2024-25
JOHN NEAR GRANT Recipient
Nothing is So Important as a Public Library: Free Public Libraries as a Barometer for Public Sentiment in Civil Rights America
Felix Chen
“Nothing is So Important as a Public Library”: Free Public Libraries as a Barometer for Public Sentiment in Civil Rights America
Felix Chen
2025 Near Scholar
Mentors: Ms. Carol Green and Ms. Amy Pelman
April 14, 2025
Introduction
“Public libraries continue to be places for education and self-help, and offer opportunity for people of all ages and backgrounds. They offer opportunity for everyone to learn and to pursue self-improvement”1
–American Library Association, “Definition of a Library” (emphasis added)
On a late summer day in 1939, five young men strode one by one up three red brick steps into the front doors of the recently built free public library in Alexandria, Virginia.2 After entering, each of the men visited the circulation desk and politely requested to be issued a library card. One by one, each was denied. Soon after, the police arrived: the librarians had notified the authorities that “the youths had taken books from the shelves … to peruse the volumes.”3 Upon declining to leave the building, all five were arrested for disorderly conduct. It was August 21, and the men all of whom were Black had just staged the first active protest against the segregation of public libraries in American history, anticipating by some two decades the era that would become known to history as the Civil Rights Movement.
The Civil Rights Movement defined an era in American history that remains one of the most well-known today. Its iconic figures and moments Rosa Parks’s arrest (1955), the Little Rock Nine (1957), the Greensboro Sit-ins (1960), and the March on Washington (1963), to name a few have entered American public consciousness to be mythologized, analyzed, and situated in a historical canon.4 Academic focus on these events has been constructive, forging an expansive
1 American Library Association, “Definition of a Library: General Definition,” American Library Association Resource Guides, accessed June 27, 2024, https://libguides.ala.org/library-definition.
2 “Alexandria Library Sit-in,” The Historical Marker Database, accessed February 15, 2025, https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=82774; Claudia Swain, “Alexandria Library Sit-In, 1939,” Boundary Stones: WETA’s Local History Website, accessed October 7, 2024, https://boundarystones.weta.org/2016/11/29/alexandrialibrary-sit-1939.
3 “Five Colored Boys, Refusing to Leave Library, Arrested,” The Washington, D.C. Times Herald, August 22, 1939, Newspapers.com.
4 “The Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Long Struggle for Freedom,” Library of Congress, accessed April 6, 2025, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/civil-rights-era-timeline.html.
field of study that has helped delineate a period of tremendous social, economic, and legal change in American history. Among these many changes was a reconsideration of the place of free public libraries within communities across the nation, a topic that only recently has begun to garner scholarly attention.
This paper focuses on the free public library in American history and consciousness, and above all on its significance and centrality to debates surrounding democracy and equality in the Civil Rights era. By their very nature, public libraries symbolize access, education, and community-mindedness, all defining American values. As civic institutions, they are intrinsically linked to their communities: the values of the community shape library policies and services through direct or indirect municipal control and public pressure. It is not surprising, then, that libraries were important places for the contestation of rights during the 1950s and 1960s the peak of the Civil Rights Movement. Debates and conflicts over libraries exposed community tensions, reflected community sentiment, and sometimes laid the path to resolution. Indeed, surrounded by protest, resistance, and turmoil, libraries were especially revealing of racial tensions and inequalities perhaps even more so than commercial, privatized spaces such as the lunch counters or storefronts that have been a focus of more intensive scholarship.5 The inherent conflict between the core goals of public library service (to democratize access to information and foster an educated public) and the objectives of institutional segregation (to limit and discriminate) provided a contradiction apparent to both Black and white community leaders.
This paper explores the link between the evolution of segregationist policies in the free public libraries of three selected American cities Birmingham, Alabama; Danville, Virginia; and 5 Local public schools, too, carry their own set of community meaning and are a parallel, though slightly different, indicator of Civil Rights sentiment. For one common community response to efforts integrating public schools, see David Nevin, Robert E. Bills, and Terry Sanford, The Schools That Fear Built: Segregationist Academies in the South (Washington: Acropolis Books, 1976).
Houston, Texas and the shift in racial sentiment of their immediate communities over the course of the twentieth century. These cities provide a cross section of several relevant factors, differing in areas such as library service history, economic base, civic organization, and ultimately racial sentiment. Analyzing community responses (in their broader social and racial context) through contemporary newspaper coverage as well as later recollections, this paper argues for the significance of American public libraries as barometers of community sentiment and predictors of local civil rights trends: their paths to integration are indicative of the broader conflict over racism and segregation within their respective cities. By focusing on library history and evolution in access during the 1950s and 1960s, this paper offers a new vantage point to consider the Civil Rights Movement.
American Public Library History and Significance
What exactly constitutes a free public library? And how do public libraries differ in service, mission, and obligation from other organizations that provide access to books and information? Free public libraries, today a widespread, broadly accepted community institution, trace their roots in America only to the mid-nineteenth century.6 Prior to their appearance, communities were most commonly served by parochial, mission-oriented, or society libraries, all of which were limited in scope and access.7 Parochial libraries, though centered around a core collection of religious literature bibles, prayer books, or catechisms often also held other materials available to parishioners.8 Mission-oriented libraries, sponsored by institutions such as the Young Men’s Christian Association or existing under the auspices of school districts and Sunday schools,
6 On the broader development of libraries throughout history see Frederick Andrew Lerner, The Story of Libraries: From the Invention of Writing to the Computer Age (New York: Continuum, 2001).
7 “American Library History: A Comprehensive Guide to the Literature,” American Library Association, last modified September 28, 2007, accessed February 16, 2025, https://www.ala.org/lhrt/popularresources/amerlibhis.
8 Lerner, The Story, 140.
provided access to wider literature, but were not necessarily open to those beyond their intended audiences.9 A final type of early library the society library was available only to fee-paying patrons or members, and was thus the most limited in access.10
Distinct from all of these, however, is the free public library. General consensus holds that the first American public library was founded in 1833 in Peterborough, New Hampshire.11 Since then, public libraries have varied widely in scope, audience, and function, though standardization in organization and coordination has grown since the time period upon which this paper focuses. Today, public libraries are broadly defined by the (now effectively defunct) Institute for Museum and Library Services as follows:
A public library is established under state enabling laws or regulations to serve a community, district, or region, and provides at least the following: 1. an organized collection of printed or other library materials, or a combination thereof; 2. paid staff; 3. an established schedule in which services of the staff are available to the public; 4. the facilities necessary to support such a collection, staff, and schedule, and 5. is supported in whole or in part with public funds.12
For the purposes of this paper, the most crucial aspects of this definition are the stipulations that public libraries serve a community and be supported by public funds. Such public funds consist largely of local governmental contributions; even today, relatively minimal (though still
9 “American Library,” American Library Association.
10 “American Library,” American Library Association.
11 “A History of US Public Libraries,” Digital Public Library of America, accessed March 9, 2025, https://dp.la/exhibitions/history-us-public-libraries/beginnings.
12 Ali Bianco, “Trump’s Next Agency Cuts Include US-backed Global Media, Library and Museum Grants,” Politico, March 15, 2025, accessed April 6, 2025, https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/15/donald-trump-agencycuts-00232119; American Library Association, “Definition of a Library,” American Library Association Resource Guides.
operationally significant) resources are provided by state and federal governments.13 Local governments, then, have largely held a level of control over public libraries commensurate with the financial support they provide. And local governments, as they are more immediately accountable to constituents, reflect most clearly the views, perspectives, and beliefs of community members. On a functional level, too, public libraries fall under community control. Most public libraries have been governed by a public library board consisting of a small number of trustees drawn from the community.14 These trustees are either elected (or serve ex officio) or are appointed. In both cases, the library is overseen by the immediate population that it serves, rather than fitting into any broader state or national administrative network.
In 1949, Jesse H. Shera argued that the library was a social agency (such as a museum or school) rather than a social institution (such as the family or the state). He wrote that “[the institution] determines the pattern of society, and the [agency] is determined by that pattern ”15 While this paper does not make that distinction in terminology, its central argument draws from the premise, advanced by Shera and other scholars, that the free public library is, by its very nature, a function and a reflection of broader community needs and desires.
13 “Public Library Revenue, Expenditures, and Funding Sources,” American Academy of Arts & Sciences, accessed March 8, 2025, https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/public-life/public-library-revenue-expenditures-andfunding-sources.
14 For examples, see: Stephen Owens and Carrel Kindel, “Public Library Structure and Organization in the United States,” National Center for Education Statistics, last modified March 1996, accessed March 8, 2025, https://nces.ed.gov/pubs/96229.pdf; Jen Clifton, “Who’s in Charge? Public Library Boards in Indiana,” Indiana State Library, last modified September 21, 2021, accessed March 8, 2025, https://blog.library.in.gov/whos-in-chargepublic-library-boards-in-indiana/; “Library Board Powers and Duties,” Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, accessed March 8, 2025, https://dpi.wi.gov/sites/default/files/imce/pld/pdf/libboard.pdf.
15 Jesse H. Shera, Foundations of the Public Library: The Origins of the Public Library Movement in New England 1629-1855 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1949), v.
Birmingham, Alabama: Library Desegregation Amid Turmoil
“It touches schools and employment practices; a seat at a lunch counter and a home in a better neighborhood, the right to worship in any church, the right to sit in any park and to read a book in any public library in short, the rights of an American citizen ”16
–Relman Morin, “Integration Struggle Hits Critical Point,” The Birmingham News, August 11, 1963, (emphasis added).
Birmingham, Alabama (1960 pop. 340,887) stands as one of the most well-known cities of the Civil Rights era.17 In 1963, images of child protesters openly being attacked by police dogs as well as Martin Luther King, Jr.’s far-reaching and foundational Letter from a Birmingham Jail spread across the nation, earning the city a reputation for especial racist brutality.18 The subsequent outcry against racial segregation in Birmingham marked a turning point in civil rights sentiment and led directly to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.19
Less dramatically, but quite tellingly, at this time, the Birmingham Public Library system was facing its own crisis over segregationist policy. Amid the broader turmoil of the 1963 Birmingham Campaign, the city library voted to desegregate. This desegregation was voluntary and has been at times construed or interpreted as a celebratory moment of civil rights progress and ideals of librarianship.20 On further investigation, however, the desegregation of the Birmingham Public Library reflects the influence of the municipal government and community attentiveness to public perception more than a positive response to Black protest movements or efforts to equalize
16 Relman Morin, “Integration Struggle Hits Critical Point,” The Birmingham News, August 11, 1963, Newspapers.com.
17 “Birmingham Population History 1900 - 2023,” Biggest US Cities, accessed March 6, 2025, https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/birmingham-alabama.
18 “Birmingham Campaign,” The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, accessed February 16, 2025, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/birmingham-campaign.
19 “The Birmingham Campaign 1963,” Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, accessed March 6, 2025, https://www.bcri.org/bham-campaign/.
20 For instance: Amanda Borden, “Celebrate Civil Rights at the Hoover Public Library,” Alabama.com, last modified May 8, 2013, accessed March 6, 2025, https://www.al.com/birmingham-newsstories/2013/05/celebrate_civil_rights_at_the.html.
service. The community’s pragmatic approach to the broader Civil Rights Movement was encapsulated within the library’s desegregation.
