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

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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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

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 fact for the day