Integrating Greenville’s library in 1960

In March 1960, the Greenville library was under-funded, under-staffed, over-crowded and segregated.

The main library was located in a 56-year-old columned former elementary school on North Main Street, where the parking lot for the Municipal Court building is today.

The County Library, a separate entity, was located in the building’s basement. It was responsible for bookmobiles and for the branches in Greer, Fountain Inn and Simpsonville.

Since 1952, the “colored” branch library had been located on East McBee Avenue not far from Springfield Baptist Church. It had replaced the single room in the Phillis Wheatley Center where Thomas Parker had established the first library for African-Americans in South Carolina in 1923.

The main branch had 55,508 books and the “Negro” one 11,644 (chosen, librarians said, to include those “of most interest to Negro readers”), although officials noted that readers could request any book in the system and have it delivered to their school or branch library.

Spartanburg and Columbia had integrated libraries, but Greenville’s were segregated. That policy ended on September 19, 1960, thanks to Sterling High School students and to outspoken white residents.

The struggle for integration began late in the afternoon of March 1, 1960.

About 20 neatly-dressed black students entered the Main Library accompanied by the Rev. S.E. Kay, minister at New Pleasant Grove Baptist Church in the southern part of the county. He had given some of them a ride, and when he learned their destination, decided that an adult should accompany them.

Some of the students sat at tables and began reading; others browsed the shelves. Within a few minutes, though, head librarian Charles Stowe called them into his office and told them that they had to use the McBee Avenue branch. He also announced that the library was closing. (It was about 6 p.m., but the library hours went on until 8 p.m.)

The students left without protest. It is unclear whether they went directly to Springfield Baptist Church or whether the Rev. James Hall, Springfield’s young minister who was also head of the Greenville branch of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), was awaiting them nearby.

According to Margaree Seawright Crosby, in an interview taped by the Upstate History Museum, when Rev. Hall asked them what had happened, they explained that Librarian Stowe had said that they would be arrested if they stayed, so they left. The minister explained that the point was to be arrested in order to call attention to the segregated facilities.

(There seems to be little question that Rev. Hall sparked this first tentative “study-in,” but it also seems clear from Dr. Crosby’s comments that little planning was involved.)

Library and city officials were rattled. Library trustee chair Romayne Barnes, library lawyer Dean Rainey, four police officials and the city attorney immediately gathered at the building to discuss the first challenge to separate public facilities in Greenville.

They had more to discuss two weeks later, when seven brave teenagers returned to the building.

Five girls, led by 18-year old Hattie Smith and including Doris Walker, Dorothy Franks, Blanche Baker and Virginia Hurst, and two boys, Benjamin Downs and Robert Anderson, attempted to use the library.

This time, they refused Stowe’s request to leave. The librarian, acting on instructions from Mayor Kenneth Cass, called the police. Four officers came to arrest the seven Sterling students.

They took the youngsters to the Greenville jail, booked them on charges of disorderly behavior and placed them in cells, where the students began singing patriotic songs. Within half an hour, lawyer Donald Sampson, Rev. Hall, bail bondsman Tony Shelton and several reporters gathered. Shelton paid their $20 bail fees, and the students were released.

Sampson announced that he would request a jury trial.

The Greenville News immediately published the names and home addresses of the arrested students, and editorially attacked their “unseemly behavior.” It treated city officials and library trustees as victims who might be forced to close both libraries to ensure segregation, and if that happened, it would be the students’ fault.

When the case came to Municipal Court two weeks later, the hearing was postponed.

And it continued to be postponed. Four months later, on July 15, seven well-dressed but unidentified black men and women appeared at the library at 11:30 a.m., and when Stowe called the police, they left.

Maybe they were rehearsing. At any rate, three hours later, eight students appeared, and this time they did not leave. They too were arrested, imprisoned briefly, and quickly bailed out. Identified as college students, the group included “Jeff Jackson,” a name later corrected to Jesse Jackson.

Afterward, Sampson condemned what he called the “poor white trash” who had had the students arrested. Editorials called his comments “intemperate” and “unsavory,” while the NAACP hastened to distance itself from the attorney.

NAACP lawyers said a federal suit would be filed soon, and on July 28, it was, asking for a permanent injunction against racial segregation at the library. Defendants were city and county officials, city and county libraries, library trustees and Stowe.

The Greenville News called for a bi-racial committee to tamp down the “extremists” while Mayor Cass referred to the “fanatical fringes.”  A federal court hearing was scheduled.

Before it took place, at 6 p.m. on Sept. 2, the library trustees, at the request of city government, closed both Main and McBee Avenue branches.

The public responded angrily. Citizens called the closing “arbitrary,” “deplorable,” “high-handed.” Dr. Donald Kilgore compared it to amputating a leg to cure a blister. Furman Professor Al Reid pled eloquently for its re-opening.

Others suggested that taxes used for library support should be rebated.

The Greenville Piedmont warned against “an influx of mixed races.”

At the Sept. 14 trial, city lawyers argued that the injunction was moot since the library did not exist. Federal Judge C.C. Wyche agreed, but noted that if the library reopened, it could again be sued.

The city won a pyrrhic victory. But the community wanted the library re-opened, and on Sept. 19 at 9 a.m., it was — to everyone “with a legitimate need.”

Charges against all students were dismissed.

To avoid “racial mixing,” however, tables were initially labeled “male” and “female.” But the library was so crowded that the signs vanished within a week.

Local editorialists called the decision wise. Others saw a first small step toward a more integrated society.