Librarians around the country are currently on a battleground, defending their right to purchase and circulate books dealing with issues of race and systemic racism. Despite this work, the library community has often overlooked—even ignored—its own history of White supremacy and deliberate inaction on the part of White librarians and library leadership. Author Wayne A. Wiegand takes a crucial step to amend this historical record. In Silence or Indifference: Racism and Jim Crow Segregated Public School Libraries (University of Mississippi Press, 2024) analyzes and critiques the world of professional librarianship between 1954 and 1974.
Wiegand begins by identifying racism in the practice and customs of public school libraries in the years leading up to the Brown v. Board of Education decision. This culture permeated the next two decades, as subsequent Supreme Court decisions led to feeble and mostly unsuccessful attempts to integrate Jim Crow public schools and their libraries. During this same period, the profession was honing its national image as a defender of intellectual freedom, a proponent of the freedom to read, and an opponent of censorship. Still, the community did not take any unified action to support Brown or to visibly oppose racial segregation. As Black school librarians and their Black patrons suffered through the humiliations and hostility of the Jim Crow educational establishment, the American library community remained largely ambivalent and silent.
The book brings to light a distressing history that continues to impact the library community, its students, and its patrons. Currently available school library literature skews the historical perspective that informs the present. In Silence or Indifference is the first attempt to establish historical accountability for the systemic racism contemporary school librarianship inherited in the twenty-first century.
Wayne A. Wiegand is F. William Summers Professor of Library and Information Studies Emeritus at Florida State University. Often referred to as “the Dean of American library historians,” he is author of many scholarly articles and books, including Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey; Part of Our Lives: A People’s History of the American Public Library; and American Public School Librarianship: A History.
Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.
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Speed slower above 40 gigabytes of city tales. My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big row as man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend. My friends still laughing at me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B. But with LinkedIn, you'll be able to reach people who do. Get a $100 credit on your next ad campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com/results to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com/results. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn. The place to be. To be. Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to the Library Science Channel of New Books Network. My name is Jen Hoyer. And today I'm speaking with Wayne Wiegand. Author of In Silence or In Difference. Racism and Jim Crow segregated public school libraries. Published by the University of Mississippi Press in August 2024. Librarians around the country are currently on a battleground, defending their right to purchase and circulate books, dealing with issues of race and systemic racism. Despite this work, the library community has often overlooked, even ignored its own history of white supremacy and deliberate inaction on the part of white librarians and library leadership. With In Silence or In Difference, racism and Jim Crow segregated public school libraries, Wayne Wiegand analyzes and critiques the world of professional librarianship between 1954 and 1974. This book brings to light a distressing history that continues to impact the library community, its students and its patrons. Currently available school library literature skews the historical perspective that informs the present. And this book is the first attempt to establish historical accountability for the systemic racism contemporary school librarianship inherited in the 21st century. Wayne Wiegand is the F William Summers Professor of Library and Information Studies Emeritus at Florida State University. Wayne, welcome to New Books Network. Thank you very much. Before we jump into chatting about your book, I would really love if you could introduce yourself for listeners. Would you mind sharing a little bit about your background and your research? Yeah. When I was a junior in college, my wife was working at a college library and I was introduced to the college librarian there who had a joint PhD in history and an MLS in library science. I thought that was kind of neat. So as I worked my own way through the PhD program in history, and I saw, foresaw that there weren't going to be any jobs at the end of that effort, I decided to pick up a library science degree in the course of my library science curriculum. I realized there wasn't very much history written on libraries. So I just married the two into an academic career and had been doing research and writing in American library history ever since. That started in 1976. Fantastic. Yeah, and I mean, you've been writing a lot about library history and this book clearly emerges from your career doing that research. You've written books broadly about American library history and you've also written specifically about school libraries. What led you to focus on segregation in school libraries and what were some of your goals for writing this book about a whole book about the history? Your referencing a book that I published in 2021 called American Public School Librarianship, A History. The research for that book was funded by a Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress. So I