A Birmingham Library History, 1886-1954
In his 2001 study of public librarians amid the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, Patterson Toby Graham observed that Alabama was “one of the most segregated southern states ”21 Birmingham, as one of the largest cities in Alabama at the time, exemplified the state’s racial biases. This widespread segregation extended to Birmingham’s public library system: the segregation of its public libraries reflected the racial sentiment of the city and state as a whole.
It is thanks to one sweeping study, first proposed in 1960 by the American Library Association (ALA) and initiated in January 1963, that an in-depth analysis of the Birmingham Public Library system’s status in regard to race-based discrimination in mid-1963 is available.22 The “Access to Public Libraries” study surveyed ten cities nationwide with a view to analyzing the status of segregation in American libraries.23 It noted that, in terms of library access, “[t]he greatest racial inequality occurs in Birmingham and in Washington, D.C,” and provided quantitative evidence for this assessment: “[branch] libraries in predominantly white neighborhoods exceed those in highly non-white areas by a ratio of more than three to one, and branches in heavily white areas have on the average twice as many volumes as those in predominantly non-white sections ”24 The data cited here was collected in the months following the desegregation of Birmingham’s libraries in April 1963; however, with little time for the system
21 Patterson Toby Graham, “Public Librarians and the Civil Rights Movement: Alabama, 1955-1965,” The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 71, no. 1 (2001): 2, JSTOR.
22 Library Administration Division to the ALA Council, “Report on the Study of Access to Public Libraries,” ALA Bulletin 58, no. 4 (1964): 300, JSTOR.
23 Access to Public Libraries (Chicago: American Library Association, 1963), 54, accessed October 6, 2024, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015028134222.
24 Access to Public Libraries, 59.
to adjust to new policies, it reflects the structural inequalities long present within the city’s libraries.
Birmingham’s first library had been established around 1886 in partnership with the local public school system, like many American libraries.25 The library, designed to be “open to the public at lagre [sic] upon reasonable terms,” soon became an institution funded by the city itself, rather than through the public school system.26 As it was providing funding for the library, the city established a board in 1913 to oversee the library and its operations.27 With the board’s establishment, the Birmingham library became an extension of the city’s government, heavily reliant on official approval and support, and subject to extensive municipal oversight. In 1913, the library was reportedly the largest system in the South (home to five locations, 27,881 volumes, and roughly 15,000 members) and its board members were lauded as civic-minded and selfsacrificing citizens.28 To Birmingham’s city leaders, a library was a place where as the Board of Directors of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce noted “our citizens and strangers may meet and confer together … for the good of our population at large.”29 But this library system no matter how progressive and inclusive its stated aims served only the city’s white community.30 The Black community, meanwhile, had been working to achieve library access for themselves. In 1898, a school for Black children became host to 1,206 books and was established
25 Citations as to the actual date of founding differ. The newspaper record suggests various precursor libraries prior to 1886; however, Wayne and Shirley Wiegand, for instance, put forth a later date 1891 in The Desegregation of Libraries in the Jim Crow South. Here, I have deferred to the Birmingham Public Library itself. “History of Birmingham Public Library,” Birmingham Public Library, last modified December 29, 2014, accessed January 16, 2025, https://www.cobpl.org/about/history/.
26 “Public School Library,” The Birmingham Age, February 5, 1886, Newspapers.com; “History of Birmingham,” Birmingham Public Library.
27 “History of Birmingham ”
28 Ralph R. Silver, “Men and Women Who Are Working to Place More Books within the Reach of All the People of Birmingham,” The Birmingham Age-Herald, September 28, 1913, Newspapers.com.
29 A. B. Johnson, “Report of the Board of Directors: To the Stockholders of the Chamber of Commerce,” The Birmingham Age-Herald, March 1, 1889, Newspapers.com.
30 Patterson Toby Graham, A Right to Read: Segregation and Civil Rights in Alabama’s Public Libraries, 1900-1965 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 10, ProQuest Ebook Central.
as Birmingham’s first library designated for Black patrons. It was not yet public, however, and charged a fee of $2.00 per year to non-student patrons.31 At the library’s opening, a local newspaper noted that “its establishment is due in a large measure to the efforts of Dr. J. H. Philips, the superintendent of the Birmingham Public Schools, and to the board of education” all white community members.32 Yet, in an oversight emblematic of contemporary social views, the article deliberately failed to acknowledge the fundraising efforts of Black community leaders or to note that it was only after these leaders had accumulated enough resources that Philips permitted the library to open.33
Despite the public touting of the library’s opening, this library did not directly fall under the city’s purview. It was not for twenty years until 1918 that a tax-funded public library branch opened under the city’s authority to serve Black patrons at no cost.34 And still, disparities were stark: in 1918, the white community had three branches, an annual city budget of $25,000, and over 20,000 volumes. That same year, the inaugural Black branch library in Birmingham (see fig. 1) had only been able to open due to a $4,000 fund created by Black school principals. Wayne Wiegand and Shirley Wiegand note that the city declined to contribute financially toward further acquisitions (though it did pay rent and a librarian’s salary); Graham, by contrast, cites the city as spending $720 on materials for the Black community, as opposed to $8,934 for white libraries in 1922.35
Regardless of the actual figure, it is clear that the Black library system in Birmingham and the white library system were starkly unequal. To maintain this inequality, the system was strictly
31 “Public Library for Colored People Inaugurated at Slater School Yesterday,” The Birmingham News, November 1, 1898, Newspapers.com.
32 “Library for Slater School,” The Birmingham Age-Herald, November 1, 1898, Newspapers.com.
33 A Right to Read, 11.
34 A Right to Read, 12.
35 Wayne A. Wiegand and Shirley A. Wiegand, The Desegregation of Public Libraries in the Jim Crow South: Civil Rights and Local Activism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018), 22; A Right to Read, 16.
segregated by the city: Black patrons were not permitted to visit white branches, and the board directed that the librarian heading the Black branch “not permit a white person in the future to register at the Washington branch.”36 Services provided by Birmingham’s library system continued in this vein for much of the first half of the twentieth century, mirroring the lack of advancement for Black rights in the city across the same time period.
Further change came about in the 1950s as the community Civil Rights Movement began to gain momentum. In 1953, the city’s public library system had grown to include two black branches, and the Black community had been able to take a more active role in guiding the institution through a community-organized three-member “Negro Advisory Committee.”37 The committee took on functional tasks increasing circulation by 20 percent and patrons by 33 percent that year but also sought to expand access more broadly.38 The following year, efforts were made to equalize service, although these failed. At a library board meeting on February 25, 1954, the advisory committee pushed for racial integration in Birmingham’s libraries: “‘without a single exception, every Negro who was at this meeting first expressed the hope’ that Birmingham would integrate its library system,” the advisory committee reported.39 If they could not integrate the system, the committee requested that the white library board earmark 40 percent of the city’s library funding commensurate with the proportion of the population that was Black for segregated library service.40 The first proposal was ignored; the second was partially taken into account and two new segregated branch libraries were constructed in the following years.41 Segregation was a fact of life: the city at the time was not yet ready or open to the possibility of
36 A Right to Read, 15.
37 “Library Board Here Names Negro Advisory Committee,” The Birmingham News, July 25, 1953, Newspapers.com.
38 Wiegand and Wiegand, The Desegregation, 115.
39 A Right to Read, 65.
40 A Right to Read, 65.
41 Wiegand and Wiegand, The Desegregation, 115.
systemic desegregation. Still, the library board of Birmingham at the time was not completely unwilling to work with its nearly 100,000 Black citizens, a consideration vital to the later successful desegregation.
Civil Rights in Birmingham, 1956-1962
To understand the development of library access in Birmingham, and the 1963 desegregation, it is vital to consider the civil rights context of the city. Birmingham in the midtwentieth century was a heavily segregated city, and one of the most inhospitable to the organization of Black community in the nation. The state and local governments were both hostile to the Civil Rights Movement: in 1956, Alabama Attorney General John Patterson sued the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) one of the most prominent civil rights organizations resulting in an injunction being issued against the NAACP doing business in the state.42
Alabama’s civil rights activism was scarcely slowed, however. Soon after, the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) was founded in Birmingham, with the express goal of “press[ing] forward persistently for Freedom and Democracy, and the removal from our society [of] any forms of Second Class Citizenship” that is, segregation.43 It became the dominant organizing force in Birmingham at the time and led activist endeavours that were met with clear opposition by the city. In 1956, the ACMHR campaigned for the city to desegregate the police force. The effort was met with some limited success, and was even supported by then-Mayor James Morgan, a segregationist (though the city commission, where the city’s true political power
42 Stanford University, “Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR),” The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, accessed February 10, 2025, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/alabama-christianmovement-human-rights-acmhr.
43 Stanford University, “Alabama Christian ”
resided at the time, remained in opposition).44 Many of Birmingham’s civil rights efforts were the product of communication and awareness of parallel efforts elsewhere in the nation. Mirroring the Montgomery bus boycotts of 1955-1956, for instance, the ACMHR similarly attempted to protest against segregated public transportation in Birmingham in the late 1950s; however, following intimidation efforts by the city, the effort foundered.45 In 1957, the organization attempted to integrate the city’s school system and, in 1958, the city’s public parks and recreation facilities.46 These efforts failed, and the city’s climate worsened. T. Eugene “Bull” Connor was elected Birmingham’s Commissioner of Public Safety in 1957, and his re-entrance into political life was an ill portent for the Civil Rights Movement in the coming years.47 Black community institutions faced bombings and the Klu Klux Klan organized unchecked, burning crosses and carrying out violent attacks in hopes of intimidating the city’s Black populace (in some cases, attackers were members of the city’s police force).48 The nation began to take note: an article published on April 12, 1960, in the New York Times under the headline “Fear and Hatred Grip Birmingham” noted the widespread segregation (mentioning the case of libraries explicitly) and described in detail harsh actions taken by law enforcement and Connor. Connor’s platform, according to the Times, was one of “race hate.”49
The New York Times article was met with immediate backlash from Birmingham. The Birmingham News offered the lukewarm and rather unconvincing defensive statement that:
44 Glenn T. Eskew, “The Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and the Birmingham Struggle for Civil Rights, 1956-1963,” in Birmingham, Alabama, 1956-1963: The Black Struggle for Civil Rights, ed. David J. Garrow (New York: Carlson Publishing, 1989), 23.
45 Andrew Manis, “Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights,” in Encyclopedia of Alabama, last modified March 20, 2024, accessed February 10, 2025, https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/alabama-christianmovement-for-human-rights-acmhr/.
46 Manis, “Alabama Christian Movement”; Stanford University, “Alabama Christian Movement.”
47 Glenn T. Eskew, “The Alabama Christian Movement,” 32.
48 Glenn T. Eskew, 51.
49 Harrison E. Salisbury, “Fear and Hatred Grip Birmingham: Racial Tension Smoldering after Belated Sitdowns,” The New York Times, April 12, 1960, accessed February 10, 2025, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1960/04/12/105426614.html.
