Careful readers may have noticed that in narrating the stories and presenting the histories of public library integration between the 1954 Brown decision and the passage of the Civil Rights Act ten years later, very seldom did we cite professional library literature or note actions taken by professional library associations—national, state, or regional. This was not by design but, rather, a telling point. For the most part the American Library Association—and certainly southern state library associations—chose to ignore the issue of public library segregation rather than challenge, confront, or even discuss it until compelled by protests against segregated public libraries across the South.
The history of this neglect is long. In March 1899, for example, as the ALA planned its annual conference for Atlanta—the first time since organizing in 1876 that the ALA had ventured into the South—a member asked about the possibility of a session on public library services to “Negroes.” Ninety percent of the country’s black people lived in the South, and since Emancipation black literacy had grown from 20 to 60 percent, he said. ALA president William Coolidge Lane of Harvard was cautious. “I am somewhat afraid to tackle [it] & sh’d not want to say anything about it at present,” he demurred, though he did suggest W. E. B. Du Bois, a Harvard graduate and Atlanta University professor, as a potential speaker. Planning committee member Anne Wallace, who was the Atlanta YMCA Library director and hoped for a Carnegie grant for a public library, objected immediately: “To bring it in its crude shape before the national association, where partisans could make political capital out of it, would prove inimical to both white and negro interests.” Days later, Lane wrote to ALA officials that “the question of Negro Education, or the Negro in Relation to Libraries, we will leave untouched altogether.” Wallace had ample reason to be concerned. On April 23 a black man was lynched in nearby Newman for killing a white person—many blacks said he acted in self-defense. Two thousand people watched, many arriving on a special excursion train from Atlanta. Several in the audience tore the body apart after the victim died; one Atlanta grocery store owner proudly displayed the victim’s knuckles in his store window.1
In coming decades, the ALA continued to ignore Jim Crow practices. Just after World War I, ALA executive secretary Carl Milam told members from the South that the Carnegie Corporation had conceded their position on race issues and now required communities seeking grants to base their appropriations “only upon the white population of the towns.” Milam, born in Kansas, raised in Oklahoma, and director of the segregated Birmingham, Alabama, Public Library system for several years before World War I, was also quoted as saying that the idea that “negroes have the right to ask for the privileges” of a Carnegie library was a “misconception.”2 In 1922, interested parties organized an ALA “Work with Negroes Round Table” that met for two conferences and did a survey of public library services to black Americans but little else. The roundtable did not survive the decade.
Partly in response to the survey, the Carnegie Corporation announced in 1925 that it would follow an ALA recommendation to fund a library school at Virginia’s Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) to train black librarians for the “colored branches of city library systems” across the country.3 New York Public Library Schomburg Center director Ernestine Rose, who was white, and Howard University’s E. C. Williams, who was black, protested strongly, albeit privately, to the NAACP, arguing that “before long colored librarians from all parts of the country would be debarred from the regular schools and shunted off to Hampton,” which would “probably mean a lower standard at the school . . . and a distinct disadvantage to colored librarians.” The NAACP agreed and protested to the ALA and the Carnegie Corporation against the establishment of a “segregated library school.” Despite NAACP opposition, however, the Hampton library school opened in September, and for the next thirteen years its graduates took jobs mostly in southern segregated and northern ghettoized public libraries serving black patrons.4
In 1936 the association published Tommie Dora Barker’s Libraries of the South: A Report on Developments, 1930–1935, which contained a seven-page chapter entitled “Library Services to Negroes.” “These extensions of branch library service to Negroes and erection of buildings, are recorded with a feeling of apology rather than of complacency,” Barker told her readers, “for wherever public library service is maintained from public funds for the whites, it should, as a matter of course, be maintained for Negroes also.”5 Nevertheless, throughout these decades the ALA remained largely mute on the issue of segregated public library services in the South.
