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

A Right to Read: Segregation and Civil Rights in Alabama's Public Libraries, 1900-1965. By Patterson Toby Graham. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. xiii, 191 pp. $34.95. ISBN 0-8173-1144-0.

Over the past three decades, print, book, and library cultures in Alabama have received only a smattering of scholarly attention. Philip D. Beidler's First Books: The Printed Word and Cultural Formation in Early Alabama (Tuscaloosa, 1999) is the only prior full-length treatment of any of these areas. G. Ward Hubbs's "'Dissipating the Clouds of Ignorance': The First University of Alabama Library, 1831-1865" appeared in the Winter 1992 issue of Libraries and Culture. Twenty years earlier, Kenneth R. Johnson wrote more broadly about "The Early Library Movement in Alabama" (Journal of Library History [April 1971]). In 1991 Vicki L. Gregory edited the essay collection, A Dynamic Tradition: The History of Alabama Academic Libraries from Their Establishment through 1988 (Birmingham, 1991).

Several articles have covered topics closer to the subject of this review. William T. Miller described "Library Service for Negroes in the New South: Birmingham, Alabama, 1871-1918" in the Alabama Librarian (Nov./Dec. 1975). Annie Greene King wrote an essay, "Library Service and the Black Librarian in Alabama," included in the collection Black Librarian in the Southeast: Reminiscences, Activities, Challenges, edited by Annette L. Phinazee (Durham, N. C., 1980). Almost two decades later Kayla Barrett and Barbara A. Bishop examined "Integration and the Alabama Library Association: Not So Black and White" (Libraries and Culture [Spring 1998]). Graham himself has published an overview, "Public Librarians and the Civil Rights Movement: Alabama, 1955-1965" (Library Quarterly [January 2001]). Thus Graham's book is a welcome addition to this small body of work and covers three areas significant in Alabama history: segregation, civil rights, and public library development.

Graham is director of the Digital Library of Georgia. This book is based on his 1998 University of Alabama dissertation, which received the ALISE-Eugene Garfield and the Phyllis Dain Library History Dissertation Awards. Graham has published several additional articles related to libraries and historical issues and resources. His work on this topic is the result of his "abiding curiosity about southern race relations and my commitment to librarianship" (p. xi). He seeks to describe the development of public library service for blacks in segregated Alabama and the opening of white public libraries to blacks during the civil rights era.

Graham's opening chapter, "Black Libraries and White Attitudes, The Early Years" covers the Booker T. Washington and Davis Avenue branch libraries for blacks opened in Birmingham and Mobile in 1918 and 1931, respectively. The second chapter examines efforts in Walker County, the Works Progress Administration and TVA libraries for blacks, and the development of a second Birmingham branch at Slossfield. The third chapter, "African-American Communities and the Black Public Library Movement, 1941-1954," focuses on branches in Huntsville and Montgomery and further developments in Birmingham. The final two chapters cover events during the civil rights era. "The Read-In Movement: Desegregating Alabama's Public Libraries, 1960-1963" features sections on five cities: Mobile, Montgomery, Huntsville, Birmingham, and Anniston. The final chapter, "Librarians and the Civil Rights Movement, 1955-1965" focuses on the roles of individual librarians, such as Juliette Hampton Morgan and Emily Wheelock Reed in Montgomery and Patricia Blalock in Selma, who challenged segregation, as well as the relevant activities of the American and Alabama Library Associations.

A Right to Read is an important book that sheds light on two dark areas of Alabama history-the role of public libraries in the eras of segregation and civil rights and some lesser-known efforts associated with the state's civil rights struggle. By 1940 Carnegie and New Deal programs had significantly expanded public libraries and created a state library agency. Yet few of these resources were available to blacks. In 1918 Reginald Gaines, an early director of Birmingham's first library for blacks, was reprimanded for allowing whites to use the branch. Books loaned by other libraries in Birmingham to the branches for blacks were not allowed to return to general circulation. In the 1950s and 1960s the struggle to integrate public institutions in Alabama and end the social contortions of segregation included the libraries. Not until this period did Gaines's vision take shape in the state.

No history can cover all details, but it is disappointing to find no mention of the efforts by Ulysses G. Mason to improve library service for his fellow blacks in Birmingham around World War I. Mason was a successful physician, banker, and civic leader who tried to improve both schools and libraries for blacks. Mason twice wrote the Carnegie Corporation, noting that several Carnegie libraries were operating in the city but that none admitted blacks.

Graham's book gives both the broad picture of public library development in twentieth-century Alabama, and many of the personal stories of struggle. The work is concise, reads easily, and offers much of interest in African American, Alabama, and public library history.

A. J. WRIGHT

University of Alabama at Birmingham

Copyright University of Alabama Press Apr 2004
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved