As a first step, it was decided that students and Negro faculty, heretofore reluctant in the face of certain rejection, should begin visiting the Carnegie Library whenever they needed books unavailable elsewhere. They expected to be rebuffed. But the visits would continue. So, the advance guard of the gradually increasing stream of Negro visitors began passing through the electric-eye entrance to the Carnegie Library. It was accidental irony that the first book sought in this campaign was John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The Spelman student who requested this was given the same treatment that subsequent Negro visitors were to receive: a courteous query as to whether the Negro branch had been tried, and then assurance that the book would be sent to the Negro branch and made available there. When a student said the book was needed immediately, she was told it could be studied right there in the library, in a special room downstairs, or in the office behind the main desk—anywhere, so long as there would be no contact with the white patrons.
Here was a typical Southern paradox: across the street from the library, in one of Atlanta's leading department stores, Negroes and whites could brush by each other at the counters, try on the same clothes, and, thanks to the irresistable impetus of the profit motive, be treated as nearequals. But nonsense has been uttered with aplomb for a long time in the South, and no one proved better at it than degree-encrusted library officials. Spelman and Morehouse College students visiting the Carnegie Library accepted whatever service was offered them, and left. Their purpose was simply to make the library aware that Negroes were in need of its facilities.
The Atlanta Council on Human Relations, meanwhile, had been working on the problem. This newly formed inter-racial group was headed by a white Unitarian minister, Edward Cahill, and the dynamic Whitney Young, then Dean of the Atlanta University School of Social Work. They began a sixteen-month campaign of persistent effort to convince the Library Board of Trustees, through detailed research and rational argument, that Atlanta libraries should be open to all. They collected statistics, made special maps, and referred the Library Director pointedly to the American Library Association's Bill of Rights, which says that "as a responsibility of Library service there should be no discrimination based on race or nationality." The Library Board remained unmoved, and the Council on Human Relations wearily announced this fact in February of 1959: "The Council urges all groups and individuals in the city to take such action as they deem appropriate to persuade the Library Board to desegregate the tax-supported facilities of the public library system."
With this, Spelman and Morehouse College students stepped up their visits to the Carnegie Library. In March, I paid a visit to the Director of the Atlanta Library systems, to probe the prospects for desegregation. He was discouraging. Of course, he assured me, the policy was not his desire, but a rule upheld by the Board which he was bound to enforce. No, he could not take the initiative in making a change. If Negroes began to use the library there would probably be violence. If this was his fear, I suggested, why not desegregate quietly, since there would otherwise be a lawsuit and the change would come anyway, with more publicity.
In the event of a court order to desegregate, the Director said matter-of-factly, he would close the libraries, as Governor Faubus had closed schools in Little Rock, to prevent violence. Surely, I said, white people who use your library would not riot over the use of the library by a few Negroes. You don't know these folks, he replied. The interview was over.
The library director's argument was the same one advanced so often in the South on the eve of change: there will be trouble. But in 90 percent of the cases where desegregation had already taken place in the South (though one would never know this from reading newspaper headlines), there had been no violent reaction at all, only quiet if grudging acceptance. And although there is never any way of guaranteeing an absence of trouble, the probabilities in a case like this were on the side of peaceful change. We proceeded therefore to prepare a suit in federal court, and Whitney Young and I took the responsibility for getting plaintiffs, money, and legal help.
Just a few months earlier, the federal courts in Atlanta had given two favorable decisions, one desegregating the city's transit system, the other barring discrimination on grounds of race in the admissions policy of the University of Georgia. Several years before, a lawsuit had forced the municipal golf courses at Atlanta to admit Negroes. And in one Virginia county the mere threat of a lawsuit had opened up libraries to Negroes.
Our first job was to find plaintiffs, and this was not easy. A number of students were anxious to file suit, but they were discouraged by the complications of obtaining parental consent and of meeting other technical requirements, such as residence. Many Negroes were subject to economic reprisal if they dared participate in court action. I began to appreciate the work of the NAACP in handling lawsuits when I saw how difficult it was to get plaintiffs, something I had always assumed was no problem. But finally, two people came forward.
One was a young minister named Otis Moss, who was doing advanced study in theology and had often suffered from the inadequacy of the library facilities available to him. Moss's wife was a student in my American History course, articulate and intelligent. Moss himself, slim and very quiet, hardly seemed a social activist. (I began to make out the depth of the man only a year later at a mass protest meeting in Atlanta when the apparently shy Reverend Moss lifted the crowd to a state of high emotion with a magnificent speech.)