The same year it published Barker’s book, however, and just prior to an annual conference scheduled for Richmond, Virginia, ALA officials circulated a letter indicating that its black members could attend but would be seated in segregated sections of meeting rooms and would not be permitted to attend meal functions or visit conference exhibits or register for conference hotel rooms. After the conference, black librarian Wallace Van Jackson wrote to the Library Journal: “The segregation of Negroes” at ALA meetings was “a shameful slide backward. What is worse, no single meeting or group at the Richmond conference so much as brought up the matter for discussion to say nothing of passing a resolution of protest.” The New Republic projected the matter to a national stage. “The explanation is made rather plaintively that these restrictions were not the fault of the ALA, but part of a law of Virginia. Query: Why should any civilized association, with Negro members, undertake to hold such a convention in Virginia or any other state that makes such distinctions?”6 Not everyone agreed. Jesse Cunningham, head librarian of Memphis’s public library, wrote a letter to the Library Journal: “Liberal provisions were made for Negro librarians to attend sessions at Richmond. . . . It is just unfortunate that emphasis was placed on the negative side of Negroes attending meetings where food was served. No Negro attending a meeting in Richmond would expect this. It is not the custom. . . . What does Rhode Island or New Jersey know about the Southern Negro?”7
Clearly embarrassed, the ALA Council eventually passed a resolution that “in all rooms and halls assigned to the American Library Association hereafter for use in connection with its conference or otherwise under its control, all members shall be admitted upon terms of full equality.” The resolution represented the first time the ALA took a public position against race discrimination.8
At its June 1939 annual conference, the ALA approved a “Library Bill of Rights” (LBR) largely as a reaction to pressure brought by right-wing groups in California, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, and New York “objecting to what they called ‘subversive’ literature in public libraries.”9 Principle no. 1 read: “Books and other reading matter selected for purchase from public funds should be chosen because of value and interest to people of the community, and in no case should selection be influenced by the race or nationality or the political or religious views of the writers.” Principle no. 3 read in part: “Library meeting rooms should be available on equal terms to all groups in the community regardless of their beliefs or affiliations.”10 Yet when Buddy Evans and four other black teenagers in Virginia protested at the Alexandria Public Library two months later, neither the library press nor the ALA saw segregation as an issue addressed by the Library Bill of Rights and made no mention of the events.
Although all state library associations sent appointed members to ALA conferences as chapter representatives, black librarians from the South were not permitted to join those associations. As a result, some black librarians organized their own and applied for separate chapter membership. In 1943, for example, the North Carolina Negro Library Association became the ALA’s first black chapter. In the mid-1950s, however, the ALA took a stand against this practice by stating that only one association per state could have representation in the ALA and that association had to admit all members who applied, regardless of race. Some complied; North Carolina’s black association dissolved when the North Carolina Library Association agreed to admit black members in 1955. Some had already tried but met resistance. In 1950, for example, the Alabama Library Association conducted a mail ballot on the question of opening membership to black libraries. When over half of the respondents answered favorably, albeit in a low return, nine black librarians submitted dues to become members. At the association’s subsequent annual conference, however, one white university librarian carped, “Who is it that is stuffing these Negroes down our throats?” Because his reaction was echoed by others, the association decided to refund black librarians’ dues and take them off its membership rolls. Other state library associations, such as those in Georgia and Mississippi, continued to deny membership to black librarians in their states and, like Alabama, lost their ALA representation.11 And the ALA showed it had learned a lesson from 1936; in 1954 it rejected Miami Beach as a conference site when it appeared that blacks would be discriminated against in public facilities. Two years later, however, the ALA did meet there once it had been assured that local hotels and restaurants would not segregate its members.
Yet, despite a significant number of protests at public libraries across the South, the library press largely overlooked Jim Crow public library practices as a professional problem. Not until 1958, for example, did the subject heading “Segregation and the Library” appear in the Library Literature Index, the profession’s main reference tool to record its bibliographical output and one of a number of resources produced by the H. W. Wilson Publishing Company. And not until events in Danville, Greenville, Memphis, and Petersburg—after civil rights activities across the South appeared on the front pages of the nation’s major newspapers and became lead stories for major network evening news programs—did the library profession begin to focus significant attention on the issue. Nonetheless, what actions it eventually took were always peripheral to local efforts to integrate public library systems.12
By reading library literature, which almost always put a positive spin on the issue of race in librarianship, librarians across the country with any interest in the subject had reason to see “progress.” A 1953 Southern Regional Council report entitled “No Segregation Here,” for example, found that fifty-nine cities and towns allowed blacks to use the main library freely, twenty-four offered limited service, eleven supported one or more black branches, and three systems had black representatives on their library boards.13 At Atlanta University, however, Virginia Lacy Jones, dean of the School of Library Service, encouraged her students to write master’s theses on race in individual public libraries of the South. While many of the theses provided detail for the present study, the vast majority were never read by contemporary library professionals. One can imagine the sense of frustration Atlanta University students felt as they shared their findings with each other and their subsequent disappointment with a profession that claimed to be in favor of free access but did very little to bring it about in the South. The soaring rhetoric about intellectual freedom and opposition to censorship that resonated in ALA conference speeches—especially in the 1950s, as the association took public positions against McCarthyism—did not match the reality they experienced and the research they generated.
