Although it was in Louisiana that Homer Plessy pressed a case against segregation in the last years of the nineteenth century that resulted in the Supreme Court’s “separate but equal” decision, Louisiana’s post-1950s civil rights history appears less violent than in other Deep South states. Baton Rouge experienced a bus boycott in June 1953, but city officials and black leaders reached a compromise that satisfied both sides a week after it started. The same year, Louisiana State University desegregated under court order. The New Orleans Public Library had quietly desegregated shortly after the Brown decision, and four years later “Whites Only” posters disappeared from New Orleans streetcars. And after a crisis in New Orleans schools in 1960 was resolved—a photo of six-year-old Ruby Bridges, a black child, surrounded by U.S. marshals, descending the steps of an all-white grade school she had just desegregated, quickly circulated in newspapers across the country—desegregation proceeded peacefully, considerably ahead of most other southern cities and towns.
Some explanation for this situation can be found in Louisiana’s more diverse nature—its French and Spanish origins, its Creole and Cajun cultures, the uniqueness of New Orleans, and its strong Roman Catholic influence—but most of these elements pertained largely to urban areas of the state. Outside those areas, race relations were different, more like other southern states. Despite the experiences and successes of activists between Brown and the August 28, 1963, March on Washington, historian Benjamin Muse notes, “many small towns and rural areas had been virtually untouched by the Civil Rights Movement.”1 In Louisiana’s rural parishes, whites held onto Jim Crow longer and more tightly. “Only the very brave and the very foolhardy” in Louisiana’s small-town black neighborhoods “raised their voices or put their heads above the parapet,” writes historian Adam Fairclough. “Getting along with the white man was an essential survival skill that parents drummed into their children at an early age. As long as blacks accepted their place in the racial order, whites could be remarkably friendly.”2
The desegregation of public libraries in rural Louisiana looks similar to that of other libraries in the South, with one major exception. In rural Louisiana, the Congress of Racial Equality determined to use public libraries to “test” Jim Crow practices. On August 24, 1963, for example, a CORE Task Force worker from East Feliciana Parish noted in his weekly field report that “among areas to be investigated are . . . the public library—Negroes aren’t allowed in the main building, and have a bookmobile of their own.”3 In a January 1964 field report for Pointe Coupee Parish, the local CORE leader reported that he intended to “test the white library in New Roads, and, if necessary, will lead a read-in, coordinated with other CORE groups’ actions across the Sixth Congressional District.”4 Then, immediately after the Civil Rights Act passed on July 2, 1964, CORE publicly announced it intended to test it in twenty-two Louisiana towns and that public libraries would be an important target.5 At each site, local black youths were the “testers.”
On Thursday, July 9, 1964—a week after the Civil Rights Act passed—eighty-eight black youngsters sponsored by CORE’s “Freedom Registered” program attempted to integrate ten places in Ouachita Parish in northern Louisiana, where Monroe serves as its parish seat. The black youths were served at four lunch counters, a movie house, a gas station, and two restaurants but were denied service at five other restaurants and lunch counters. Rather than serve blacks, a second movie theater shut down. In addition, sixteen black youths took seats in the front of city buses. Claiming mechanical problems, city buses temporarily stopped service in late afternoon.6
Also among the places they challenged that day was the Anna Meyer Branch Library, part of the Ouachita Parish Library system, where twelve Monroe black youths entered the front door at 2:30 p.m. Eighteen-year-old Dorothy Higgins went to the back of the library, glanced at a few books, and sat down at a table with a Reader’s Digest next to seventeen-year-old Jimmy Andrews and fifteen-year-old Etta Faye Carter. No one disturbed them while they were reading.7
