Carnegie libraries visited: Union Springs, Alabama.
The Carnegie Library in Union Springs, Alabama, is almost empty when I arrive at 3.30 on a beautiful spring day. It’s a pity. The interior has creaky pine floors and radiators, which probably squeal on cool wintry days. The only patron is a woman who spells out aloud each word she types into a computer. There are no free standing bookshelves. Instead, the library is ringed with mahogany-colored built-in shelves, six feet high as per Carnegie library standards, along all walls.
Union Springs has seen better days. Just not recently. Its population peaked in 1970, at 4324 residents. By 2020, the population had declined by over 20 percent. The town has one elementary school, one middle school, and one high school. These schools serve mainly economically disadvantaged students. Union Springs is 76 percent African American. The Conecuh Springs Christian School is the town’s other school and, probably, where most of the students are white. The town was also the home of Mary Hardaway Walker, who was reportedly one of the nation’s oldest surviving enslaved persons when she died in 1969 at the age of 121. Walker learned to read when she was 116.
I would have taken a side trip through Troy, Alabama, if I could have remembered anything that I would have wanted to see there. Two important episodes in my life did happen there, one “first” and one “last”. Both firsts (the first time I did something) and lasts (the last time I did) interest me. The former are usually easier to remember than the latter. My first kiss? Yes, I remember that. The last time I changed a diaper? If I had known at the time that this would be my final one, I would have held a party to celebrate.
I had hitchhiked over spring to Troy to see my friends John, Martha, Jim, and Katy, who had been my neighbors during middle school in Arkansas. John had a motorcycle, and he let me drive it while he rode on the back. Steaming down a country road I saw that we were approaching a T intersection. An inexperienced driver, I slammed on the brakes. We skidded down and slid along the pavement, stopping feet before the intersection. Just then a truck roared through it. If we had slid 20 feet further, we would have been roadkill. I never drove a motorcycle again.
A “first” also happened on that trip. Modesty precludes me from disclosing it.
I hitchhiked a lot in those days. A lot: my longest trip was from Fayetteville up to Canada, then all the way across the trans-Canada highway and down to Stanford University – 3500 miles. I had gotten the hitchhiking bug not from the most famous hitchhiker (according to Google) Christopher McCandless, the subject of Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild (McCandless eventually died of starvation in Alaska); I got it from my father. When I was a child, my dad would regale our family with his stories of riding the rails and hitching from place to place. Once, he was arrested for auto grand theft. The driver of the car was the one who had actually stolen it, and so my father was soon released from custody. I believe that was his only run in with The Man. Ace hitched because he didn’t have money. True, for me also, yet I hitched mainly for adventure. I wanted to explore and I also wanted the challenge of convincing drivers to pick me up and take me where I (or they) were going.
McCandless had his own reasons for his desire to go away and to disappear into the wilderness. According to his sister Carine, their parents verbally and physically abused them, abuse fueled by his father’s alcoholism. He loved classic literature, and his favorite authors included Jack London and William Faulkner (both alcoholics, just saying) and Leo Tolstoy, who wrote the essay “Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?” as a preface to a book on “drunkenness” by the Russian physician P. S. Alexeyev. In Tolstoy’s words,
The cause of the world-wide consumption of hashish, opium, wine, and tobacco, lies not in the taste, nor in any pleasure, recreation, or mirth they afford, but simply in man’s need to hide from himself the demands of conscience….
When a man is sober he is ashamed of what seems all right when he is drunk. In these words we have the essential underlying cause prompting men to resort to stupefiers. People resort to them either to escape feeling ashamed after having done something contrary to their consciences, or to bring themselves beforehand into a state in which they can commit actions contrary to conscience, but to which their animal nature prompts them.