But events such as the Montgomery bus boycott ultimately forced the issue. In the late 1950s, ALA Intellectual Freedom Committee members asked several librarians from the South if an ALA statement supporting the integration of public library services would be helpful. Their responses hinted at the limits of what the ALA could do. “One of my chores has been to keep publicity about this situation at a minimum,” said one librarian managing an integrated library. “I believe the answer to the question of extending use to the Negro race in communities which are still segregated is through the Negroes themselves. . . . This is the only actual approach which would produce results and no amount of speaking or beating of the chest by ALA will do much to aid and abet such a situation.” Another librarian managing an integrated institution argued, “Such a statement would stir up the rabble rousers, a noisy minority in the South, which would interrupt the rapid progress being made.” Said a state librarian from the South: “Statements by outside agencies such as ALA will do more harm than good because they are deeply resented and further inflame already hot tempers. We fervently hope that such a mistake can be avoided.”14
But events nonetheless forced the ALA to act. An excerpt from the ALA Executive Board minutes for March 27, 1960, reads: “It was suggested that ALA will sooner or later be asked to state its position on the situations reported in Petersburg, Virginia, and Memphis, Tennessee, related to integration. . . . It was recognized that the Association while striving for service cannot, nor does it attempt to, intrude on local jurisdiction.”15 On May 17 the ALA appointed a special “Committee on Civil Liberties” to “recommend an ALA policy statement on the civil rights of individuals to have access to libraries and the resources contained therein.”16
With the subject in the public eye, in his September 1960 issue of Wilson Library Bulletin, editor John Wakeman enumerated the ALA’s reactions to racial incidents in Danville, Memphis, and Petersburg and the “teen-age violence” that followed the Greenville sit-in. Starting with shifting the Miami Beach conference from 1954 to 1956—“a complete success,” he labeled it—he also noted how the North Carolina Negro Library Association had quietly dissolved in 1955 because the North Carolina Library Association had agreed to integrate so that the ALA would retain it as North Carolina’s only ALA chapter. From this evidence Wakeman concluded, “Surely then, ALA’s record is that of an organization opposed to segregation, and as effective as its structure permits.” For fear of retarding integration and making more difficult the tasks of southern librarians opposed to segregation, he advised against “intervention in local situations.”17
The Wilson Library Bulletin Wakeman edited was a publication of the H. W. Wilson Publishing Company, which also issued the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature and such staple library bibliographies as the Fiction Catalog and Public Library Catalog, both issued quinquennially with annual supplements to help librarians identify the best books for library acquisition. Books recommended in these bibliographies were selected from book reviews in periodicals that the Readers’ Guide indexed, which local public libraries then subscribed to primarily because they had been indexed. The fact that the Readers’ Guide and other Wilson indexes largely overlooked African American newspapers and periodicals such as the Chicago Defender and the Colored American in their indexing practices effectively limited the ability of public library users across the country to access African American perspectives on civil rights issues that did not appear in the mainstream media before the 1960s and thus reinforced the perception of American life that dominant white Anglo-Saxon Protestant cultures defined. Through the middle of the twentieth century, other members of the nation’s library press reflected similar values.
Wakeman’s editorial, which had followed private conversations about the ALA’s tepid position on the issue of segregated libraries in the South with Library Journal editor Eric Moon, sparked Moon to react—the first time the thermometer of professional discourse on the subject showed any heat. Like the Wilson Library Bulletin, the Library Journal was not an official organ of the American Library Association and often functioned as a major ALA critic. In a December 15, 1960, editorial he entitled “The Silent Subject,” Moon noticed that “segregation and integration are two words which appear not to have crept into Library Literature,” and even under existing subject headings “Negro and the Library” and “Public Libraries—Service to Negroes,” Library Literature for 1959–60 listed none of the events taking place at segregated public libraries across the South. The index did list seven Atlanta University theses, a 1955 Library Journal article on “Library Service in Mississippi,” and the “No Segregation Here” report mentioned earlier. “A vacuum,” Moon called coverage of the subject.
To fill some of that vacuum and start a professional dialogue on the subject, Moon published in the same issue an article entitled “Segregated Libraries” by Rice Estes, a black librarian at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute who was born and raised in South Carolina and had suffered many of the humiliations Jim Crow imposed on black people. Estes’s words were sharp and to the point. “So far no library association seems willing to do anything about the most pressing domestic issue the nation faces today, the integration and education of our Negro citizens,” he said. “Instead, librarians are piously declaring that they will not become involved in local problems. The term ‘local’ is never defined.” Estes noted how librarians were ready to organize a book campaign for residents of Ghana, but when denied service in Danville, Virginia, black people “were left without a librarian’s voice lifted in their behalf.” “As effective as its structure permits?” he quoted Wakeman. “I challenge this statement.” Millions of black Americans living in the South were denied access to public libraries that their taxes helped support, and “the American Library Association has been completely ineffective about the issue. It has never even passed a resolution on the subject. It has never commended the efforts of Negro readers and organizations who have tried to end library segregation by doing everything from making a mild request to staging library sit-ins. It has not attempted to bring a law suit or lent its name as amicus curiae to any group bringing a suit.”
