Background
Alexandria’s first reading room, the Alexandria Library Company, was established in 1794 as a subscription service for the exclusive use of elite white men. Beginning in the nineteenth century, a few elite white women were allowed to use their husbands’ memberships for reading-room privileges, while others joined as members. The library excluded white members of the working class and Black Alexandrians.
Alexandria opened its first free public library on August 20, 1937. The Alexandria Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (the Quakers) leased the library’s site to the city for ninety-nine years for a token sum of one dollar. Robert S. Barrett funded construction of the building in honor of his mother, Kate Waller Barrett, a prominent physician, social reformer, and humanitarian; other monies came from the federal Public Works Administration, while the federal Works Progress Administration supplied the labor.
The funds to operate the Alexandria Library, which was named the Kate Waller Barrett Library, came from city council allocations and municipal taxes paid by all Alexandrians. However, the library’s bylaws explicitly barred Black people at a time when most public accommodations in the commonwealth were segregated either by law or by tradition. Historian Eliza Atkins Gleason has determined that in 1939, only fourteen of Virginia’s sixty-five libraries provided service to Black patrons; those that did serve African Americans either operated separate facilities or offered limited borrowing privileges and did not permit Black patrons to enter library buildings.
In 1938, two African American siblings, twenty-five-year-old Samuel Wilbert Tucker, a native Alexandrian and an attorney, and twenty-one-year-old Otto Lee Tucker, attempted to obtain library cards at the Alexandria Library. Staff denied their requests. On March 17, 1939, Tucker initiated a similar attempt to obtain privileges on behalf of George Wilson, a retired U.S. Army sergeant. When that effort also failed, Tucker filed a writ of mandamus (a court order requiring government officials to fulfill their legally required duties) in Alexandria’s Corporation Court, demanding that city librarian Katharine Scoggin issue Wilson a library card. In response, Scoggin claimed that Wilson’s application had not stated that he was an Alexandria resident.
The Sit-In
With Wilson’s case pending, Tucker orchestrated a protest against the Alexandria Library’s policy of racial discrimination. It was not the first time Tucker had confronted Jim Crow policies. When he was fourteen, Tucker was arrested after a white patron on a Washington, D.C., trolley complained that eleven-year-old Otto had flipped a reversible seat so that it protruded into the white section of the car and had refused to move. Samuel Tucker was fined five dollars but found not guilty on appeal. Then in July 1939, at its annual conference in Richmond, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) passed resolutions on civil rights and education, challenging racially discriminatory policies at institutions operated for the public and subsidized with public funds.
These resolutions resonated with Tucker because he understood that public libraries, like public schools, are components of a community’s educational infrastructure. He commuted from Alexandria to Washington, D.C., to attend Armstrong Technical High School, a prestigious African American secondary school, because Alexandria did not provide a high school for Black students until Parker-Gray High School opened in 1932. Tucker earned a bachelor’s degree from Howard University in 1933 and then read law with Alexandria attorney Thomas Watson and researched cases for him at the integrated Library of Congress. Though Tucker did not attend law school, he passed the bar exam on his first try. Tucker believed all Black Alexandrians, most of whom lacked the time and money to commute to the District of Columbia, deserved local educational opportunities.
Tucker devised a plan for a nonviolent civil disobedience action patterned after Mahatma Gandhi’s protest techniques, enlisting five young local men—William “Buddy” Evans, Edward Gaddis, Morris L. Murray, Clarence Strange, and Otto Tucker—to stage a sit-in in the Alexandria Library’s main reading room on August 21, 1939. Anticipating that the police would arrest the protesters, Samuel Tucker planned to serve as their attorney. He instructed the participants to behave with proper decorum, to wear suitable attire, and to maintain silence in the face of any remarks made to them by the library staff or police.
The protesters approached the front desk and requested library cards. After being refused, each man picked a book from the stacks and sat at a table to read. Assistant librarian Alice Green told them they would have to leave because “this library is for whites only.” Head librarian Katharine Scoggin then asked them to leave; when they did not comply, she summoned police officer Jack Kelley, who again repeated the request. According to the Washington Post, Evans asked, “What would happen if we don’t leave?” and Kelley replied, “Then I would have to arrest you.”
