082623 Way Black History Fact - The First Sit-In Protest of a Whites-Only Library

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Our Way Black History Fact highlights the first sit-in protest of a Whites-Only library in Virginia in 1939 by Samuel Wilbert Tucker.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
For now, though, it is time for the Way Black
History Fact. Today's Way Black History Fact is sponsored by
Underground Beach Club. From the Streets to the Beach. For
the latest in beachware, visit Underground Beachclub dot com. And
today we're talking about the first sit in protest of
a white's only library. This reading comes from Zen Education Project.

(00:21):
On August twenty first, nineteen thirty nine, twenty six year
old Samuel Wilbert Tucker, an innovative civil rights lawyer, launched
a sit in aimed at protesting the white's only policy
at the segregated Alexandria, Virginia Public Library. Earlier in the year,
Tucker and an acquaintance, retired Army sergeant George Wilson, had
been rejected in their attempts to apply for library cards
and were told by an assistant librarian that the library's

(00:44):
library boards policy was not to issue cards to colored persons.
According to historian Jay Douglas Smith, author of Managing White Supremacy, Race, Politics,
and Citizenship in jen Crow, Virginia, Tucker There we Go
foiled a lawsuit on behalf of Wilson, arguing that taxes

(01:05):
paid by black citizens helped operate the library, so blacks
therefore had a right to use its facilities. Corporation Court
Judge William Wools held off on his ruling to give
the city and library time to solve the issue with
actions such as creating a separate branch library for African Americans. Tucker, though,
decided to force a confrontation. According to Smith, he recruited

(01:27):
five black men otto Tucker, Edward Gaddis Morris, Murray, William Evans,
and Clarence Strange, all between eighteen and twenty two years
of age, to go one by one into the library,
well dressed and ask to apply for borrowers cards. Anticipating
that they would be rebuffed, Tucker had instructed the young
men to select books from the shows and quietly sit
down to read each at a different table and after

(01:48):
being refused. The action was an early attempt at non
violent protests, preceding by two decades the civil rights lunch
counter sit ins that began in Oklahoma City in nineteen
fifty eight. In Greensboro, North Carolina, in nineteen sixty, when
the men did not stand up and vacate the library
at the librarian's request, police were summoned. They told the
men they would be arrested if they did not leave.

(02:11):
Men politely refused. Over an hour later, they went peacefully
with the police. When they left the library, the men
encountered an audience of two to three hundred people, plus
news reporters and photographers waiting outside. The crowd had been
gathered by Tucker to witness the discrimination and arrest. Although everyone,
including the police, remained calm, City Manager Carl Budweski, ordered

(02:32):
the police to charge the men with disorderly conduct the
next day, and hearing before Police Court Judge James Rhese Duncan,
Tucker's questioning led the police officers to concede there was
no disorder. Tucker accused the city of assuming that the
men were disorderly because they were black. City Attorney Armstead
Booth then requested the judge to postpone the case while

(02:52):
the charges were reconsidered. The disorderly case dragged on through
the fall of nineteen thirty nine, with Judge Duncan allowing
multiple continuance is but never officially ending the matter in court. Meanwhile,
Tucker's lawsuit on behalf of Sergeant George Wilson proceeded in
Judge Woolve's court, and Wolves finally ruled on January tenth,
nineteen forty, when he issued a split decision. He denied

(03:13):
Wilson's petition for a library card on a technicality that
Tucker was the one who actually filled out the application
for him, But Wolves also ruled that Alexandria must permit
black residents to use the white library because there was
no other separate library for non whites. Two days after
Wolve's ruling, the Alexandra City Council undermined any thought of
having an integrated library by approving money for a separate

(03:36):
library for black residents. Tucker denounced the council's action as
pouring insult into injury. He wrote to city Librarian Catherine
Skaggin to say, I refuse and will always refuse to
accept a card that could be used only at the
forthcoming black library, and that is our way. Black History

(03:58):
fact for the day