Eighty years after being arrested for disorderly conduct and illegally sitting in at the whites only public library in Alexandria, VA, those 1939 charges against five young African Americans were officially dropped on Friday. An article posted on WTOP online news provided the following details:
Staff at the Alexandria Library recently discovered that the judge originally assigned to the case never made a ruling and the charges were still technically outstanding. Commonwealth’s Attorney Bryan Porter asked the Alexandria circuit court to dismiss them in recognition of constitutional rights.
The court found that the men were “lawfully exercising their constitutional rights to free assembly, speech and to petition the government to alter the established policy of sanctioned segregation at the time of their arrest,” and that “sitting peacefully in a library reading books … was not in any fashion disorderly or likely to cause acts of violence.”
Mayor Justin Wilson applauded the action by the Commonwealth’s Attorney and the Circuit Court to “right an important part of the wrong that occurred 80 years ago,” said Wilson.
This seemingly small gesture is a vivid reminder of the daily indignities that African Americans faced during the Jim Crow era of legal segregation. It is also a vivid reminder of the many relatively unknown people who stood up or sat down to protest this form of injustice throughout that nearly 100 year shameful period of our nation’s history. As this time period recedes into history, it is especially important to become educated about this reality and the ways in which the legacy of that era is still with us today. With that in mind and in memory of those five young men arrested in 1939 at the public library in Alexandria, VA, I want to share links to two books among many that have been helpful to me:
Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi won the 2016 National Book Award for nonfiction: Click Here
The Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church’s Complicity in Racism by Jamar Tisby focuses on how much of American Christianity was complicit with racist culture and ways to work for greater levels of equity and justice in our time: Click Here