This is still a somewhat raw industrial community, granted. There has been some occasional violence, race-connected and otherwise. The whites are strongly opposed to mixing. The police at times have been ineffective in digging up tangible evidence of such as dynamitings. But these situations do not mark the community.50
The Times article and resultant community response demonstrate the premium that the city placed on pride and public perception nationally, a core factor in the later decision to desegregate the city’s libraries.
Regardless of the city’s protests and ongoing turmoil, the schools remained segregated, and the city commission fully closed the public parks and recreation facilities in 1962 rather than comply with a court order mandating that they be integrated.51 Segregation on the basis of race remained commonplace and enforced, nearly fully supported by a favorable city commission and prospering white social elite.
Successful Library Desegregation in Birmingham, 1962-1963
The issue of libraries came once more to the forefront of Birmingham’s public consciousness in summer 1962, when Lola Hendricks, ACMHR Corresponding Secretary, sued in an attempt to desegregate Birmingham’s public libraries.52 Her suit noted that “she was told by an employee of the central library in charge of issuing books that she could not obtain the book at the central library because she was a Negro, but she could go to one of the branches … located in a Negro neighborhood and they would request the book from the central library and the central
50 “Everybody Wants into the Act!,” The Birmingham News, April 20, 1960, Newspapers.com.
51 “Alabama Christian Movement,” in Encyclopedia of Alabama.
52 Wiegand and Wiegand mistakenly characterize Hendricks as a teenager; this is untrue. Hendricks was born in 1932; in 1962 she would have been 30. Wiegand and Wiegand, The Desegregation, 116; “Homegoing Service for Lola Mae Hendricks,” New Pilgrim Baptist Church, last modified May 24, 2013, accessed February 16, 2025, web.archive.org/web/20160819191651/http://newpilgrim.org/wp-content/uploads/obits/lolahendricks.pdf.
library would send the book to the branch.”53 The suit, however, saw little action or progress over the next months.
The following year, on April 9, 1963, as the civil rights wave in Birmingham began to crest, another group of Black students decided again to test the library’s policies.54 The group, composed of three students from nearby Miles College as well as Addine Drew, a white-passing woman, held a sit-in at the Birmingham Public Library reading unobtrusively in the company of white patrons.55 The library staff, notably, gave no response, leaving the participants to read in peace.56 This sit-in passed without incident: the participants were unimpeded by authorities and the librarians did not directly force them to leave, instead choosing measured inaction. Buoyed by this success, the students returned in force the next day, April 10.57 White community members present in the library spoke disparagingly to the sit-in participants, but took no further action. Police officers, too, were present at the library during the sit-in, but made no arrests and did not bar them from entry.58 In fact, one newspaper cited a police officer who attributed the lack of arrests to the failures of the library board to formally file a complaint: a deliberate and telling indication in regard to the library board’s subsequent actions.59
53 “Negroes File Mixing Suit,” Birmingham Post-Herald, July 11, 1962, Newspapers.com.
54 “Birmingham Campaign,” The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute.
55 “50th Anniversary of Birmingham Public Library’s Desegregation,” Birmingham Public Library Blog, last modified April 11, 2013, accessed February 16, 2025, https://bplolinenews.blogspot.com/2013/04/50th-anniversaryof-birmingham-public.html.
56 U.W. Clemon, “Judge U.W. Clemon Looks Back,” interview by James L. Baggett, YouTube, last modified May 22, 2009, accessed February 17, 2025, https://youtu.be/dR7qmeYcZMA?si=xTBEh2-bZey9n37i.
57 Various figures are cited for the number of students to enter the library: The Birmingham News lists 13, the Boston Globe 16, and The New York Times eight. Regardless, it is clear that the number was an increase following the previous day’s attempt; “More Racial Moves Set,” The Birmingham News, April 11, 1963, Newspapers.com; “Ala. Negro Crusade Succeeds in Library,” Boston Globe, April 11, 1963, ProQuest Historical Newspapers; Foster Hailey, “Negroes Uniting in Birmingham: Anti-Segregation Picketing Again Led by Blind Singer,” New York Times (1923-) (New York, N.Y.), 1963, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times (116545815).
58 Hailey, “Negroes Uniting.”
59 “Ala. Negro.”
The next day, April 11, the Birmingham Public Library board gathered for a regularly scheduled meeting.60 Though the library director, Fant Thornley, said that he “did not feel that the students had any bona fide desire for library service,” the board expected further protest and was eager to avoid visible and disruptive incidents.61 After a period of discussion and deliberation, the board elected to desegregate. In a unanimous statement, they declared that “no persons” regardless of race should “be excluded from the use of public library facilities.”62
The efforts by the Birmingham library sit-in participants certainly affected the ultimate desegregation of the system. Yet the Birmingham Library Board’s desegregation resolution can also be explained in light of local politics, coming on the heels of a local election that resulted in the victory of more moderate white officials.63 Connor, the city’s commissioner of public safety who was well known nationally for his hardline views and willingness to circumvent the law to uphold segregation, was ousted on April 2, 1963, by Albert Boutwell. Boutwell, while still a proponent of segregation, was viewed as a far more moderate alternative when compared to Connor and the existing city commission.64 The election results, leaving Connor defeated 29,630 to 21,648, or 57.7 percent to 42.2 percent, showed a drastic shift in sentiment from the previous election only two years earlier, which Connor had swept with a landslide 42.6 percent margin over his nearest opponent.65
60 “Minutes of the Board Meeting Held April 11, 1963,” in Birmingham Public Library Meeting Minutes, 1313; Wiegand and Wiegand, The Desegregation, 117.
61 Library Director Fant Thornley as quoted in Wiegand and Wiegand, The Desegregation, 117.
62 Wiegand and Wiegand, The Desegregation, 117.
63 Wiegand and Wiegand, The Desegregation, 117.
64 Art Hanes, then-mayor, has been cited as refusing to desegregate the city’s public library specifically “only at gunpoint”; these reference sources lack verification, and I have been as of yet unable to trace the phrase further. “Fant Thornley,” in Bhamwiki, last modified October 21, 2023, accessed March 4, 2025, https://bhamwiki.com/w/Fant_Thornley; James L. Baggett, “Birmingham Public Library,” in Encyclopedia of Alabama, last modified January 21, 2025, accessed March 4, 2025, https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/birmingham-public-library/.
65 Eddie Badger, “Hanes, King to Settle Campaign with Runoff,” The Birmingham News, May 3, 1961, Newspapers.com; “Birmingham Vote Ends a Long Rule: Connor Defeat Is Expected to Mean New Era for City,” The New York Times, April 4, 1963, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times (116307930).
The 1963 election was a critical one, and the new administration’s victory was seen as intensely symbolic both within the city and across the nation. The New York Times, for instance, declared that the new government “signals the beginning of a new era for Alabama’s biggest city ”66 Though Connor had not yet left office by April 11, 1963, when the library was desegregated, his was now a lame duck administration. (Connor had been an ex officio member of the public library board; the extent of his active interest, however, remains unknown.)67
More pointedly, Connor had publicly lost the support of the city’s white elite.68 A group of white residents known as “Citizens for Progress” had been the key organizers behind a late-1962 election that reformed the city’s government to eliminate Connor’s position (Connor subsequently ran for mayor against Boutwell under the city’s new political system).69 Their motivations, the Birmingham Times retrospectively noted, were focused on how the city’s racial conflict had a “negative impact on their bottom lines and stunted the city’s growth ”70 Boutwell’s agenda demonstrates the main priorities of the city’s elite: “[Boutwell] proposed the creation of two special bodies ‘under the mayor’ to help solve the city’s pressing problems: ‘A Birmingham Economic Advisory Council’ and ‘a full-time public relations program.’”71 These municipal proposals, so closely responding to the detrimental byproducts of visible segregation, were intimately related to the ongoing civil rights turmoil shaking the city. In effect, the city’s violent responses to the Civil Rights Movement made for bad publicity nationally and internationally, and this negative publicity manifested itself through economic outcomes. More than any real
66 “Birmingham Vote ”
67 “50th Anniversary,” Birmingham Public Library Blog.
68 Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 285.
69 McWhorter, Carry Me Home, 285.
70 “A Brief History of the Mayor-Council Act,” The Birmingham Times, March 17, 2016, accessed February 11, 2025, https://www.birminghamtimes.com/2016/03/a-brief-history-of-the-mayor-council-act/.
71 Don Brown, “Boutwell Pledges to Unify City for Greater Progress,” The Birmingham News, January 21, 1963, accessed February 11, 2025, https://www.newspapers.com/image/575102373/.
repentance for the drastic inequalities of segregation within the city, Birmingham’s understanding of the ramifications for its national image was the root cause in desegregating the library.
The 1963 mayoral election marked a turning point in the city’s relationship with civil rights efforts. It signaled to the library administrators the changing perspectives of the city’s government; without it, the library would not have acted independently to desegregate. This interplay between local governmental policy and library action (or inaction) makes clear that the library board would not go against a government so deeply opposed to desegregation. But the moment when the library did desegregate indicated that the governmental attitude had shifted. Similarly, this desegregation resolution came in a moment where Birmingham was in the national spotlight. At heart, library decisions are affected by public sentiment, and the desegregation of the library indicated that the community perception of segregation had begun to evolve.
Desegregation of the Birmingham Public Library did not mark the end of racial conflict in Birmingham; in fact, it took place as conflict neared its 1963 climax. The Birmingham Campaign continued, and Connor remained in office until late May.72 In that time, public perception of Birmingham only worsened: Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested on April 12, the day after the library was integrated; boycotts continued; and, on May 3, the city loosed police dogs and fire hoses on marching children.73 In his Letter From a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote that:
[R]acial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There
72 Ted Pearson and Lou Isaacson, “Mayor and Council Take Over,” The Birmingham News, May 23, 1963, Newspapers.com.
73 “Birmingham Campaign,” The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute.
have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case.
74 His words were in no way false. This stark outline of the violations of basic rights, the rampant discrimination, and the societally ingrained inequality laid bare the challenges facing the city. But within this broader racial conflict, the desegregation of the Birmingham Public Library revealed the importance of Birmingham’s image in its policymaking around race and crystallized a turning point of Birmingham’s relationship with civil rights activism and its Black community.
74 Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963,” Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2001, Bates College, last modified 2001, accessed March 8, 2025, https://abacus.bates.edu/admin/offices/dos/mlk/letter.html.
Danville, Virginia: Consequences of Community Resistance to Change
“Racial calm in this Last Capital of the Confederacy was broken today …”75
–“Young Negroes Invade Library, Bringing about Early Closing,” The Danville Bee, April 2, 1960.
Danville, Virginia (1960 pop. 46,577), was resistant to racial integration, no matter how small the scale.76 Local backlash against activist efforts to integrate the public library in Danville offers an important window into the community’s broader rejection of the Civil Rights Movement. Though the library was eventually integrated in 1960, it was done so on a restrictive basis and only on the heels of extensive civic struggle that split the community. This limited form of integration was a function of unfavorable and vocal local public opinion as well as internally divided municipal government.
A Danville Library History, 1865-1950
Danville’s history was intimately tied to issues of slavery and race in America: on April 2, 1865, Richmond, then-capital of the Confederate States of America, fell to Union forces. President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis, accompanied by his cabinet and much of what remained of the treasury, fled to Danville, reestablishing the government at the mansion of William T. Sutherlin, a Southern enslaver and planter.77 Ironically, and perhaps symbolically, this same mansion later became the centerpiece of Danville’s public library system and was named the Danville Confederate Memorial Library (see fig. 3).78
75 “Young Negroes Invade Library, Bringing about Early Closing,” The Danville Bee, April 2, 1960, Newspapers.com.
76 “1960 Census of Population: Advance Reports, Final Population Counts,” United States Census Bureau, last modified November 15, 1960, accessed April 5, 2025, https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1960/dec/population-pc-a1.html.
77 “Sutherlin House,” Virginia Department of Historical Resources, last modified June 21, 2024, accessed February 15, 2025, https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/108-0006/.
78 The library bore a bronze tablet which read “Corona Post Imperium (The crown awarded after the power had gone). Last capitol of the Confederacy, April 3-10, 1865. Lest I forget thee, O Jerusalem”; for a brief summary of
On April 2, 1960, ninety-five years after Danville’s establishment as the last capital of the Confederacy, a group of Black students attempted to enter the Danville Confederate Memorial Library. The Danville library system had been segregated for the entirety of its history. That history was relatively short: extensive organized public library service in the formerly Confederate states was nonexistent until the 1890s at earliest, and segregated Black libraries took to the stage even later.79 At the time, in the post-Reconstruction years dominated by the emergence of Jim Crow legislation, only white citizens were served. Not until the first years of the twentieth century did public libraries designated for Black patrons emerge in southern cities.80
In this respect, Danville’s growth echoes that of many other Southern cities. Danville’s public library began to take shape in 1907 due to the efforts of the Wednesday Afternoon Club, a society organization that sponsored a subordinate Wednesday Afternoon Literary Society and petitioned the city to set aside funds for a library.81 Although there was already present a 1,400 volume “Danville Library” organized by a certain Carrie Pace, that library was open only to duepayers, and many in the city recognized the need for a more accessible and publicly accountable institution.82 As Danville worked to organize a library over the subsequent decades, however, common opinions were revealing of broader tensions and community themes. The establishment of the library was tied to “purifying” the city’s “moral conditions,” to encouraging “patriotism and Danville’s history to 1954, see L. Beatrice W. Hairston, A Brief History of Danville, Virginia 1728-1954 (Richmond, VA: Dietz Press, 1955), accessed February 15, 2025, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uva.x000214945.
79 Michael Fultz, “Black Public Libraries in the South in the Era of De Jure Segregation,” Libraries and the Cultural Record 41, no. 3 (2006): 338, JSTOR.
80 Fultz, “Black Public,” 339.
81 “Mere Mention,” The Danville Register, February 13, 1907, Newspapers.com; “Meeting of the Council: A Called Meeting Held in the Chamber Last Night at 8 O’Clock,” The Danville Register, April 20, 1907, Newspapers.com.
82 Letters to the editor published within the pages of The Danville Register from 1907-1913 bear extensive evidence of debates over the public library issue, and the community’s perception of the urgent need for it. Carrie Pace, “Please Pay Your Dues,” The Danville Register, March 27, 1907, Newspapers.com; Paul Liepe, “Danville Library,” Bits of History, last modified February 14, 2015, accessed February 16, 2025, https://hisbits.blogspot.com/2015/02/danville-library.html; “The Danville Library,” The Danville Register, December 1, 1908, Newspapers.com.
beneficence,” and to defending Danville’s staunch independence (“We need no Carnegie to do things for us. It has always been the boast of Danville that it did what it desired, without calling for outside aid”).83
Already, the concept of a public library stood as a symbol to the community, bearing so much more symbolism than that befitting a mere repository of books. The campaign stretched on for a number of yearsl; as a stopgap measure, community members banded together to found a library that they recognized as “semi-public,” in that it required a small membership fee however, in many contemporary sources it is incorrectly referred to as a public library.84 It was not until 1928, following more than twenty years of both sporadic and concentrated efforts, that the city inaugurated a true free public library.85 This library (which inherited the collections of the members-only Danville Library) was placed under the control of a library commission directly “responsible to the [city] council,” a key note in regard to oversight and municipal control.86
Regular library service was limited to white patrons, however, a disparity that few bothered to recognize or address. One opinion piece, printed in 1923, commented that, after a library for white patrons in Danville had been established, “we anticipate that it will not be long ere the thoughtful and influential element of the negro race will be pressing an appeal for such a [free
83 R. Harvie White, “Work for a Civic Association in Danville,” The Danville Register, November 12, 1911, Newspapers.com; “Danville’s Opportunity and Responsibility,” The Danville Register, November 17, 1912, Newspapers.com.
84 “Library Campaign This Week,” The Danville Register, January 9, 1916, Newspapers.com; “To the Danville Public,” The Danville Register, November 30, 1915, Newspapers.com; “Our Growing Public Library,” The Danville Register, December 2, 1915, Newspapers.com.
85 The city underwent at least one period of political turmoil in 1923-1924 that was centered largely around the city’s rejection of a generous $28,000 donation to establish a free public library in the city. The Danville Bee featured numerous scathing editorials, and the issue became a critical one in the 1924 municipal election. “New Library Board Will Be Appointed: City Institution to Be Operated under New Auspices,” The Danville Bee, January 10, 1928, Newspapers.com; “Need Three Councilmen Now,” The Danville Bee, June 5, 1924, Newspapers.com; “A Grand ‘Mess,’” The Danville Bee, June 12, 1923, Newspapers.com.
86 “New Library ”
public library].”87 This same article also recognized the hypocrisy of a library existing only for white citizens:
If we are sincere in our professions of belief as to the desirability and the beneficence of of universal free public education; and if we realize that whatever elevates and develops the wealth-producing and peace-conserving character of the negro masses also benefits the whites and promotes the peace, order, safety and prosperity of the whole community, how may we consistently withold co-operation and aid from the negro citizens in the matter of a public library[?]88
The author, though paternalistic, spoke presciently yet stood alone. With all attention focused on establishing any public library at all, few white community members turned their minds to ensuring access to a public library for Black citizens, let alone equalizing access between Black and white Danville residents.
By about 1930, the need for a library open to Black patrons was evident.89 This branch, known as the William F. Grasty branch in honor of a local educator, was to be situated in a room of a segregated local high school, rather than in a dedicated building similar to the white library’s facilities.90 At its opening, the library saw little fanfare and even fewer resources allocated: only 750 volumes were then available for borrowing, compared to more than 10,000 held at the main branch, which remained inaccessible to Black citizens.91
Later, in 1950, the Grasty branch library was moved to a new building only blocks from the main, white-only library (see fig. 4).92 Though the location was new, the Black library’s
87 “A Free Public Library for Whites,” The Danville Register, February 14, 1923, Newspapers.com.
88 “A Free Public Library ”
89 “Negro Branch of Public Library May Be Started,” The Danville Bee, January 15, 1930, Newspapers.com.
90 “Library for Negroes Is Under Way,” The Danville Bee, April 1, 1930, Newspapers.com.
91 “Open Colored Branch Library,” The Danville Register, September 3, 1930, Newspapers.com; “89,194 Books Borrowed at Library 1930,” The Danville Bee, February 6, 1931, Newspapers.com.
92 Wiegand and Wiegand, The Desegregation, 91.
collections still were only one-tenth of the much larger white central library.93 As was typical for Black branch libraries, too, its holdings consisted largely of discards from the larger, better-funded white library.94 One participant in protests against library segregation in Danville, Robin Williams, later recalled in an interview the relative states of the Black and white libraries: “There was a division of the library that was on Holbrook Street that was for Blacks and that was in a very, very small building. It may have had three rooms at the time. There was very little space to spend a lot of time studying and viewing the books.”95
Civil Rights in Danville, 1946-1960
Following the Second World War, the Black community’s growing civic voice for defense of civil rights manifested itself more clearly. In 1946, Charles Kenneth Coleman, a Black Danville resident, ran for City Council the first Black person to do so in Danville since the end of Reconstruction in the late 1870s.96 Although he was not elected, his efforts illustrated the Black community’s expanding political activism. As the fight for civil rights raged across southern American cities over the following decade and a half, Danville’s Black community took note. Civil rights organizations found strong roots in Danville’s Black community. Regular local NAACP meetings began to be held: the organization, for instance, hosted a “mass freedom rally” in the city to celebrate the first anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education in 1955.97 The NAACP later also made an unsuccessful integration attempt at the city’s municipally run golf courses in
93 Kerry Robinson, “Black High School Students Sit-in, Desegregate Public Libraries in Danville, VA, 1960,” Global Nonviolent Action Database, last modified March 24, 2014, accessed February 15, 2025, https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/black-high-school-students-sit-desegregate-public-libraries-danville-va1960.
94 Wiegand and Wiegand, The Desegregation, 91.
95 Emma Edmunds, “Robert A. Williams,” Mapping Local Knowledge: Danville, Virginia 1945-1975, last modified 2011, accessed February 15, 2025, http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/cslk/danville/bio_williams.html.
96 http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/cslk/danville/bio_isley.html
97 “Negroes Plan Freedom Rally Here Tonight,” The Danville Bee, May 17, 1955, Newspapers.com.
1956.98 In 1960, the Danville Christian Progressive Association an affiliate of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a well-known civil rights organization was established in the city.99 It was in this environment that protests at the Danville library took place, building upon the context of a local Black community primed for change and inspired by progress on a national level.
Library Activism and Backlash in Danville, 1960
Efforts to desegregate Danville’s library first arose from these local organizations and national influence. A group of local Black high school students, inspired particularly by the contemporary Greensboro, North Carolina, lunch counter sit-in in February 1960, began to plan their own sit-in against segregation in Danville. Robin Williams (mentioned earlier), son of a local NAACP attorney and thus aware of the legal obligations of publicly funded institutions to desegregate following Brown v. Board of Education, persuaded his peers to focus on Danville’s public parks and public library.100
After walking into the library on April 2, 1960, the group, roughly 15 in number, attempted to check out books, but were denied service.101 The librarian closed the library shortly after, and the students left.102 The backlash to the sit-in was swift: immediately, the city council voted to restrict library access only to those who were already cardholders at the time, a step recognized as a clear effort to forestall further protests (an article in the Danville Bee, a local publication, claimed that the goal was to “head off further negro demonstrations”).103 The community viewed the
98 “Two Negroes Decline to Play Golf at Cain Creek Club on White Day after Asking, Getting Permission,” The Danville Bee, February 9, 1956, Newspapers.com.
99 “Civil Rights Movement in Virginia: Danville,” Virginia Museum of History & Culture, accessed February 16, 2025, https://virginiahistory.org/learn/civil-rights-movement-virginia/danville; Edmunds, “Robert A. Williams,” Mapping Local Knowledge: Danville, Virginia 1945-1975.
100 Edmunds, “Robert A. Williams.”
101 Edmunds, “Robert A. Williams,” Mapping Local Knowledge: Danville, Virginia 1945-1975.
102 “Negroes Gather at Library, Ballou Park; Both Closed,” The Danville Register, April 3, 1960, Newspapers.com.
