Telling the Story of the 1939 Alexandria Library Sit-In on Screen

Matt Spangler was a 20-something aspiring documentary filmmaker when he learned about the 1939 Alexandria Library sit-in. He was walking just a few blocks from his home in 1998 when he came across a metal plaque mounted on a stone installed in the ground at the corner of Wythe Street and North Alfred Street in Alexandria, VA. The marker briefly told the story of the sit-in and noted that the building at this corner was the segregated, or “colored,” library that opened in the spring of 1940, months after five young Black protesters were arrested for reading in the public library, just a few blocks south, which was designated for White residents only.

The story of the sit-in and its impact captivated Spangler and he went inside the building, which is now the Alexandria Black History Museum, to learn more. In 1999, he released the documentary film Out of Obscurity: The Story of the 1939 Alexandria Library Sit-In to bring the story to more people. We spoke to Spangler on July 7, 2023, at the museum. The conversation below, on video and as a transcript, is an excerpt of a longer interview and has been edited for clarity.

How did you find out about the story of the Alexandria Library sit-in?

So geographically, how close was I? I was on the northern end of Old Town [Alexandria], and I was working as a journalist at the time. I was very interested in nonfiction media and also had aspirations to become a documentary filmmaker. And I was just wandering around, and I ran across the stone marker commemorating Alexandria as the site of the nation's first sit-in in 1939. And like probably most Americans, at least at that time, outside of Alexandria, I thought that the sit-in movement began, you know, in the South in the 1960s with a bunch of lunch counter protests, right? So I was kind of blown away by that fact. So all this was kind of swirling in my head. And then one day, it just kind of popped in my head: this really should be a documentary. This should be a story that should get out to a wider audience. And that’s what launched me on it.

You’ve said that the next step was connecting with the staff at the Alexandria Black History Resource Center, the name of the Alexandria Black History Museum back then. Tell us about that and how you met the now-director, Audrey Davis.

Well, it seemed, you know, pretty obvious that if I was going to embark on this project, I had to collaborate with the center. You know, that's the repository of, then and now, of Black history and African American history in Alexandria. So I just literally walked in one day, and Audrey and Louis Hicks, who was the director at the time, were here, and I told them I was just, you know, smitten with the story. And I really thought it should be a documentary. And I guess I was just passionate and persuasive enough that they agreed to collaborate with me.

And they were, to put it short, invaluable resources throughout the whole process. You know, they steered me towards all the research sites that I needed to go to get background on it, helped connect me to folks that I needed to interview for the project, helped connect me to the images for it as well. So they were...it just couldn't have been done without them.

So that was the spring of 1998. By August of 1999, that was the 60th anniversary of the sit-in. I think I may be skipping ahead here, but we actually released, you know, the documentary shortly after that 60th anniversary.

Tell us more about the release of the documentary that summer, in 1999.

There were some politics, you know, swirling around it, because it was the 250th anniversary of Alexandria. And Alexandria is a city, you know, that's mostly been known for celebrating its White history throughout its history. I can't really speak for the last quarter century as well. [Spangler moved away from Alexandria more than twenty years ago and returned to the DC area in 2022.]. But there was definitely a sentiment in the city at the time that something needed to be done to chronicle the African American history as well. So there were politics kind of fueling that, the drive to get it done at that time.

What financial resources did it take to produce the documentary?

So some of, you know, the funding for the project came out of my own pocket. I also received a very generous grant from the Office of Historic Alexandria. So that actually helped underwrite a lot of the production and postproduction costs of it.

Your documentary featured video footage of Samuel Tucker and others who had passed away by the time you were filming. How did you find those older video clips?

Yeah, that's an interesting story. I think you asked once what one of the roadblocks was in getting it done. And probably the most significant one was the one remaining participant—the one living participant in the sit-in—was Buddy Evans. He was still alive in the summer of 1999. And we were going to do an interview with him. So my co-director, Eddie Becker, and I showed up at his house. He was in Washington, living in DC at the time, in the summer of 1999. And one of his family members came to the door and told us he had had a stroke, you know, the day before.

