probability, because of the presence, of violence or bodily harm, either to the person or to others, and the person refuses to leave when requested by an officer, in my judgment, there would be a violation of the ordinance.”19 Thus, having any black person in the white library created a disturbance for the white librarians and white patrons, so an officer could arrest that person if he or she was ordered to leave and refused. The Albany city attorney adopted the same approach as Kelley, arguing that black people were not being kept out of public facilities. He said that local segregation ordinances were not being enforced and that the arrests were made because of other violations, such as disturbing the peace or refusing to obey an officer.
The next day, the movement sent small groups to test the assertion—by now, both black and white protesters had arrived in Albany from other parts of the country20—at parks, swimming pools, a Holiday Inn dining room, and the public library. They were rebuffed at all of these places. Five blacks and one white youth entered the white library and browsed for ten minutes before the librarian asked them to leave. When they refused, Riley asked all white patrons there to leave, after which she locked the doors. The black youths remained until Chief Pritchett arrived and ordered them to leave. Moments later the library closed again—this time permanently. When white patrons arrived later in the day, they found a metal garbage can outside the front door with a handwritten sign: “Deposit books in can.”21
At the same time, the city closed down its three public parks and the black branch library, all in the interest of “public safety,” according to Chief Pritchett. One group consisting of both blacks and whites attempted to play tennis at the “black park,” but an attendant there quickly shredded the net with a knife before closing the park entirely. Martin Luther King Jr., “plainly irked by the city’s padlocking of the library and parks,” the Afro-American reported, argued that “it was an act of bad faith on the part of city authorities. . . . Why did they take this step if they stand in court and deny that they are enforcing racial segregation laws?”22 Unbeknown to King, movement protesters, and the media, at a closed council session the mayor and city leaders had relinquished the power to act to Chief Pritchett. “I can handle it, but I don’t want any interference,” he told them. He later told civil rights historian Fred Powledge: “When we closed the swimming pools down and we closed the library down, I’m the one who did it. And it was an awesome feeling.”23
Keenly aware the city would continue to maintain its segregationist ways, the Albany Movement filed its own class-action lawsuit in July, seeking desegregation of the city schools, auditoriums, parks, playgrounds, libraries, swimming pools, theaters, and other public facilities. The city’s position was twofold: first, that the four named plaintiffs—all movement leaders—had not themselves been denied any request for integrated service. Thus, the city argued, they could not adequately represent the class for which they sought an injunction in this class action.24
Second, the city argued no segregationist policies were currently in effect. Yet the hearing revealed the contrary. Mayor Kelley recalled the petition presented to the city commission in 1961 requesting integration of public facilities. “It was the feeling of the City Commission that the request embraced too much, based on the long-term customs of this area,” he testified, “that it was not feasible at this time to consider complete desegregation.” Protesters should seek redress in federal court, he had argued. And at the hearings he continued to maintain that “Albany is not yet ready for the use of public facilities involving personal contact” between races. Also presented at the hearings was a 1961 response by the city commission published in a local paper that advised the protesters, “If the Negro leaders of Albany have a sincere desire to help earn acceptance for their people, they can accomplish far more by encouraging the improvement of their moral and ethical standards.”25
But pressure was building from both sides to find a resolution. Outside the media’s purview, some of the city’s white business leaders and leading white clergymen were urging an end to the stalemate, and most observers believed that pressure from these white community leaders was key to opening negotiations between the two sides. Weighing in on the side of the protesters was major league baseball’s Jackie Robinson, the league’s first African American player—now honored in the Baseball Hall of Fame—who had visited Albany after a series of black church bombings and had lent both moral and financial support to the movement. In “Home Plate,” a column he wrote for the black weekly New York Amsterdam News, he argued it made “no difference” to black people “if someone hates us. It is only when he begins putting his foot on our neck, keeping us from getting a job, walking in a public park, taking a book out of a public library, voting at the polls, living in a neighborhood we can afford—it is only then that we will holler loud and long.” Martin Luther King Jr., released in August after yet another Albany arrest, warned, “I am leaving but I will return if there has been no efforts [sic] to negotiate.”26