Estes recalled visiting a southern library recently, where he asked a librarian how blacks were serviced. “Oh,” she responded, “they are not interested in reading.” Had she never read Richard Wright’s Black Boy, he wondered, especially the part where he describes how he illicitly obtained books from Memphis’s public library? “If only this passage could be reprinted and sent to every trustee of every library in the South,” wrote Estes, “surely fruit would be borne.” At the end of Estes’s article, editor Moon reprinted the Black Boy passage Estes referenced and noted that Wright had recently died of a heart attack in Paris at age fifty-two.18
Moon’s editorial and Estes’s article effectively initiated the debate, and for the next several years—as news of protests and demonstrations against segregation of public facilities in the South saturated the media—ALA discussion of “integration” took priority over “censorship” as an issue of professional ethics. “I, for one, was only vaguely aware of the existence of segregated libraries in the South, and was astounded at the extent of the problem,” California Librarian editor W. R. Eshelman said in his January 1961 issue. “Yet the subject of segregated libraries is rarely discussed and virtually unmentioned in our professional literature. If federal funds are being used to extend segregated library service, we are compounding the problem.”19 Eshelman seemed unaware of how the 1956 Library Services Act funds for which the nation’s library community lobbied so hard were being allocated by southern state library agencies.
In its February 1961 issue, Library Journal published a “selection” of scores of letters to the editor. “Orchids to Mr. Rice Estes,” wrote one Virginia community college librarian. Estes’s article “left me with a very guilty feeling about my own individual failure to speak out against segregated libraries,” said an Ohio reference librarian, “and I am sure many other librarians feel the same way.” “I salute the editor of Lj and Mr. Rice Estes for their criticizing the pussyfooting of the ALA on the issue of segregation in our public libraries of the South,” argued a Rutgers University periodicals librarian. “That this subject has first been broached in Library Journal rather than in the ALA Bulletin [the Bulletin of the American Library Association had been the ALA’s official organ since 1905] should, I think, cause some room for thought by American librarians,” argued a Long Beach, California, public library director. Ruth Brown, at the time director of the Sterling Public Library in Colorado, who had been fired as the Bartlesville, Oklahoma, Public Library director in 1950 for her efforts to desegregate public facilities, asked: “How can a librarian read [Richard Wright’s Black Boy] and not be influenced, and how can anyone fail to see that freedom to read must include all who have that desire? I could not see then and have never understood why the ALA carefully seemed to avoid this angle.”20
“How can an issue on which the United States Supreme Court has taken action be regarded as ‘local’?” asked an Ohio State Library employee. “It is embarrassing and humiliating to think of our allegedly progressive profession sitting on the side lines in agreeable politeness throughout this period of national shame since 1954,” said the Yale University Library director. Joseph Wheeler, Enoch Pratt Free Library director from 1926 to 1945, welcomed the “fresh breeze” that “blows through” LJ’s December 15 issue: “Oh my, I’ve spent 58 years listening to the smug librarians who don’t want to change.”21 Wheeler said nothing, however, about interviewing black children’s librarian Augusta Baker in 1933, when he “made it very plain that they weren’t hiring Negro librarians.” “Our interview wasn’t the happiest one,” Baker later recalled. Nor did he mention that a year later the library opened separate “Colored Men” and “Colored Women” washrooms because whites had complained about sharing toilets with blacks.22
Criticism of the ALA was justified. Discussion of integration before 1960 in the association’s archives is thin. During the 1950s the ALA Bulletin editor said nothing about desegregating southern public libraries, “perhaps under orders from the executive director of the association, an unrepentant southerner,” W. H. Eshelman later speculated.23 While the ALA and its Intellectual Freedom Committee (IFC) carefully watched book censorship activities in southern libraries and corresponded with white librarians running them, existing correspondence shows that ALA officials and southern librarians very seldom referenced issues of segregation, except for some discussion of the eligibility of black librarians for membership in state library associations. Part of the problem was confusion surrounding the issue of professional jurisdiction. For example, although the IFC decided to collect data on segregation in southern public libraries in the fall of 1959 and the following spring sought similar data from the South’s state librarians, IFC chairman Archie McNeal nonetheless felt “the committee was functioning outside the scope of its original charge and beyond the limits of the Library Bill of Rights.”24
At its 1961 midwinter meeting, the ALA Council accepted a recommendation from its special “Committee on Civil Liberties” and adopted an addition to the Library Bill of Rights: “The rights of an individual to the use of a library should not be denied or abridged because of his race, religion, national origins or political views.” In his March Library Journal editorial, Eric Moon welcomed the discussion, applauded the change in the Library Bill of Rights, and called for a survey that would give the IFC more information on segregated libraries. “Surely, here is a worthwhile project for the Council on Library Resources [CLR], one which is at least as important as the kind of charging machines libraries should use,” he wrote. “The CLR financiers, the Ford Foundation, whose declared objective is ‘to advance human welfare,’ might well see this as an advance toward what” a Ford Foundation vice president “recently called ‘the ideal library of the future.’”25
The debate found its way into other venues. Was National Library Week, scheduled for April 16–22, really “for all”? Harold C. Gardiner asked in the Roman Catholic periodical America. In the six years since Brown, Gardiner noted, “scant public attention has been paid to the integration of public libraries.” He called on the ALA, the National Book Committee, and Catholic organizations across the country that participated in National Library Week “to take the lead in making next year’s observance truly a national affair—for all.”26
