Civil Rights Building Trivia

For what I expect will be my last Civil Rights building trivia question of the semester, I'm using a suggestion from Carl Tobias.  What is the building at right, where is it, and why is it important in Civil Rights history?  This is probably going to be pretty easy given that a close look at the picture may disclose what it is ... and google will likely do the rest.

Once we get all that settled, I'll have a cemetery headstone photo of one of the people at the center of this, from one of my favorite cemeteries.

Now that Joel Eisen's picked off the answer, I want to talk a little more about the Petersburg library sit-in from February 1960.  It began, as a recent article in the Petersburg Progress Index described, when Revs. Wyatt T. Walker and R.G. Williams entered through the front door of the library and Williams asked for a copy of Douglas Southall Freeman's biography of Robert E. Lee.  No surprise, he was refused service.  Black people had to enter through side and use the segregated section in the basement.  One thing that interests the property professor in me a great deal is the report in the Progress Index article that the gift of the library building came with a restriction that the building be segregated.  Shades of Evans v. Newton and Evans v. Abney, of course -- and of Heritage Methodist Homes as well.  I'd be most interested to know more about how the restriction was abrograted, which perhaps I'll look into a little next time I'm passing through Petersburg and have a little time on my hands.

When I visited the library recently I went to the biography section to look for the Freeman biography and also to see what else was on the shelves.  On the top floor in the biography section I was pleased to see that there were more biographies of Frederick Douglas than of Lee (the libraries' two copies of the Freeman four volume biography are in the research room on the first floor) -- and there are posters of Douglas and other important civil rights leaders.  Again, no surprise here, but the character of the library has completely changed since 1960.  I had a nice chat with a young woman who works as a security guard at the library; she saw that I'd taken a few pictures asked if I was interested in buying the building, which puzzled me, of course.  Turns out that the library is about to move into new quarters.  Another icon of the civil rights era is about to close.  Not, of course, that anyone gives those momentous events fifty years ago much thought these days.  That world is so long gone and so unimagineable ... and yet we're connected to it through many people who are still alive.

If you're interested in Freeman's biography, it's available in full text here.  It's long, though -- it runs to about a million words.  That used to seem longer to me than it does now, since I realized recently that the full version of University, Court, and Slave runs to about a quarter million words.  My editor has no interest in a book that long -- and more importantly I suspect readers don't, either!  So I've already taken out like 50,000 words, with more cuts to come....

Anyway, as I promised in the initial post, I've added a photograph of Douglas Southall Freeman's headstone in Richmond's Hollywood cemetery.

Comments

[Alfred Brophy]

Well, maybe this is proving tougher than I'd anticipated. Anyone want a hint?

[David J. Garrow]

I looked & had no idea whatsoever! Somehow my instinct says Richmond, not Savannah, not Charleston, not New Orleans, but I don't know Richmond well at all, though clearly several of your regular readers do, and their silence suggests my instinct is wrong!

[Alfred Brophy]

If you don't know, David, then this is going to be prove tough!

It's in Virginia, close to Richmond. David, I'm pretty sure that you identified one of the civil rights building trivia questions from this same town earlier this year.

[Alfred Brophy]

I'm thinking I need to give a hint here. So which do folks want -- the location of the building or what it is?

[Joel Eisen]

Petersburg Public Library, site of a 1960 sit-in. (On my honor, no communication with or advice received from my colleague Carl. . .)

Bonus: sit-in took place mere hours after I was born.

This was hard. At first, I thought "school" (but why the red drop box on the porch??) & your cemetery clue was Lewis Powell/Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond. Now, having read an article about the sit-in, I have no idea what cemetery you are referencing or who is buried there.

[Alfred Brophy]

Joel! You're good. I feared this one might go unanswered for a while, perhaps a long while. One of my correspondents (known by his pen name, Bevereley Tucker) said this is the hardest trivia question we've had! And, as you might suspect from his pen name, he's from Virginia.

Very nice job figuring this out -- indeed the drop box was a give-away, of sorts. There's a lot to this story that I want to talk about. The sit in, in February 1960, was one of the first -- and all the more important because it took place in a library. There's some very good work on integration of libraries -- my former colleague Art LeFrancois has a nice piece on the integration of libraries in the Alabama Law Review back in like 2003, for instance. But the really cool thing for me is that one of the people who integrated (or attempted to integrate) the library asked for -- get this -- Douglas Southall Freeman's Lee Biography. I love that. When I visited the library recently I looked in the biography section of the stacks and saw more on Frederick Douglas than Lee. My, how the times have changed! Freeman is buried in the Hollywood Cemetery and I'll post a picture of his headstone later today, along with a little more on this.