Renate L. Chancellor, associate professor in the Department of Library and Information Science at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and author of E. J. Josey: Transformational Leader of the Modern Library Profession (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), is a leading Josey scholar. American Libraries spoke with her about his life, activism, and impact on … Continue reading The Activist Life of E. J. Josey
Hollis was treated to the screening of recently discovered footage at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History showing the read-in and the arrests. The video shows her talking to a library assistant in the Jackson Municipal Library. “I went to the desk very confidently,” Hollis said, “and asked for a specific book. I let her … Continue reading The Tougaloo Nine Remembered
It’s long past time that library organizations and individual libraries do something to recognize the black kids—many of them still alive like Joan Mattison Daniel—who risked their lives at this critical time. Here are some of their stories. The Tougaloo Nine At 11 a.m. on March 27, 1961, nine students from the historically black Tougaloo … Continue reading Desegregating Libraries in the American South
August 21, 1939. Five African-American men—William “Buddy” Evans, Edward Gaddis, Morris L. Murray, Clarence “Buck” Strange, and Otis Lee Tucker—walk into the whites-only Alexandria (Va.) Library (now the Barrett branch library). Strange’s younger brother Bobby, 14, serves as lookout and courier. The men, who range in age from 18 to 22, ask for library cards … Continue reading “I Always Will Refuse”
Another of the students was Joan Mattison Daniel, a then-18-year-old freshman at Morris Brown College in Atlanta, who recently told American Libraries that “Jesse Jackson was responsible for our getting together to stage the sit-in. He had come home in January and needed a book to write a paper. The book was not at the … Continue reading The Greenville Eight