103 “Council Limits Use of Main Library and Parks to Head off Further Negro Demonstrations,” The Danville Bee, April 4, 1960, Newspapers.com.
students’ attempt to obtain library service as an unprecedented disruption of norms and tradition. As The Danville Bee noted in a blistering and frankly unbelievable editorial the following day: The conservative people of Danville deplore this rupture of homogeneous relations between the Negro and the white man of this community, because it brings to an end what, for decades, has been a sympathetic and understanding racial coexistence. It has endured ever since Danville citizens in November 1883 drove out the northern carpet-baggers and convinced the colored people that they had been the tools of unscrupulous self-seekers, just as they are today.104
The Danville Register, the city’s other large newspaper, expressed similar sentiments, nodding nostalgically to the city’s Confederate past and writing that “the law, as determined by the Supreme Court, may say its [sic] legal [for Black people to use the white library], but a majority of the white majority still holds it isn’t acceptable. Until it is acceptable, it cannot happen in Danville ”105 The paper continued by arguing patronizingly that the decision to hold a sit-in was shortsighted and impractical, and threatened Black community access to the segregated Black library. In the same issue, The Register publicized on its front page the identities of the student protesters, all but two of whom were teens, and all but one of whom were still in high school.106
On April 5, in an 8 to 0 vote, the city council froze the membership rolls of the library and dictated that the white library “be used only by the present holders of library cards issued from the Central Library,” a policy carefully designed to exclude all Black residents from the main library branch while also grandfathering in any white cardholders.107 The sit-in participants returned to
104 “An Invasion of Community Quiet,” The Danville Bee, April 4, 1960, Newspapers.com.
105 “Legality Clashes with Reality,” The Danville Register, April 4, 1960, Newspapers.com.
106 “Council Limits ”
107 “Main Library Open to Card Holders; Parks Limited to Neighborhood Use,” The Danville Register, April 5, 1960, Newspapers.com.
the library the next day, but were denied under the new access restrictions.108 On April 9, the Danville Loyal Baptist Church, of which the 15 sit-in participants were members, saw crosses burned on its front lawn, an incident that is barely mentioned in the city’s major newspapers.109
In response to the city’s actions, the NAACP prepared on April 10 to file a federal lawsuit challenging segregation in the Danville public library.110 The organization also scathingly addressed the newspapers of the city in a statement, saying that:
We do not feel that the news media of Danville express the sentiment of white people of Danville; but if it does, it is unfortunate that the good relations that is hoped for is of the “master-servant” type and that we cannot meet as citizens to solve our problems … Good relations emphasized by the press have been only on the surface, and Negroes with pride cannot feel good relations have existed with the many injustices visited upon them.111
The library sit-in, then, laid bare the deeper tensions pre-existing within the city: the media silence on or denial of the issues surrounding segregation placed the Black community on a collision course with a city that was unwilling to engage with them and genuinely hostile to their quest for equality and justice.
The white response was swift and drastic. The next day, April 11, a group of “25 leading citizens” of the city stood before the council to pressure it into “clos[ing] all public libraries before
108 “Negro Groups Denied Entry to Library,” The Danville Register, April 7, 1960, Newspapers.com.
109 “Negroes Seek Court Order on Library,” The Danville Bee, April 11, 1960, Newspapers.com; “Burning Crosses Does No Good,” The Danville Bee, April 11, 1960, Newspapers.com.
110 “Negroes Seek”; Robinson, “Black High,” Global Nonviolent Action Database.
111 “Negroes Seek ”
allowing any of them to be integrated.”112 In response, the mayor and council created a committee to hear the group’s proposals and decide the library’s future.113
The NAACP lawsuit, filed on April 13, named as defendants the City Manager, the city of Danville itself, the head librarian, and the Library Advisory Committee.114 (The library in actuality no longer had a library advisory committee; instead, it was overseen fully by the city manager, with operations accountable only to the city council.115) Many in the city saw the closing of the libraries as inevitable should the result of the court decision be as expected in accordance with Brown and the Fourteenth Amendment.116 Only a small minority of whites in the self-proclaimed “Committee for the Public Library,” a community organization whose petition eventually gained over 300 signatures from “leading white citizens,” voiced resistance to the prospect of closing the library, even as the group declined to oppose segregation.117
The court case was decided in favor of the NAACP by the federal district judge on May 6: he imposed an injunction requiring Danville to offer equal library services to all.118 The local government, divided by conflicting community opinion as well as the impending legal deadline, elected to leave long-term decision-making on the matter for the subsequent council term, to start after elections in mid-June.119 They added a referendum with five options to the ballot, ranging from fully opening the library to all, to a system-wide shutdown, to limited bookmobile or private
112 “Leading Citizens Appeal to Council: Closing of All Public Libraries Asked before Integration in City,” The Danville Register, April 12, 1960, Newspapers.com.
113 “Leading Citizens Appeal ”
114 “May 6 Set for Hearing of Integration Suit,” The Danville Register, April 13, 1960, Newspapers.com.
115 “May 6 Set”
116 “A Turn from Cooperation to Coercion,” The Danville Register, April 13, 1960, Newspapers.com; “Five Demonstrators Plaintiffs in Suit,” The Danville Register, April 14, 1960, Newspapers.com.
117 “Library Policy Issue to Fore,” The Danville Register, April 20, 1960, Newspapers.com; Wiegand and Wiegand, The Desegregation, 92.
118 “Judge Says Library Cannot Be Closed to Negroes Solely Because of Race; Hearing Is Continuing,” The Danville Bee, May 6, 1960, Newspapers.com; “Negro Card Holders Granted Right to Use White Main Street Library,” The Danville Register, May 7, 1960, Newspapers.com.
119 “Count-Down on the Library,” The Danville Bee, May 10, 1960, Newspapers.com; “Library Question May Go to Voters,” The Danville Register, May 10, 1960, Newspapers.com.
service.120 However, following the initiation of community efforts to found an entirely private library system and after having formally appealed the court injunction on May 16 the council chose to close the library on May 20, the day before the injunction would take effect.121 Danville would prefer that no citizen have access to a library, rather than open access to Black people.
The fact that the city’s administration elected to completely shut down the library system rather than consider integration reveals the city’s attachment to segregation, and how harm to its entire reading populace could be tolerated, and even enthusiastically embraced, to thwart Black hopes for equality. 5,942 of Danville’s citizens voted on the referendum regarding whether to open or close the library. The library continued to be closed by a 2,829 to 1,598 margin.122 With this advisory referendum in hand, the council opposed opening the public library in a 5 to 4 vote.
The closing of the Danville public library soon became a focus of regional media attention.123 This media attention and external pressure on the municipal government was the central reason that the library eventually integrated. In September 1960, the council voted 5 to 4 to reopen the library.124 But instead of free and open access to the library, the city elected to enact a more subtle yet just as deliberate form of arbitrary race-based segregation. Library cards,
120 In an affront to library-lovers everywhere, one proposed solution touted itself for removing the need to browse, claiming that “‘browsing’ seldom amounts to anything rather than wasted time ” Wiegand and Wiegand, The Desegregation, 93; “The Library Problem and City Council,” The Danville Register, May 12, 1960, Newspapers.com; “A Way between the Horns,” The Danville Register, May 8, 1960, Newspapers.com.
121 “Moves Made to Prevent Integrated Library,” The Danville Register, May 17, 1960, Newspapers.com; “Council Votes to Close Library System at Close of Day Friday,” The Danville Bee, May 19, 1960, Newspapers.com; “Vote of 2,829 to 1,598 Reported in Advisory Referendum on Issue: Danville Refuses to Surrender Last Capitol to NAACP Drive,” The Danville Register, June 15, 1960, Newspapers.com.
122 “Freedom to Read Limited in Danville, Virginia,” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, December 1960, 1, accessed October 6, 2024, https://archive.org/download/sim_newsletter-on-intellectual-freedom_196012_9_4/sim_newsletter-on-intellectual-freedom_1960-12_9_4.pdf; “Vote of 2,829 ”
123 For varying contemporary coverage, see “Danville Library Closed by Council,” The Roanoke World-News, May 20, 1960, Newspapers.com; “Author Says Books Should Be for All,” Bristol Herald Courier, May 27, 1960, Newspapers.com; John I. Brooks, “Danville Split on Library,” The Norfolk Virginia-Pilot, June 12, 1960, Newspapers.com; or other sources cited in “Freedom to Read Limited in Danville, Virginia,” Newspaper on Intellectual Freedom
124 “Freedom to Read,” 1.
formerly free, now cost $2.50 (the equivalent of roughly $26 today).125 To get a library card, applicants were also required to fill out a lengthy application asking: “the applicant’s birthplace, educational record, and reading habits, hours he would use the library, purpose for using, expected frequency of use, and maximum number of books he would check out at a given time ”126 The application also requested two character references and two credit references.127
This action made moot the NAACP’s injunction suit on the grounds that the library was technically desegregated and ended the open fight for library equality.128 However, the actions taken by the city council to undermine the social and educational place of the library within the community belie true racial “equality.” The extensive, burdensome application the council put into place was specifically designed to raise barriers to entry for Black citizens; it ultimately decreased library patronage and limited access for all Danville residents.
The Danville public library was one of the city’s first publicly funded institutions to be integrated on any basis.129 Its troubled journey to integration, and the hostile community sentiment that this journey reflected, foreshadowed the protracted and violent struggle to come. Fights over civil rights in Danville continued across the 1960s. In one notable event known as “Bloody Monday” on June 10, 1963, for instance, police and deputized garbage collectors attacked Black protesters at the Danville city hall with fire hoses and clubs, leaving dozens injured.130 Danville civil rights activists never made real headway with local government, despite years of effort: unlike
125 “Freedom to Read,” 1; Coinnews Media Group, “Inflation Calculator,” US Inflation Calculator, accessed April 6, 2025, https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/.
126 “Freedom to Read,” 1.
127 “Freedom to Read,” 1.
128 “Danville Library Injunction Ends,” The Washington Post, Times Herald (1959-1973) (Washington, D.C.), 1960, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Washington Post (141237844).
129 “A Way between ”
130 “Protests in Danville, Virginia,” SNCC Digital Gateway, accessed March 9, 2025, https://snccdigital.org/events/protests-danville-virginia/; “Civil Rights,” Virginia Museum of History & Culture.
cities such as Birmingham, which saw more immediate results over the same time period, it took the passage of federal legislation in 1964 and 1965 to affect broader change.131
131 “Civil Rights,” Virginia Museum of History & Culture; Bay Area Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, “Civil Rights Movement History 1963 (January-June),” Civil Rights Movement Archive, accessed March 9, 2025, https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis63.htm#1963danville.
Houston, Texas: Subtle Library Desegregation in a Wary Community
“But for all their intentions of doing good by stealth, the Post, the Chronicle and the Press would certainly have found life simpler had they lived up to a motto engraved … over the entrance of the Houston Post building: ‘Let facts be submitted to a candid world ’”132
–“The Press: Blackout in Houston,” TIME, September 12, 1960.
