From the Chicago Sun Times obituary of Jesse Jackson, this caught my attention:
[Jesse Jackson] was supposed to write a speech — on patriotism, ironically — but the books he needed were not available at the McBee Avenue Colored Branch of the Greenville Public Library. The librarian there sent him with an explanatory note to the main, whites-only library downtown, naively phoning ahead, thinking to smooth the way. What the call did was make sure two police officers were waiting for him as he walked to the library. He tried to get the books he needed; the police threatened to arrest him if he didn’t leave without them.
The humiliation stung.
“I had to break off my Christmas vacation four days early to get back to Illinois to get that speech done,” Rev. Jackson told The New Yorker in 1992. “I remember riding that train alone back to Atlanta and to Nashville, and up [to] Chicago and on the bus back to Urbana, thinking the whole way, That library’s public. And when I get back home this summer it’s going to go public for real. I’m going to use that library.”
‘The Greenville Eight’
And so he did. On July 18, 1960, he returned with seven friends, went into the reading room and looked at books, refusing demands that they leave. The police came and arrested them for disorderly conduct, and they became “The Greenville Eight.”
The subsequent lawsuit led to a ruling that the libraries must be desegregated. Greenville instead shut down all its public libraries, blaming those who tried to use them.
“The efforts being made by a few Negroes to use the White library will now deprive all White and Negro citizens of the benefit of a library,” Greenville Mayor J. Kenneth Cass said in a statement.
This is part of a larger pattern of behavior from the racists and white supremacists. They would rather live in worse communities, and a worse country, than be forced to live side by side with those they consider inferior.
Heather McGee calls this “drained-pool politics” and has written a book on it, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.
Photo by Sean Foster on Unsplash,
