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  • Responses to the Resurrection of Miss Ruth Brown:An Essay on the Reception of a Historical Case Study
  • Louise S. Robbins (bio)

At the turn of the twenty-first century some Bartlesville, Oklahoma, residents knew of Ruth W. Brown and her long career at the Bartlesville Public Library. They knew as well of her activism on behalf of the community's African Americans; her participation in the only Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) chapter south of the Mason-Dixon Line; her having gone with two young African American schoolteachers to Hull's Drug Store, "where they did not belong"; and her consequent run-in with the City Commission and the "antis," as Brown called them, amid charges that she was circulating Communist propaganda from the library. But few, if any, librarians outside Bartlesville knew or remembered anything about her. I certainly did not, although I practiced in Oklahoma for a number of years. Had I not plowed through the archives of the Intellectual Freedom Committee of the American Library Association at the University of Illinois on the way to my dissertation, published several years earlier, she might have remained the most important unknown librarian Oklahoma ever had. Why was she important? First, because she is a prominent example, counter to one myth of librarianship, that it is a timid profession because so many of its members are women, for Ruth Brown took action in support of the Library Bill of Rights in a way that few men of her time period did. Second, because Ruth Brown pushed librarianship in an area in which it was uncomfortable being pushed—access to libraries for all people—and exemplified the civil rights era before the civil rights era. [End Page 422]

Ruth W. Brown, Bartlesville's public librarian since 1919, became involved in 1946 in a group that then became affiliated with CORE. This group included Don Sheridan, the minister of the Disciples of Christ Church; Roosevelt T. Gracey, the principal of the segregated Douglass School; other members of the African American community; a few whites connected with the YWCA; and some Phillips Petroleum employees and their wives. Together they carried out a series of projects designed to improve the quality of life of the African American community, including, for example, hiring an African American doctor for the community. Brown and her colleagues tried to develop an integrated story time at the library; they hosted CORE organizer Bayard Rustin in a controversial appearance in Bartlesville; and, ultimately, in February 1950 Brown, with African American teachers Clara Cooke and Mary Ellen Street, went to Hull's Drug Store and asked to be served. Within days, a "citizens' committee" asked the City Commission to fire Brown. When they discovered that she could not be fired for going with the teachers to the drugstore on her own time, committee members accused her of circulating Communist propaganda from the library. The investigations and counterinvestigations lasted until July, when the library board that supported Brown was replaced and the City Commission interrogated Brown about both her integrationist activities and the library's collections and then fired her. The new board was made up of people who had prominently disagreed with Brown and her colleagues, including an American Legion Americanism officer, E. R. Christopher.

Brown and one board member, Phillips Petroleum attorney Darlene Anderson Essary, took her case as far as the Supreme Court of Oklahoma, supported by the Friends of Miss Ruth Brown, many of whom were also members of the CORE group. The case failed, largely because the state law simply did not support their claims. Phillips Petroleum, the city's overwhelmingly dominant business, ordered a number of employees who were Brown's and CORE's staunchest supporters to cease their support of her. Others were transferred or fired. A large number left the company and the community at the earliest feasible time. Roosevelt Gracey lost his job.

During the controversy Essary wrote a letter to the Saturday Review describing the ordeal. Screenwriters Elick Moll and Daniel Taradash used the letter as the seed of a film designed to speak back to the McCarthyism that had affected Hollywood. Their film became—after several years' delay due to...

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