Segregated Va. Library Will Become Museum
By Margaret Foster | From Preservation | Feb. 6, 2007
Not so long ago, black residents of Portsmouth, Va., couldn't check books out of the city library. Instead, they used the Portsmouth "Colored" Community Library, a small building used from 1945 until 1963, when a lawsuit, filed by the city's current mayor, forced the library system to integrate.
In 1959 James W. Holley III and a friend, Dr. Hugo Owens, sued to gain access to the public library and won: U.S. District Court Judge Walter Hoffman ruled on Dec. 20, 1960, that the library must allow access to everyone or close down, "lock, stock, and barrel."
Last month the National Register-listed Community Library moved a step closer to becoming a museum when Portsmouth's city council reinstated its proposal to relocate the building to city property.
The dilapidated library was in jeopardy until the Jan. 9 decision. Its current owner, the Ebenezer Baptist Church, wants to offload the building, which was moved onto its property in 1967, to the city, but the deal stalled. (Church officials did not return phone calls from Preservation Online.)
"We're working on a relocation plan," says Bill Moody, city councilman and former vice mayor. "It's not a dead issue."
The city, which has allocated $275,000 for the move in its current budget, plans to lease the building to the African American Historical Society of Portsmouth, Inc., for $1 per year for five years, Moody says. The society will raise money for interior and exterior renovations.
"This is a building that was for blacks only, and I think that's a diamond in the rough for African American history," says Mae Breckinridge-Haywood, president of the African American Historical Society of Portsmouth, Inc. "The historical society wants to make it a black-history museum and to let the world know about this building that's still around that had library services just because of the color of a person's skin."
Mayor Holley, who declined to comment for this article, upset preservationists last year when he suggested that the city build a replica of the library because it was too fragile to move. Although the building has a leaky roof, water has damaged the interior plaster but not the structure itself, a Norfolk-based engineer reported in a November 2006 study.
"Given that it is structurally sound and historically significant, it would be a pity to lose the Portsmouth Community Library," wrote National Trust President Richard Moe and trustee Renee Ingram in a Dec. 20 letter to Mayor Holley.
Now the city is working on a memorandum of agreement with the church and society about the library's future.
"I think it would become part of one of our [city] museums," Councilman Moody says. "A black-history museum, certainly a period museum, that would tell a story of the role that that building played in the Jim Crow era. A lot of people have no idea how black people during that era had to go about getting library books."
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