Houston is not a city that jumps to mind either in terms of segregation or Civil Rights era debates. When compared with such cities as Selma, Birmingham, or Greensboro, it might seem as if strife and race-based discriminatory legislation passed Houston by. This is no coincidence: through the efforts of an economic and political elite hopeful of evading conflict, relatively little national attention was paid at the time to segregation in Houston.
The fate of the Houston Public Library mirrors that of the city broadly. The “quiet desegregation” of the Houston Public Library in 1953, one avoiding media attention and public announcement, was a community choice made in hopes of averting a potential community crisis.133 The decision to desegregate was made privately, by white stakeholders, and not announced to the public as a whole. The entire desegregation process took place over the course of a decade, yet remarkably, at no point was there ever a clear public declaration of integration. This desegregation, notably devoid of public attention, foreshadowed the course that civil rights developments would take in Houston: the Houston Public Library’s integration was an early example of the city’s measured response to Black community organization.
132 “The Press: Blackout in Houston,” TIME, September 12, 1960, accessed February 14, 2025, https://time.com/archive/6832554/the-press-blackout-in-houston/.
133 “Rev. Bill Lawson, a Houston Civil Rights Icon Who Helped Desegregate the City, Dies at 95,” Houston Chronicle, May 14, 2024, accessed April 2, 2025, https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houstontexas/houston/article/rev-bill-lawson-dies-19438114.php.
A History of Library Access in Houston, 1854-1951
Houston came early to the library scene: the Houston Public Library as it is today has its roots in a successive pair of Houston Lyceums (founded in 1848 and 1854, respectively) which quickly became centers of the city’s intellectual life, offering access to society, a series of free lectures, and most importantly a circulating library accessible to members.134 By 1857, the second Lyceum’s collection had grown to 760 volumes.135 It continued to expand, enough so that the library became an independent organization before 1904.136
But it was not yet a public library, as patrons were limited to white male due-payers.137 Only after William Rice had dedicated a large donation to “the establishment and maintenance of a free library, reading room, and institute for the advancement of literature, science and art in the city of Houston” (the institute later became Rice University) did the city’s civic organizations begin to work toward the founding of a free public library.138 When Rice’s donation was combined with a grant from Andrew Carnegie, the noted library philanthropist, the city of Houston was finally able to open its Houston Lyceum and Carnegie Library in 1904.139
The history of Houston’s public library as a segregated institution thus began in 1904. The library board professed that the library was open to all interested parties; indeed, central to Rice’s contribution was the condition that the library should be “free and open to all” and “subject only to the restrictions … [that] will conduce to the good order and honor of the said institute ”140 Black
134 Diana J. Kleiner, “Houston Public Library,” Texas State Historical Association, last modified March 21, 2017, accessed February 13, 2025, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/houston-public-library; “Texas News,” The Daily Picayune, February 22, 1866, Newspapers.com; “Items,” The Texas Republican, April 28, 1855, Newspapers.com.
135 Kleiner, “Houston Public,” Texas State Historical Association.
136 Kleiner.
137 Betty T. Chapman, “Story of Public Libraries Took Long Time to Write in Houston,” Houston Business Journal, June 2, 2000, Gale General OneFile.
138 “Mr. Rice’s Princely Gift,” The Galveston Daily News, July 17, 1892, Newspapers.com.
139 Chapman, “Story of Public Libraries ”
140 “Mr. Rice’s Princely Gift”; Cheryl Knott, Not Free, Not for All: Public Libraries in the Age of Jim Crow (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), 65.
educators, however, attempting to make use of the library, were denied access in 1907. When Black residents complained that they had attempted to enter the library, and been refused, the board took no action to support them. That same year, the city passed further legislation mandating segregation.141
Having noted that the city’s existing library was not open to Black Houstonians (who then comprised about 40 percent of the city’s 44,600 residents), a number of Black citizens founded an organization that intended to establish a library for African Americans as well.142 The group first sought the written support of prominent white community members, which was granted, albeit on dismissive, paternalistic, and racist grounds (the organization’s leader noted that white leaders thought a library would promote a “less idle, less criminal, and more industrious, peaceful and law-abiding citizen”).143 With this grudging endorsement, the group then reached out to the Houston Public Library’s librarian, Julia Ideson, and the city’s government for funding and approval.144
In March 1909, the first publicly funded library dedicated to the Black community opened in the city’s Fourth Ward Colored High School, an area of the city that was then roughly 38 percent Black. However, it was done on a temporary basis: its lease of one room within the school was initially only for three years.145 Recognizing this, and in the hopes that establishing a more permanent library would accord them a greater proportion of city funding, Black community leaders reached out to Carnegie to fund the construction of a second library in Houston, one
141 Knott, Not Free, 65.
142 Matthew Griffis, “Colored Carnegie Library, Houston, Texas (1913-1961),” BlackPast, last modified November 17, 2019, accessed February 13, 2025, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/institutions-africanamerican-history/colored-carnegie-library-houston-texas-1913-1961/; Cheryl Knott Malone, “Autonomy and Accommodation: Houston’s Colored Carnegie Library, 1907-1922,” Libraries and Culture 34, no. 2 (1999): 97, JSTOR.
143 Malone, “Autonomy and Accommodation,” 98.
144 Malone, “Autonomy and Accommodation,” 97, 99.
145 Malone, “Autonomy and Accommodation,” 99; Griffis, “Colored Carnegie,” BlackPast.
governed by a Colored Carnegie Association independent from the preexisting library. Carnegie’s grant of $15,000 was substantial, but markedly less than his earlier $50,000 grant to Houston’s white applicants.146 Regardless, the new library opened on April 11, 1913.147
At its opening, the Houston Post acknowledged that “it was through the negros that it was built,” in a notable departure from cities such as Birmingham, where credit was given to the white community leaders who approved the project (see page 11).148 Additionally, the Black public library in Houston was one of the few purpose-built segregated libraries in America. The Post described it as “a beautiful edifice”: its stature was far beyond that of a side room in a school, or a three-room branch dependent upon the pre-existing library system. Houston’s Colored Carnegie Library had the largest establishment budget of any of the three libraries in the cities considered here (the city committed to appropriating $1,500 annually) and the largest collection, starting at no less than 3,000 volumes. Guest speaker L. C. Anderson, Black superintendent of the Austin, Texas, colored school system, noted at its inauguration the unique nature of the library and said: [I]n extending an opportunity such as this, Houston protects herself by encouraging greater intelligence along moral and social lines. It will bring increased happiness and more general prosperity, more loyalty and a broader patriotism among its 30,000 Afro-American citizens, an asset in the physical development of this rapidly growing city. And it is the most fervent wish of the speaker that this moment may eventuate into a better understanding, in more amicable relations between all the people of Houston … that all men and women in all lines of labor high and low
146 Malone, “Autonomy and Accommodation,” 101.
147 “Negro Library Was Dedicated,” The Houston Post, April 12, 1913, Newspapers.com.
148 “Negro Library ”
may continue to meet and pass without friction on the busy thoroughfares of this city, in peace, happiness, and in growing prosperity.149
The Carnegie Colored Library did indeed quickly become a symbol of Black achievement and a point of pride to the Houston community. Central to this was the self-governance of the library: it was one of only three independent Black libraries in the early 1900s.150 The head of Houston’s public library noted in a letter to a leader of the Black library board that “[y]our Library is now independent of this Library in all respects ”151 However, this had both positive and negative implications: the library, independent as it was, bore the full brunt of costs, for which its $1,500 city budget was insufficient.152 In 1921, after eight years of independent operation by the Blackrun library, Houston’s government moved to incorporate the library as a branch under the authority of the white board only.153 This marked the last major evolution in the situation surrounding library access in Houston for nearly thirty years.
Houston’s Racial Consciousness, 1951-1953
Over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, Houston experienced massive urban growth. From 1920 to 1950, its population grew more than fourfold, its Black population hovering just above 20 percent increasing proportionally.154 But library service had failed to keep pace. In 1953, the white community had access to the main library, six branches, several
149 “Negro Library ”
150 Michael Fultz, “Black Public Libraries in the South in the Era of De Jure Segregation,” Libraries and the Cultural Record 41, no. 3 (2006): 341, JSTOR.
151 Malone, “Autonomy and Accommodation,” 105.
152 Malone, “Autonomy and Accommodation,” 105.
153 Griffis, “Colored Carnegie,” BlackPast.
154 “Untold Stories: The Strange Demise of Jim Crow in Houston,” University of Houston, last modified August 26, 2009, accessed February 14, 2025, https://web.archive.org/web/20090826053018/http://www.coe.uh.edu/untold_stories/untold_stories.html.
deposit stations, and two bookmobiles (see fig. 5).155 In contrast, the Black community was limited to the same Colored Carnegie Branch of 1921, with only three deposit stations located around the community (see fig. 6).156
Cognizant of this disparity in access, and buoyed by advances of the Civil Rights Movement in Texas during the 1940s, members of Houston’s Black population once more returned to the issue of library segregation.157 In 1950, a group from the Houston branch of the NAACP wrote a letter to the public library board requesting “a voluntary solution” to the issue of library segregation with the subtext given the recent Texas-focused Supreme Court civil rights victories such as Smith v. Allwright or Sweatt v. Painter, which opened primary elections and law school admissions, respectively that a lawsuit would likely succeed at forcing the matter.158 The director of the library, Harriet Reynolds, proceeded to delay and respond noncommittally, backed by the mayor’s desire to retain the status quo. But the issue continued to gain momentum and support and soon could no longer be ignored by city leaders.
The year 1953 saw the inauguration of a new government for Houston, and, with it, a shift in the city’s stance on race. The incumbent mayor, Oscar Holcombe, having served ten terms, elected not to run for reelection.159 Holcombe had declined to consider the library desegregation efforts, but his successor, Roy Hofheinz, faced the stirrings of new sentiment on segregation within the city and around the nation. The Civil Rights Movement had begun to yield results: the Supreme Court first heard Brown v. Board of Education in late 1952, for instance, and, locally, Houstonians
155 Cheryl Knott Malone, “Unannounced and Unexpected: The Desegregation of Houston Public Library in the Early 1950s,” Library Trends 55, no. 3 (2007): 666, accessed February 14, 2025, https://hdl.handle.net/2142/3712.
156 Malone, “Unannounced and Unexpected,” 666.
157 For a view of the broader Civil Rights Movement in Texas, see Bruce A. Glasrud and James Smallwood, eds., The African American Experience in Texas: An Anthology (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2007).
158 Cheryl Knott, Not Free, Not for All: Public Libraries in the Age of Jim Crow (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), 238-239.
159 “Houston Mayor Won’t Run for Re-election,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, October 6, 1952, Newspapers.com.
sued to desegregate the city golf course.160 With the rising postwar sentiment in Black communities more critical of the status quo, the incoming mayor’s crucial task was avoiding protracted media attention and potential violence.161
As a potential root of the city’s deep-seated desire to avert racially motivated violence, Thomas R. Cole points to a 1917 race riot that resulted in the deaths of 39 people, arguing that “[m]emories of that awful night left black and white Houstonians over age forty with a palpable fear of race war.”162 One foreboding incident, too, which occurred just a month before the final desegregation of the library, would have been fresh on the minds of city officials and demonstrates the very sort of unrest that the city of Houston sought to avoid. On April 17, a Black resident’s home had been bombed as, in his own words, “a warning for other Negroes not to buy in this area” that is, an act of intimidation.163 Unlike, for instance, in Birmingham (a city that gained the epithet of “Bombingham” for its roughly fifty largely unpunished bombings between 1947 and 1965), the perpetrators in this Houston attack were soon after arrested.164
While an all-white jury did impose the minimum penalty, the words of the Assistant District Attorney more fully convey the position of the government: “The eyes of the people of Houston, of the state and, yes, of the nation are on what you do here today,” he said to the jury.165
160 “Timeline of Events Leading to the Brown v. Board of Education Decision of 1954,” National Archives, accessed February 14, 2025, https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/brown-v-board/timeline.html; Knott, Not Free, 240.
161 Diane Arbus, “The Greatest Showman on Earth, and He’s the First to Admit It,” Vault, last modified April 21, 1969, accessed February 14, 2025, https://vault.si.com/vault/1969/04/21/the-greatest-showman-on-earth-and-hesthe-first-to-admit-it.
162 Robert V. Haynes, “Houston Riot of 1917,” Texas State Historical Association, last modified November 9, 2020, accessed February 14, 2025, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/houston-riot-of-1917; Thomas R. Cole, No Color Is My Kind: The Life of Eldrewey Stearns and the Integration of Houston (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 25.
163 “Houston Home of Negro Damaged by Dynamite Explosion,” Corpus Christi Times, April 17, 1953, Newspapers.com.
164 Glenn T. Eskew, But for Birmingham: the Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 53; “Two Held in Houston Bombing,” Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, April 19, 1953, Newspapers.com.
165 “Handyman Gets 2-Year Prison Term for Bombing Negro Home in Houston,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, July 22, 1953, Newspapers.com.
The premium that Houston’s civic elite placed on warding off racial tensions before they reached boiling points as well as maintaining the city’s public image underpinned to its reasons for desegregating the public library system.
In May 1953, recently elected Mayor Hofheinz addressed the city’s library board on the issue of segregation and directed that they begin the process of integrating the system.166 Notably, however, he deliberately worked to avoid media attention: he not only told the board not to announce the change to the NAACP and the media, but also later recalled in an interview “calling in the white and black press and asking them not to print it.”167 (This was a tactic he pioneered here to effective use: he described it in many situations as resulting in “no phone calls, no protests, because no one knew what was happening ”)168 Indeed, one aspect that eased the transition was the lack of mandatory review by the Houston city council of the board’s policies; they were thus free to execute changes that they deemed necessary to integration without any external community resistance.169 Over the course of 1953, the library board began to implement the functional aspects of Hofheinz’s directive, reviewing policy and procedure with an eye to integration. By August 21, 1953, the board could technically declare that all adult facilities within the library system had been integrated a notable step taken the year before the Brown v. Board of Education decision.170 Houston Community Progress, 1953-1963
August 21, 1953, marked the official date of integration for the Houston Public Library. But reality was not so clear-cut. With Hofheinz’s policy of clandestine, unpublicized action, it would have been impossible deliberately so for the Black community to know of the roughly
166 Knott, Not Free, 240.
167 Knott, Not Free, 241; Diane Arbus, “The Greatest Showman on Earth, and He’s the First to Admit It,” Vault, last modified April 21, 1969, accessed February 14, 2025, https://vault.si.com/vault/1969/04/21/the-greatest-showmanon-earth-and-hes-the-first-to-admit-it.
168 Arbus, “The Greatest,” Vault.
169 Knott, Not Free, 243.
170 “Timeline of Events,” National Archives.
200,000 books across seven locations that had now become technically accessible to them.171 In the four months following the change in policy, no more than fifty Black patrons joined the rolls as borrowers from Houston’s central library.172 The impact of the library’s integration was thus deliberately limited by the city’s government. Over the following years, the Houston public library system continued to expand, while largely integrated policies remained in place.173 Although the library had adopted some measures of integration, the system still discriminated between Black children and white children those under high school age until after 1956.174 Even then, the integration of children’s services was done without incidents requiring major note in the historical record.
The Houston Public Library’s unremarkable desegregation was remarkable for being just that. In its uneventful progress, it created a blueprint for the Civil Rights Movement in Houston. The influence of the library’s example can be seen in the subsequent “quiet desegregations” of schools, department stores, hotels, and other businesses around the city.
As the Civil Rights Movement around the nation accelerated throughout the 1950s, a small number of Black Houstonians, many of whom were college students, took further action.175 The Brown decision was ignored for six years, though a Black person was elected to the Houston school board in 1958.176 It took the 1959 arrest and beating of Eldrewey Stearns, a Black law student, to
171 Knott, Not Free, 243; Malone, “Unannounced and Unexpected,” 666.
172 Knott, Not Free, 243.
173 Knott, Not Free, 244.
174 Summarized in Knott, Not Free, 243-7.
175 Aswad Walker, “A Look Back into Houston’s Desegregation,” Defender, January 16, 2025, accessed March 9, 2025, https://defendernetwork.com/news/local-state/houston-desegregation-movement/.
176 “Untold Stories,” University of Houston.
provoke further general action.177 Stearns publicly accused the police department of brutality, drawing broad media attention precisely what the city had hoped to avoid.178
Student sit-ins at lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina, galvanized Stearns to action, leading a group of students to a well-publicized sit-in at a local Houston lunch counter.179 The city’s response, however, was carefully calibrated to avoid any incident that could spark further activist responses, and the police department declined to arrest the sit-in participants.180 Emboldened, Stearns turned to Houston city hall’s cafeteria, successfully demanding to be served on March 25, 1960.181 The incident received extensive coverage in local media, to the detriment of some businesses.182 The next month, the same group of students marched on the local Greyhound bus station in search of service, again seeing success.183 In the eyes of Houston’s elite, however, the negative publicity of civil rights activism in the city had gone far enough. The city’s Retail Merchants’ Association issued a statement saying that “Houstonians are concerned that our community continue to grow and prosper free of the disorder and violence which took their toll on business and community life in Little Rock.”184
Recognizing that controlling public awareness of progress was the key to forestalling any conflict, three Houston businessmen two white, one Black joined forces to pressure the city’s media into withholding coverage of civil rights developments, in a course of action strikingly similar to that which Mayor Hofheinz had pioneered when desegregating the public library.185 The
177 “Silent Transformation in the Bayou City: The Desegregation Process of Houston’s Public Facilities,” Houston Civil Rights Movement, last modified April 9, 2012, accessed February 13, 2025, https://houstoncivilrightsmovement.blogspot.com/2012/04/silent-transformation-in-bayou-city.html.
178 “Untold Stories,” University of Houston; “Negro ‘Degraded,’” Corsica Daily Sun, August 27, 1959, Newspapers.com; “Silent Transformation,” Houston Civil Rights Movement; Cole, No Color, 27.
179 Cole, No Color, 28.
180 Cole, No Color, 32.
181 “Silent Transformation,” Houston Civil Rights Movement.
182 Cole, No Color, 37.
183 Cole, No Color, 41.
184 “Silent Transformation,” Houston Civil Rights Movement.
185 “Untold Stories,” University of Houston.
few individuals and families who controlled the city’s media proved amenable to the stratagem since their affluence, too, was tied to the city’s continuing prosperity and was endangered by the prospect of rioting or violence.
186 The trio of businessmen then coordinated with many of the city’s downtown shops to prepare for integration, with the guarantee that the lack of news coverage would protect business proceedings.187 The blackout was justified as “insur[ing] public safety” by the Houston Post, and as the “safest course of action” by another newspaper editor within the city.
188 Regardless of ethical concerns surrounding a free press, the strategy worked, and many of Houston’s businesses desegregated while evading public incidents, just as the public library has.189
Reverend William Lawson, the Black founder of Houston’s Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church and a major force for civil rights in the city, attended planning meetings of white businessowners and Black community leaders in 1960.190 In a 1974 oral history, he recalled the motivations behind the city’s integration:
The one thing we didn’t want to do was to have the kind of social unrest that would affect economic growth… [I]f you allow all these marches and all these demonstrations… companies who would like to move to Houston, would have said, no we do not go to Houston. We got too much social unrest there. So it was on that basis, that much was done in Houston, peacefully. Groups of Blacks and Whites
186 “Segregation Ends in Houston and Galveston County,” Dickinson Historical Society, accessed April 2, 2025, https://dickinsonhistoricalsociety.org/segregation-ends-in-houston-and-galveston-county/.
187 Zan Dubin, “Chronicling the Quiet Desegregation of Houston,” Los Angeles Times, 1998, accessed March 9, 2025, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-feb-11-ca-17755-story.html.
188 “The Press: Blackout in Houston,” TIME
189 “The Press”; William Henry Kellar, Make Haste Slowly: Moderates, Conservatives, and School Desegregation in Houston (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1999), 120.
190 James Pinkerton, “Road to Integration Was Quieter in Houston, but Still Wasn’t Easy,” Houston Chronicle, July 30, 2016, accessed April 2, 2025, https://www.houstonchronicle.com/local/history/major-storiesevents/article/Road-to-integration-was-quieter-in-Houston-but-8773914.php.
met behind closed doors and worked out ways by which we could desegregate… without the marches and the protests.191
As Lawson later explained in a 2016 interview with the Houston Chronicle: The issue [facing Houston] was not moral, it was not ethical. … The issue was not whether or not it was right to segregate. The issue was, what is going to be the economic potential of Houston at this time in its history if it doesn’t do something like this.192
That pragmatic recognition of Houston’s predominant concerns, materialistic as they were, was vital to working alongside the city’s white leadership to further integration.
Cheryl Knott Malone points out another instance of integration in Houston that bears marked similarities to the 1953 library integration, writing that “Houston Public Library in fact appears to have established the pattern of quiet token integration that HISD [Houston Independent School District] would follow” in 1960.193 When finally forced to comply with Brown, the school board elected to adopt the least immediately effective and most noncontroversial methods of school integration.194 The board and city hoped, as always, that this progress would be enough to alleviate tensions whilst not sparking segregationist backlash. Once again, they were successful in staving off much-feared incidents such as those that occurred in Little Rock.
The development of civil rights in Houston across the 1950s and 1960s was shaped by a deep mutual understanding and shared goals between the city’s economic elite and municipal
191 William Lawson, “Lawson, William Rev.,” interview by Dorothee Sauter, Audio/Video Repository, University of Houston, last modified October 20, 2004, accessed April 2, 2025, https://id.lib.uh.edu/ark:/84475/do6143b1930.
192 “Rev. Bill Lawson, a Houston Civil Rights Icon Who Helped Desegregate the City, Dies at 95,” Houston Chronicle, May 14, 2024, accessed April 2, 2025, https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houstontexas/houston/article/rev-bill-lawson-dies-19438114.php.
193 Malone, “Unannounced and Unexpected,” 666.
194 Kellar, Make Haste, 125.
government. Both aimed at maintaining those elements of segregation that they could while preempting any major demonstrations. In the case of the public library, this resulted early on in official integration, and the opening of access to the Black community. The lack of publicity surrounding the new, integrationist policies in 1950, however, were representative of the subtle political currents of Houston across the Civil Rights era. No announcement of integration was made, raising the question of what constituted integration, and whether solely legal integration could be without an effort to increase access. Similarly, across the other public and private institutions in the city that faced challenges to segregation, many aspired to avoid the public eye and uphold de facto segregation.