Nineteen-year-old Bennie Roy Brass used the card catalog to search for a book on Louisiana history. Upon finding one, he sat down at a reading table near the librarian’s desk, where, like others, he read undisturbed. A few minutes later, however, Brass approached the circulation desk and asked to apply for a borrower’s card to check the book out. The female desk attendant said he could read the book in the library but he could not check it out. “Just as I finished asking,” Brass later wrote, “a white boy of my age came to the desk and checked out a book to take home.” Again Brass asked for a card; again he was denied. This branch did not issue cards, he was told. Go to the main library, the desk attendant said, but don’t expect to get a card there either. “The only way I could at all get a card was to go to the [black] Carver Branch.” Could he use the Carver branch card to check out books from any library in the system? No, the librarian said. Brass would also have to go through Carver to get the book. “I told them I had come in person to eliminate the transfer problem.”8
At this point “a male clerk” appeared from a back office to ask Brass if he wanted a borrower’s card. Yes, Brass replied. The attendant looked under the counter, said he could find no forms there, and offered to go back to the office to look for one. Through a glass window Brass could see the attendant talking to the head and assistant librarians. When he returned, he said he could find no applications there either. Again Brass asked for a library card; again the clerk said he would have to go to the Carver branch. When Brass asked a fourth time for a card, the clerk shouted “No!” Brass answered, “Well, I’ll wait until I get one,” and returned to his seat to read.9
Police arrived fifteen minutes later. One went directly to the head librarian’s office, and brought her back to the table where Brass and his friends were reading. The policeman then said: “You will all have to go because the lady said she will not be able to give you library cards. Are you going to leave?” “I and my friends have come as citizens of Monroe to use our public library,” Brass responded. Minutes later, the chief of police arrived and asked the black teenagers to leave; five did. The seven who remained were arrested for disturbing the peace and trespassing. Brass returned his book to the shelf, then waited at the front door while police cars were brought up. “Where are the grown-ups?” the chief asked. “They send children down to do the work.” “I’m the one who wants to read good books,” Brass responded, and “besides,” he was “not a child.”10
Outside the building, white CORE Task Force worker David Kramer watched events transpire with camera in hand. He and his colleagues had actually alerted the police to what was about to happen in hopes of photographing events. First, he took pictures of the five youths who chose to leave, but when police began bringing the “testers” out, a deputy sheriff protested: “Don’t take my picture; I’ve got my rights too.” Kramer ran to a car containing several white CORE Task Force workers, including Mike Lesser, but before they could lock all the doors, the sheriff grabbed the camera and tried to remove the film. Unable to do so, he invited Kramer to accompany him to the police station, where he could retrieve the camera. Am I under arrest? Kramer asked three times but got no answer. He decided to accompany the sheriff.
Once inside the cars, police formed a cavalcade and stopped all traffic to the station, where the youths were separated for interrogation. The assistant chief took Jimmy Andrews into his office; a deputy sheriff took Dorothy Higgins to a judge’s bench. Why did you go to the library? he asked her. “I told him that since the civil rights bill had passed I wanted to use the library to check out some books. And that the books I wanted were works by Edgar Allen [sic] Poe and a novel, Burn Killer Burn, by Paul Krump.” Do you know who CORE Louisiana project director Ronnie Moore is? he asked. “No,” Higgins replied. How about CORE Monroe Chapter director Mike Lesser? When Higgins replied yes, the sheriff pressed. When and where did you meet him? Had she been involved with any other “tests”? Who was “the white guy with the camera”? How long have you been a member of CORE? Why “don’t you let the older people” protest? Don’t you know “that someone would have to work to support all of the children that your mother has and that the Welfare has to take care of”? “We are not on welfare,” Higgins responded.11
Bennie Brass “was pulled roughly to the back of the courtroom” by other officers, where he was peppered with questions:
Who got you into CORE?
Did you have to pay to join CORE?
Are you a communist?
Who’s putting up the money for CORE?
Are they going to pay you?
How much are they going to give you?
Did you eat at a lunch-counter this morning?
Did Ronnie Moore pay you?
How did the police know you-all were coming to the lunch-counter and library?
Who told you to come down to the library—Moore or Lesser?
We know you’re not doing this for nothing.
Did you have to pay for your badges and cards?
Did you all have some meetings this morning?
We know you were there at the Ritz: What was that meeting?
They are paying Moore and Lesser; you’re being short-cutted.
Do you go to church?