Behind the scenes, ALA officials scrambled. Much of the news about libraries across the nation in the 1950s came to the association from news clipping services, and because sit-ins and demonstrations at public libraries were often not covered in white-owned southern newspapers, ALA officials had difficulty following events. But even direct communication often failed. “In the case of the Danville, Virginia, Library,” the Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom editor wrote to Chairman McNeal on January 12, 1961, “I did not succeed in obtaining information from the librarian, who declined even to send me clippings.”27 To McNeal, ALA deputy director Grace Stevenson wrote on March 28, 1961: “I understand that you are writing an article for Library Journal around the subject of ALA’s civil rights activities. Would it be possible for us to see a copy of this article for our information? We have been a little concerned about LJ’s treatment of ALA’s activities in the field of civil rights over the past several months.”28
In its May issue, the Wilson Library Bulletin opened its pages to several black librarians. All recommended more action in the form of programs, workshops, publicity, and resolutions to local library officials as well as the possibility of withholding federal funds provided by the Library Services Act to localities using them to support segregated library practices. “Conditions can not improve until ALA takes strong action to present itself as a model in democratic practices and until the leaders in the profession can do likewise,” said Virginia Lacy Jones, who not only cited many of the details her students had uncovered in researching their master’s theses but also noted that her request for membership in the Georgia Library Association had again been denied. “ALA needs to be less fearful of offending by making its influence felt at the local level,” she wrote. She also called upon ALA headquarters to hire black people “above the clerical level.” “Every profession at one time or another must endure the test of its convictions, and this will often involve grave social and moral issues,” said Miles M. Jackson of the Hampton Institute Library. “Librarianship, up to this time, has managed to skirt many such issues by ignoring them. But the time has come for the profession to be tested on just how sincerely its members believe in the philosophy that supposedly guides them.” Black children’s librarian Spencer Shaw, of Hempstead, New York, noted only two months separated the ALA’s modification of the Library Bill of Rights and the beating of black Americans at the Jackson, Mississippi, hearing for public library demonstrators. “Clearly, the gauntlet has been thrown down,” he wrote. “Are we ready to pick it up?”29
The act of picking up the gauntlet brought different responses, however. Although former ALA Bulletin editor Beatrice Rossell thought “our northern communities are too far from being ‘without sin’ for us to indulge in self-righteous stone-throwing at anyone,” she hoped “ALA leaders will not ignore the Jackson library situation, or take the easy path of considering it ‘local.’ It is of national and world-wide importance, as are all these racial incidents today.”30 But in his June editorial the current editor complained about “a small but vocal element of the membership” demanding “the ALA become a crusading agency.” He supported modification of the Library Bill of Rights but, after citing previous ALA actions on the issue of race, quoted from the ALA charter and constitution (both documents crafted in the late 1870s) and concluded: “It is clear from the charter and the constitution that the Association exists to further the development of libraries, not to regulate the manner in which they are operated”31—a line of logic that, ironically, could also be applied to the Library Bill of Rights, an overt attempt to influence library collections, which librarians regarded as a professional imperative.
“After reading your editorial concerning ALA and the segregation issue in the June Bulletin, I have decided not to renew my membership,” wrote University of Vermont cataloger Paul K. Swanson to ALA executive secretary David Clift on June 21, 1961. “I do not wish to belong to an organization which on the one hand affirms the rights of all to the use of libraries and with the other cooperates with those who deny those rights. . . . Someday the battle against segregation in libraries will be won. When that day comes ALA can claim very little credit for winning.” In the ALA Archives a note is attached to a letter from Clift to Archie McNeal dated November 17, nearly five months later: “I am enclosing a copy of this letter that I received last June from Paul K. Swanson. I keep looking at it every other day or so to see what kind of a reply might be made and so far I haven’t come up with anything that would be useful to say or helpful to him. Any ideas?” If McNeal answered, the archives do not contain his reply.32
Library Journal editor Eric Moon did complain publicly, however. “LJ, we have been told, has been unnecessarily harsh in its criticism” of ALA. “It is all too easy for a large organization to become so enmeshed in procedural and constitutional problems that it reaches the point where the rule book governs the association rather than the reverse.” Moon also quoted Idaho State College librarian Eli Oboler: “If ALA ‘was not designed to do and by its present nature and structure cannot do’ those things which its membership want it to do as relates to segregation, then the major and urgent and vital task for the Association now is to change the nature and structure of ALA to conform to its membership’s wishes.”33
In September 1961, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights called for congressional action to withhold federal funds, under the Library Services Act, from states using those funds to maintain segregated library services.34 More and more, as public libraries in the South became routine targets of demonstrations and sit-ins, librarians became introspective and examined themselves on the issue. Library Journal published a survey of twenty-two national professional associations, comparing them with the ALA on attitudes toward segregation. “ALA seems to be well above the middle range of the professional associations in statements of policy,” its author reassured readers, “as well as in some of the actions already taken and now under consideration.”35
For decades, the ALA had hosted two conferences per year—one a midwinter meeting primarily for planning, the other the ALA’s main summer conference, at which it hosted major programs. At its 1961 summer conference in Cleveland, the IFC refined two recommendations to the ALA Executive Board. The first called upon the board to make sure state chapters were meeting ALA requirements by admitting all applicants for membership. At the time, because the Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi Library Associations openly refused to admit blacks, they were not ALA chapters. The second recommended that no library be given membership if it “discriminates among users on the grounds of race, religion, or personal beliefs.” Thereafter, the committee polled fourteen chapters (twelve state, two regional) primarily from the South to see “whether Negroes are eligible for membership” and “whether any Negroes are members.” All fourteen reported that they did not restrict membership on the basis of race, but because an unnamed three said they had “no Negro members at the present time,” the IFC concluded: “It appears equally clear that some of the chapters involved are not providing their members with the fundamental rights of membership.”
