Not Free, Not For All: Public Libraries in the Age of Jim Crow
Not Free, Not For All, was a book I elected to read as an aspiring information professional who just happens to be a Black woman. I knew that I needed a reality check and I wanted to challenge myself.
Speaking personally now, I’ve gone the entirety of my life knowing to some extent about the history of segregation, slavery, and racism; I also knew that I, as a Black person, was at one point now allowed in certain places. As you might be able to imagine, once it clicked in my head that the library was also a place that would have denied my entry because I was Black was a devastating blow. In fact it was almost enough to make me give up the dream of working in the library profession all together, because it almost felt like I had been lied to about this place I loved so much.
Going back to the book, I recommend it as essential reading for all aspiring information professionals because it helps to redefine what an individual’s understanding of “access” is within the context of racism. Beginning with the dissection of the given history of the library, the author quickly goes into the history that is more hidden from view, laying the foundation for the argument that “free access” was never about open shelf policies, but rather the historical policy and practice of allowing open access to some patrons and actively and explicitly restricting the access of others.
In reviewing this text, I realize that there is far too much material for me to analyze here, but I would be remiss if I didn’t run down a short list of topics she covered, which includes:
Policies that forced Black communities to create their own libraries with very little funding.
Policies that kept Black readers out of libraries and Black professionals out of positions of power within libraries.
Policies that turned intellectual freedom into a white privilege.
Contradicting uses for the library, which meant intellectual spaces cultivated by white women and social welfare and educational spaces created by Black women.
How white women feminized the library space and profession (this is more linked to low literacy rates in Black men as opposed to librarianship)
Censorship of culturally relevant materials to Black patrons by white library professionals.
In summary, this book truly attempts to tackle the issue of how white supremacy and racist policies played a role in the development of libraries and is essential to understanding how the library has the power to either transform or hinder the communities that they are placed in, because it’s not enough for a library collection to be representative—there is the additional issue of the community who is being represented having access to that representation. (From this book I learned that W.E.B. Du Bois was not allowed to step into a library that had books he had written himself in its collection.)
“As ‘universities of the people,’ public libraries helped create an African American identity, asserting individual's’ capacity for intellectual labor in an era when the value of a liberal education for blacks remained a topic for debate. Libraries provided access points for black literacy and intellectualism, confirmation that African Americans were reading, reflecting , striving human beings.”
“‘Experience seems to show that [an] adult Negro waits for tangible proofs of the library’s willingness to extend full privileges to him before he takes advantage of it’s service, then he responds to the library service and needs more of it than the library can give….Time is ripe for development of library services for Negroes, but it must not be patronizing or partially informed.’”
“Public libraries designated for the exclusive use of African Americans clearly participated in the construction of blackness. Less obviously, public libraries in general helped define whiteness. On one hand was the public library, with it unannounced restriction on access; on the other was the Negro library, with it’s label of difference sometimes carved into its facade.”
“The U.S. public library was one of many institutions upholding the systemic racism that enabled white supremacy...it is fantasy to believe that the public library was one of the few institutions not implicated in a system of racism or that separated public libraries for African Americans were just an unfortunate exception to the public library’s true democratic nature.”
“More significantly, literary societies gave African Americans an opportunity to position themselves as participants in rather than victims of a democratic experiment whose founding documents revered liberty but whose national economy increasingly depended on slavery.”
“Unlike the white General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the Nation Association of Colored Women did not declare the creation of public libraries a priority. Instead, clubs wove a commitment to books and reading into their social welfare programs and services. Most black clubwomen pursued self-improvement through reading and writing as well as community improvement in a variety of charitable events.”
“The racially restrictive admission policies of southern public libraries ensured that the new public spaces would not challenge white women’s sense of superiority and entitlement nor the white man's sense that white women needed protecting from a threat manufactured by white men themselves.”
“...he did not give away manhood so much as redefine it. Black manhood meant accepting a hard lot in life and making the best of it. In compensation, whites were to recognize what such men had given up and accept the conciliation it represented. Black men’s power lay in their capacity for work, not in their ability to organize and agitate.”
“For the most part, the new southern public libraries were free to all whites. Inequitable access did not disappear with the transformation of libraries from private to public; it merely shifted from an economics basis to a racial one. Inability to pay membership and use fees no longer precluded access to library collections and service. Race did instead.”
“Elizabeth McHenry’s interpretation of the benefits that accrued to members of black literary societies applies equally well to the users of black libraries. ‘The growing number of educated black men and women considered reading and other literary work as essentially to the project of refashioning the personal identity and reconstructing the public image of African Americans...although black women’s clubs were not exclusively literary in nature…a primary impact of the black women’s club movement was the increased production, circulation, and readership of printed texts.’”
“The library was organized around the needs and desires of individual readers. Once the librarian issued them borrowing cards...readers followed their own literary tastes, reading paces, and borrowing patterns. In contrast, literary societies were organized around regular meetings, often opened to non-members as well as members, which featured the public presentation of a paper written before the meeting and discussed during the session and even afterwards. Reading, writing, thinking, and talking were social activities with the potential for political outcomes.”
“A person ventured into the literary society meeting in search of spoken words but traveled to the library in search of printed words. The result at both venues could be a meeting of the minds, but at the library, that meeting was silent and invisible, occurring solely between reader and author.”
“Henry Gaill of New Orleans indicated that his library could not afford to send staff to a library school and their low salaries meant that they would not be able to afford such training themselves. Some respondents said that black librarians and assistant librarians had received training in the main library, apparently alongside whites, who were receiving apprenticeship-style practical instruction instead of attending library school.”
“Several of the librarians asserted that a library school for African Americans was need...If one of the functions of professional education was to socialize students into the customs and practices of the profession, then a southern library school for blacks would need to manage the expectations of students who, as public librarians, could expect to work part time at low pay with little support for collection building or outreach.”
“For the most part, African American library buildings were small, with inadequate collections and funding. Nevertheless, they were significant, both as physical places in the urban landscape and as symbolic spaces in the lives of local black communities.”
“The New South included racial segregation and gender-specific roles designed to create appropriate places for black men, black women, white women, and to keep those places separate from and subordinate to the place of white men.”
“The injection of Carnegie funds and the requisite annual city appropriation for maintenance might have fed into the black economy, providing design and construction projects for African American architects, engineers, contractors, and trades workers. Instead, local black professionals and skilled workers received little or no benefit from these important building projects in their neighborhoods.”
“Librarians generally seemed to think that they had a responsibility to help children develop the habit of reading, as long as it did not become an obsession, and the duty to lead children from the more sensational and unrealistic to the more refined...they also seemed to understand the need to nurture not only children’s intellectual development but also their emotional life and imagination.”
“African American readers were better served by library staff members who looked like them and who exuded helpfulness rather than hostility. Black librarians would create ‘an atmosphere where welcome and freedom are the predominant elements,’ Harris suggested, implying that white librarians were creating quite a different atmosphere when African Americans entered the building.”
“The library’s annual report for 1953 noted that, with one exception, all of the African American borrowers returned their books on time. Perhaps the librarian included this information because some white staff members had assumed that black readers would be irresponsible.”
“Bullock was exactly what late nineteenth-century opponents of education for African Americans had feared: a black person who was willing to speak out when treated unfairly, willing to demand the rights due to him as a citizen, a taxpayer, and a human being. He also represented what supporters of education and libraries claimed would happened when blacks were given the same opportunities as whites. They would form a class of hardworking, responsible citizens who paid their taxes and a market of consumers who would contribute to overall economic growth.”
Knott, C. (2015). Not free, not for all: Public libraries in the age of Jim Crow. University of Massachusetts Press.
