Our thanks to Christine Pawley, who painstakingly went through an earlier draft of this book and gave wise counsel and advice that substantially improved it; Chris Dodge, who compiled the index; the anonymous reader for Louisiana State University Press, who not only carefully screened the manuscript but also prodded us to take a broader perspective; and especially our editor, Rand Dotson, who showed amazing patience with sometimes fussy authors and who certainly made this into a better book.
We also thank former students and colleagues with whom we’ve discussed ideas and conclusions that found their way into our narrative; Karen Muller of the American Library Association Library, who screened the American Library Association Executive Board minutes for mention of amicus briefs filed by the association between 1954 and 1965; the American Library Association, for a Diversity Grant that Wayne used in May 2012 for research into newspaper databases at the Library of Congress; Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library for a short-term fellowship in October 2012, and especially Randall Burkett, who made Wayne’s weeklong stay there so profitable; librarians at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and especially Michele Besant of the School of Library and Information Studies; archivists at the Wisconsin Historical Society, where Wayne perused the records of the Louisiana Section of the Congress on Racial Equality, which was so heavily involved in desegregating rural Louisiana public libraries; Marquette University Law School, and especially Dean Joseph Kearney, for supporting this project, and Patricia Cervenka and other law school librarians who helped retrieve research materials at so many stages of this project; Florida A&M University Law School, for supporting this project in so many ways while Shirl was visiting professor there from 2008 through 2011; librarians at Florida State University, and especially the School of Information’s Goldstein Library director, Pamala Doffek, and her staff, many of whom helped this project in so many ways; librarians and archivists at the Library of Congress (where Wayne spent weeks going through newspaper databases—especially the ProQuest African American newspapers—and several days going through the papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the Manuscripts Reading Room); archivists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (where Wayne consulted the American Library Association Archives); librarians and archivists at the Virginia State Library in Richmond, the University of South Carolina Library in Columbia, the University of Georgia in Athens, the Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, the Alabama State Department of Library and Archives in Montgomery, and the Mississippi Department of Library and Archives in Jackson, where Wayne perused microfilmed newspapers from small towns within each state; librarians and archivists at the Civil Rights Museum in Albany, Georgia, where director Lee Formwalt showed Shirl documents relating to the desegregation of the public library and where Wayne and Shirl perused copies of local newspapers; archivists at the National Archives and Records Service in Philadelphia; librarians at the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture in Atlanta, who kindly copied and mailed to us a transcript of an oral history interview with Annie McPheeters, longtime director of Atlanta’s black public libraries; and indirectly the National Endowment for the Humanities, for a Fellowship for University Teachers for Wayne in 2008–9 that funded research for a book entitled Part of Our Lives: A People’s History of the American Public Library (2015), which Wayne also used to screen huge newspaper databases at the Library of Congress for valuable information used in The Desegregation of Public Libraries in the Jim Crow South.