Two national television programs—CBS’s Eyewitness and NBC’s Meet the Press—featured stories about the Albany events, including footage of young blacks who had been picked up and carted off to jail as they prayed and sang on the library steps.27 The Meet the Press story drew quick objections from library personnel. Director Riley complained the protests were obviously “staged” by young blacks, some of them “disgruntled expelled Albany State College students.” She pointed out that blacks in Albany had their own library. She added that the library board had repeatedly asked city commissioners to reopen the library but they refused to do so while the lawsuit was pending. “Your report said that Negro children could get books only by going to some basement,” the library’s board chairman chimed in. “The implication was that it was a horrible place, or perhaps under this very building in your picture. The actual situation is that the Negroes have had their own branch library for some 15 years. They have a fine, modern building . . . air-conditioned and furnished with new furniture, shelving and a creditable number of volumes.” He did not mention that the main branch held over fifty thousand volumes, ten times that of the black branch, which also lacked a card catalog listing the main library’s contents.28
For several months the Albany Movement ceased demonstrations and protests, creating an “uneasy peace” for Albany residents. On February 14, 1963, however, Judge Elliott issued his ruling. Because he had taken four and a half months to render a decision, some accused him of engaging in a “prolonged judicial filibuster.” Their suspicions seemed justified when Elliott dismissed the case. He found that the four named plaintiffs did not represent the entire class and had not shown they had ever been refused service. The plaintiffs’ attorneys immediately filed an appeal, but all recognized that months would pass before a decision was reached.29
By now, Albany officials may have seen the inevitable. The movement was attracting national attention. Forty clergymen from the North arrived in Albany and were arrested with others as they held a prayer meeting in front of city hall. The local paper described them as black and white, men and women, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Some fasted during their jail stay. In the 1962 state Democratic primary election, moderate gubernatorial candidate Carl E. Sanders defeated his opponent, an avowed segregationist, and with no Republican opponent in this single-party Jim Crow state, he inevitably became the governor, a signal to many to end tough segregationist laws and policies.30 Shortly after the election, more than sixteen hundred white Albany citizens signed a petition asking that the public library be reopened.
For whatever reason, on March 7, 1963, by a six-to-one vote, Albany city commissioners voted to abolish all ordinances that required segregation in private businesses such as buses, taxicabs, and restaurants. In so doing, the commissioners stated that they were “‘not interested in desegregating local facilities’ but simply conforming to law ‘as outlined in numerous U.S. Supreme Court decisions.’” A spokesman emphasized that local businessmen could continue to voluntarily practice segregation: “Now the decisions . . . rest solely with individual citizens, and not with the City of Albany. . . . In our view this will strengthen rather than weaken the existing social pattern of segregation.” From afar, Martin Luther King Jr. called the action a “subtle and conniving move to perpetuate discrimination.” The commission’s action did not directly affect public facilities, given that segregation there was enforced not by ordinance but by local custom. Specific to the library, however, the commission recommended by a four-to-three vote that it reopen on a thirty-day trial basis. Movement leaders had threatened to resume protests if the library opened on a segregated basis, but the city commission opted to cede this decision to the seven-man library board.31
On March 11, seven months after the city had closed them—the longest period of time any southern public library had been closed in an effort to resist integration—the black and white branches of the Albany Carnegie Library opened on an integrated basis for a thirty-day trial period. But there were conditions. As in Danville, Virginia, and Montgomery, Alabama, the library practiced “vertical integration.” All tables and chairs were removed, the reference and reading rooms were closed, and patrons were allowed only to enter, select their materials, and check them out. A plainclothes detective was on hand to guard against conflict. During the trial period no new library membership cards were issued, so blacks could use the formerly white library only if they had previously obtained cards for the black library.32 Martin Luther King Jr. called vertical integration an important step to full integration. “The solid wall cracks,” he wrote in an op-ed piece for the New York Amsterdam News. In addition to the four hundred books white library patrons hungry for reading materials checked out that first day, nine black Albanians also showed up to patronize the collections. “They’ve all been very nice, and very polite and very quiet,” one library official noted. “A year ago, Negroes were being dragged away from the library and locked up,” noted a local movement leader. Although he vowed to fight the library’s stand-up integration policy, he acknowledged progress in its implementation.33
Vertical integration of the public library became, as in other states, the first step toward full integration of the public library. And in Albany the library became the first public facility to be truly integrated. But the editor of the white Albany Herald could not restrain himself. “These decisions are disappointing because we see them rendered timidly, without suitable public explanation and in direct reproach of a social principle to which the majority of Albanians had candidly pledged themselves,” he wrote. “Neither colored nor white in Albany is ready for this.” He argued that library integration was underhanded and wrongheaded, and he attacked both the city commission and the library board: “Somewhere along the line a deal has probably been made with the self-appointed chiefs of the Albany Movement not to assail the libraries with too many colored card holders—at least for the present. But for how long? Who can make a deal with professional racists?” “As for us,” he concluded, “we will take the ‘old’ Albany.” Later that month he offered to purchase the city swimming pool and operate it for whites only.34