When the board took up the recommendations at its 1962 midwinter meeting in Chicago, members balked at the first recommendation because, they said, it “will surely force the withdrawal or expulsion of some chapters” that operated under laws over which they had no control and would bring a “concurrent loss of many personal members in the states affected.” In addition, ALA members from the South were “making significant contributions to librarianship,” despite social customs and legal constraints. Therefore, the board concluded: “Should the ALA, by drastic action, separate these chapters and personal members from ALA, breaches in understanding and professional relations might be created that would require years to heal.” The second recommendation was equally troublesome. “Such a provision would surely . . . cause a regrettable and on the part of the libraries affected an unwilling loss in ALA membership and support,” stated the board. Rather than impose “presently impossible-to-meet conditions on all libraries,” the board recommended that the ALA Council issue a “Declaration of Belief, Encouragement and Confident Expectation” that public libraries in the South would soon desegregate and, after the IFC also endorsed it, provided a draft for council consideration.
At the meeting at which the council considered the draft, one member complained about the “short notice” given and called for a stronger statement. “I am not asking for punitive action,” she said, “but for leadership.” Another argued the declaration “is a monstrously cynical statement, a confession of moral bankruptcy. I would feel tragically desolate if this confession were made by the association.” Recently appointed New Orleans Public Library director Jerome Cushman countered that the statement “will put us squarely, in terms of philosophy, where I want to be,” but at the same time he admitted that “it will not change one blamed thing anywhere.” Another council member condemned the declaration’s “weasel words.” Virginia Lacy Jones, the only black librarian to speak at the meeting, called the statement weak. It reads as if “ALA is fearful of losing membership in the South and the financial support of the South,” she argued. After what the Library Journal called “much parliamentary confusion and a vigorous though meandering discussion,” the council voted three to one to “recommit” the declaration to the executive board for further study and possible revision at the summer conference. “A bouquet to the ALA Council for their refusal to rubber-stamp the highly dubious statement,” Moon wrote. “Brave statements, unsupported by action, can only provoke those in the South who oppose integration and irritate those who are working towards it,” said the Wilson Library Bulletin’s Wakeman.36
After the midwinter conference the executive board appointed a subcommittee to revise the statement, and the council ultimately approved the “Statement on Individual Membership, Chapter Status, and Institutional Membership” on June 19. “The statement calls on individual members of ALA to work for an end of discrimination in libraries and in ALA chapters,” the Wilson Library Bulletin explained. “It lists the rights of members of ALA chapters to certify that these rights are guaranteed to their members, it urges institutional members (libraries) to end discrimination among library users, and states the Council’s intention of pursuing ‘with diligence’ a proposed study of access to libraries.” ALA members thought the document more “tightly organized and concise” than its predecessor. At the same conference the ALA announced it had gathered sufficient funds to engage a nationwide study on access to public libraries.37 Just over a month later, five black teenagers were arrested at the Albany Public Library in Georgia, and while they were conducted down the library steps, CBS News filmed the activities and broadcast the story across the nation that evening.
In his April 1963 issue, Bay State Librarian editor John Berry III asked if the eleven southern libraries receiving ALA-administered library awards were “segregated.” He said he had contacted the Southern Regional Council about these libraries and received the following response: “Our files show no record of desegregation at any of the libraries cited in your letter. We assume, therefore, that they are still segregated.” With this statement in hand, Berry concluded: “We violently oppose any award to strengthen institutions which maintain a system of service that in any way separates one citizen from another in his use of books. We ask the question in the sincere hope that every library and system involved can and will truthfully answer with a resounding ‘no!’ to separation, segregation, and unequal library service. Can we expect a reply?”
