Samuel W. Tucker: A man ahead of his time

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Police removing sit-in participants from the Alexandria Library

Samuel W. Tucker: A man ahead of his time

— 21 August 2014
By Derrick Perkins

In 1939, quietly reading a book in a city public library meant risking arrest, depending on the color of your skin. One young, black Alexandria attorney pressed it to his advantage.

Seventy-five years ago today, Samuel Wilbert Tucker sent five well-dressed black men into the Alexandria library — now the Kate Waller Barrett branch — to ask for a borrowers’ card. One by one, the first four entered and made the request, only to be refused by a baffled librarian. ... The library was whites-only, after all.

Rebuked, the men quietly selected books from the nearby stacks and sat down to read. The fifth, a man named William “Buddy” Evans, made immediately for a book and found a seat, joining his compatriots. ... There they sat until the police arrived. Reading in the public library earned the five black men disorderly conduct charges.

“Tucker wanted to make a gesture,” said S. J. Ackerman, who delved into the civil rights lawyer’s life story in a riveting and deeply researched article for The Washington Post in 2000. “Old Virginia was really squeamish. They had all these pretentions about how civilized everyone was. Tucker wanted to embarrass them.”

Samuel Wilbert Tucker