Brass answered the questions “truthfully to the best of my knowledge,” but when asked for a fifth time if Moore or Lesser had sent him, Brass said he had gone to the library “because I was dissatisfied with the present library conditions and wanted to see if the Civil Rights Bill meant anything to the whites in the South. I attempted to explain my action to the officers,” he said, and told them “of all the Negro problems I was aware of.” He then quietly explained “that the Negro people were not satisfied with present conditions.” He talked for “many minutes,” he later wrote. “Many officers gathered about to hear me. They said they agreed with me.”12
The seven arrestees were then fingerprinted and photographed. In the process, one officer said that if the arrestees had listened to the librarian when she told them to leave the library, none of this would have happened. When Dorothy Higgins said the librarian had not told them to leave, the officer said she did. No, Higgins said, she did not. The officer then “told me to shut up.” “Since she’s so smart,” another said, “put her in [a cell] by herself so she won’t see nobody, hear nobody, and talk to nobody for about three days. Maybe when she gets out she won’t be so smart.” While all this was going on, David Kramer was attempting to retrieve his camera. “The camera incited local people,” the chief of police told him. “He wanted me to promise that I would no longer use it.” After Kramer refused, the chief said police would not press charges against him (never mentioning for what) and gave Kramer back his camera. He later discovered the film had been exposed.13
All seven were then transferred to juvenile detention home cages before officials called their parents. “In jail I spoke to my fellow prisoners about Freedom Registration and about our Civil Rights testing,” Brass later wrote. “They wholeheartedly approved of it.” On the third day of their incarceration, on their way to breakfast, “some vile remarks were made to us by whites. My fellow prisoners wanted to fight the whites, but we calmed them by telling them that violence would only mess up our cause.” When released later in the day, “the detective who escorted us said the only thing left to do with you all is to put you in the river.” Three were released on $200 bond each, four to the custody of their parents.14
“Testing” at the Ouachita Parish Public Library continued. On July 14 six black youths approached the main library. On a “CORE Testing Form,” black activist Diane Gordon reported what happened next. “A policeman and the librarian met us in the walkway, the librarian said what do you want? I said a library card, the librarian said here is a card to the Carver Branch Library.” (The library administration had obviously rehearsed a response for the next testing.) Three took the card, and to the three who did not, the librarian said they could not enter: “I was told not to let you come in the Library, I don’t want to have you arrested for trespassing, you made your point. Go home now, I don’t want to have you all arrested.” “We said thank you very much,” Gordon wrote, “and left.”15
But six days later—“in a quiet and orderly way”—fifteen black youths tested all three white branches of the Ouachita Parish Public Library. The premise was the same. They wanted library cards and access to the collections and services of all the parish’s public libraries. The response was the same; they were denied service, and when they refused to leave until they were given cards, they were arrested for disturbing the peace and trespassing on library premises. Among those arrested was sixteen-year-old Alice Smith.16
While Smith remained with her friends at the detention home, a Ouachita Parish sheriff’s deputy approached her parents at their house. Why haven’t you visited her? he asked. She has not committed a crime, her father responded. But you have to go see her, the sheriff responded. Alice hadn’t committed a crime, her father repeated, and the only way he would go was if he was arrested. Two days later, at 1:00 p.m., two sheriff’s deputies came to the house with arrest warrants for Smith’s parents. The charge? Contributing to the delinquency of a minor. They were taken to jail, placed in separate cells, and individually interrogated. They “wanted us to admit that we influenced Alice to sit-in,” Oliver Smith later recalled. “The juvenile officer also asked if Alice were released, would we permit her to do it again.” “That was Alice’s decision,” her father replied. As he was released, the jailer yelled to his subordinate, “Let that nigger man out.”17
While this was happening to the Smiths at the parish jail, at 2:30 p.m. sixteen-year-old Tommy Robinson led three black teenage friends to the steps of the Anna Meyer Branch of the Ouachita Parish Public Library. Police blocked them as they tried to enter. The librarian asked them what they wanted, and Robinson said “library cards.” Why did you come here? the librarian asked. “Because the Civil Rights Bill says that I can go into any public place,” Robinson said, and “this library is a public place.” “She said that she did not want to have her library integrated,” one protester later wrote, “and she told us we would have to go to the Carver Branch library to get cards.” Robinson said they would not leave without cards. “Are you refusing to go?” the policeman asked. “Each one of us said yes,” one of his friends later reported. Police then arrested them for disturbing the peace and took them to the detention home.18 At about the same time, fifteen-year-old Joseph Profit led three of his teenage friends into the West Monroe Branch of the public library. Inside the door they were met by the librarian and two policemen. What do you want? the librarian asked. “Library cards,” Profit responded. The librarian said, “I will not have this place integrated,” and told them to go to the “Colored Library.” When the youths refused to leave, all were arrested for disturbing the peace and taken to the detention home.19
That same afternoon, thirteen-year-old Lettie Bess led three of her friends into the main library, where she was met by “two ladies,” who said, “The library wasn’t integrated yet.” Bess asked them for a copy of the Civil Rights Act. If she really wanted it, one lady responded, “we should stay outside and she would bring it to us.” Do you have a library card? one lady asked. Bess responded no. At that moment the police arrived and arrested the four teenagers for trespassing on public property; one was also charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. “Who brought you to the library?” one detective asked on the way to the station. The four youths refused to answer until they saw their lawyers. At the station one officer asked Bess if she knew David Kramer. “Must be a new kind of drink,” Bess replied. Shortly thereafter, state police took her and her fellow testers home.20
