Site Type: Museum or Cultural Center

Historical Significance:

In August 1939—more than 20 years before the sit-in at a Greensboro, N.C., lunch counter thrust the Civil Rights movement into the spotlight—five young black held a sit-in at the whites-only public library at 717 Queen Street. One by one, the well-dressed men entered the library and politely requested library cards. One by one they were refused. They sat down and began to read. The librarian called the police, who arrested the men for trespassing and charged them with disorderly conduct.

The protest was organized by African-American attorney Samuel W. Tucker, who was born in Alexandria in 1913. Tucker sued the city, and a local judge found that no regulation limited the library's use to whites. Rather than open the library to blacks, however, the city hastily built a separate library for blacks in the Parker-Gray neighborhood. Angered at the continued injustice, Tucker refused to accept a library card. The black community slowly accepted the Robert Robinson Library, however, despite its shorter hours and cast-off books.

Tucker went on to win groundbreaking civil rights cases across the state. He served as the lead lawyer in Virginia for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (N.A.A.C.P) in many school desegregation cases, and was a founding partner in the prominent Richmond law firm Hill, Tucker and Marsh. Tucker died in 1990. Ten years later, a new elementary school in western Alexandria was officially dedicated as the Samuel W. Tucker Elementary School.

In the first half of the 20th century public facilities were segregated across the South. Separate schools, restaurants, and restrooms were all legal, and “Jim Crow” policies made it difficult and sometimes dangerous for African-Americans to do simple daily tasks. The library where Tucker staged his sit-in, now the Barrett Branch Library, was not integrated until the 1950s.

Today the library’s special collections include many archival sources for studying local black history and genealogy. The 1939 sit-in has been chronicled in a documentary called Out of Obscurity, available at Alexandria libraries. The building at Alfred and Wythe streets that housed the city’s black library is now part of the Alexandria Black History Museum.

Physical Description:

Constructed on top of the Quaker burial ground, the 1937 Alexandria Library has been modified several times. The most recent improvement resulted in the archaeological recovery of 66 burials and the identification of nearly 100 more graves. The 1995 addition capped the burial ground and preserved the unexcavated graves. The individuals and artifacts which were excavated were reinterred in the front plaza of the library. The new library contains special collections which include many archival sources for studying black history and geneology. The Alexandria Monthly Meeting owns the burial ground and lot, while the city leases the land for use as a library.