Conclusion: Libraries in the North and Today
“The essential mission of a publicly funded library is to provide free, equal, and equitable access to information in all its forms.”195
–American Library Association, “Economic Barriers to Information Access ”
Birmingham, Danville, and Houston were located in regions commonly considered to be part of the Southern United States. Yet, the issue of equal access to free public libraries was not limited to the South or to formerly Confederate states. Across the country, redlining and other forms of systemic discrimination also resulted in the curtailing of library access. In the American North, Black patrons experienced a subtle, yet deeply entrenched undermining of access that was just as effective as the explicit limitations present in Southern cities. A brief examination of library access in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania reveals different factors at play, which nevertheless resulted in similar outcomes. The 1963 ALA report on library access (discussed previously) exposed pervasive issues in nearly all public libraries, shedding light on de facto as well as de jure segregation.
Investigating library segregation in Philadelphia and other northern cities requires separate methodology from that employed thus far: unlike in the south, where the path toward desegregation can be traced through narratives of sit-ins, court cases, and municipal backlash, Philadelphia’s (effectively) segregated library system can best be understood through municipal statistics.
196 This is not to say that Philadelphia saw no outward racial turmoil; it had its own active NAACP chapter, and the Black community was cognizant of stark racial differences in opportunity.
197 However,
195 “Economic Barriers to Information Access: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights,” American Library Association, accessed April 12, 2025, https://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/interpretations/economicbarriers.
196 For a broader analysis and summary of Civil Rights-era Philadelphia, see Temple University Libraries, “Home,” Civil Rights in a Northern City: Philadelphia, accessed April 3, 2025, https://exhibits.temple.edu/s/civil-rights-in-anorthern-cit/page/Home.
197 Leon Howard Sullivan, Build, Brother, Build (Philadelphia: Macrae Smith, 1969), 67.
since the city was less obviously segregated than Birmingham, Danville, or Houston, race-based differentials feature less often in news reports: there was minimal civil unrest and few significant episodes of resistance. Statistics, therefore, tell a story of underlying inequality and tension that no narrative text as clearly reports.
In 1963, as Birmingham faced its own racial reckoning, Philadelphia was home to an extensive public library system (known as the Free Library of Philadelphia). The city was at the time 27 percent non-white (out of roughly 2,003,000 inhabitants total) and hosted forty branch libraries.198 While libraries were distributed throughout the city, upon analysis of “predominantly white” and “predominantly non-white” areas, 12 percent of predominantly white areas were served by libraries, while only 2 percent of predominantly non-white areas were served.199 Though the average collection size of branches located in both areas was similar, with 31,501 volumes in majority-white areas as compared to 36,270 volumes in majority-non-white areas, the stark difference in service overall remains clear.200 The library access report noted that, “In Philadelphia, a white neighborhood is six times as likely to possess a branch library as is a predominantly nonwhite section [of the city].”201
The report, with its arresting data on library access, provoked heated debate and some denials (stemming from disagreements over statistical criteria for “predominantly” white/nonwhite neighborhoods and out-of-date census information). Yet the basic conclusion stands: in Philadelphia, non-white neighborhoods were far less likely to include branch libraries than majority-white areas.202
198 Access to Public Libraries, 55.
199 The study defined “those tracts whose racial composition is eighty per cent or more white… as ‘predominantly white’ areas while tracts eighty per cent or more non white [were] termed ‘predominantly non-white.’” Access to Public Libraries, 56-58.
200 Access to Public Libraries, 58.
201 Access to Public Libraries, 59.
202 “The Access to Public Libraries Study,” ALA Bulletin 57, no. 8 (1963): 17, JSTOR.
The 1963 ALA report further analyzed the influence of several other factors within city neighborhoods income level, educational attainment, age distribution on allocation of library resources, and acknowledged that: It is possible to maintain that this discrimination against non-whites is not actually based upon the factor of race but rather reflects differences in the other socioeconomic characteristics income, education, and elementary school enrollment between the white and non-white populations.203
But these demographic differentials themselves were functions of a society that systemically thwarted non-white achievement.204 And, when variations in income, education, and elementary school enrollment were considered, public libraries still clearly exhibited differences in service between white and non-white communities.205
These divided neighborhoods within the city were not formed by chance: like municipalities across the nation, Philadelphia was “redlined” limiting loans to Black and other minority homeowners and saw the widespread usage of racial covenants (deed clauses restricting ownership of certain properties to certain races) that created racially homogenous areas.206 One source notes that in the “ten years after World War II, only three subdivisions in suburban Philadelphia were marketed on a non-racial basis,” contributing to the stark spatial barriers
203 Access to Public Libraries, 65.
204 Systemic, institutional racism and discrimination against Black communities has been extensively studied, spanning, as it does, nearly every aspect of American life. No one source could treat the breadth of the issue in comprehensive depth. A thoughtful introduction to systemic racism in some areas, however, is offered in Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2018).
205 Access to Public Libraries, 66-67.
206 Larry Santucci, “Documenting Racially Restrictive Covenants in 20th Century Philadelphia,” Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research 22, no. 3 (2020): 244, accessed April 4, 2025, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/368000757_Documenting_Racially_Restrictive_Covenants_in_20th_Cent ury_Philadelphia.
between Black and white communities.207 Additionally, “[t]he population of the seven suburban counties surrounding the city grew by 85 percent between 1940 and 1960, while the white population within the city fell by 13 percent,” further contributing to the separation of white and Black Philadelphians into the majority-white or non-white neighborhoods examined in the Access to Public Libraries study.208
Although the Free Library of Philadelphia did not engage in explicit segregation, the location of its branches and allocation of its resources among the diverse communities within the city led to marked disparities in access. Despite Philadelphia’s status as a “Northern” city one that was removed from the contemporary violence and enforced segregation of the South the city’s policies and de facto segregation had similar results: Black residents had unequal access to libraries.
Conclusion
This paper has argued that social inequality within and between communities can be examined through the lens of free public library access. Library segregation and desegregation in Birmingham, Danville, and Houston mirrored and even prefigured the course of civil rights developments within their respective communities. Birmingham’s public library desegregated without further incident over the course of days pivotal to the racial trajectory of the city as a whole. The Danville library’s marked resistance to integration foreshadowed the violent racial unrest that the city had yet to face. And Houston’s public library, which integrated while deliberately avoiding media attention, initiated a pattern of measured, careful progress within the city. Just as in these three cities, so too in Philadelphia: the city’s free public library system offered 207 Temple University Libraries, “Home,” Civil Rights in a Northern City: Philadelphia. 208 Temple University Libraries.
a unique perspective into the less visible racial currents in the community that shaped broader social and economic inequalities across the twentieth century.
In this, the present moment is not so very different from the past. Library policy and access continue to reflect unstated social and economic hierarchies. Funding, service, and institutional priorities are seldom more than functions of the cultural and political climate on local, state, and national levels. Public libraries have increasingly shown themselves to be barometers of broader public and political sentiment, manipulated and fought over as cautionary examples of social development and reactionism. Access to public libraries and the content that they offer remains contested throughout the nation.
Inequalities in library access are similarly perpetuated in the present as in the past. Despite ongoing efforts to equalize service, public libraries continue to incorporate significant gaps: rural libraries and libraries that serve low-income communities, for instance, have smaller collections, fewer staff members, and less funding than urban and higher-income counterparts.209 Additionally, public libraries today face an age-old restriction: book bans. Within the past five years (beginning in roughly 2021) battles over literature in public libraries have grown drastically in number.210 From 2015 to 2020, between 193 and 276 unique books were reported to the ALA as having been explicitly challenged in school and public libraries.211 In 2021, that number jumped more than sixfold: 1,858 titles were challenged.212 The number of unique books challenged peaked with 4,240
209 Sei-Ching Joanna Sin, “Neighborhood Disparities in Access to Information Resources: Measuring and Mapping U.S. Public Libraries’ Funding and Service Landscapes,” Library & Information Science Research 33, no. 1 (2011): n.p., accessed April 12, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2010.06.002.
210 Elizabeth A. Harris and Alexandra Alter, “Book Ban Efforts Spread across the U.S.,” The New York Times, January 30, 2022, accessed April 12, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/30/books/book-ban-us-schools.html.
211 A challenge is defined by the ALA as “an attempt to remove or restrict access to materials or services based upon the objections of a person or group ” “2024 Book Ban Data,” American Library Association, accessed April 12, 2025, https://www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data; “Censorship by the Numbers,” American Library Association, accessed April 12, 2025, https://www.ala.org/bbooks/censorship-numbers.
212 “Censorship by the Numbers,” American Library Association.
in 2023; these statistics fail, however, to represent the full extent of book ban efforts due to underreporting and other, subtler methods of access restriction in libraries that continue to be implemented.213
Today, public libraries are under new threat. Content restrictions target their ability to carry out their core missions, while funding cuts take aim at their very existence. These contemporary attacks bear distinct parallels to the controversies of the civil rights era, bringing to the forefront once more the question of who libraries are meant to serve and why. Controversies that center on public libraries both past and present are built upon issues that reflect the communities themselves. While we often think of community tensions as being played out on the street and in the public, this thesis argues that they are equally and perhaps even more so made evident in the stacks of the local library. In the free public library, community conflicts erupt and are resolved around those issues that matter most to those the library is designed to serve.
213 These statistics, as reported by the ALA, cover public and school libraries together. In 2024, 55 percent of challenges took place in public libraries and 38 percent of challenges took place in school libraries. “Censorship by the Numbers,” American Library Association; “2024 Book Ban Data,” American Library Association.
Figure 1. Birmingham Public Library’s main reading room in 1928. (Birmingham Public Library’s Main Reading Room, January 1928, photograph, Birmingham Public Library Digital Collections.)
Figure 2. The Birmingham Booker T. Washington Branch in 1919.214 (R. P. Wood, Washington Branch Library Interior with Young Patrons, photograph, Birmingham Public Library Digital Collections, 1556.32.30.)
214 Graham, A Right to Read, 13.
Figure 3. The Danville Confederate Memorial Library in 1960. (Confederate Memorial Library, 1960, photograph, Illinois Library Digital Collections, ALA0001812.)
Figure 4. The Grasty Branch Library in an undated photograph. (Edmunds, “Robert A. Williams,” Mapping Local Knowledge: Danville, Virginia 19451975.)
Figure 5. The Houston Public Library main branch in 1925. (Julia Ideson Building Photograph #1, November 18, 1925, photograph, accessed April 4, 2025, https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth494705/m1/1/.)
Figure 6. The Houston Colored Carnegie Library in an undated photograph. (Griffis, “Colored Carnegie,” BlackPast.)
Figure 7. A redlining map of Philadelphia. (New Indexed Guide Map of Philadelphia and Camden, N.J., map (Philadelphia: C. S. Werstner & Son, n.d.), accessed April 4, 2025, https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/data/PA-Philadelphia.)
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