The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 100, July 1996 - April, 1997 Page: 44
551 p. : ill. (some col.), ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
did not take a public role in the case, he gave "tacit support" to the city
commissioners' actions and pressured his employees to be silent.48
When these pressures were not enough to stop the movement, howev-
er slight, toward integration, conservative forces tried other tactics. With
McCarthyist rhetoric they attacked "subversive" materials in the library.
The library board members were supportive of Brown and more tolerant
of nonconformity than Bartlesville's other community leaders, yet their
tolerance did not equip them to handle the attack, nor did they appar-
ently share Brown's burning desire to do away with segregation. Al-
though Brown's degree of community involvement was significant, and
she had counted on her status as an institution to protect her when she
accelerated her interracial activity in 1948, little of her support came
from Bartlesville elites with the power to save her job, which was not pro-
tected by contractual or civil service regulations. By charging Brown with
circulating subversive materials and thus implying her disloyalty, the op-
ponents of integration called her patriotism into question, made it dan-
gerous for others to join her struggle for racial equality, and deprived
her of her livelihood as well.49
Although Brown had support from the Oklahoma and American Li-
brary Associations in combating the challenges to library materials,
those groups could do nothing to protect her job. Neither the ALA nor
the ACLU believed that the grounds on which the case was argued-that
the city commissioners had no legal right to assume control of the li-
brary because the state had an overriding interest-had any hope of suc-
cess. All the parties were clear that civil liberties were at issue, yet they
never argued a breach of those liberties-free expression rights or civil
rights of African Americans-in court.
And Brown was disappointed with the way the ALA argued the case in
the court of public opinion. "I could not see then and have never under-
stood why the ALA carefully seemed to avoid" the racial aspects of the
case, Ruth Brown-still a CORE member at the age of seventy-wrote
Library Journal in 1961. The ALA clearly did not want to deal with the
racial issue. The association's instructions to the Oklahoma Library Asso-
ciation had been not to deal with the race issue, but only with the cen-
sorship issue. By highlighting the censorship aspects of the case, in fact,
48 Donald Koppel, interview with author, July 13, 1994, Bartlesville (1st quotation); the state-
ments made by Koppel were re-stated in other ways by almost every person Interviewed. F. A. Be-
hymer, "Librarian Fights for Job Lost over Criticism of Journals Chosen," St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
Oct. 16, 1950 (2nd and 3rd quotations).
11 Stouffer, Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties, p. 52. Oliver Garceau, The Public Library
in the Politzcal Process: A Report of the Publzc Library Inquiry (New York: Columbia University Press,
1949), chap. 2, remarks on library boards' political ineffectiveness. Brown to Houser, July 25,
1948, Frame 58o, Reel 9, Series III, Exec. Secretary's File 22, CORE.July
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 100, July 1996 - April, 1997, periodical, 1997; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101218/m1/72/: accessed April 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.