In his acceptance speech at the National Book Awards in 2016, Congressman John Lewis spoke of his youth, and his love of books and reading. “I remember in 1956, when I was sixteen years old,” Lewis recalled. “Some of my brothers and sisters and cousins going down to the public library and trying to get library cards, and we were told that the library was for whites only.” Lewis’ experiences as a teenager in Alabama echoed those of Black people of all ages across the country. Libraries were as exclusionary as any other in Jim Crow era America.

Prior to Plessy v. Ferguson (the “separate but equal” ruling), library scholars Maurice Wheeler, Debbie Johnson-Houston and Billie E. Walker point out, libraries didn’t allow Black patrons at all “except to return or collect materials for white patrons.” And Black people were “beaten, arrested, and often lost their jobs for attempting to register for library cards.” Once segregation was the law of the land, Black people advocated for their right to library services. Solutions came in many forms: Black branch libraries, segregated libraries where, as historian Stephen Cresswell writes, “despite the shared building, the entrances, reading rooms, and book collections were all rigidly segregated.”