Downtown Huntsville Library
Back on the Map: Tracing the History of Library Services to the Black Community before the Civil Rights Era
Friday, September 16, 2022 1 p.m. – 2 p.m.
Public library services in the State of Alabama began in Huntsville in 1818, but it would be another 122 years before its Black community had access to a public library. This presentation will focus on the first library branch for the Black community which began in 1940 as a library project of the WPA and engineered by a Black woman and retired educator named Dulcina DeBerry.
During its existence from 1940-1968, the “Negro Branch”—later renamed the Dulcina DeBerry Branch—moved numerous times, rarely had its own standalone building, and never had a purpose-built library building. To identify the different sites of this library we used meeting minutes from the HMCPL Archives, maps from the Madison County Department of HUD Collection at the UAH Archives and chatted with members of the community. In order to reconstruct and visualize this history, we created a storymap showing the DeBerry Branch’s history and movement overlaid on a map of present-day Huntsville. During this talk, I will walk us through the storymap virtually and then talk a little bit about the work it took to reconstruct this history.
Presented by:
Dr. Beth Hereford Patin is an Assistant Professor at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies and the granddaughter of local Civil Rights leader Dr. Sonnie Hereford III. Before earning her doctorate at the University of Washington Information School, Beth was named an American Library Association Emerging Leader. Her innovative work focuses on information equity, community resilience, and infusing the diverse and often overlooked work of people of color and other marginalized groups in the library and information sciences field. Current projects focus on epistemicide (the silencing, killing, or devaluing of knowledge systems), libraries during disasters and crises, and digital humanities and the Civil Rights Movement. She is also the co-founder of the Library Information Investigative Team and Director of the Rocket City Civil Rights Initiative.