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Public libraries developed later in the South than in other regions. Unlike that of the Northeast, whose tax-supported free library service came into its own during the second half of the nineteenth century, the South’s public library movement was for the most part a twentiethcentury phenomenon. Examining New England between 1629 and 1855, Jesse H. Shera identi¤ed the causal factors he believed led to the growth of Northern libraries. These were economic ability, a demand for scholarship, awareness of a need for publicly supported educational services, a faith in self-education, a demand for vocational education, and “other causal factors,” including a belief that reading was a “good” thing in itself. As a region, the South exhibited none of these characteristics until the last years of the nineteenth century.1 In her 1958 book on the development of southern public libraries, Mary Edna Anders contends that its defeat in the Civil War left the South without the ¤nancial wherewithal to match the North in library development. The war left the South impoverished and largely subject to economic interests outside the region. In the immediate postwar years, the South lacked a well-heeled indigenous class of men and women with the leisure time, ¤nances, and inclination to work toward the establishment of institutions of culture. It should also be noted, however, that even before the war, the South had an individualistic, provincial , and sometimes anti-intellectual nature that did not lend itself to public library development. In the antebellum South, a widespread conviction that governments should provide agencies of education for the masses had yet to emerge.2 By the 1890s, however, the South had changed. It was in the midst of an economic transition that made the region more industrial and more 1 Black Libraries and White Attitudes, The Early Years Birmingham and Mobile, 1918–1931 urban. Modernization brought the rise of a new middle class of professionals and businessmen in southern cities. Anders asserts that the improved southern economy provided a “more favorable climate” for the establishment of public libraries than had previously existed. Out of the new professional and business class came a demand for educational facilities and services, including libraries. By 1900, the southern public library movement was underway.3 The public library movement in the South was distinguished from its northern counterpart in several respects, including its ties to southern progressive reform and the presence of racial segregation of library facilities. With the transition of the old agrarian South into the “New South” that was trying to be both industrial and urban came an awareness within the new bourgeoisie of a need for social improvement. In Alabama this progressive impulse translated into tax reform, a workman ’s compensation law, a child welfare department, and governmental support for public health, roads, and education. In a state that had traditionally lagged in literacy and general education, the progressives recognized that the need for agencies for learning was particularly acute. The public library movement in Alabama and in the urban South came out of this spirit of reform.4 Anders points out that clubwomen were the ¤rst to adopt libraries as a cause, but businessmen, educators, clergy, and librarians followed. These individuals worked to found libraries in the interest of education for children, self-help for adults, local culture, and civic pride. Municipal leaders believed that presence of a public library provided evidence that a community was progressive in its thinking. According to Marilyn J. Martin, library development was also a beginning point for other social improvements, “a ¤rst step toward activist reforms typical of the Progressive Era.”5 With the arrival of new libraries in Alabama, librarianship emerged as a profession at the turn of the twentieth century, during the region’s period of modernization. Partly as a result of the generosity of Andrew Carnegie, the state had nine public libraries for whites by 1904. Representatives of these institutions, along with others from college, religious , and women’s club libraries gathered in Montgomery that year for the ¤rst meeting of the Alabama Library Association. The organization ’s goal was to promote the library movement in the state by creating an esprit de corps among Alabama’s ®edgling library community and to press for public funding for library service. “Let us demonstrate by what we do,” association president Thomas M. Owen urged the group, Black Libraries and White Attitudes / 7 “that we are alive to an appreciation of the library as one of the great, if...

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