A man when sober is ashamed to go after a prostitute, ashamed to steal, ashamed to kill. A drunken man is ashamed of none of these things, and therefore if a man wishes to do something his conscience condemns he stupefies himself…
In a word, it is impossible to avoid understanding that the use of stupefiers, in large or small amounts, occasionally or regularly, in the higher or lower circles of society, is evoked by one and the same cause, the need to stifle the voice of conscience in order not to be aware of the discord existing between one’s way of life and the demands of one’s conscience.
Tolstoy is overthinking this. As Freud didn’t actually say, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
When I hitchhiked, I was an actor, playing a role. I wanted to appear both intriguing and harmless. I often took my guitar with me, which although certainly an inconvenience gave me the appearance of being a romantic. I always carried a cardboard sign (“Going home to Mother” “Denver or Bust”). I knew that drivers could change their mind at any time and ask me to get out, so once inside the car I tried to find some commonality that would allow us to bond. And I thought I could find common ground with anyone and everyone.
I was picked up by mothers with their children in the car (“Are you sure you really want to pick up hitchhikers?” I would ask). Rarely, by single women who, I hoped, had their own special reasons for picking up an attractive blond lad like me. My most frequent rides came from solo businessmen. They usually fell into three categories. Some just wanted company to break the monotony of a long drive. Others wanted someone to drink with them or, even better, to drive while they drank. A sizable number just wanted blow jobs (giving or receiving, depending). To these I would give a polite “No thanks” and that usually ended that; I assumed they thought “nothing ventured, nothing gained”. Only one time do I recall the driver pulling over straight away after his rejection and telling me to get out.
Other than a few drivers who had had a few too many, only once was I truly terrified when on the road. While crossing Canada, one pickup truck driver who was already creeping me out asked me to reach into his glove box for his gun.
“Um, no thanks.”
Then he said “Do you know what I like to do? I like to pick up hitchhikers and dump them into a ditch.”
You might not believe this – although it’s tru(ish) – I responded “I’d rather you didn’t do that.”
We drove on in silence, and everything was silent except my heart which was jackhammering blood into my brain because we were in the middle of nowhere. Luck: in a few more miles, he pulled into a gas station and cafe. He asked me if I wanted to go in for a bite to eat – I was gobsmacked – and so I politely declined and went straight back to the road, put my thumb out and, thank you God, quickly got another ride. He probably was just fucking with me and in that he definitely succeeded.
The Eufaula Carnegie Library sits on the east of tree-lined Eufaula Avenue. It is in the Seth Lore and Irwinton Historic District, which encompasses over 700 buildings of historic or architectural significance. Built in 1904 it, along with the Union Springs library, is one of the only two of the 14 Carnegie Libraries built in the state that still serves as a library.
I do not know the fate of all of the dozen Carnegie libraries in Alabama that were closed, but one can surmise the reason that many of them were. The Anniston library: closed, 1965. Avondale: 1961. Gadsden: 1964. Huntsville: 1966. Westend: 1962. Not until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was segregation banned in all public accommodations, yet pressure had been growing for desegregation for years. Alabama had banned the NAACP from operating there in 1956, and in that same year Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth formed the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) to use protests and litigation to promote integration. When state courts ended the segregation of public parks, for example, Birmingham and other cities merely closed them. They had done the same with their libraries, I concluded.
In June 1962 Lola Mae Hendricks (nee Haynes), walked into the segregated Birmingham Library to request a book. She was denied “because she was a negro," according to Desegregation of Public Libraries in the Jim Crow South. Hendricks, along with her husband Joe, both members of the ACMHR, filed suit in federal court to desegregate the public libraries in Birmingham, and this suit was joined by others in ACMHR in an attempt to desegregate all public buildings there. (In a historical sidenote, Hendricks was the one who applied to “Bull” Connor for the first day of a parade permit in Birmingham for the marches led by Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders. Connor’s response to Hendricks’ request? “I’ll parade you to jail.”)
As Wayne and Shirley Wiegand, the authors of Desegregation of Public Libraries, characterized the prevailing attitudes of whites in the South during (at least) the first half of the 1900s: “There was…an assumption that Black people just weren’t interested in literacy or having an education, and it was thought that they didn’t have the same capacity as white people to learn.” Not true, the Wiegands correctly noted: “Like whites across the country, Blacks perceived public libraries as important civic institutions that helped create an informed citizenry and offered myriad opportunities for self-improvement.” Yet “the few public libraries in the South that did provide limited services to blacks often subjected them to experiences that were humiliating.”
Selma was one of the Alabama towns with a Carnegie library. In 1900, “The ladies of our city, interested in a public library, have gotten up a petition to you asking for a donation for the assistance of our library (which, at that time, was in two rented rooms).” This request is followed by “You will find on this petition the names of the most prominent men in Selma….” Moreover, “These ladies have passed a resolution pledging themselves to raise a sum equal to the sum you may donate, not to exceed $5000. (The town was ultimately given $11,800.) Carnegie agreed to fund the library, but only on the condition that the ladies of Selma not raise matching funds, but that the city itself would through taxes levied on the public. This was a condition for any library that Carnegie funded.
The library would be, of course, for whites only. So in 1908 came another request:
God and nature have decreed that you [Carnegie] should be the benefactor of more races than one. I have been urged by the citizens of Selma of both races to call upon you, in this time of our greatest need, and the time of our greatest struggle, to help us in the establishment of a public library for the colored people of the city of Selma. You have furnished one for our white friends, [and] my race cannot enjoy the benefits of that institution, because of the race feelings of the South, therefore as the President of the Colored Library Association of the City of Selma, Alabama, I most earnestly and prayerfully solicit a liberal donation from the ‘Father of Public Libraries of the World’...We have no place for public information.
A couple of paragraphs of informed flattery follow.
James Bertram, Carnegie’s personal secretary (and, later, the Secretary of the Carnegie Corporation), responded: “The City of Selma has already received funds for the erection of a library building from Mr. Carnegie. If the taxpayers wish a small library for the colored people and are prepared to tax themselves in support in same, the proper authorities should address him on the subject, stating what the city is willing to do for its part.”
Another letter, probably from the Colored Library Association and signed by W.H. Nixon, thanks Carnegie for his consideration and again makes its request, this time noting that citizens had pledged $5000 in support of the library.
Bertram responds, peevishly: “Will you please confine yourself strictly [to my previous letter]. You say you will pledge yourselves to raise $5000. Please read our letter again.”
Nixon writes again:
The City authorities desire to know the amount of tax you will require to be levied for the support of the library. The City authorities will not take up the matter until the amount of tax per year is named.
You know the difficulties under which the colored people of this section have to labor to obtain the library, and will you please depart from your usual mode to help us out in this matter. I do not recall a single public library for colored people exclusively in the South. We in Selma labor under many disadvantages but I think that if you specify the amount of the tax required each year I think the City will grant our request.
Bertram replies: “You are giving us a great deal of trouble by persisting in referring this matter back. If you do not at once state…what tax the community will contribute annually…this matter will be dropped.”
Nixon responds with an estimate for the cost of the building.
Bertram replies: “You were written plainly…that if the taxpayers want a library for the colored people…the city must be willing to do its part…As you have again failed to do so, this matter has been postponed indefinitely.”
Selma never got a library for its Black residents; for years, Black residents were served through the back door of the Carnegie by the library’s maid, Annie Mollette. Finally, Selma did get a librarian who finally opened the library up to African Americans. Patricia Swift Blaylock, a white woman who was taught by her grandfather “not to fear blacks,” became the library’s director in 1963, and she pushed immediately and hard for integration. Using personal appeals and warnings of disruptions, she persuaded a reluctant library board to agree to open the doors to Blacks, so long as all the library’s chairs were removed so that whites and Blacks would not be able to sit next to each other. Blalock promoted Mollette to library assistant. In 2017 Blalock was inducted into the Alabama Social Work Hall of Fame.