That these responses had been rehearsed is obvious from undated notes in the CORE Papers (now at the Wisconsin Historical Society), which were likely written by a task force worker. “General procedure,” the notes began, was “know your part thoroughly” and “don’t lose your temper or your head.” For all the Louisiana public library sit-ins, youthful testers showed exemplary behavior. For the “library,” the notes continued, testers needed two things—a borrower’s card and the title of a “particular book.” Possibilities recommended for the book title included a history of Louisiana, a history of Monroe, the municipal code, and the U.S. Constitution. (Lettie Bess’s request for a copy of the Civil Rights Act likely was her own idea.) If they encountered opposition, they were to ask for the person in charge and refuse to leave unless that person appeared. Once that person showed, testers were instructed to remind him or her that their parents were taxpayers, that the library was a public accommodation as well as a municipal institution, and that “refusal of service” violated their “rights of citizenship on both counts.” Throughout, testers were instructed to “conduct yourselves quietly.” When arrested, testers should “go limp” if experiencing force, only answer questions on “vital statistics,” and at the police station request one phone call each. In jail they were to choose a spokesperson and to set up a daily schedule that included exercise, prayers, singing (not at “late hours,” however), and “quiet times.”21
On July 28 three black teenage testers filed suit in the Monroe Division of the federal district court to declare the segregation practices of the Ouachita Parish Public Library unconstitutional. On August 3, twenty-two Ouachita Parish black teenagers—all of whom admitted to being CORE members—facing criminal charges for disturbing the peace, criminal trespass, and contributing to the delinquency of a minor as a result of library sit-ins asked federal district judge Ben C. Dawkins Jr. to assume jurisdiction of their cases. They claimed charges against them were an outgrowth of the city’s and county’s segregationist practices and a violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment.22 Although the Ouachita Citizen, the parish’s major newspaper, reported none of these events, local KNOE-TV did give the sit-ins and court proceedings some coverage on its evening news program, shortly before closing its broadcasting day with video showing black Americans picking cotton to the tune of “Dixie.”23
In the meantime, white city officials resurrected plans to relocate the Carver branch and in December 1964 reopened it in a new 5,278-square-foot building constructed on the black high school campus at a cost of $66,921. To no avail, however. The new facility did not satisfy local civil rights activists, who continued to protest Jim Crow practices by harnessing the language of the Civil Rights Act. A year later white officials acquiesced, and when the Ouachita Parish Public Library finally desegregated all its facilities in 1965, the plaintiffs dropped their suit.24
On July 22, 1964, in Jonesboro, fifty miles southwest of Monroe, six black youths attempted to enter the Jackson Parish Library at 10:45 a.m. “Good morning, may I help you?” a librarian asked as she met them at the door. “We asked her for library cards,” one later reported. Are you Jackson Parish citizens, and have you lived in the parish for at least six months? the librarian asked. “We answered yes, and asked for library cards again.” In response the librarian told the youths about the bookmobile service they could use, which would be in their neighborhood the following Thursday. When one youth asked if she was “denying us use of the library,” the librarian reiterated information about the bookmobile. Are you the head librarian? they asked. No, she responded, she was the bookmobile librarian; the head librarian was not in the library. She then asked them to leave. Instead, “we asked to see the head librarian. She told us to wait just a minute, but she didn’t make an effort to go get the head librarian.” Minutes later two men entered, one carrying a book, one with a camera. When she saw the camera, the librarian shouted, “Wait just a minute!” At that point the parish sheriff came out of the back room, and three policemen came in the front door. As the teens turned to leave, the sheriff shouted, “Wait, get their names!” Are we under arrest? the teens asked. “No,” the sheriff responded, “give us your names and ages.” One policeman told his colleague, “Brooks, you had better get these children back across town and fast.” A third addressed the youths directly. “You’d better get back to the ‘freedom house’ and sing some songs because you are gonna get in trouble up here.”25
The following day, the president and secretary of the Progressive Voters League, a local black organization, wrote the Jackson Parish Library board chairman. “We believe that an open library is most important for the education and health of all the citizens of this community. . . . Citizens of color have been turned away from this tax-supported public facility. This fact constitutes a denial of this class of citizen’s constitutional rights, and is clearly an insult to the Negroes of this community.” They sent copies to the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.26