Despite this movement victory, the “old” Albany was alive and well. The tentative integration of the public library seemed the only bright spot amid continued segregationist practices. “I don’t know of anything for [the protesters] to be overjoyed about,” Chief Pritchett said. Sitting in his newly renovated office flanked by the flags of the United States, the state of Georgia, and the old Confederacy, the chief glanced up from his glass-topped desk and grinned. “You look around and see if anything’s integrated,” he told a New York Times reporter, “and if it is, call me, will you?” He said nothing about the public library.35
Indeed, two days after the commission vote, four black teenage girls were arrested and charged with trespassing when they took seats at a drugstore lunch counter. That week, others were arrested as they attempted to use other restaurants and theaters. And in an ironic twist of events, two black teenagers were arrested when they attempted to sit in the white section of a county courtroom. They were dragged from the courtroom, found in contempt, and ordered to pay a fine of $25 each or serve ten days in jail, the maximum allowed under law. The judge, wishing he could have imposed a stiffer sentence, scolded them, “You people have created a situation that borders on chaos.”36
Two months later, the U.S. Supreme Court rendered four major decisions in one day, all bearing on Albany’s continued segregationist policies. In all four the Court struck down the convictions of civil rights demonstrators who had attempted to integrate restaurants, lunch counters, and public parks.37 In reviewing the Albany Movement’s appeal from the February dismissal of their case, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals signaled it, too, would not tolerate ongoing segregation, at least where the government played a role. That case, originally filed in July 1962, sought desegregation of not only publicly owned and privately owned but also publicly regulated facilities. No local ordinance or state law required segregation of public facilities—parks, swimming pools, the city auditorium, and the city library—but the local “custom” of segregation was enforced by local police; local ordinances had required segregation of privately owned transportation facilities, theaters, and taxicabs. In both cases government actors enforced segregation. The court first found that the trial judge should not have dismissed the plaintiffs’ case for lack of standing. To the court it was clear that these four plaintiffs, leaders in the Albany Movement, had frequently petitioned the city to desegregate, that they had been arrested numerous times, and that “the plaintiffs . . . truly represent the Negro citizenship of the city of Albany.”38
As to the merits of the complaint, the court clearly and in no uncertain terms found that segregation enforced by government action, whether by arrests for violation of local custom or by segregation ordinances, violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The court therefore issued an injunction against segregation in public facilities and on public buses, in bus and train terminals, in taxicabs and theaters, and against arrests made for attempting to use the facilities on a nonsegregated basis.39 That left alive private segregation efforts by restaurants and hotels. Almost exactly one year later, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 addressed segregation in those places of “public accommodation.” Finally, in 1964, ten years after Brown v. Board of Education, Albany public schools were integrated.
The viciousness with which civil rights activists in other cities were treated was never a part of Albany’s history. Both Albany’s white mayor and white police chief deserve credit for adopting the same nonviolent approaches as the protesters. “It was early in the demonstrations that Chief Pritchett, noting that I had been arrested, directed the policeman to escort me to his office. I was impressed with his sincerity and sensitivity,” local black doctor and civil rights activist W. G. Anderson recalled. “It was apparent that his strong religious background, his personal moral convictions and his professionalism were being tested by the segregation rules he was required to enforce. . . . It is ironic that Chief Pritchett and I became the very best of friends after the movement was over.” Like Martin Luther King Jr., Pritchett had studied the life and methods of Mahatma Gandhi and knew that Gandhi had succeeded in fighting the British regime in India through nonviolent means. Unlike Birmingham’s Bull Connor, Pritchett believed that a nonviolent response was most appropriate in dealing with civil disobedience. He “knew that to initiate violence on the part of his policemen could do nothing but aggravate the situation and call more press and worldwide attention to the Albany Movement,” Anderson notes. “He directed all of his police staff and other police agencies from surrounding communities . . . that no violence would be tolerated.”40
Not all civil rights historians are so gracious toward Pritchett, however. “Albany was the stone wall of segregation, the land of never,” argues Fred Powledge. “Albany’s police and city government mocked the law while claiming to obey and enforce it.” Many credit Pritchett for what they consider the failure of the Albany Movement to achieve all of its goals. And it is true that Bull Connor’s brutalism attracted far more national attention and outrage that prompted the federal government to take action. But Powledge nonetheless judged the movement a “failed success” because young protesters “brought an end” to “the fear Negroes had of those who would be their masters.” Police were “no longer invincible,” he argued, governing officials “no longer completely in charge.”41 The Albany Public Library was one manifestation of this success.
