What Was the Library Sit-In of 1939?

Most people have never heard of the Alexandria Library sit-in of 1939, but that may soon change. This quintessentially American story helps to illuminate the history of inequities still plaguing our education system and offers inspiring examples of how to overcome them. On the eve of World War II, a group of young African American men in Alexandria, VA, participated in a peaceful demonstration of their right to use the public library. It was the only library in the city and was located just blocks from their homes. At the time, the library still refused to serve Black residents, citing Jim Crow policies and laws in force across most of the South.

On the morning of August 21, 1939, five young men entered the library, one by one, and requested library cards. When they were denied and told to leave, they did the opposite. They selected books from the shelves, sat down at the library’s tables, and quietly began to read. About an hour later, the police arrived and arrested the men. As they were escorted out by two officers, a crowd of observers and several journalists were waiting to capture the event. The five arrests set off a legal challenge unprecedented for the city, if not the country. This was years before the lunch counter sit-ins, bus boycotts, and voting-rights marches of the 1950s and ‘60s.

Here at New America, this story has captured our interest not only because it is largely unknown but also because it offers lessons about how and why to keep pressing for inclusive and nondiscriminatory policies across educational spaces of all kinds. As we wrote in a commentary for The 74, “The story of these five young men in Alexandria in 1939 is a reminder of the unfairness and infringement of rights that come when one group of people dictates what other people are allowed to see, read, absorb and learn.”

In Alexandria, the library sit-in has been the subject of exhibits and events over many years, offered by the Alexandria Black History Museum and Alexandria Library. The event is now receiving national attention as the subject of Public in Name Only: The 1939 Alexandria Library Sit-In Demonstration, a 2022 book by library scholar Brenda Mitchell-Powell from the University of Massachusetts Press.

In this collection of interviews, we delve into the impact of the sit-in, how its story was preserved and has been told over time, how the city’s segregated libraries and schools affected families across generations, and what city leaders are doing to acknowledge and reckon with that fact. Animating the project are these questions:

• What is the legacy of exclusionary policies in libraries and other educational settings? Where does exclusion, segregation, and discrimination still show up in these settings today?
• What can we learn from the individuals who had the courage and vision to protest and push for equal access?
• What can today’s community and education leaders do to elevate community stories and keep pressing for equal opportunities and equity in education?

We open this series with an interview with Brenda Mitchell-Powell, author of Public in Name Only. In the coming weeks we will publish interviews with Audrey Davis, the director of the African American history division in the Office of Historic Alexandria; Rose Dawson, the Alexandria Library director, who is the first African American to hold that position; Justin Wilson, the mayor of Alexandria who worked with the Commonwealth of Virginia’s attorney to have the five arrest charges dropped posthumously; Bryan Porter, the city’s Commonwealth’s attorney who petitioned the judge to drop the charges; and Michael Johnson, a community member and youth mentor in Alexandria who lived through segregated schools and was a child when the library finally integrated.

This interview series is an introduction to a larger suite of materials that will help education leaders, teachers, students, and the public to learn about and continue to grapple with the meaning of this story, and similar stories in other communities.

Over the next year, we will add more video interviews, including conversations with Matt Spangler, a documentary filmmaker who told the story via video in the late 1990s; and Adaarema Kelly and Cathy David, the current and inaugural principals of the elementary school named for Samuel W. Tucker, the young lawyer who organized the sit-in.

This interview series is an introduction to a larger suite of materials that will help education leaders, teachers, students, and the public to learn about and continue to grapple with the meaning of this story, and similar stories in other communities. For example, we are working with curricular experts at New American History and Alexandria City Public Schools to develop resources for teaching students about the sit-in.

In partnership with the Alexandria Library, funded by a grant from the National Archives and Records Administration, we will be helping to digitize—and make available online—scores of printed primary source documents about the events leading up to, during, and after the event. Future projects may include multimedia sites for getting immersed in the story and interactive maps that take readers back to the streets of segregated Alexandria in the 1930s.

Meanwhile, we continue to seek out new scholarship on early resistance to segregationist policies and injustices, widening the aperture for looking at the civil rights movement and showing how protests like the library sit-in helped set the stage for the more well-known demonstrations of the mid-20th century.

We hope the interviews and larger suite of materials will lead to a deeper appreciation for at least three other aspects of this story that resonate today. One is the example of young people within a community leading the push for change. The sit-in participants—William “Buddy” Evans, Edward Gaddis, Morris Murray, Clarence “Buck” Strange, and Otto Tucker—were between 18 and 22 years old. They refused to accept a status quo that held them back from equal opportunities, blazing a trail for others.

The sit-in participants refused to accept a status quo that held them back from equal opportunities, blazing a trail for others.

Another significant theme centers on how systems throughout our communities restricted access to knowledge for generations of families, ultimately adding more evidence to the long history of anti-literacy policies aimed at Black Americans.

And a third is what libraries, symbolically and literally, represent to our country as educational spaces. Today’s libraries are spaces that invite families to learn and explore together and encourage individuals of any age to continue learning outside the four walls of a classroom. They enable a sense of individual autonomy, self-directed learning, and freedom of inquiry—all key components for a thriving democracy. The sit-in story exposes, however, the fact that public libraries were not always such bastions of inclusivity. Sometimes it takes brave individuals and outside groups to push institutions toward fairness and equal opportunity.

In short, the story of the library sit-in opens many avenues for examining the state of education and learning in the U.S. We are excited to be launching this project and want to make it as collaborative, engaging, and relevant as possible. If you have questions or would like to connect with us, please email project lead Lisa Guernsey at guernsey@newamerica.org.