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A Seat at the Reading Table: The 1939 Sit-in Demonstration to Integrate the Alexandria, Virginia, Public Library ― A Study in Library History, 1937‒1941

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In Folder: Library & Information Science, Ph.D.

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A Seat at the Reading Table: The 1939 Sit-in Demonstration to Integrate the Alexandria, Virginia, Public Library ― A Study in Library History, 1937‒1941

Mitchell-Powell, Brenda - Dissertation

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title: A Seat at the Reading Table: The 1939 Sit-in Demonstration to Integrate the Alexandria, Virginia, Public Library ― A Study in Library History, 1937‒1941

creator: Mitchell-Powell, Brenda

subject: Dissertations, Academic.

description: On August 21, 1939, Samuel Wilbert Tucker ― a native Alexandrian, a local Black attorney, and the organizer of the sit-in demonstration to integrate the Alexandria, Virginia, public library ― prefigured the course not only of American public library history, but also of twentieth century American social history. Tucker’s awareness of the myriad ways in which libraries serve personal, professional, and community interests; his recognition of the inequity of Black tax dollars used to support a segregated public facility; and his personal and familial experiences with the court systems, inspired his decision to force the municipal government of Alexandria to mandate equal protection and to dismantle the social, legal, and institutional Jim Crow barriers that barred Black citizens from the city’s only public library. Employing the combined strategies of public protest, civil disobedience, and municipal litigation, Tucker’s grassroots initiative was an effort to subsume the national priorities of organizations such as the NAACP in the civil rights objectives of a local community. Such linkages illustrate how early, local strategies to secure equal access to libraries were part of a larger context of civil rights activities that bore fruit in the 1950s and 1960s following the passage of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Brown v. Louisiana in 1966.

publisher: Simmons College (Boston, Mass.)

contributor:

date: 2015

type: Text

format: 1 PDF (452 Pages)

identifier: td_lis_2015_bmp

source:

language: English

relation:

coverage:

rights: Material from the Simmons University Archives collections are made available for study purposes only. For more information, or to request rights to reproduce or reuse any material, contact the University Archives at archives@simmons.edu.

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