San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Library integration quietly rolled out in 1949
A question on desegregation came from Judith Berg Sobre, professor emerita of art history at the University of Texas at San Antonio: “Do you happen to know the year that San Antonio integrated its public libraries?”
Sobre, the author of “San Antonio on Parade: Six Historic Festivals” who has helped this column with many Fiesta San Antonio questions, was working on a blog post about Briscoe Western Art Museum and its building at 210 W. Market St., formerly the Hertzberg Circus Museum (1968-2001) and originally the main public library. In relation to the Harry Hertzberg Circus Collection, installed in 1942, Sobre was “wondering about the library’s integration and whether Black people were allowed in to see the collection.”
Like other Southern cities at that time, San Antonio had separate and not necessarily equal facilities for Black and white residents — schools, pools, restrooms, water fountains, bus and theater seating, restaurant access and yes, libraries.
The city’s first public library was the Carnegie Library, completed in 1903 with a $50,000 donation from industrialist/philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. The city soon outgrew the library, and a new, larger building on the same site opened Aug. 1, 1930. This is where the Harry Hertzberg Circus Collection opened to the public in 1943. After the main library moved in 1968 to a new building, the former library became the Hertzberg Circus Museum, which closed in 2001, and is now the Briscoe Western Art Museum.
Branch libraries were discussed as early as 1917, including “a well-equipped branch for Negroes with a trained Negro librarian in charge and one or more branch libraries for white people in remote quarters,” according to a report in the San Antonio Light, June 10, 1917.
A stopgap for the former
was a hybrid branch/school library at the Douglas High School for Negroes, as described in the San Antonio Express, Oct. 11, 1924, with plans for a second such facility to be established in “another Negro school.”
After years of budgetary wrangling, the city decided to build an actual library for Black patrons.
While the library board dragged its feet on funding this project — at first offering only $5,000, inadequate even then — Mayor C.M. Chambers said in a statement reported in the Express, March 8, 1929, that, “If the Negroes are not allowed admittance to the Carnegie (main) library, they are entitled to their (own) ‘main library building’ just the same as the whites.”
The specter of integration must have done the trick, because “the Colored Branch of the San Antonio Public Library,” as it was first known, opened to the public on March 3, 1930, said Andy Crews, archivist/librarian in the Texana/Genealogy Room of San Antonio’s Central Library. The branch was renamed in 1938 to honor Black scientist George Washington Carver.
Crews also found a story in
the San Antonio Register, a Black community newspaper, that indicates that Black patrons received at least a qualified welcome to the main library’s circus exhibit.
“Free visiting hours, from 4:30 to 6 on Thursday afternoons, have been arranged for Race (Black) patrons to view the famed Harry Hertzberg Circus Collection on display at the downtown public library,” says the Register. Feb. 26, 1943. “Should teachers or others interested in bringing groups plan to come … the librarian in charge would be pleased to explain the exhibit … It is hoped that large numbers of Race patrons will visit and enjoy the exhibit.”
Cristal Rose Mendez, historian at the San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum, passed the query about library integration along to D.L. Grant Jr., Ph.D., Carver Library manager and historian.
“According to an eyewitness and longtime Carver Branch user,” Grant said, “Cuney Elementary School students walked with teachers to the library to visit that collection.” According to this individual’s account, “the students filed inside, then right back out again after taking in the exhibit.
It can be assumed that the visit did not include access to the building’s restrooms and drinking fountains, as Jim Crow practices were still observed at the time.”
Toward the end of the
1940s, those policies were relaxed.
Crews found that the library board passed a motion May 31, 1949: “The San Antonio Public Library shall be open to all people equally, irrespective of race or creed.”
That sounds like integration, and it was, but on the down-low.
Citing “Not Free, Not for
All: Public Libraries in the
Age of Jim Crow” by Cheryl Knott, Grant says that 1949 was the year that San Antonio’s main public library started admitting Black patrons — before Houston, which did so later that year, and Austin, which didn’t do so until 1951.
“Librarian Julia Grothaus, board president M.M. Harris, and board member John McMahon (president of Our Lady of the Lake College) secured the policy change,” writes Knott, “and then relied on Prudence Curry, head of the Carver Negro Branch, to spread the word (among Black patrons) ‘without fanfare.’ By 1953, the board included an
African American trustee, Stonewall Davis” before Houston did later that the same year and Austin in 1951.
“The policy change here was rolled out quietly,” Grant said, “likely out of fears of reprisal, the same strategy that would be used to integrate lunch counters here in 1960.” But the word must have spread: The March 1963 Register advertised the main library’s Saturday story hour.
Gradually, from the mid-1950s to mid-1960s, the city desegregated golf courses and tennis courts, swimming pools, lunch counters and restaurants until a 1965 ordinance integrated all public accommodations.
PLANE INFO: The exact purpose of the wooden structure preserved at Port San Antonio and discussed in this column two weeks ago is still a work in progress. Air Force 37th Training Wing Historian Tracy English reports that ongoing research had turned up some other possibilities besides an early ground-control tower for the former Kelly AFB.
It could have been an old control tower for Duncan Field, an aircraft-repair depot from the end of World War I through 1923, when it became part of Kelly. Or maybe it was an observation tower for a supply yard, or a “unique, raised facility for an unknown purpose of the Quality Assurance facility it was next to.” It also could have been part of a long-lost HVAC system or turned into a treehouse-style office space.
Readers of the same column guess that an undated Kelly photo showing the structure probably dates back to the 1980s. Thanks to John Koch, Greg Nussel and Stephen Shackelford for spotting the cars in the picture as an Oldsmobile Cutlass, Chevrolet Monza and Chevrolet Nova, all made from the late 1970s to early 1980s.
Anyone who remembers the use or approximate age of the Kelly/Port San Antonio structure may contact this column. All responses will be forwarded to English for the Air Force archives.