had access to a whole bunch of stuff that was at the Library of Congress, which in my estimation is the, for me, it's the best library in the world. And as I was putting together a history of American public school librarianship, I was simply appalled at the absence of commentary regarding the civil rights, what's called the second civil rights area, about 1954 to 1974. And so I decided if I could not find any information about this in library literature, could I find it elsewhere? And yes, I did. So I pursued all sorts of recorded interviews with people who, black people who went through the civil rights area, came up with a number of them that were school librarians. I pursued, fortunately for me, while I was in Washington doing research at the Library of Congress, I also went over to George Washington University, which had the National Education Association Records. And the NEA took the desegregation of public school libraries much more -- they did a much more accurate job than the American Library Association did. There was almost no response to desegregation of public school libraries that I could tell in library literature, but there was a great deal of response that I could see in the National Education Association Records. And so that became the reflective platform for me. I could see what ALA wasn't doing. I could see what state library associations weren't doing. I could see what library agencies were not doing by looking at what educators were doing with the National Education Association and its affiliates. That's how I put the thing together, with records from the NEA, state records and federal records having to do with desegregation. On occasion, they would speak to the issue of school libraries. And I just picked up bits and pieces of this information and put it together into the book that you've got before you. Yeah, I mean, you clearly -- you've found a real wealth of information. And you've organized the book in three sections that look at three different eras. Before Brown versus Board of Education, the decade following Brown and then the decade from 1965 to 1974. So to situate listeners, could you give some context on the general situation of segregated school libraries prior to Brown and what the reality was in various parts of the United States? Most of what my attention, of course, is that the Jim Crow South, the former states of the Confederacy, which is where one will find most of the racially segregated schools. That doesn't mean that there weren't segregated school libraries elsewhere. For example, African Americans lived in black parts of large towns. And of course, their kids would attend schools in those parts of those large cities. And they would largely be all black kids in all black schools. So segregation existed throughout the country, but it was most prominent and in the Jim Crow South. I can't, you want me to expound more on that? Yeah, sure. I mean, one thing I was really fascinated by in reading about the situation of these segregated school libraries was just a very like stark funding difference. And how the plate of these segregated black school libraries was just really having an impact on even school accreditation for high schools. Right. Yeah. Well, when the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, SACS for short, established its rules for getting accredited in the South, black schools wanted to get get accredited as much as white schools did, but the black schools were vastly underfunded compared to the white school. So you had so many fewer black schools getting accredited because they simply didn't have the funding to meet the criteria established by SACS. Nonetheless, some tried as best they could to do so. And some were successful in doing so, but the percentage was relatively small. So the black, in order to supply black school librarians, a number of HBCU historically black universities and colleges established library science programs because black students could not get into ALA accredited white schools like University of Alabama, like Louisiana State University, like Florida State University where I taught for a number of years. So those programs arose to supply the black school librarians and largely they were the ones that did that. Even in library practice, however, the black school, the few black school librarians were managing collections at black schools before Brown versus the Board of Education. They had obstacles to overcome. For example, a number of your listeners are not going to know what readers guide to periodical literature is readers guide to periodical literature was the index that the H W Wilson company put together that screen of index about 5060 magazines so that people who wanted information in those Magazines could visit the index readers guide to periodical literature index, no black periodical before Brown versus the Board of Education. And there were a number of prominent black periodicals, including a periodical called Christ was crisis, which was issued by the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People NAACP. So if the library, the black library, subscribe to readers guide to periodical literature, or it's abridged version, which most high schools had, that abridged version did not index a black periodical leader, even again, though there was several prominent. So a black student in let's say Columbia, South Carolina, going to the black school and act trying to access information on, let's say, black soldiers in World War II. If he went to the abridged readers guide would find no information from black periodicals, he'd have to go elsewhere for that. So there are obstacles built into the practices of librarianship that manifested the systemic racism that I talked about before Brown. Yeah, absolutely. And I, you've, you've kind of mentioned on mentioned on a few threads that I want to tease out, because looking across all three eras that you touch