The five men were arrested on charges of disorderly conduct and escorted outside, where reporters alerted by Tucker were waiting to document the protest. The sit-in received news coverage in the Chicago Defender and the New York Amsterdam News, two of the country’s most influential Black newspapers, as well as in the Washington Post.
At a September hearing, Tucker got both Green and Kelley to admit that the protesters had not been disorderly, and Scoggin testified that they had been removed from the library because of their race. Police Court judge James Reese Duncan said, “There seems to be no evidence of disorderly conduct here, but it is a matter of constitutional privileges.”
In legal briefs requested by Duncan, Samuel Tucker argued that his brother had a right to sit and read in the library, which was a public accommodation, and that he was not guilty of disorderly conduct. In addition, Otto Tucker’s innocence was not altered by the fact that he was Black and that the library’s policy was to accommodate whites only. City prosecutor Armistead Boothe argued that failure to obey a police officer’s request to leave constituted disorderly conduct. After three hearings, Duncan allowed the case to lapse. He made no ruling, and Otto Tucker and the other protesters were neither fined nor jailed.
By late October 1939, the Alexandria City Council was considering a recommendation to appropriate $3,900 for a separate library for Black residents. On January 10, 1940, William Pape Woolls, the Corporation Court judge, dismissed Tucker’s writ filed on Wilson’s behalf on a technicality, ruling that Wilson had not properly applied for a library card. However, Woolls noted that the Alexandria Library Association had no rules denying Black citizens use of the library, effectively ending the ban. Within two days, two Black residents applied for library cards. One was Dorothy Pierce, the librarian at the segregated Parker-Gray High School. According to the library, her application was not immediately granted while her references were checked.
Robert H. Robinson Library
Within days of Woolls’s ruling, the Alexandria City Council appropriated $2,500 to construct a library for Black residents. The council had previously appropriated $750 for the purchase of a site for the library across the street from Parker-Gray High School. A modest $1,941.50 was appropriated for the book budget. The Robert H. Robinson Library, named for a previously enslaved Methodist minister, opened on April 23, 1940. The Robinson Library was a cramped, one-room building with 1,500 titles, many of them cast-offs from the Alexandria Library, which boasted a collection of 10,000 books as well as a number of rare editions and a local history special collection. Samuel Tucker, his family, and many other Black Alexandrians refused to use the inferior library branch, regarding it as an affront to their community. Other Black Alexandrians, however, welcomed access to the library despite its shortcomings. The Black librarians at the Robinson Library—Evelyn Roper Beam (1940–1942), Hazel Miller (1942–1944), Sara Murphy Carr (1944–1948), and Minnie N. Fuller (1948–1962)—ensured that the facility offered patrons age-appropriate special programs and activities and that it functioned as a welcoming, nonsectarian, community meeting space. In addition, the Robinson Library offered literacy classes, book clubs, and support for schoolwork, continuing to serve Black patrons even after the Alexandria Library was integrated for adults and high school students in February 1959, five years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruling that “separate but equal” facilities for Blacks Americans were inherently unequal. Not until July 1962, twenty-three years after the sit-in, did the Alexandria Library become fully integrated.
Samuel Tucker went on to a career as a noted NAACP civil rights attorney. In 1968, he argued another landmark U.S. Supreme Court case, Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, Virginia, which abolished dual systems of education for Black and white students and required school boards to desegregate schools.
Legacy
The Alexandria Library sit-in is the first recorded civil rights protest for Black access to a whites-only public library. It illustrates how early grassroots efforts to secure equal access to libraries were part of a larger decades-long movement that finally reached its zenith in the 1950s and 1960s. In a 1966 decision, Brown v. Louisiana, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that protesters have a right to engage in peaceful sit-ins to protest segregation of library services and that regulation of libraries must be “reasonable and nondiscriminatory.”
In 1983, the building that housed the Robinson Library became the Alexandria Black History Resource Center. The Watson Reading Room, a research repository that houses noncirculating Black history materials, was constructed in 1995 on an adjacent lot. In 2004, the Alexandria Black History Resource Center was renamed the Alexandria Black History Museum.
On October 18, 2019, the Alexandria Circuit Court dismissed all the technically outstanding charges against the sit-in protesters, stating that they were “lawfully exercising their constitutional rights to free assembly, speech and to petition the government to alter the established policy of sanctioned segregation.”
