“A P LACE D EDICATED TO Q UIET ”: T HE E ND OF L IBRARY S EGREGATION & THE R EORDERING OF P UBLIC S PACE 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 on compliance with our laws.”
“Common Consciousness” “[S]o man is in himself a society, a “[T]he extending light of combined group of living cells common consciousness as united in a common consciousness .“ Society comes alive !” -Washington Gladden (1902) -Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1904) “[Southerners are] above all, as “[T]here was among us but a half- to the white folk a people with a awakened common consciousness, common resolve indomitably sprung…above all, from the sight of maintained — that it shall be and the Veil that hung between us and remain a white man’s country.” Opportunity .” -Ulrich B. Phillips (1928) -W.E.B. DuBois (1903)
Argument: Cases: • Danville Public Library Openly racist ideologies and library – Obsession with order policies were (in place of open racism) emerges transformed into an obsession with orderliness that • Brown v. Louisiana continued to limit – The obsession creates access to public legal and cultural doctrine space.
S ECTION I: “V ERTICAL N EGRO ”: D ANVILLE AND THE T URN TO O RDER 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)
S ECTION II: “S OMEONE E LSE ’ S P ROPERTY ”: P ROPERTY , P ROPRIETY , AND P RESENCE IN B ROWN V . L OUISIANA 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 “I too lament this fact, and circumstance that the for this reason I am deeply troubled with the fear that locus of these events powerful private was a public library — a groups…will read the place dedicated to Court’s action…as granting quiet, to knowledge, them license to invade the and to beauty. It is sad tranquility and beauty of commentary that this our libraries whenever they hallowed place…bore have a quarrel with some the ugly stamp of state policy which may or racism .” -Fortas 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)
“They were “Their deportment neither loud, within the library was boisterous, unexceptionable.” obstreperous, indecorous nor impolite.” “no “there was disorder” no noise or boisterous talking”
“It is high time to challenge the “[T]his and that body of assumption…that groups have a men…are beginning to constitutional right to use the assert and put in practice public’s streets, buildings, and an Englishman’s right to property to protest whatever, do what he likes; his wherever, whenever they right to march where he want .” likes, meet where he likes, enter where he “I have never believed that it likes, hoot as he likes, gives any person or group of threaten as he likes, persons the constitutional right smash as he likes . All to go wherever they want, this, I say, tends to whenever they please .” anarchy .” -Hugo Black (1966) -Matthew Arnold (1869)
“[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.”
C ODA : “A P OSITIVE P EACE ”
“Knowledge is power!” The People’s Library branch at the MLK vigil (16 January 2012) From the People’s Library Twitter feed
“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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