On July 27 thirteen-year-old Larry Robinson was one of five black youths who began picketing the library by carrying signs stating their right to use the building. Fifteen whites observed them silently. Minutes after the picketing started, police showed up. “Move out,” one said; “the library is closed and it’s not for your use.” When the youths refused to stop, one officer retrieved a leashed German shepherd from his squad car. When another officer ordered them to follow him across the street, the group complied quietly, then scattered when ordered to do so. When they reported to their white CORE Task Force worker, however, he gathered them together to re-form the picket line in front of the library. Again police came, this time wielding blackjacks and with more police dogs. One officer told his colleagues not to release the dogs but said to the picketers: “I will ask you to leave once.” No one left. “I’ll ask you to leave twice.” Same response. “I’m gonna ask you one time, I’m gonna ask you two times, I’m gonna ask you three times.” Still no one left. “Now you are all under arrest,” he said, and he took them to the police station. While conducting them into a cell, one arresting officer told them, “You are here because you violated a city ordinance.” Three times the CORE Task Force worker asked: “Which ordinance?” and each time the officer ignored him. Two nights later, seventeen-year-old Will Farmer reported, they were singing in their cells at about 10:00 p.m. when three officers charged into the cell block. One shouted: “Shut up! I don’t want to hear another damn word out of you niggers.”27
On the morning of July 20, black CORE Task Force workers Catherine Patterson and Daniel Mitchell from the Jonesboro Freedom House showed up for the testers’ arraignment. They were immediately arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor and placed in the same cell block as those arrested at the library. When they all began singing about ten o’clock that evening, five officers stormed into the cell block. One opened the cell door and said, “OK, you niggers, come on out.” But “no one moved.” Will Farmer described what happened next. One officer “then pulled us out of our bunks and out of the cell. We, the thirteen of us, were taken to a 6' long and 4' wide padded cell and put in it.” The officer said, “If you niggers aren’t quiet now I have an even worse place.” When he began to close the porthole on the cell door, a white trusty “said we would suffocate with the port-hole closed.” A second officer responded: “I don’t give a damn if they suffocate. As long as they act like animals, we’ll treat them like animals.” Nonetheless, he left the porthole open. When they got out of the cell the next morning, one officer said, “Maybe you niggers will act like people this time.” At no time during their incarceration were any of those detained informed of charges again them; most learned on a local newscast that they had been arrested for disturbing the peace. “To the best of my knowledge,” Robinson stated later, “I at no time disturbed the peace. The picket line was moving in an orderly, quiet manner.”28
Eventually, however, the Jackson Parish Library buckled to the inevitable. On December 16, five black teenagers entered the library at 9:30 a.m., approached the desk, and asked for library cards. “They were received politely and secured cards with no trouble,” the black New Orleans Louisiana Weekly reported. One new card owner asked for particular books on Negro history. Although the librarian told him the books were not in the collection, she volunteered to order them. By closing time that evening, 236 members of the Jackson Parish black community had obtained library cards, and several were still in line. That evening, members of the Jonesboro Freedom Movement—a “militant group,” the Weekly called them—hosted a mass meeting and vowed to continue efforts to integrate local restaurants, parks, and theaters. At the library the next morning, however, patrons found all the chairs and tables had been removed. They were returned several months later.29
The series of incidents that brought most attention to library desegregation in Louisiana’s rural parishes occurred in the Audubon Regional Library system in St. Helena and East and West Feliciana Parishes. The Audubon Regional Library is located in Clinton, less than ten miles from the Mississippi border and thirty miles north of Baton Rouge. At the beginning of 1964, black people living in this area still could not access the library building. Instead, their only access to public library books was a blue bookmobile; a red bookmobile was reserved for whites. Both were supported by Library Services Act funds through the state library agency.30 When white residents applied for a library card, they received a red one, no doubt to match their red bookmobile. When blacks registered for a card at the blue bookmobile—the only place they could register and the only place they could retrieve and return a book—they received a blue library card with the word Negro stamped on it. Louisiana CORE members helped to organize voter registration drives and protests against segregated swimming pools and other public places, and they also focused on the Audubon Regional Library system’s segregated public libraries. As one Louisiana newspaper noted when reporting a local library sit-in, it was “a CORE type integration attempt.”31
On March 7, four St. Helena Parish black teenagers approached the Greensburg branch of the Audubon Regional Library system. The librarian saw them coming up the walk, recognized what was happening—CORE blamed “talkative Toms and Sallies” for leaking word—immediately locked the door, and posted “Closed” signs in the window.32 The group left. “The street was crowded with negroes and whites,” a CORE observer reported, “the majority of the merchants was standing on the sidewalk talking with spectators. The sheriff could not be found anywhere.” Four days later the youths returned and met the same response. Through the window the group saw the librarian make a phone call. Moments later she unlocked the door, came out, relocked it, and walked across the street to a drugstore.
On a third attempt, on March 13, the four teenage boys decided to pair off rather than approach as a foursome. As two of them walked in front of the drugstore across the street, the pharmacist came out and said: “I’m sorry boys, but you are too late. Come back tomorrow and you may have better luck.” As they left, however, he added: “I wish you —— Niggers would come to my place.” When the pair crossed the street to meet the other two (they were approaching the library from a different direction), they learned it had again been locked against them. They decided to walk to the courthouse, and without incident they drank from the “white” water fountain. They then returned to the drugstore for some ice cream, where the pharmacist met them at the front door. “I am tired of fooling with you —— Niggers!” he shouted, then rushed to his car and pulled out a .32-caliber automatic pistol. “Git away from here and I don’t mean maybe.” The youths left.
Three days later the group made a fourth attempt and once again found the library closed. Although they did not go to the drugstore across the street, they did go to the courthouse, where they again drank from the “white” water fountain. This time, however, the white janitor grabbed one of the boys and shouted, “There’s a fountain over there for the Niggers, and if you —— Niggers can’t drink from that fountain, get out of here, and don’t be caught back in here no more.” He then called for help from a friend upstairs: “Come down here and help me get these —— Niggers out of here!” When the group walked to the courthouse front steps, the janitor went to a closet for a lead pipe and ran to the front door. “If you —— Niggers come back here again,” he threatened, “I will kill every one of you.” At that point he struck one of the boys with the pipe. The boy was taken to a local hospital, treated, and released. Days later, after several white merchants queried the parents of the testers if they knew their son or daughter was “trying to use the library,” CORE organized a “selective buying campaign” against the pharmacist. “Rallies are being held every Wednesday night to support the selective buying campaign,” a task force worker reported.33
On March 7, four black teenagers approached the public library in West Feliciana’s St. Francisville, where no black citizens had registered to vote for sixty-one years. When some had made the attempt to register earlier that year, they were met at the courthouse by a mob of white men armed with guns and knives. Later that week, night riders shot at the homes of several of them, and two were beaten with a rifle butt.34 But the teenage library testers had been well trained. “For the past two weeks we have been preparing the young people and the community leaders in West Feliciana [Parish] for the upcoming library action,” a CORE Task Force worker wrote in early March. The chapter chairman had been “lining up bond, both cash and property,” but was having difficulty because so few black citizens in the parish owned property. If arrested, participants pledged to stay in jail until their trials and prepared for their ordeals by conducting sociodramas and discussing nonviolence. Post-arrest plans included a prayer vigil in front of the jail and a “stepped-up boycott.” “It is hoped that the library action will provide an issue around which we can mobilize the people to boycott,” a task force worker noted. “We then hope to do extensive canvassing and leaflet distribution to spread the word about the campaign.”35
One of the CORE observers who had been stationed near the library to record events told the youths that the library had been open that morning but had closed at noon. Although three police cars were stationed outside, the group decided not to attempt to use the library, “since if they were arrested by the Sheriff’s deputies, there wouldn’t be a clear-cut case against the library now that it was closed.” Instead, “after consultation with the project coordinator in Clinton,” the teenagers drove to East Feliciana Parish.36
The Clinton branch remained open, but the local sheriff had been notified that morning that there might be “trouble.” All morning he watched and waited and finally saw five students enter the library. With four of his black friends, East Feliciana resident Henry Brown walked in, apparently the first blacks ever to do so.37 The library was not large; it consisted of a small front “adult reading room” with two tables and a chair, a stove, a card catalog, several open bookshelves, and the branch assistant’s desk and chair. Offices were in the back room.38
As soon as he observed the students, the sheriff called his deputies and ordered them to the library. In the meantime, Brown requested two books, one a copy of the U.S. Constitution, the other Story of the Negro, a children’s history text written by Fisk University’s head librarian Arna Bontemps.39 Katie Reeves, the white branch assistant, checked the card catalog for Bontemps’s book and told Brown that the branch library did not have it. She said that she would order it from the state library and that it would either be mailed to him or he could retrieve it from the blue bookmobile. Shortly thereafter, Reeves asked the five to leave. When they did not, she tried a second time, and when that didn’t work, she called in the regional librarian, who issued the same order.