In 1976, years before she retired, the Selma Carnegie was shuttered and replaced by a new library that was funded by the community. I knew that Selma’s Carnegie building was no longer a library and I wondered what had happened to it. After the new library was built, the Carnegie served as the Dallas County Board of Education building for a number of years, before standing vacant for a couple of years. It was renovated in 2003 and is now called the Centre for Commerce.
We all have our prejudices, and I definitely have mine. I incorrectly surmised that a number of Alabama’s Carnegies closed in the early 1960s because of racial prejudice. I jumped to the conclusion that Alabama + civil rights struggle + racism = close libraries rather than integrate them because that chain of logic accorded with my preconceptions.
This is what really happened. Avondale didn’t close its Carnegie library rather than integrate it; the town demolished it in 1961 to replace it with a much larger new building funded through a local bond issue. The West End Carnegie library, likewise, was replaced in 1962 by a larger building that was air-conditioned. The library in Gadsden followed the classic path. In 1897, eight young women formed what became the Thursday Study Club. By 1900 they had opened a public reading room in a building downtown, and then in 1905 they received a Carnegie building grant. Lena Martin, who had been a charter member of the Study Club, served for 49 years as the library’s director. By 1964, the nearly 60-year building was replaced by a new, larger, modern one. The Huntsville-Madison County library is the oldest continually operating one in Alabama. Founded in 1818, it was burnt to the ground by Union soldiers during the Civil War and between then and the opening of the Carnegie structure in 1916 it existed in changing, temporary, quarters. By the mid-1960s, the community had outgrown that building, and a new library opened in 1966; a yet bigger one replaced it in 1987.
Only in Anniston did overt and violent racism poison the final days of one of Alabama’s Carnegies. On Sunday, September 15, 1963 Reverends William B. McClain and Nimrod Q. Reynolds, two African American ministers, peacefully tried to enter the library. This action was approved in advance by the Anniston Human Rights Council and word of the plan was not kept secret. As they approached the building, a group of white men attacked and beat them, severely injuring Reynolds. The following day, Reverend McClain returned, accompanied by Reverends J. Phillips Noble and George Smitherman, City Commissioner Miller Sproull, and library board members Charlie Doster and Carelton Lentz: in all, four whites and two blacks. McClain checked out a book without incident.
There are no AA meetings in Eufaula, and the alcoholics might be well-hidden, as the town has only two bars and two restaurants that serve spirits, while it heavenly hosts thirty-six churches. Baraboo, Wisconsin – a town of similar size, with a population of about 13,000 – has 127 drinking establishments (according to the Yellow Pages) and twenty-four churches (according to ChurchFinder). There are churches, it seems, on every corner in Eufaula, and bars on every block in Baraboo.
This is the Bible Belt. The day before I arrived, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children, and thus destroying them would involve taking the life of a child (in common parlance, murder). As Chief Justice Parker notes in his concurring opinion, the state constitution includes a reference to the “sanctity of unborn life” and sanctity is defined as “1. Holiness of life and character: GODLINESS; 2a. The state or quality of being sacred: INVIOLABILITY; b pl sacred objects, obligations, or rights.” Quoting John Calvin, Parker rules that “to kill a man is to deface God’s image, and so injury is done not only to man, but to God.” Parker concludes “human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of his image as an affront to himself.” Thus the Alabama Supreme Court defers to the First Commandment and not the First Amendment.
After the library closed, I cruised around the town looking for a good place to park overnight. I was hoping to find a dark, quiet, street, with some cars parked along the side so that I could blend stealthily in. Those streets don’t exist in Eufaula: every home has a driveway, and so the streets were entirely cleared of parked cars. I settled for a very broad road without any traffic. I know this because in the hour I was watching Captivating the King on Netflix not a single car had used it. A church was at one corner – obviously – and some kind of business enterprise with a locked parking lot was on the other. I figured I was safe.
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