The other plaintiff was Irene Dobbs Jackson, Professor of French at Spelman College, a friend and colleague, who said quietly as we sat having coffee in the Snack Shop on the campus, "It's what my husband would be doing if he were alive." Irene Jackson's rock-like strength had been put to its most severe test when her husband, a prominent Atlanta minister, died, leaving her with six growing children. She continued their education somehow, took four of them to France with her, where she studied for several years and received her doctorate at the University of Toulouse. Dr. Jackson came from a well-known Atlanta family. Her sister, Mattiwilda Dobbs, a Spelman college graduate, became famous because she was the first Negro to sing a starring role with the Metropolitan Opera company. Her father, John Wesley Dobbs, was one of Atlanta's most distinguished citizens, a militant battler for equal rights and a great orator in the old Southern tradition. I heard him keep a crowd of thousands in an uproar one night at the Wheat Street Baptist Church. "My Mattiwilda was asked to sing here in Atlanta," he thundered at one point, "but she said, 'No sir! Not while my daddy has to sit in the balcony!'" Irene Dobbs Jackson told me: "Why, I've passed by the Carnegie Library a hundred times, and always wanted to go in. I think it's time."
Student visits to the Carnegie Library were now stepped up. City officials were apparently becoming uneasy, because a high municipal officeholder telephoned an Atlanta University administrator to plead that legal action be held up until the adjournment of the state legislature, which was in constant battle with the city administration.
What happened shortly after this, on May 19, 1959, I will quote from the notes I made on that day:
Tuesday, May 10th: made an appointment to see Whitney Young at 2 P.M., to discuss with him next moves in suit to desegregate library system. Whitney told of an interesting development which might change things. A member of the Library Board had called him that morning, said he was disturbed at hearing that lawsuit was pending on library situation, wanted very much to avoid lawsuit. Whitney told him there was long history of conferences, requests, etc., and we were going ahead, and as a matter of fact had appointment at 2 P.M. with the parties involved in the suit to discuss pending action. The Board member said don't do anything, call me at 2 P.M. before talking to parties involved, and meanwhile will try to get lunch meeting of Board together.
We talked a few minutes, then the Board member called. Library Board had just met at Atlanta Athletic Club. Whole board was there. Mayor was there. Chief of Police, City Attorney there. Library Director was there. Decision was to change
policy. Mayor told the Board they had been foolish long enough. The board member told Whitney hold off a few days, just long enough to allow Director to inform staff of change.
Whitney and I agreed that we would give them Wednesday and Thursday, test it out Friday and for a week thereafter. Agreed I would go with Mrs. Jackson to Carnegie Library Friday.
So it was that Friday, May 22, 1959, four of us rode downtown to the Carnegie Library: Dr. Irene Jackson, Professor Earl Sanders, myself, and Pat West, the charming and spirited Alabama-born wife of a Spelman philosophy professor. Irene Jackson joined the library, and Earl Sanders took out his long-sought records. Later that week two Spelman students and one Morehouse student walked into a "white" branch library on Peachtree Street and gave it its initiation.
As predicted by all groups who had asked integration, the desegregation decision caused no great commotion. Not until five days after the Board action did the newspapers carry the story, and by then it was an accomplished fact. The library director received a few angry letters, Dr. Jackson was kept wake one night by nasty telephone calls: "You that integratin' nigger?" "This is the KKK." And as she sat at the library table reading, that first day, a man came by and slammed his books down hard on the table in voiceless protest. But the general reaction was an enormous silence. One white Atlantan said in a letter he sent to the Atlanta Constitution that he had lived in Atlanta all his life and never knew the libraries were segregated, and he felt ashamed.
At a press conference a few days later, Georgia Governor Ernest Vandiver predicted that voluntary segregation would continue at the library because integration "does not represent the thinking or the wishes of the vast rank and file of colored citizens who would prefer to use their own library facilities." He turned out to be wrong, for the Carnegie Library, in the several years since it was integrated, has been used constantly by Negroes, without any trouble from whites. Mayor William Hartsfield turned out to be a better prophet than the Governor, when he told reporters: "A public library is a symbol of literacy, education, and cultural progress. It does not attract troublemakers."
In the library episode, a number of our hypotheses were underlined: Negroes acted and whites reacted. The reaction of the whites was consistent with their particular value-schemes. The Mayor, dependent on Negro votes for election, saw a gain in popularity among Negroes which would not be offset by white disaffection, for the library was not, by its nature, an emotional issue; its users were not likely to be rabid on the race issue. Even if the library users were not delighted at the idea of Negroes using "their" library, they were not so unhappy as to cramp their own needs by staying away or by creating a scene in the genteel atmosphere of the reading room. The library Board did not gain any political advantage by changing its policy; but it also would not have gained anything by battling with the Mayor, whose favor it wanted. And behind all this was the impending lawsuit, which would undoubtedly result in a court desegregation order, with attendant publicity. So the choice was not between segregation and desegregation but between quiet and noisy desegregation. As for the library employees, like most employees, their supreme value was keeping their jobs; so, they were likely to carry out policy as directed from above, no matter what it was, and whatever their personal wishes.