The youths remained, Brown sitting at the table and the others standing near him, doing and saying nothing. Five minutes later, the sheriff and his deputies approached them and ordered them to leave under threat of arrest. When they refused, they were all arrested, taken to jail, and charged with disturbing the peace. The basis of their arrests was a Louisiana statute: “Whoever with intent to provoke a breach of the peace, or under circumstances such that a breach of the peace may be occasioned thereby, crowds or congregates with others” in a “public place or building . . . and who fails or refuses to disperse and move on, when ordered so to do by any law enforcement officer . . . or any other authorized person . . . shall be guilty of disturbing the peace.”40
While in jail, Henry Brown received the copy of the Constitution he had requested, but with it came instructions that he return the book in person to the blue bookmobile or mail it back to the East Feliciana Public Library.41 On March 11 police also arrested white CORE Task Force worker Mimi Feingold as a material witness to the trial; a local judge set her bond at $1,000. “Request an immediate investigation,” one CORE fieldworker cabled the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. “We believe that this is an act to prevent further voter registration instructions and CORE activity.”42
At their trial on April 9, the five black youths were found guilty of disturbing the peace. Henry Brown received a sentence of $150 plus costs or ninety days in jail. The other four were assessed a fine of $35 plus costs or fifteen days in jail. At the trial, however, the librarian of the Audubon Regional Library system surprised everyone by announcing, “Negroes are allowed to use the library if they are citizens of one of the three parishes.” But use had taken on new meaning. A week after the trial, all three of the initially targeted Audubon Regional libraries closed their doors, claiming they intended to cut costs and at the same time improve library services through a telephone reference and request service: “The patron can now dial a special library number . . . at no charge. . . . Reference questions are answered immediately or by return call; books are mailed or sent by bookmobile.”43 If users wished to browse, they were required to do so when the bookmobile arrived in their area every few weeks. Black people still had to use their blue bookmobile, white people their red bookmobile.
The plan was so bizarre, a West Feliciana CORE Task Force worker argued, that he hoped “adverse reaction . . . will be enough to open the branches up again.” Perhaps he had picked up on complaints from the white community. One white resident observed, “It was strange that no one had ever heard of the plan before now, and the announcement came so soon after the attempt to integrate services there.” Many other library patrons, the white East Feliciana Watchman reported, expressed “dissatisfaction at the proposed limited service to be offered by phone and mail.”44 Later the city’s attorney revealed that the white women who staffed the branch libraries “weren’t paid much” and that once the demonstrations began, “they wouldn’t work . . . because they anticipated that it would be trouble and they didn’t want to have any part of it and that was the reason. They were just scared to work in there.”45 While the Watchman reported these events in March and April, the librarian’s regular weekly Watchman column carried no mention of them. Instead, she kept reporting on “interesting books.” On April 24 the Watchman also reported a Ku Klux Klan beating of a Baton Rouge newsman who was covering these events.46
Although Henry Brown and his four codefendants appealed, Brown v. Louisiana followed a different path from much civil rights litigation in the South. Often local lawyers called in NAACP lawyers, who then filed a civil rights lawsuit in the nearest federal court. This time, however, local attorneys worked with Carl Rachlin, a white New York City CORE attorney, and filed no lawsuit, instead choosing to appeal the disorderly conduct charges all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Rachlin led the way. Born in Brooklyn, he had graduated from New York University and Harvard Law School and became a well-known civil rights and labor lawyer. At age forty-six, he became general counsel to CORE and served in that capacity for seven years. In 1961 he successfully overturned the conviction of six Freedom Riders who had entered a “whites only” waiting room in a Louisiana bus terminal. In 1964 he helped form and lead the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee, which enlisted lawyers to defend civil rights activists in the South.47
Local Louisiana attorneys were also involved in the defense. New Orleans attorneys Robert F. Collins, Nils R. Douglas, and Lolis E. Elie drove the 110 miles north to represent the five defendants, while Murphy W. Bell came up from Baton Rouge. All were attorneys with backgrounds in civil rights litigation. Black attorney Robert F. Collins became the most well known. He had been forced to file a lawsuit just to gain entrance to the all-white Louisiana State University Law School and, after graduating from law school in 1954, became heavily involved in civil rights litigation with both CORE and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed him to the United States District Court.48
In 1965, when Brown v. Louisiana finally made it to the Supreme Court, all the attorneys were keenly aware that the time had come for change. They reminded the Court in their brief that the March 1964 arrests came just four months before passage of the Civil Rights Act, which had put an end to Jim Crow segregation. They argued that the arrests and convictions violated the defendants’ constitutional due process and equal protection rights. The state, on the other hand, argued that “the issue is simply whether any person, or group of persons, have any right to use a facility such as a public library room as a place in which to loiter or create a nuisance,” said Clinton district attorney Richard H. Kilbourne, “to the extent that the employees . . . or those wishing to make a bona fide use of it, are embarrassed and disturbed.” He asserted that the library did not discriminate, that anyone could use the library, and that the defendants were treated courteously but that they had been arrested because they “had no reason to loiter about the premises.”49
During the Court’s oral argument, however, Kilbourne stumbled when justices asked about the library’s policy of issuing different library cards to whites and blacks and permitting blacks to use only the blue bookmobile. Justice William O. Douglas remarked, “That looks like a segregated library system.” Kilbourne’s response did not help his case. “In Clinton, Louisiana—well, I always felt like we had more integration than probably any place in the United States, I mean, just from the way people live. But . . . segregation and integration seems to mean different things in different parts of the country.”50
It apparently meant different things to the members of Court as well because they split five to four in the opinion issued on February 23, 1966. Both the majority and dissenting opinions recognized the library as a special place, unlike lunch counters, bus terminals, and public streets, where other protests had occurred. Justice Abe Fortas, a Lyndon Johnson appointee just four months earlier, who wrote the majority opinion, called it “a place dedicated to quiet, to knowledge, and to beauty . . . [a] hallowed place.” Justice Hugo Black, who wrote the dissent, noted that public libraries are “dedicated to reading and learning and studying” and recognized “the extremely necessary purposes underlying their existence.”51 Both sides wanted to protect the quiet and peacefulness of the public library. The most significant difference in the opinions was how each side viewed the conflict that had occurred in this special place and where the blame for that conflict might lie.
