Using Tech to Spread the Story of the 1939 Library Sit-in

Stories of American history have always shaped the way students learn and teachers teach, but the advent of digital media has brought far more possibilities—not to mention questions about how to teach forgotten history, reveal hidden stories, and elevate new voices. Next week at SXSW EDU in Austin, TX, New America’s Education Policy program will be discussing an unusual local-to-national project that explores these questions.

The 1939 Library Sit-in Project is a multi-year digital initiative to shed light on the first-recorded sit-in demanding unsegregated access to a public library. The sit-in, which occurred in Alexandria, VA, during the thick of the Jim Crow era, led to the arrest of five young Black residents. They were charged with disorderly conduct for requesting library cards and sitting down to read in the city’s only public library, designated for White city residents.

On March 6th in Austin, our panel discussion, Arrested for Reading, will delve into how this once-hidden event is becoming better known and why that matters in today’s political and cultural climate. The panel features Rose Dawson, the executive director of the Alexandria Library, and Audrey Davis, the director of the African American History Division of the Office of Historic Alexandria, with myself and Jazmyne Owens, our PreK-12 policy advisor at New America.

The SXSW EDU panel kicks off a year of project activities in partnership with local community leaders, educators, historians, digital media experts, and scholars. To understand what it takes to highlight new stories and make educational materials more accessible, we will be working with librarians digitizing and indexing primary source materials. We’ll also be hosting workshops with teachers and students to design a new online exhibit that points to those resources and tests out new entry points to educational materials.

Last year, with support from the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, we began to explore the possibilities by publishing a video interview series with 10 community leaders, including educators, authors, and a filmmaker, about how the story was preserved and how the City of Alexandria has started to reckon with its implications. Several of the interviews describe actions taken in 2019 to dismiss the charges against the protesters decades after their deaths.

Since then, we have partnered with the Alexandria Library to digitize primary source documents that are currently only available on paper in vertical files and collections in the Local History/Special Collections branch on Queen Street in Alexandria (which happens to be the very site of the sit-in 85 years ago). We received a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission and subgranted most of it to the Alexandria Library for the purchase of specialized digital cameras, scanning equipment, and transcription software to digitize four special collections of printed materials, including letters, library board minutes, city government documents, and biographical materials about individuals involved in the 1939 event and its aftermath. The aim is to digitize an estimated 4,370 pages from these collections and make available approximately 4,400 image files through the Alexandria Library’s web pages and database searches.

The digitization grant will also support the development and hosting of workshops for educators on how to browse and employ the primary source materials with K-12 and higher-education students for courses on U.S. history, education, information literacy, and more.

The project adds to a series of local events hosted by the library this year, which will highlight what Dawson, the library director, calls the “legacy of courage” passed down by the sit-in protesters. “This partnership between New America and the Alexandria Library opens the doors of access and tells the story to a new generation,” Dawson said, “and we are excited to see where it leads.”

We are also embarking on the first phase of a free and open exhibit designed to appeal to educators and students. With a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities’s (NEH) program, Digital Projects for the Public, we will determine the design requirements for this exhibit in coordination with the Alexandria Library and the Alexandria Black History Museum, which is part of the Office of Historic Alexandria. One of the museum’s galleries was once the segregated library hastily constructed for Black residents eight months after the sit-in. For decades, the Alexandria Black History Museum has preserved artifacts and curated exhibits about the sit-in, and the funds awarded by NEH will now enable elements of those exhibits to reach online audiences around the country.

Another partner in the NEH-funded design work is GBH Educational Foundation, which will help us think through how users could experience the exhibit and engage with its educational components. The project also includes other education-focused partners, such as New American History, which is leading the development of openly licensed curricular materials, and the social studies division of the Alexandria City Public Schools, which is supporting co-design with teachers.

From the beginning, we have been guided by an advisory board of seven historians, educators, and community leaders, including Brenda Mitchell-Powell, the author of Public In Name Only: The 1939 Alexandria Library Sit-In Demonstration, published in 2022 by the University of Massachusetts Press. We are grateful for their guidance as we tap into new ways to raise awareness of this quintessentially American story.