A sit-in demonstration that presaged the Civil Rights Movement by some 20 years was reenacted at the Alexandria (Va.) Library’s Kate Waller Branch August 21. In the original protest, occurring on that date 60 years earlier, five men were arrested when they refused to leave the whites-only facility after being denied library cards.
At the reenactment, five black actors reading at a library table were asked to leave by a pair of actors wearing uniforms supplied by the local police department. The Washington Post reported August 23 that another actor playing a library clerk shouted, “There are colored people all over the library!”—apparently an actual quote.
In 1939 the men were charged with trespassing, later reduced to disorderly conduct, but the charges were eventually dropped. The following year the city council appropriated $2,500 to build a “colored branch” of the library; that building now houses the Alexandria Black History Resource Center, which sponsored the reenactment.
Posted August 30, 1999.