COLUMBUS
While Albany Movement organizers used scattered protests and demonstrations against all forms of local segregation, including at the public library, protesters in Columbus were more focused. Without incident, at 5:35 p.m. on July 5, 1963, one male and six female black youths between the ages of thirteen and seventeen occupied two tables at the white W. C. Bradley Memorial Library. Other patrons said, and did, nothing. Shortly after six, however, seventeen-year-old Cleophas Tyson, president of the NAACP Youth Council’s Columbus Chapter, and fifteen-year-old Gwendolyn Smyre left the room to call a wire news service in Atlanta. At 6:45 the remaining five girls left the library, but when they returned at 7:00 with Tyson and Smyre, two library employees blocked the door. Five minutes later the director intervened, and while he talked with the teenagers, other white patrons entering and exiting the building expressed their displeasure at having to walk around them. Tyson asked the librarian to recommend to the local board of education exercising authority over the library that it desegregate the facility. The librarian said he would not initiate a request, but he would recommend library integration if the group—“in a proper manner”—asked for a meeting with the board to discuss their request. The librarian then allowed the group to enter the library but closed it for all other patrons.42
Three days later, another group of twelve male and three female black teenagers entered the library at 2:00 p.m., took books from the shelves, sat at tables (several left to make phone calls), then approached the circulation desk one by one and surrounded it. When asked to step aside to allow white patrons to check out books—librarians argued they “stood as close to each other as they could to block the counter”—they refused. Librarians denied them library cards, refused to check out books they brought to the desk, and told them to use the Fourth Avenue Negro library. Instead, teenagers peppered the librarian with questions. Soon police arrived. “They just stood there,” the police chief said later. “I read them the state law on unlawful assembly and told them to leave and there would be no case made against them. They just looked at me and said nothing.” Because they refused to move, he reasoned, “they were creating a disturbance.” Police arrested three (one girl had reportedly “bumped” several white patrons trying to access the circulation desk), and charged four with unlawful assembly in what the city’s major newspaper, the Columbus Ledger, called a “read-in”—a direct action term that now joined sit-in, kneel-in, vote-in, ride-in, and swim-in in the lexicon of civil rights activists.
At the hearing, their lawyer argued, “There is no law whereby the people in the library have a right to refuse service because of a person’s race.” When he asked the assistant librarian why he had refused these teenagers cards, the librarian said it was because they were black. “Then the refusal to issue library cards to the Negroes . . . was based entirely on their race, on orders from your superiors?” “You’ll have to interpret that yourself,” the assistant librarian responded. After the hearing thirty black people filed silently from the courtroom to the police station to greet those arrested after they had posted bond.43
That the protesters did not speak for all in Columbus’s black community became obvious the next day when the Adult Liaison Committee, a group of mostly black male clergy and their wives—and representing an older generation—who had been working with white officials, issued a statement: “We feel that real progress can only be accomplished in discouraging activities that tend to mislead and confuse the public in areas that have been finalized or those in the process of being finalized.” The committee opposed desegregation demonstrations and called on “citizens who live here” to work for progress through “peaceful negotiations.”44
The younger protesters ignored them, however, and established a pattern that became obvious the next day, when nineteen teenagers—including Cleophas Tyson—staged their third read-in in four days. Except for one white youth who elbowed a black male, the group left an hour later without incident when a black funeral director entered the library and asked the group to leave. But thirty-nine well-dressed teenagers—“some appearing to be no more than 10 or 12 years old,” the Ledger reported—arrived in different-sized groups at 1:00 p.m. the following day, selected books, and sat down at reading tables. Some of the girls used the women’s restroom, but none gathered around the circulation desk. An hour later, they all walked out of the library in single file.45 At a read-in the following day—twenty-three demonstrators arrived around noon and left at 3:30—one white thirty-year-old and a black seventeen-year-old got into what police called a “pushing scuffle,” in which the black youth struck the white man twice after being shoved, the second time with clenched fist. Six officers stationed at the library arrested both. The black seventeen-year-old was later fined $37.50 for disorderly conduct; the white thirty-year-old was acquitted.46
The incident, combined with several disturbances between white and black youths at city parks and swimming pools, heightened community fears. “The time has come when parents of both races have to have a heart-to-heart talk with their young sons and daughters,” the Columbus Ledger editorialized, “to help them become aware of the dangers of rash actions in a tense situation, of the importance of conducting themselves in a dignified, calm manner.” On July 20 the NAACP Youth Council and its adult leaders hammered out an agreement “to explore the possibility of ending segregation here without demonstrations.” While they discussed the matter, the main library and the Fourth Street branch remained closed.47
Whether these read-ins forced the Muscogee County school board to consider integration of public libraries is uncertain. After a special committee of the board issued a series of recommendations on July 17, the full board voted on August 2 to desegregate Columbus public libraries and schools. To apply for a borrower’s card at the library, however, black patrons first had to go to the Fourth Avenue branch, which forwarded the application to the main library with a certificate of good standing. The staff at the main library then investigated the applicant and, if he or she was judged “satisfactory,” issued a borrower’s card good at any Columbus public library. Although no black readers showed up in the main library in the two days following the decision, seven did apply for library cards on July 20.48