In Kentucky, the oldest Black independent library is still making history

Thirty minutes into the library tour, Louisa Sarpee wants to work there.

History is so close to her. One block away from her high school, the small library she had never set foot in laid the foundation of African American librarianship. What is more, the library was created by a former principal of her own school. Its archives even house a diploma of her school from the time the word “colored” was still in the school’s name.

“Is there any way to volunteer at the library?” the ninth grader asks Natalie Woods, the librarian giving the tour. “I’m obsessed with everything here.”

“Say no more, girlfriend,” Ms. Woods replies, beaming. “We’re gonna talk.”

For Ms. Woods, the manager of Louisville’s Western Library, the gasps coming from the group of 18 students learning about its history is no surprise. She meets Louisvillians every day who know nothing about Western. The library under her care is the oldest public library in the United States independently run by and for African Americans. It was also the earliest training ground of Black librarians from around the South. It is a legacy that has changed Ms. Woods’ life, and preserving it has become her vocation.

“There is so much history right here,” she tells the group. “It is now your assignment to make sure it’s not forgotten.”

Training ground for South’s Black librarians

The “Western Colored Branch” of the Louisville Free Public Library system opened in 1905, in an era when Black communities across the South were building institutions in the wake of emancipation, says historian Tracy K’Meyer at the University of Louisville. (The name later became Western Library.)

The segregated library was considered an experiment, says Ms. Woods. Its first manager, the Rev. Thomas Fountain Blue, had no formal schooling in library science – because there were no library schools open to Black people.  

Blue not only ran a successful library, which led to the creation of a second “colored” branch in Louisville. He also started the first training program for Black library workers. The course became the prototype for the first degree program in library science for African Americans, which opened in 1925 at Hampton Institute in Virginia. 

In 2003, the American Library Association recognized Blue’s “leadership role” in “laying the foundation for the continued presence of African American libraries, library students, and library employees in all types of libraries within the United States and abroad.”

Ms. Woods remembers Blue’s cursive handwriting. The first time she held his papers, they changed her life.

She never learned about Western’s history when she grew up in Louisville. The child of a Black father and a white mother, she became a page at Louisville’s Shawnee Library. There, she would hear mentions of Western’s history.

In 2008, while working as a library clerk and attending college at night, Ms. Woods lost the vision in her left eye due to complications from surgery. She couldn’t perceive distance properly and had to relearn basic activities, such as picking up a pencil, by repetition. It was a struggle to finish college, she says, and she gave up the idea of pursuing a master’s degree in library science.

Then, one day, a supervisor brought Ms. Woods a folder of documents to transcribe. They were the papers of Thomas Fountain Blue. 

On lined sheets, the cursive hand discussed circulation methods, library cards, and a library’s role in educating the public. 

“I knew of him, but I didn’t know how deep and intentional he was in everything he did,” Ms. Woods says. “And it just gave me a new love and desire to go to library school.”

She obtained her library degree at Florida State University. She became Western’s manager on March 6, 2016: Blue’s 150th birthday.

“Where everyone may feel at home”

When Ms. Woods started at Western, she found that many people living near Western did not even know the library exists.

The library’s archive, which includes Blue’s papers and a wealth of material on Black Louisville history, was disorganized. There was no indexing, and the room was not even locked down, Ms. Woods says.

So she started giving tours of the library, which she still offers about once a week. In 2018, she obtained a $70,000 grant to index and digitize Western’s archive. 

It is an important archive that sheds light on “how Black librarians, in real time, were trying to imagine what a library to serve a Black community should look like,” says David Anderson, a professor of English at University of Louisville.

Blue was “incredibly proactive and inventive in placing library collections where they would be used: ... public schools, barbershops, businesses, places with foot traffic,” says Professor Anderson. He was “bringing people into the branch, and taking the branch out to the people.”

Aside from cultivating a varied collection – from W.E.B. Dubois to Henrik Ibsen to Charles Darwin – Blue also made Western a community center “where everyone may feel at home and share equal privileges,” Blue wrote in a speech on Louisville’s “colored” libraries in 1927. 

“During a single month ninety-three meetings for educational and social uplift have been held in the buildings,” he wrote.

A child of formerly enslaved parents, Blue attended college and seminary in Virginia and ran a Louisville YMCA before starting at Western. He died in 1935, after being denied medical care for a treatable infection, says Annette Blue, his granddaughter. 

“He died from Jim Crow laws,” she says in a Zoom interview from her home in California.

In the early 1960s, Black protesters staged sit-ins in various cities to challenge library segregation, which became outlawed nationally by the Civil Rights Act. Meanwhile, Blue lay in an unmarked grave in Louisville’s Eastern Cemetery until 2022, when Ms. Woods had a headstone installed.

“You are their legacy”

“How many of you sit and talk to your parents and grandparents about how they grew up?” Ms. Woods asks Louisa and her schoolmates. A few raise their hands. 

“You should. That’s your history,” Ms. Woods says. “You are their legacy.”

Ms. Woods says she does her work in honor of Blue and her parents. She tries to embody Blue’s commitment to “the betterment of his people.” Her parents, who faced much opposition to their relationship as an interracial couple, taught her to “treat people the way you want to be treated.” 

Western sits in a low-income neighborhood. Every day, patrons come in for the free Wi-Fi and to use the library’s computers to look for jobs. Ms. Woods and her staff offer patrons one-on-one tutoring in basic computer skills and reading. 

“She will see you through to the end of what you need,” says Maggie Bailey, a resident who has received computer training at Western over the past two years.

Sometimes, Ms. Woods says, patrons talk down to her because she is a woman, or say nasty things about her race. But Ms. Woods lets it “roll off [her] back.”

“I think about Reverend Blue,” she says. “I imagine he faced all those kinds of things back at that time, too. So I just keep my head up.”