Dissenters saw no racism in the arrests. Justice Black blamed the protesters for disrupting the “peace and order” required to achieve the purposes served by the public library.52 He seemed frustrated by the protesters’ continued demonstrations, a frustration that was exacerbated by the location of this protest: “Public buildings such as libraries . . . are maintained to perform certain specific and vital functions. Order and tranquility . . . are essential.” He noted that the protesters had received courteous service at the library desk. Brown had requested a book. The librarian had informed him that the branch did not have it, that she would order it, and that he would receive it in the mail or by bookmobile. She had asked the protesters to leave, but they refused. “There simply was no racial discrimination practiced in this case,” he stated. He bolstered his statement with the testimony of the librarian, who “testified unambiguously that there was no racial discrimination practiced at her library,” and with the state attorney’s oral argument, in which he “stated frankly and forthrightly that there would be no defense had Louisiana denied these petitioners equal service at its public libraries on account of race.”
Black was offended that the protesters had interfered with the “normal, quiet functioning” of the library, even after they received courteous and complete service. Even though no one else had been in the library, he nevertheless asserted that the library’s “normal activity was completely disrupted.” His frustration was clear. “It is high time to challenge the assumption, in which too many people have too long acquiesced,” he argued, “that groups that think they have been mistreated or that have actually been mistreated have a constitutional right to use the public’s streets, buildings, and property to protest whatever, wherever, whenever they want without regard to whom such conduct may disturb.” He then warned, “If one group can take over libraries for one cause, other groups will assert the right to do so for causes which . . . may not be so appealing to this Court.” States would be “paralyzed with reference to control of their libraries,” he warned, and “I suppose that inevitably the next step will be to paralyze the schools.” Finally, Black differentiated the merits of the protests and the means used to effectuate them: “It is an unhappy circumstance . . . that the group, which more than any other has needed a government of equal laws and equal justice, is now encouraged to believe that the best way for it to advance its cause, which is a worthy one, is by taking the law into its own hands from place to place and from time to time. . . . The crowd moved by noble ideals today can become the mob ruled by hate and passion and greed and violence tomorrow.”53
Justice Fortas, however, directly blamed the Jim Crow racism practiced in the area’s public libraries. “It is an unhappy circumstance that the locus of these events was a public library,” Justice Fortas said. “It is a sad commentary that this hallowed place . . . bore the ugly stamp of racism. It is sad, too, that it was a public library which . . . was the stage for [the] confrontation.” Fortas added, “This is the fourth time in little more than four years that this Court has reviewed convictions by the Louisiana courts for alleged violations, in a civil rights context, of that State’s breach of the peace statute.” In previous cases involving lunch counters, bus depots, and a street protest, demonstrators had been orderly, with no evidence that they planned or intended disorder. “In none,” Fortas noted, “were there circumstances which might have led to a breach of the peace chargeable to the protesting participants.” In the present case he found that the protesters had been lawfully in the library—“Negroes could not be denied access since white persons were welcome”—and “were neither loud, boisterous, obstreperous, indecorous, nor impolite. . . . They sat and stood in the room, quietly, as monuments of protest against the segregation of the library.” Fortas held that protesters had “the right in a peaceable and orderly manner to protest by silent and reproachful presence . . . the unconstitutional segregation of public facilities.” They could not be punished for doing so. He admitted that libraries may regulate library use but that they “must do so in a reasonable and nondiscriminatory manner.” The convictions were reversed.54
At the time of the Court’s decision, the Clinton library building remained closed, all the while offering telephone reference and bookmobile service. Both the majority and dissenting opinions made it clear that when it reopened, it should do so on an integrated basis. Months later it did open on an integrated basis, and by the end of the year all Louisiana public libraries were integrated. Around the same time that the Supreme Court rendered its decision, the American Library Association Council, which had filed no amicus curiae brief in Brown v. Louisiana, voted to continue welcoming into membership all libraries, including those that discriminated against black people.55