Because Berry made no attempt to contact the eleven libraries prior to publishing the editorial, Library Journal did, supplying each with a copy of Berry’s editorial and requesting a response. From the responses, LJ reported, two evaded the question, but “seven denied unequivocally that they were segregated,” some in colorful language. “I’ll be damned if I’ll answer [Berry’s] editorial question,” said the Beaufort, South Carolina, County Library director. “The principle of ‘assuming a fact without any evidence’ is something I deplore,” said the North Arkansas Regional Library director. “Unfortunately racial strife will continue so long as people, expecting the worst, act on someone’s assumptions instead of fact,” argued the Plant City, Florida, Public Library director. “As I write from a desk in our library,” wrote her board chairman, “I see in the reading room almost as many Negro patrons as white ones, and they have been coming ever since the library first opened its doors for service, and without incident!” Of the respondents, only Jackson Parish Library in Jonesboro, Louisiana, admitted segregated services that, incredibly, the librarian wrote, were “designed for the use of all citizens. The same staff—trained bookmobile librarian and clerk-driver—operate two bookmobiles, one of which is devoted exclusively to the service for Negroes, with a collection selected to appear to their interest and informational needs.”38
By the time LJ published the article, ALA had met in Chicago, where it eagerly awaited the results of the survey work the association had commissioned International Research Associates (INRA) to conduct. But the results of the study that surveyed 1,789 library systems nationally (22 percent of the total)—issued in the form of a seven-page digest to a packed room at the conference—were not what most librarians expected. “This research project is highly unusual insofar as it is a self-audit by a professional group in the very delicate area of civil rights,” the study began. “The position of the American Library Association in this area has been emphasized by a revision of its Bill of Rights.” Yes, INRA concluded, direct racial discrimination did exist in southern public libraries, in 1963 more in rural areas than urban. In twenty-one southern public libraries in cities of at least fifty thousand people, only five had fully segregated systems. At the same time, nineteen still had segregated school systems, thus demonstrating that public library integration greatly outpaced school integration, in most cases “with a minimum of disturbance.” The study also charged that “the rate of library integration is also affected by the generally low priority accorded to it by the leaders of the Negro community, as compared to the fields of voting, housing, education and other public facilities.”39
When analyzed through the physical location of branch libraries and resources allocated to neighborhood branches, however, it became obvious that public libraries across the country—South and North—engaged in “indirect” racial discrimination. “In Philadelphia, a white neighborhood is six times as likely to possess a branch library as is a predominantly nonwhite section,” the report noted. “In Detroit, twice as many branches are located in white neighborhoods as in Negro neighborhoods, and these branches contain more than one and one-half times as many books as those in predominantly non-white areas.”40
After hearing the word indirect, audience members scrambled for microphones located in the aisles to protest in a cacophony that followed. “It was notable,” the ALA Bulletin later reported, “not one question was asked about any of the ten principal findings of the Access of Public Libraries study, and that only one criticism was made—of number three,” the finding referencing “indirect discrimination.” That the report highlighted Detroit and Philadelphia—two systems run by former ALA presidents—may have been a coincidence, but both directors protested. Philadelphia’s Emerson Greenaway took issue with “assumptions” in the report. Detroit’s Ralph Ulveling was more forthright. “You’ve made some very serious charges about this city,” he told the study’s director. “This is a most damaging kind of thing.” He accused INRA of using “old statistics which don’t show the true picture.”41
The statistics could also be used to explain another form of indirect discrimination that had not been acknowledged: school segregation in northern cities had actually increased in the North after the Brown decision. In 1960, for example, 40 percent of New York City’s black and Puerto Rican schoolchildren had no white classmates; seven years later, that number had jumped to 50 percent. Across the North, cultural historian Lizbeth Cohen notes, Brown “became increasingly meaningless as growing residential segregation kept whites and minorities apart and persistent localism, fortified by a stratified real estate market and substantial municipal property taxes, made remedying inequality difficult.” Public library funding reflected similar patterns. Virginia Lacy Jones, who recognized the indirect discrimination, spoke in favor of the study. “No one should be surprised,” she said, that branch libraries across the country discriminated against black people. All public institutions “had discrimination against Negroes built into them. This fact is well known in the South; it is time the North woke up to it.”42
After the full report was published in August—several library directors had persuaded the ALA to include a disclaimer that “poor methodology” characterized the INRA research on northern library services43—Library Journal opened the pages of its December 15 issue to a forum on the study that consisted of eleven statements and an editorial. Several contributors groused about methodologies, while others were more forgiving. “Almost invariably, libraries reflect the neighborhood served rather than the ideals of librarianship,” wrote one. “The report has exposed a ghost in our purpose. This ghost is known by many aliases: apathy, cowardice, conformity, weakness, lack of political imagination, expediency, ignorance, inability, security, and defeatism.” The forum included three black library professionals. Virginia Lacy Jones noted that the master’s theses her students had written “reveal that [black] branches not only have an insufficient quantity of books, but that the quality of the materials is often inferior in terms of scope of subjects included and recency of publications.” “A monumental document,” black librarian and civil rights activist E. J. Josey called it, “that stirred up a hornet’s nest in Chicago,” where, “strangely enough,” he teased, “the most vehement denunciations . . . came from the North and not the South.” He was most disappointed at the comments of the “timid lot” of southern librarians and board members, which reflected a “poverty of values” and convinced him “that the keepers of knowledge in these communities are not concerned about providing library service to all citizens which will strengthen democracy in America.”44
