A P LACE D EDICATED TO Q UIET : T HE E ND OF L IBRARY S EGREGATION - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

“A PLACE DEDICATED TO QUIET”:

THE END OF LIBRARY SEGREGATION & THE REORDERING OF PUBLIC SPACE Derek W. Attig

Ph.D. Candidate Department of History University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

bookmobility.org

“[B]eyond the immediacy of what is requisite, the central desires of the people have coalesced and been made

• known. The uniting thread of

dissatisfaction has given birth to a fresh emphasis on the right to knowledge, and the first institution of the people has been given form; The People’s Library.”

“[W]e must never be afraid to insist

• n compliance with
• ur laws.”

“Common Consciousness”

“[S]o man is in himself a society, a combined group of living cells united in a common consciousness.“

• Washington Gladden (1902)

“[T]he extending light of common consciousness as Society comes alive!”

• Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1904)

“[T]here was among us but a half- awakened common consciousness, sprung…above all, from the sight of the Veil that hung between us and Opportunity.”

• W.E.B. DuBois (1903)

“[Southerners are] above all, as to the white folk a people with a common resolve indomitably maintained—that it shall be and remain a white man’s country.”

• Ulrich B. Phillips (1928)

Argument: Openly racist ideologies and library policies were transformed into an

• bsession with
• rderliness that

continued to limit access to public space. Cases:

• Danville Public Library

– Obsession with order (in place of open racism) emerges

• Brown v. Louisiana

– The obsession creates legal and cultural doctrine

SECTION I:

“VERTICAL NEGRO”: DANVILLE AND THE TURN TO ORDER

Argument: Jim Crow used race to limit who could go where and do what, and thus when applied to libraries restricted access to public culture. But when that segregated regime fell, a related system devoted to ordering space took shape.

Library Segregation

• 21% of black residents (about two million) in 13 Southern

states had access to any public library service

• 22% of black residents lived in jurisdictions that offered

service to white residents but denied it to black citizens

• Most of the non-segregated libraries did not advertise

themselves as such or explicitly welcome black patrons

From Eliza Atkins Gleason, The Southern Negro and the Public Library (1941)

Tobacco worker picks a book from Richard B. Harrison bookmobile (1946)

From the North Carolina Digital Collections (http://digital.ncdcr.gov)

The Danville Public Library—and “last Capitol of the Confederacy.”

From Gerard Tetley, “Danville Reopens – with a difference,” Wilson Library Bulletin 35 (1960): 224.

“The white and Negro stand at the same grocery and supermarket counters; deposit money at the same bank teller’s window; pay phone and light bills to the same clerk; walk through the same dime and department stores, and stand at the same drugstore counters.

It is only when the Negro ‘sets’ that the fur begins to fly.”

• Harry Golden, Only in America (1958)

Openly racist position

(segregated service)

“Massive resistance” to change

(closing the library)

Reordering space

(rearranging the furniture)

SECTION II:

“SOMEONE ELSE’S PROPERTY”: PROPERTY, PROPRIETY, AND PRESENCE IN BROWN V. LOUISIANA

Argument: Even as the Supreme Court rejected racial segregation, it predicated access to libraries on the maintenance of order—at the cost of revolutionary racial justice.

The Audubon Regional Library - Clinton, La.

From the Robert R. McCormick Foundation’s Freedom Express Exhibit Guide

Property

Who owns public space? What about libraries?

“It is high time to challenge the assumption…that groups that think they have been mistreated or that have actually been mistreated have a constitutional right to use the public’s streets, buildings, and property to protest …without regard to whom such conduct may disturb.”

“We felt on that day, very, very triumphant—that we had accomplished what we wanted—that was that if we could not use the park and the library, then they would be closed to all.”

“It is an unhappy circumstance that the locus of these events was a public library—a place dedicated to quiet, to knowledge, and to beauty. It is sad commentary that this hallowed place…bore the ugly stamp of racism.”

• Fortas

“I too lament this fact, and for this reason I am deeply troubled with the fear that powerful private groups…will read the Court’s action…as granting them license to invade the tranquility and beauty of

• ur libraries whenever they

have a quarrel with some state policy which may or may not exist.”

• Black

Propriety

Must protests be orderly? What about in libraries?

“There is and can be no such thing as a peaceful picketing, any more than there can be chaste vulgarity, or peaceful mobbing, or lawful lynching.”

• Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe Railway v. Gee (1905)

“Their deportment within the library was unexceptionable.”

“no disorder”

“They were neither loud, boisterous,

• bstreperous,

indecorous nor impolite.” “there was no noise or boisterous talking”

“[T]his and that body of men…are beginning to assert and put in practice an Englishman’s right to do what he likes; his right to march where he likes, meet where he likes, enter where he likes, hoot as he likes, threaten as he likes, smash as he likes. All this, I say, tends to anarchy.”

• Matthew Arnold (1869)

“It is high time to challenge the assumption…that groups have a constitutional right to use the public’s streets, buildings, and property to protest whatever, wherever, whenever they want.” “I have never believed that it gives any person or group of persons the constitutional right to go wherever they want, whenever they please.”

• Hugo Black (1966)

“[S]urely, in the prevailing opinion's futile effort to rely on Cox, it is not meant that 300 or 100 grumbling onlookers must be crowded into a library before Louisiana can maintain an action under this statute.”

“Riot produces fear, and fear has a tendency to still the response of conscience.”

Presence

Is “mere presence” disorderly?

“They embrace appropriate types of action which certainly include the right in a peaceable and orderly manner to protest by silent and reproachful presence, in a place where the protestant has every right to be, the unconstitutional segregation of public facilities.”

“They embrace appropriate types of action which certainly include the right in a peaceable and orderly manner to protest by silent and reproachful presence, in a place where the protestant has every right to be, the unconstitutional segregation of public facilities.”

CODA:

“A POSITIVE PEACE”

The People’s Library branch at the MLK vigil (16 January 2012)

From the People’s Library Twitter feed

“Knowledge is power!”

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s greatest stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is…the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”

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