Accommodating Access: Colored Carnegie Libraries, 1905-1925

Between 1905 and 1925, several cities used grants from Andrew Carnegie and the Carnegie Corporation to build public library branches staffed and used exclusively by African Americans. The ambiguity of the segregated public library, a separate building standing simultaneously as a monument to the containment of black bodies and the liberation of black minds, expressed well the tensions of New South cities in the Jim Crow era. Whites accommodated black desire for public library access, while blacks accommodated white insistence on separation.

By focusing on Louisville, Houston, Nashville, and New York City's Harlem, the dissertation explores in-depth the differing motivations and meanings of library services to African Americans in the South and compares and contrasts those to similar developments in the North. This interdisciplinary historical study draws on the secondary literature related to the history of American public libraries and the New South and the theory of gender and race relations. Primary sources consulted include the extant unpublished records of the public libraries selected for study.