This analysis of the advantages that were weighed does not take account of the element of genuine idealism present in the Mayor, in some Library Board members, in some library employees. But such idealism unfortunately is rarely preponderant enough to change a situation where one value clearly outweighs another. It can be important in circumstances where the advantages are so evenly balanced that even the feather-weight of social conviction may tip the decision-making scales. And for a small number of radical prime movers, idealism has become their greatest interest; it serves thus as an igniting spark for the self-interest of the mass.
3
Finishing School for Pickets
I was on the faculty of Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, for seven years, from 1956 to 1963, and was lucky enough to live in a black Southern community in the midst of the Civil Rights revolution. The sit-ins of February 1960, in Greensboro, North Carolina spread quickly through the South, and in May, the students of Spelman and Morehouse and other colleges in the Atlanta University Center quietly moved into ten public places downtown—historically segregated. They refused to leave, were arrested, and nothing was the same in Atlanta after that. The "young lady" who put up the dormitory notice was Marian Wright, later Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children's Defense Fund in Washington, D.C. Another of my students at Spelman was Alice Walker, for whom even the changed Spelman did not change enough. She left a year after I was fired by the college president for "insubordination." I had supported the Spelman students not only in their actions in the city, but in their rebellion against the old order on campus. In this article, which appeared in The Nation August 6, 1960, I try to convey what was happening to Spelman and that old order.
Atlanta, Georgia.
One quiet afternoon some weeks ago, with the dogwood on the Spelman College campus newly bloomed and the grass close-cropped and fragrant, an attractive, tawny-skinned girl crossed the lawn to her dormitory to put a notice on the bulletin board. It read: Young Ladies Who Can Picket Please Sign Below.
The notice revealed, in its own quaint language, that within the dramatic revolt of Negro college students in the South today another phenomenon has been developing. This is the upsurge of the young, educated Negro woman against the generations-old advice of her elders: be nice, be well-mannered and ladylike, don't speak loudly, and don't get into trouble. On the campus of the nation's leading college for Negro young women—pious, sedate, encrusted with the traditions of gentility and moderation—these exhortations, for the first time, are being firmly rejected.
Spelman College girls are still "nice," but not enough to keep them from walking up and down, carrying picket signs, in front of two supermarkets in the heart of Atlanta. They are well-mannered, but this is somewhat tempered by a recent declaration that they will use every method short of violence to end segregation. As for staying out of trouble, they were doing fine until this spring, when fourteen of them were arrested and jailed by Atlanta police. The staid New England women missionaries who helped found Spelman College back in the 1880s would probably be distressed at this turn of events, and present-day conservatives in the administration and faculty are rather upset. But respectability is no longer respectable among young Negro women attending college today.
"You can always tell a Spelman girl," alumni and friends of the college have boasted for years. The "Spelman girl" walked gracefully, talked properly, went to church every Sunday, poured tea elegantly and, in general, had all the attributes of the product of a fine finishing school. If intellect and talent and social consciousness happened to develop also, they were, to an alarming extent, by-products.
This is changing. It would be an exaggeration to say: "You can always tell a Spelman girl—she's under arrest." But the statement has a measure of truth. Spelman girls have participated strongly in all of the major actions undertaken by students of the Atlanta University Center in recent months. They have also added a few touches of their own and made white Atlanta, long proud that its nice Negro college girls were staying "in their place," take startled notice. A few weeks ago a Spelman student, riding downtown on the bus, took a seat up front. (This is still a daring maneuver, for in spite of a court decision desegregating the buses, most Negroes stay in the rear.) The bus driver muttered something unpleasant, and a white woman sitting nearby waved her hand and said, "Oh, she's prob'ly goin' downtown to start another one o' them demonstrations."
The reputedly sweet and gentle Spelman girls were causing trouble even before the recent wave of sit-ins cracked the wall of legalism in the structure of desegregation strategy. Three years ago, they aroused the somnolent Georgia Legislature into near-panic by attempting to sit in the white section of the gallery. They were finally shunted into th
e colored area, but returned for the next legislative session. This time they refused to sit segregated and remained on their feet, in a pioneering show of nonviolent resistance, until ordered out of the chamber.
The massive, twelve-foot stone wall, barbed-wire fence and magnolia trees that encircle the Spelman campus have always formed a kind of chastity belt around the student body, not only confining young women to a semi-monastic life in order to uphold the ruling matriarchs' conception of Christian morality, but "protecting" the students from contact with the cruel outside world of segregation. Inside the domain of the Atlanta University Center, with its interracial faculty, occasional white students and frequent white visitors, there flourished a microcosm of the future, where racial barriers did not exist and one could almost forget this was the deep South. But this insulation, while protecting the University Center's island of integration, also kept the city of Atlanta for many years from feeling the barbed resentment of Negro students against segregation. Spelman girls, more sheltered than women at the other colleges, were among the first to leave the island and to begin causing little flurries of alarm in the segregated world outside.