OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) – A deep dive of metropolis information requires a parting of paper seas in the Special Collections and Research part of the essential department downtown.
The towering cabinets home assembly minutes, constructing blueprints, the unofficial made official, in response to Executive Director Larry White.
“The community is the community,” he factors out. “We serve all of the community.”
It was on one such dive that his group of historians got here head to head with a completely different period.
The minutes from a 1921 Library Board assembly that set in stone a segregation coverage that lasted greater than 40 years.
Reading from the precise minutes from the assembly, “That negroes be excluded from the use of the Central Library…”
“It was discussed that that was a better approach going forward,” continues White.
It was later in 1921 that Dunbar Library opened in a Slaughter’s Hall storefront then moved to a bigger constructing on 4th Street in 1926.
The previous Carnegie Library continued serving the metropolis’s white residents, Dunbar its residents of coloration.
Explaining previous reasoning, White permits, “I think it was probably more a reaction to the Tulsa race riots and the general opinions that were part of society at the time.”
The analysis got here to gentle as the previous Dunbar department acknowledged a century, it’s constructing a long-ago sufferer of city renewal, but its legacy bared to a fashionable interpretation.
“There is astonishment. There is also a certain degree of shame,” he admits.
Researchers, to librarians, to government workers all agreed that publicizing the previous errors would show wholesome for at the moment’s public to find out about.
“By studying what happened, we learn the value of diversity. We learn the value of all of the community,” White mentioned.
An exhibit that can journey to each metropolis library department this 12 months, beginning at the Ralph Ellison Library, represents a sq. look at historical past, not papered over.
For extra information on the Dunbar Exhibit or the Metropolitan Library System, go to www.facebook.com/metrolibrary or www.metrolibrary.org/about-us/mission-history/history.
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