Book: Librarian was an early civil rights activist

The civil rights movement of the ’60s was boosted by the bravery of those who had gone before, and Martin Luther King Jr. had a surprising partner from the ’40s and ’50s: an elderly white librarian in a small Oklahoma town.

That librarian is the focus of a new book by Louise Robbins, “The Dismissal of Miss Ruth Brown: Civil Rights, Censorship, and the American Library.” Robbins is the director of the School of Library and Information Studies.

“The Dismissal of Miss Ruth Brown: Civil Rights, Censorship, and the American Library,” by Louise Robbins, is available from the University of Oklahoma Press, (405) 325-3198.

Ruth Brown was dismissed from her job as librarian of the Bartlesville, Okla., public library in 1950, after 30 years of exemplary service. Ostensibly, she was fired because she had circulated “subversive” materials, but in truth she was forced out because she was active in promoting racial equality.

In 1946 Brown helped found the Committee on the Practice of Democracy to improve the plight of African-Americans in Bartlesville. Under Brown’s leadership, the group became the only affiliate of the Congress of Racial Equality south of the Mason-Dixon line.

In 1950 Brown and two African-American teachers had the courage to ask for service at the lunch counter of a whites-only drugstore in town. That prompted a group of citizens to accuse Brown of supplying “subversive” materials at the library such as the Nation, New Republic, Negro Digest and even Consumer Reports. Brown called these people the Antis because they were anti-this and anti-that.

The Antis firmly believed that the periodicals were part of a communist plot – this was Joseph McCarthy’s heyday – supported by African-Americans. The same people attacking Brown were also demanding that the local YWCA drop its longstanding interracial programs.

Their pressure had an impact. The city council sacked the entire library board and replaced them with Brown’s enemies, who took only two weeks to fire Brown. She said her dismissal was based not on her performance as a librarian, but of her attempt to “live as a Christian in a democracy.”

Robbins

The firing provoked the formation of a 200-member group called Friends of Miss Brown, but Brown never got her job back. She left Bartlesville to work at an African-American school in Mississippi, then finished her career as a librarian in Sterling, Colo.

Brown was not the only one to suffer the wrath of the Antis. Two of her key supporters who were employees of the community’s largest employer, Phillips Petroleum, were abruptly transferred out of town. And Roosevelt Gracey, principal of the Douglass School in Bartlesville for African-Americans and a Brown ally, was fired the year after Brown lost her job. He and Brown had once unsuccessfully petitioned the city council to allow an interracial story hour for children at the library.

A movie inspired by Brown’s dismissal , “Storm Center,” came out in 1956, starring Bette Davis as the librarian. Shooting was scheduled to start in 1951, but the film ran into a series of production setbacks due mainly to its controversial topic. It won a prize in 1956 from the Cannes Film Festival for the film that best served “the cause of freedom of expression and tolerance.”

“The Dismissal of Ruth Brown” is the first book written about the affair. The reason Robbins was drawn to the project was the woman herself.

“Ruth Brown was a person before her time, and she paid the price,” says Robbins. “When you think of the civil rights movement, you don’t think of a white woman walking into an Oklahoma drugstore with two black women in 1950.

“And Ruth cut against the stereotype of librarians at that time – sweet old ladies cowering in the back of the library who don’t have the courage of anything, let alone their convictions. As I learned more about her, her personality jumped out and grabbed me.”

Like Brown, Robbins was a librarian in Oklahoma. Before coming to UW–Madison, she served as librarian at an elementary school in Byng, Okla., and at East Central Oklahoma University. She also was mayor of Ada, Okla. – the first woman ever to hold that position.