Race and School Librarianship in the Jim Crow South, 1954–1970: The Untold Story of Carrie Coleman Robinson as a Case Study

Abstract

On December 23, 1969, the National Education Association and the Alabama State Teachers Association (a black organization) filed a class action suit in federal court against the Alabama Department of Education on behalf of Carrie Coleman Robinson, Negro School Library Supervisor in Alabama’s Department of Education. The suit argued that Robinson had suffered racial discrimination in hiring and stated that her First, Fifth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights had been violated. The American Association of School Librarians and its parent American Library Association (Robinson had been a member of both for decades) chose not to participate in the suit. The decision reflected the library profession’s unwillingness to openly discuss public school segregation, one of the nation’s major social issues in the last half of the twentieth century that was sparked by the Supreme Court’s landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education (1954). This article recounts the heretofore untold story of Carrie Coleman Robinson’s experiences with racial discrimination within the professions of education and librarianship.