The same issue carried an article by Bernice Lloyd Bell, whose research was based on her master’s thesis at Atlanta University’s School of Library Service. In her summary she reported the progress made, which was also evident in the “Access” study. She did not mention the fact that what little existed as a research base on library services to black Americans was little read and had been written almost entirely by blacks and that the vast majority of that literature came from master’s degree students at a black university in the South. As a group, white library researchers at any level—student, library school faculty member, or professional librarian—were almost entirely absent, a telling example of the limits of a professional discourse in the middle of a civil rights revolution.45
Although several southern state library association chapters had been banished from ALA membership, not all communications between them ceased. When, for example, Virginia Steele organized a Community Center Freedom Library in Greenville, Mississippi, during the 1964 Freedom Summer, she wrote to Mississippi Library Commission director Lura G. Currier for help. When she received no response, she wrote to Grace Stevenson at the ALA, who forwarded publications designed to help start a library. In her response, however, Stevenson added: “I think you can understand why it is not possible for Mrs. Currier, who has labored valiantly for years to improve library service for all the people of Mississippi, to become involved with your program in any way.” A day later Currier and Steele did have a phone conversation, after which Steele wrote Currier: “Just a note to thank you for the phone conversation yesterday, and the background of your struggle for library service. My impression is that you’re doing an heroic and brave job.”46
As more public libraries in the South integrated, the library press did finally take notice—Library Literature cited fifty-six articles under “Segregation and the Library” for 1961–63—but thereafter, as Jim Crow libraries rapidly diminished in numbers, the subject heading disappeared again in 1965. Most professional attention was instead redirected at denying segregated library institutions and segregated state library associations the privilege of ALA membership. But by 1966 all southern state library associations were integrated. In 1968 one librarian perceived a professional “consensus” on the issue of the integration of southern public libraries and concluded, “The American Library Association has probably done as much as it can to enforce non-discrimination among its members.”47
Ultimately, little that the ALA, its members, or any other state and national library organization or association did or said about segregated public library practices in the South had significant impact at the local level. “For both black and white [Alabama] librarians, there were social, economic, and even physical dangers associated with open opposition to the prevailing racial order,” writes library historian Toby Graham. White southern librarians who agreed with or supported the desegregation of public libraries ran the risk of being called “nigger lovers”—an epithet that threatened to separate them from friends and family. Precedent existed and was part of the grapevine. “The library organizations at the state and national levels had less to fear,” according to Graham, “but they were also unprepared to forcefully address issues as complex and as emotionally charged as race relations. Librarians lacked a tradition of organized resistance and were wary of becoming entangled in social issues of ‘local’ concern.” The ALA, Graham argues, “had little influence” on the desegregation of Alabama’s public libraries, adding: “The support it provided for [anti-segregationist] librarians like Juliette Morgan, Emily Reed and Patricia Blalock was negligible.” His conclusion that events in Alabama “demonstrated that the efforts of black protesters were ultimately more important to the cause of equal access to public libraries than the impulses of librarians on the state and national level to fulfill their professional values” is equally accurate for other Jim Crow states.48
In our research, we were unable to find any references that ALA actions directly or even marginally influenced decisions to desegregate local libraries. Although the ALA filed one amicus brief in an Alabama censorship case regarding Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in 1962, it failed to file similar briefs in any of the cases involving public library desegregation that we covered in previous chapters. And after 1965 the impact of race riots in northern cities captured most of the attention of the library press on race issues, perhaps in part because many of these riots occurred closer to editorial homes.
In the 1960s, librarians carped at each other about right moves and wrong moves, and many expressed righteous indignation about the manifestations of segregated libraries. Always, however, they spoke from the periphery of desegregation activities. Although Library Journal editor Eric Moon later recalled a few unpleasant encounters at ALA conferences with “three or four lady battle-ax state librarians, all from the South” who opposed his civil rights positions on public libraries, these encounters never left the conference hallways.49 Few librarians were ready to put their lives on the line for the cause; few had suffered Jim Crow humiliations as a routine way of life, walked up public library steps through hostile white crowds carrying bats and clubs and shouting “Nigger,” sat in libraries before the eyes of angry white librarians and their white patrons, or were arrested on site only to be walked back through (and occasionally beaten by) the same crowds, then carted off to jail, where, if the history they knew was any teacher, they were easy prey for lynch mobs.