Five African-American youths staged America’s first deliberate and planned sit-in at the segregated Alexandria Library on Queen St. on Aug. 21, 1939 — more than two decades before the tactic would become the trademark of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, according to Historic Alexandria.
The protest had its roots in earlier efforts by attorney Samuel Wilbert Tucker and retired Army Sgt. George Wilson, who on March 17, 1939, had walked through the doors of the whites-only library and requested applications for library cards. Library policy prohibited issuing cards to “persons of the colored race.”
Tucker, who passed the newly erected Alexandria library daily but had to travel to Washington for library access, decided to challenge the Jim Crow system through the courts. He filed a lawsuit to force the librarian to issue a library card to Wilson as a taxpaying citizen of Alexandria.
When the case was heard Jan. 10, 1940, the judge rejected the petition on technical grounds but affirmed that “there were no legal grounds for refusing the plaintiff or any other bona fide citizen the use of the library,” according to the city’s historical records.
The Virginia Public Assemblages Act of 1926 required both races to be segregated within the same facility, meaning African-Americans were unlawfully barred from the Alexandria Library entirely.
Within two days of the judge’s decision, two African-Americans applied for library cards but were refused. They were told a new “colored branch” was under construction and their applications were under consideration — an obvious tactic to appease them until a separate facility could be opened.
The colored branch became the Robinson Library, now the site of the Alexandria Black History Museum.
Although this first act of defiance against Jim Crow did not garner media attention, it marked the first step toward Alexandria seriously considering library access for its African-American citizens and facing the issue of accessibility for all residents, however unequal.
The historical account is documented on the City of Alexandria’s website at alexandriava.gov.