Yeah, so that was very sad news, you know, for his family. Also sad news for the film because I was kind of relying on him to kind of tell the story—at least, you know, from a contemporary standpoint.

So I thought the project, frankly, might be sunk, you know, at that point. But I talked to Audrey, and she saved our bacon. She—and you'll have to confirm this with her—I think she was an undergrad at the University of Virginia [confirmed], and she had a professor there, William Elwood, who had made this wonderful documentary in the 1980s called The Road to Brown. And he went around throughout the South interviewing all these veterans of the Civil Rights Movement about, you know, the struggle that led to Brown versus Board of Education [the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on segregated schools]. And he had hours and hours of footage. And included in that was some interviews with Sam Tucker and Buddy Evans, and actually Otto Tucker, Sam's brother, as well. And Audrey connected me to Dr. Elwood, and he just said, “yeah, sure, you can have whatever you want from the collection.” So Audrey and Dr. Elwood really saved it. And, you know, if you see the documentary today, you know, that's a lot of his footage that's in there.

Is some of that video footage from interviews with Tucker about his later work bringing desegregation cases to the U.S. Supreme Court?

In the ‘80s, yeah. You know it was the New Kent case that he argued before the Supreme Court in 1968 and that was the one where, you know, the Southern states had basically been resisting desegregation for years. And so the Supreme Court kind of pointed a finger at them and said, no, you have to take care of this now. And Tucker was the one that made that argument, you know, before the Supreme Court.

The addition of actual footage of Tucker provided depth for the documentary. What are some other successes you experienced?

Well, I you know, after that, they really kind of came together and it was a joy ride, I would say, for the most part, from start to finish. Especially with everyone that I collaborated with, the people that work with me on the production and postproduction, and working with, you know, Audrey and Louis and the other historians as well.

I would say, you know, the biggest success that always, you know, sort of sticks out in my mind, and I think understandably so, is towards the end of 1999 [when] the city council of Alexandria had a meeting [and the school board voted] to name the new elementary school in the west end of Alexandria. And interestingly the two names that they were considering were Sam Tucker and Armistead Boothe, who was on the other side of the courtroom fighting the, litigating the case, you know, in 1940 over the sit-in.

And they showed the documentary at the council meeting. And then afterwards, they unanimously voted to name it after Sam Tucker. So I don't think that was me. But I think if watching that film helped persuade them, you know, that this was something that needed to be done, I don't know what else I can say—it was certainly a great success, and what I'm most proud of, you know, [being] associated with this film.

We had the opportunity to interview the founding and current principals at Samuel W. Tucker Elementary School as a part of this project.

Yeah, I haven't been there in quite a while, but I did see—I went onto their website this week—and see that they put up that BLM mural, recently. And that's just wonderful. It's wonderful that the kids there are, you know, having a sense of social justice instilled in them at that age.

Tell us how the film was disseminated.

There were a series of public screenings around the DC area for maybe like the next year or so. It did screen at a couple of festivals, including the Rosebud Film Festival. I don't know if that's still in existence anymore, but that was in Washington; [it] won an award there. Years later, it screened at the inaugural Alexandria Film Festival, and I think that's still around. But it won the inaugural Best Documentary award at that festival as well. It aired on a couple of public television outlets. There was an independent public television outlet named WNVC-TV in Falls Church. So they aired it in 2000; also the PBS affiliate in Pittsburgh aired it as well. And then later in 2000, it got picked up for distribution by California Newsreel, which is a big catalog and distributor of films to the education market, I would say primarily; they had, for about a decade, exclusive distribution rights on it. But we did have a carve-out in our deal so that the resource center can sell its own copies of the DVD as well.

Having that deal sort of limited, somewhat, you know, what I could do with it, you know, at that point. But yeah, it got out, you know, quite a bit. I don't know that it really took the world by storm,…. But it's a story that, you know, continues to fascinate and, you know, in this area,…resonate as well.

