A small-town institution becomes a target in the '50s

Review

Posted: Sunday, May 14, 2000

Title: THE DISMISSAL OF MISS RUTH BROWN: Civil Rights, Censorship, and the American Library

Author: Louise S. Robbins

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Price: $24.95

For 30 years she lived a life of quiet dedication, steward and sentinel over the stacks of a small-town public library.

A lover of books, Ruth Brown believed that "the freedom to read must include all who have the desire." She fraternized with individuals in the black community who shared her belief and helped form an integrated group of townspeople committed to promoting racial equality. In so doing, she ran afoul of the powers-that-be in Bartlesville, Okla., a contingent that suddenly developed a lively interest in the reading material in the library and determined to their own satisfaction that Miss Brown was circulating communist and subversive materials.

The year was 1950. The bespectacled, respectable middle-aged librarian was dismissed from her position, the target of a communist witch hunt in a community in which she had come to be regarded as something of an "institution" by many townspeople.

At first glance, it would seem that author Louise S. Robbins, a librarian herself, has chosen the most ho-hum biographical subject imaginable, given the public's insatiable lust for biographies and made-for-TV flicks about the Monicas, movie stars, multi-millionaires and miscellaneous murderers among us. But readers learn that Hollywood discovered Ruth Brown long before Robbins did. The Oklahoma librarian's battle against censorship, intolerance and suppression of individual rights was sufficiently dramatic to inspire a 1956 Stanley Kramer film, "Storm Center," starring Bette Davis.

Hollywood, besieged perhaps more than any other American community by the inquisitions of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, saw the travails of its own members mirrored in Ruth Brown's ordeal in an Oklahoma oil town.

The ironic twist in the plot, according to Robbins, was that the film omitted what may have been the real reason Miss Brown was fired. Although the American Library Association tried to help save Brown's job and defended the right of American libraries to acquire and circulate reading material representing a diversity of viewpoints, the ALA focus was entirely on the censorship issue, ignoring Brown's role in interracial activities. At the time, the "separate but equal" doctrine prevailed in libraries as well as schools and the ALA did not actively advocate change.

Miss Brown was in the vanguard of public servants who worked for integration well before the 1954 landmark Supreme Court decision in the suit of Brown vs. the Board of Public Education that made public school integration the law of the land. Robbins chronicles the high price the high-minded librarian paid for her stand.

By forming a local group affiliated with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), by showing up in restaurants and at church with her Afro-American friends who taught in segregated schools, by advocating racial integration in the library and the local YMCA, Brown violated racial boundaries well-established in Bartlesville. Some prominent townspeople saw red.

Ruth Brown was no Erin Brokovich, the sexy, gutsy gal whose winning class action suit on behalf of her community is currently showcased in a popular film that bears the name of the real-life crusader. Supporters who rallied to Brown's cause won no awards. Instead, they found themselves in hot water. The library board that backed the librarian was replaced by a new one. Phillips Petroleum employees who supported her were threatened, fired, or transferred. (One of them was sent to Borger, known at the time as the "Siberia" of the oil company).

Unlike Brokovich, Brown lost her court case and never received recognition, much less profits, from the film loosely based on her story. Although Bette Davis wrote an aggrieved fan of her conviction that "my children will be proud of me for having appeared in this motion picture," her film was neither the box office hit nor the sensational star vehicle that "Erin Brokovich" has proved to be for Julia Roberts.

Robbins, who is associate professor and director of the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin, devotes the final chapter of her book to examination of her own motives and biases in taking up Ruth Brown's cause a half-century after the librarian got the ax. She also presents an interesting analysis of how change in the direction of socio-political winds alters the perceptions and memories of key players in "skirmishes" such as the one fought in Bartlesville.

Robbins has written a 178-page book with no less than 41 pages of notes and bibliography in order to arrive at the truth of what really happened in Bartlesville 50 years ago. Her work will be of particular interest to librarians, civil rights activists, and students of history seeking to write scholarly but readable accounts of what historian Howard Zinn calls "obscure events that illuminate the atmosphere of an era."

"When values are in conflict, those agencies entrusted with communicating cultural values, including libraries, become areas for conflict," Robbins writes. She notes that this is occurring in our own time - and reminds readers that "battles for both equality and free inquiry are fought in myriad skirmishes in towns and cities we call home."

- Ann Warnecke

Ann Warnecke, a longtime resident of Amarillo, is a free lance writer.



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