It has an assembly room which is used for lectures, entertainments and numerous other public meetings, and two classrooms for smaller gatherings. There is a story hour for children and several reading and debating clubs for boys and girls and adults. Through its various activities the library not only circulates books and furnishes facts but it is an educational and social center from which radiate many influences for general betterment.
Fine work is being done with children, who draw 68 per cent of the books circulated. An interesting account of it is given in the Library Journal for April, 1910, 25:160-61, by Mrs. Rachel D. Harris, a former teacher in the colored schools, who is in charge of this department.
When the branch was started eight years ago it was somewhat of an experiment and there was doubt and apprehensiveness all around with regard to the outcome of the undertaking. But it has been a pronounced success from the beginning. It has grown steadily until last year 73,462 vols. were drawn from it for home use. It has become so popular that the second branch is now under construction in the eastern colored section of the city.
The colored people are proud of this library and its achievements. Its opening marked an epoch in the development of the race which is second in importance only to the opening of the first colored free schools there in 1870.
Houston, Texas, also has a separate branch building opened last April. For the past four years it was maintained in a small way in the colored high school. The new building is distinctively a product of negro enterprise. Booker T. Washington's secretary called on Andrew Carnegie personally and secured the promise of $15,000 on condition that the city of Houston would agree to provide not less than $1,500 annually for its maintenance. The $1,500 for the site was raised by colored citizens entirely among their own people. The plans for the building were drawn by a colored architect and its erection supervised by a committee of a separate board of trustees, which consisted of nine colored men. The librarian is a colored girl who is responsible only to the colored trustees. Although she and the trustees consult freely with the librarian and trustees of the public library, the latter act only in an advisory capacity to them. They are therefore justly proud of the library as their own achievement. It contains 5,000 volumes. From a colored population of 30,000 the registered borrowers were only 1,261 last year and the books drawn 5,117. These numbers seem very small, but no doubt there will be a large increase in the new building.
While the Houston method of management may contribute to the negro's self-respect and minister somewhat to the pride and independence of a few of their number, the wisdom of the plan may well be questioned. The results are bound to be inferior unless experience counts for nothing. It is unfortunate that so many cities in their first venture proceed with such disregard of the experience of other places. But the limit is reached when the same city repeats the process with a second board after one board has learned its lesson. This applies not only to the details of planning, erecting and furnishing a building but equally if not more to its operation, the selection, purchase and cataloging of books, the appointment of assistants and the transacting of its daily business.
The white public library boards of Nashville and New Orleans both have plans under way for the erection of Carnegie colored branch buildings, each to cost $25,000. In Nashville the negroes are raising $1,000 and the city is paying $5,000 toward the site. In New Orleans the city will purchase the site. In neither of these places is there any public provision at present for supplying books to negroes.
In Atlanta, Ga., the leading educational center of the South for negroes, they are still without public library facilities, although agitation on the subject began over ten years ago. On the day of the opening of the beautiful $125,000 Carnegie building a committee of colored men called on the library board. Prof. W. E. B. DuBois of Atlanta University acting as spokesman said:
"Gentlemen, we are a committee come to ask you to do justice to the black people of Atlanta by giving them the same free library privileges that you propose giving to whites. Every argument which can be adduced to show the need of libraries for whites applies with redoubled force to the negroes. More than any other part of our population they need instruction, inspiration and proper diversion; they need to be lured from temptation of the streets and saved from evil influences, and they need a growing acquaintance with what the best of the world's souls have thought and done and said. It seems hardly necessary in the twentieth century to argue before men like you the necessity and propriety of placing the best means of human uplifting into the hands of the poorest and lowest and blackest.