When Out of Obscurity was first released, was it a DVD, VHS, or some other media?

So when we made the film, we shot it, like, all the interviews on mini DV. I don't know what Elwood shot his films on, but we eventually mastered on a format called Beta Cam. And it's obsolete, you know. I think it’s not used anymore. So we still have, like, a few Beta Cam masters of it, and that's what we created the DVD copies from.

Is there anything you wish you would have done differently when developing the documentary?

To that question, I would give what is a very generic answer, that a lot of filmmakers would, and that is you just wish you had more money, you know, to make it with….I think it looks good. And it's obviously a film that resonates with people. But, you know, I look at it sometimes; I think, you know, I wish we had more money to stage that reenactment sequence. You know, we....It was a crunch in postproduction, and, you know, we booked some space in a local post house, you know, to do it. And I wish we'd had more time, you know, to do it. My co-director was Eddie Becker. He was also the cinematographer, and he was using a Sony, a Mini DV camera, to shoot it on, which was fine. But, you know, there were better cameras available at that time. So it would have been nice to have [had] more money to do it.

In terms of being able to capture the voices of those involved in the sit-in, were there people you wish you could go back and interview?

There was—I don't know that this is a moment that I really regret not having captured or an interview I regret not having captured— but I did contact Howard Smith, Jr. [who served on the board of the Alexandria Library for 63 years.] And it was his father that presided over the trial of Tucker, when he was a youth, when he was arrested for sitting in the wrong seat in a streetcar.* And his father was a pretty unapologetic supporter of segregation when he was a congressman. So his son, maybe not surprisingly, didn't want to talk to me. He gave me a pretty curt response, you know, when I talked to him on the phone. So when I got off, I was like, “well, that's not happening.” So yeah, but, you know, it would have been fascinating, you know, to get that interview, to try to get somebody to defend the system, I suppose, but...

How has your work on the film Out of Obscurity informed the way you think about your work today?

So my work now—like a lot of creative types, I have a day job. So I work in development for a social justice nonprofit. So certainly the same passion that I had for this project, for the documentary and how it told the story of the civil rights struggle, certainly that fuels the work that I do for social justice. It's a legal defense, public defender, law firm.

And I think the way [the story of the sit-in] should have probably affected me is for me to take away a message like—what is the quote?—"The arc of the moral universe is long, but always bends toward justice." Right? But, you know, I made the film in my ‘20s and I suppose I was a little bit more of an optimist then. Now I'm in my 50s. And since that time, you know, we've had the war on terrorism. We've had the Trump administration. We've had George Floyd, and gun violence that just never stops, and climate change, and so on and so forth. So I don't know that, you know, I feel that way about the direction that America is headed. So, sorry to end on a dark note. But that being said, you know, what do you do with that? You know, when you have that sort of realization? Well, you know, do you put your tail between your legs and do nothing? Or do you try to make whatever difference you can in the world?

Do you see the work of amplifying the story of the sit-in connected to what’s happening in the country now?

I always saw the story as…one piece of a larger puzzle, in telling the story of the larger civil rights struggle. You know, he did...Sam Tucker, you know, he didn't litigate Brown versus Board of Education personally. But this was kind of a critical test case, you know, that proved out that these arguments could be made, you know? So by the same token, does anyone think Dr. King single-handedly ushered in the Voting Rights Act? No. I mean, there's many players involved in the process and many stops along the way. And similarly, like the sit-in it is one of those steps, right? It was one of those steps.

*In “The Trials of S. W. Tucker,” a Washington Post Magazine article published on June 11, 2000, writer S. J. Ackerman describes an incident when Tucker was 14 years old and riding an electric streetcar with his brother. The two boys flipped a reversible seat on the streetcar so that they could face their older brother, and a White woman had them arrested for flipping that seat because it encroached on the “Whites only” section. A jury found them innocent.