A new children’s book is highlighting the historic work of Samuel Wilbert Tucker, an attorney from Alexandria who pioneered one of the first library sit-ins against Jim Crow segregation.
“Fight for the Right to Read” tells the story of the Alexandria Library sit-in as Tucker, at age 26, led a group of five young Black men to enter the whites-only Alexandria Library on Aug. 21, 1939. Co-authors Jeff Gottesfeld, Michelle Y. Green and illustrator Kim Holt came to the Alexandria recently to discuss the September release and sign copies during Black History Month.
Their new book delves into Tucker’s childhood and background in law, the history of Alexandria’s segregated library and the 1939 sit-in. During the sit-in, police arrested William Evans, Otto L. Tucker, Edward Gaddis, Morris Murray and Clarence Strange for “disorderly conduct” after the men were denied library cards and read peacefully inside. Outstanding charges against the men were not formally dismissed by Alexandria Circuit Court until 2019.
Despite Tucker coordinating one of the country’s first civil rights sit-ins, Los Angeles-based children’s book author Gottesfeld said he hadn’t come across his story until about five or six years ago.
“I had that response I always have, which is like, this was a long time ago. Why hasn’t anybody written about this?” Gottesfeld told ALXnow. “Why don’t I know about that? Why is it that I don’t know about it? … Am I gonna write this?”
He and Green, an author and the daughter of a Tuskegee airman, co-wrote the manuscript, which is set to Holt’s digital illustrations.
“I have an affinity for older things, history in particular, and that is from a drawing perspective,” Holt, a graduate of Tucker’s alma mater, Howard University, said. “Even my personal art that I do is like ’40s, ’50s, ’60s. Those times really resonate with me and I love little-known history, because I just feel like it expands what you know, and so many times I’m like, ‘man, I wish I had learned this in school.'”
All three creators visited the Alexandria Black History Museum on Feb. 28 for a family program. The Wythe Street site is where Alexandria, in the year following the sit-in, established the separate and unequal Robert H. Robinson Library branch for the city’s African Americans. Tucker refused to attend it, and the library system eventually integrated in 1959.
“[In the book], we go through the court case afterward in a kid-friendly way. We go through Tucker’s refusal to set foot in the ‘separate but equal’ library,” Gottesfeld said.
Gottesfeld hopes kids are inspired to follow in the footsteps of Tucker, who later served in World War II, was a fierce advocate for civil rights in Virginia and won several civil rights cases before the Supreme Court.
“Tucker was not a lawyer who sought the limelight at all … All he wanted to do was do great work,” Gottesfeld said. “Tucker did this thing in his community, on a small level, with young men from his community, to change something in his community, right?”
Holt and Gottesfeld said Tucker’s fight for library access is relevant today. Libraries nationwide faced threats of federal grant termination last year, and books are increasingly being banned from school libraries nationwide, according to data from PEN America.
“While we can go to libraries, there are many who are under-resourced, don’t have the funds to have the books that are needed. Books are being banned,” Holt said. “Restricting [books] from everyone, burning them, doing any of those kind of things — books, to me, are precious, and I feel like children and adults really need to understand that, because libraries are a community resource that a lot of us take for granted.”
In the meantime, Gottesfeld and Green are continuing to work on more historical projects. Gottesfeld’s “We All Serve” comes out this fall, spotlighting the lives of kids in military families, while Green is working on a book about Oscar Micheaux, the first African American to produce a major feature film.
“Fight for the Right to Read” is available at the Alexandria Black History Museum and online.