on, people librarians are one, one real theme and you mentioned how hard it was for black librarians to get training when white library schools wouldn't allow them. Um, so kind of starting with, with librarians. How did school librarian training evolve, especially for perspective black librarians over this span that you write about prior to Brown, and then through the civil rights era and what were some of the major obstacles and some of the different solutions you've you've referenced a few but curious to know what else. Yeah, let me focus on two people. First, authoring Lucy. Authoring Lucy and a friend managed to get accepted to the University of Alabama in 1952. As I recall, but they didn't identify the race on their application. Authoring wanted to become a school librarian and she wrote that into her application well when the University of Alabama found out that she and her friend were African Americans. They denied her admission so the NAACP took them to court. Ultimately, authoring was allowed to come to campus and took a couple of classes in early 1956 and riots occurred on campus and ultimately authoring was expelled. So she was not allowed to go to the white library school on the University of Alabama campus, and thus could not get a library science degree. Now I'll focus on Virginia Lacey Jones, who ended up becoming dean of the Atlanta University School of Library Service. When she went to school, she went to the University of Illinois library school on what was called a Jim Crow scholarship. The state of Georgia, where she was, didn't want black students in white university so for graduate education the state supplied money for fellowships for black students to go outside of the state, and that's where Virginia Lacey Jones ended up at the University of Illinois. Well she experienced racism at the University of Illinois. Also, she was felt isolated there weren't a whole lot of black students there, but that's how she acquired her master library science degree and her PhD also at the University of Illinois. So if you compare those two you'll see there were always obstacles for African American students, sometimes insurmountable, sometimes surmountable but relatively unpleasant. It is brought to you by La Quinta by Window. Your work can take you all over the place, like Texas. You've never been, but it's going to be great because you're staying at La Quinta by Window. Their free bright side breakfast will give you energy for the day ahead, and after you can unwind using their free high speed Wi-Fi. Tonight La Quinta, tomorrow you shine. Book your stay today at LQ.com. Ford Pro-Fins Simple offers flexible financing solutions for all kinds of businesses, whether you're an electrician, or run an organic farm. Because we know that your business demands financing that works when you need it, like when your landscaping company lands a new account. Wherever you see your business headed, Ford Pro-Fins Simple can help you pursue it with financing solutions today. Get started at FordPro.com/financing. Yeah, definitely. And then you also referenced this reader's guide earlier, and that ties into the whole theme of collections, and it was just so clear to me when I was reading your book that we can't separate library segregation from collection censorship. And so this issue of having these bibliographic tools that are heavily skewed towards white literature, white produced literature, white history, really impacted the state of libraries. What did black librarians do to combat that? What kind of tools did they come up with? Well, not only did they meet the obstacles I already mentioned in their library practice, but they had to work extra hard to find the materials that address the world through the eyes of African American people. Let's take the state of Mississippi, for example, Mississippi supplied matching funds to school libraries across the state for particular books. So the senior high school library catalog, for example, was a staple acquisitions guide in the first part during most of the 20th century, and that senior high school library catalog identified a number of books. Let's use the Civil War as an example for a subject that manifested the lost cause theme. So, you had the state of Mississippi supplying matching funds for school librarians across the state to acquire books identified in the senior high school library catalog that favored lost cause literature. If the black librarian in Tupelo, Mississippi, for example, wanted to buy other kinds of literature that had to come out of her budget and she couldn't get matching funds for it. So that kind of systemic racist practice permeated her efforts to identify black literature. If she wanted to subscribe, for example, to some of the national black newspapers like the Chicago Defender or the Pittsburgh Courier, there were no matching funds for those kinds of things. In fact, often, if people were found with copies of the Chicago Defender of the Pittsburgh Courier, they were subject to harassment. So it was even more difficult there. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And then another thing that you referenced when you talked about doing your research is the NEA archives and the NEA was really present throughout your book in clearly in their, their action or support of different things. But, librarianship also has professional organizations that we're often members of state organizations, national organizations, and I would love if you could talk a little bit about what our professional library organizations were doing. Related to, or really not related to segregation, moving into the 50s and 60s. I should greet your question with silence. Because they weren't doing anything. I mean, it was appalling to me that after the Brown decision came down, the American Library Association or state library associations or national school library associations had nothing to say about it. This was probably the major Supreme Court case in the 20th century, and they had nothing to say about it. So I'm just going to, and the absence of discussion about civil rights activities in segregated public school libraries exists to the present. Listen, there's very little knowledge about this subject in our professional collective memory, and it manifests itself in so many ways. For example, when there was a, you may recall in late 2020 early 2021, when critical race theory became one of the themes that certain ideological libraries were pumping the American Library Association came out with a statement saying that for 140 years it has supported libraries and librarians in articulating particular principles. And my book shows that's not the case. And if you look at the subject of race in libraries for those 20 years, there was no response to those things there was no support for those black school librarians. The absence of knowledge of this history is leading our library associations, a la in particular, to say things about its history that simply aren't verified in the historical record. Yeah, yeah. And you point out kind of this, I guess, cognitive disconnect of the library bill of rights coming out. And at the same time, as you mentioned, these associations aren't, aren't saying anything about these issues and aren't indexing in in their major publications that this is even going on. Correct. Yeah. I just have very little information I can cite in library literature, other than an article written in 1971 by Pat Schuman in School Library Journal, I have little information I can cite that is in the literature that librarians were reading. Right. Yeah. And, and at the same time, you know, in some states there were still segregated library associations and yeah, the national organizations weren't pushing that. I mentioned Virginia Lacey Jones. She was the Dean of the School of Library Service at Atlanta University, and she could not join the Georgia Library Association. Right. Because she was black. Yeah. Well, and I guess maybe one other thing to touch on going back to the issue of librarians is you do write a lot about what happened when schools started to desegregate. What, how did these school boards use librarians? What did what did they do with the librarians as like kind of pawns in the desegregation process. Two forces came together in 1964 and 1965. Lyndon main Johnson had started what he called his war on poverty programs and got a lot of activities funded that benefited libraries now one of them was the educational elementary secondary act that provided millions of dollars to public school libraries to augment their collections. So it was a really wonderful thing for school librarians across the country. But married to that legislation was a requirement that the other legislation that required the Brown decision that required school schools to desegregate it married to that was a mandate that schools had to integrate their faculties. Well, in the Jim Crow South principles and superintendents white principles and white superintendents resisted this imperative as long as they could. But one way they resisted it was they take a black school librarian from a black school and bring it to a white school and put her in the library there usually as an associate librarian working under a white librarian sometimes as a head librarian. But when that happened, the black librarian was often isolated silly stupid rules like she couldn't use the faculty restroom she had to use the student restroom. Well, before we wrap up, I would really love some of your thoughts on where this takes us. I'm also curious about where it takes you so, you know, each of your books has clearly fed subsequent research and I'm curious where you're interested in looking next but also the history that you spell out should have real implications for us as a profession and what are some of the lessons that you hope our profession takes away. Well, one of the things that has always bothered me about the library profession is when other professional associations were establishing commissions on racism to show their profession what racist practices existed in the past so they could take it into consideration and process it into their collective professional memory. The library profession did none of that and that's so obvious in my own research, because I couldn't find anything in library literature so to speak. So I think the American Library Association should establish a commission on racism and take a look at the past practices that racism demonstrated in the past so that we don't come out with these silly ideas that for 140 years. We've advocated for libraries and librarians well you have for many of them, but not all of them, and you need to know that. So that's one of the things I think I hope this book accomplishes is get the profession to do some self reflection on an issue as this, definitely. Yeah, American Library Association, for example, is coming up on its 150th anniversary. The American Association of School Librarians is coming up on its 75th anniversary. I look at the literature published around previous anniversaries. It's almost happy almost all happy history nostalgia stuff. And you don't learn anything for happy history nostalgia stuff. You learn from your mistakes, you don't learn from your successes. And so I hope this this book somehow gets involved in the discourse surrounding the thinking about these significant significant events and get some reflection about that that's my that was my goal with writing it. Yeah, absolutely. It's a good time to learn from our mistakes, better now, better late than never. Well, thank you so much Wayne once again today I've been speaking with Wayne Wiegand, author of in silence or indifference racism and Jim Crow segregated public school libraries. My name is Jen Hoyer and you're listening to new books network. [Music] You
