A Right to Read: Segregation and Civil Rights in Alabama's Public Libraries, 1900–1965 - Softcover

Graham, Patterson Toby

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0817353712 ISBN 13: 9780817353711

Verlag: University Alabama Press, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

This original and significant contribution to the historiography of the civil rights movement and education in the South details a dramatic and disturbing chapter in American cultural history.

The tradition of American public libraries is closely tied to the perception that these institutions are open to all without regard to social background. Such was not the case in the segregated South, however, where public libraries barred entry to millions of African Americans and provided tacit support for a culture of white supremacy. A Right to Read is the first book to examine public library segregation from its origins in the late 19th century through its end during the tumultuous years of the 1960s civil rights movement. Graham focuses on Alabama, where African Americans, denied access to white libraries, worked to establish and maintain their own "Negro branches." These libraries-separate but never equal-were always underfunded and inadequately prepared to meet the needs of their constituencies.

By 1960, however, African Americans turned their attention toward desegregating the white public libraries their taxes helped support. They carried out "read-ins" and other protests designed to bring attention and judicial pressure upon the segregationists. Patterson Toby Graham contends that, for librarians, the civil rights movement in their institutions represented a conflict of values that pitted their professional ethics against regional mores. He details how several librarians in Alabama took the dangerous course of opposing segregationists, sometimes with unsettling results.

This groundbreaking work built on primary evidence will have wide cross-disciplinary appeal. Students and scholars of southern and African-American history, civil rights, and social science, as well as academic and public librarians, will appreciate Graham's solid research and astute analysis.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Patterson Toby Graham is Head of Special Collections at the University of Southern Mississippi. His research on library segregation has won four awards, including the ALISE-Eugene Garfield Dissertation Award.

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A Right to Read

Segregation and Civil Rights in Alabama's Public Libraries, 1900–1965

By Patterson Toby Graham

The University of Alabama Press

Copyright © 2002 The University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-5371-1

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
1. Black Libraries and White Attitudes, The Early Years: Birmingham and Mobile, 1918–1931, 
2. Black Libraries and White Attitudes II: The Depression Years, 
3. African-American Communities and the Black Public Library Movement, 1941–1954, 
4. The Read-In Movement: Desegregating Alabama's Public Libraries, 1960–1963, 
5. Librarians and the Civil Rights Movement, 1955–1965, 
Conclusion, 
Notes, 
Bibliographic Essay, 

CHAPTER 1

Black Libraries and White Attitudes, The Early Years

Birmingham and Mobile, 1918–1931

Public libraries developed later in the South than in other regions. Unlike that of the Northeast, whose tax-supported free library service came into its own during the second half of the nineteenth century, the South's public library movement was for the most part a twentieth-century phenomenon. Examining New England between 1629 and 1855, Jesse H. Shera identified the causal factors he believed led to the growth of Northern libraries. These were economic ability, a demand for scholarship, awareness of a need for publicly supported educational services, a faith in self-education, a demand for vocational education, and "other causal factors," including a belief that reading was a "good" thing in itself. As a region, the South exhibited none of these characteristics until the last years of the nineteenth century.

In her 1958 book on the development of southern public libraries, Mary Edna Anders contends that its defeat in the Civil War left the South without the financial wherewithal to match the North in library development. The war left the South impoverished and largely subject to economic interests outside the region. In the immediate postwar years, the South lacked a well-heeled indigenous class of men and women with the leisure time, finances, and inclination to work toward the establishment of institutions of culture. It should also be noted, however, that even before the war, the South had an individualistic, provincial, and sometimes anti-intellectual nature that did not lend itself to public library development. In the antebellum South, a widespread conviction that governments should provide agencies of education for the masses had yet to emerge.

By the 1890s, however, the South had changed. It was in the midst of an economic transition that made the region more industrial and more urban. Modernization brought the rise of a new middle class of professionals and businessmen in southern cities. Anders asserts that the improved southern economy provided a "more favorable climate" for the establishment of public libraries than had previously existed. Out of the new professional and business class came a demand for educational facilities and services, including libraries. By 1900, the southern public library movement was underway.

The public library movement in the South was distinguished from its northern counterpart in several respects, including its ties to southern progressive reform and the presence of racial segregation of library facilities. With the transition of the old agrarian South into the "New South" that was trying to be both industrial and urban came an awareness within the new bourgeoisie of a need for social improvement. In Alabama this progressive impulse translated into tax reform, a workman's compensation law, a child welfare department, and governmental support for public health, roads, and education. In a state that had traditionally lagged in literacy and general education, the progressives recognized that the need for agencies for learning was particularly acute. The public library movement in Alabama and in the urban South came out of this spirit of reform.

Anders points out that clubwomen were the first to adopt libraries as a cause, but businessmen, educators, clergy, and librarians followed. These individuals worked to found libraries in the interest of education for children, self-help for adults, local culture, and civic pride. Municipal leaders believed that presence of a public library provided evidence that a community was progressive in its thinking. According to Marilyn J. Martin, library development was also a beginning point for other social improvements, "a first step toward activist reforms typical of the Progressive Era."

With the arrival of new libraries in Alabama, librarianship emerged as a profession at the turn of the twentieth century, during the region's period of modernization. Partly as a result of the generosity of Andrew Carnegie, the state had nine public libraries for whites by 1904. Representatives of these institutions, along with others from college, religious, and women's club libraries gathered in Montgomery that year for the first meeting of the Alabama Library Association. The organization's goal was to promote the library movement in the state by creating an esprit de corps among Alabama's fledgling library community and to press for public funding for library service. "Let us demonstrate by what we do," association president Thomas M. Owen urged the group, "that we are alive to an appreciation of the library as one of the great, if not the greatest, educational forces of the time." With the universality characteristic of early library movement rhetoric, Owen called on Alabama librarians not to rest until "every community in the state is properly supplied with good books free to the use of all the people."

Along with the progressive desire for social improvement expressed in the first library association meeting, however, came an impulse toward social control. In his 1967 book, Search for Order, Robert H. Wiebe contends that American progressivism was about establishing a social order in times that were decidedly "out of joint." For southern progressives, this search for order was seen most vividly in the emergence of racial segregation and the disfranchisement of blacks. In the aftermath of Civil War and Reconstruction, white southern reformers believed that segregation was necessary for social stability and peaceful race relations. Historian Dewey Grantham calls segregation a "fundamental component" of southern progressivism. For Jack Temple Kirby, it was the South's "seminal reform." Freed from the dangers and complications of building new institutions in a heterogeneous society, white reformers could establish a public system of schools and libraries. Thus, both segregation and the public library movement emerged from progressive reform at the turn of the twentieth century.

As a result, the southern library movement was characterized by a complex and often contradictory set of priorities. Though seemingly at odds, a desire for both social uplift and social control drove library supporters to act as they did. Their racism was a paternalistic sort. White library boards evidenced a belief in the inherent intellectual inferiority of African Americans, but also in a responsibility to do something to help them. Libraries, they felt, served to improve their users socially and culturally. This was true for blacks as well as whites. Library boards considered it worthwhile to provide library service for blacks, so long as that service was inexpensive and did not suggest in any way a social equality among the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University Alabama Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0817353712
• ISBN 13: 9780817353711
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 207
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar