The George Cleveland Hall Branch of the Chicago Public Library is an oasis amid the ghetto`s bleak reality.
”Sometimes I`ll see an older, well-dressed man running his hand along the shelves as if searching for a certain volume,” said Florine Pratt. ”But if I ask to help, he`ll reply: `No, I just had an urge to see the place again. We moved out of the neighborhood years ago. But I started out here, inspired by some of these books to do something with my life.` ”
Her daily commute from a middle-class community on the South Side has also become a sentimental journey for Pratt, who is about to retire after three decades with the public library. For 15 years she has headed the Hall branch, where several generations of black Chicagoans have discovered the miracle of the printed word. Some also found their literary voice here.
”Did you ever read Richard Wright`s novels about life on the South Side?” the 65-year-old Pratt said. ”Well, as a young man from the neighborhood, Wright was encouraged to try his hand at writing in this very building. So, too, were Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks, when they first dreamed of being poets.”
It`s easy to imagine how the Hall library would be a beacon for a ghetto child with a vision. Sitting at 48th Street and South Michigan Avenue, it seems an intruder, perhaps not from another planet but certainly from a far different part of this one. Its mix-and-match quarrystone walls give it the look of a fieldhouse in a small-town park. Its lawns are virtually the only patches of green in view.
Most nearby buildings are surrounded by vacant lots carpeted with broken glass and rubble. On some blocks, only a single three-flat or bungalow still stands, the rest of the land now occupied only by clumps of weeds and rusting shells of abandoned cars. In places, the flattened landscape extends all the way to the Robert Taylor Homes, about a half-mile to the west.
For Sam Turner, crossing those empty lots between the library and the housing project is a twice-weekly pilgrimage. A 5th-grade teacher turned him on to reading, recalled Turner, who was surveying the new-arrival shelf. The habit, he noted, survived his adolescence, when he ran with the local gangs, just as it now provides respite from his daily surroundings. Without books, the 35-year-old Turner observed, he would have been lost long ago.
”In the projects, you see terrible things you`re powerless to change and you hear all your neighbors` sorrows and hatreds,” Turner said. ”Which is why I read science fiction books just as quick as the library gets them in. They allow me to dream and to live in a better future, for a little while.”
After checking out Turner`s books, Pratt noted that the area around the library is much more transient, its patrons fewer, than when she first came to work here.
”Now, when one of our older readers dies, it`s like losing a member of the family,” Pratt said.
Sixty years ago, she said, this was a vibrant neighborhood known as Bronzeville, which is why the library stands here. Until the 1930s, she recalled, there were no public libraries in Chicago`s black community;
residents had to use branches in white neighborhoods. In that segregated era, such a trip could discourage all but the most intrepid readers. Still, a library for the black community didn`t rank high among the city fathers`
funding priorities.
Then a black surgeon, George Cleveland Hall, found a way to force the issue, Pratt recalled. Julius Rosenwald, the great philanthropist who headed Sears, Roebuck and Co., had been funding libraries for black communities in the South. Hall was able to convince him that Chicago`s blacks needed his help too. So Rosenwald bought the land on which the Hall branch now stands and donated it to the city. The attendant publicity forced the library`s board of directors to appropriate funds to build the branch.
”Dr. Hall died before this building was finished,” Pratt said. ”It is only a pity that he never knew his name would be carved over the door of this library, for which he had fought so hard for so many years.”
A guiding light
Virtually from the day it opened in 1932, the library became Bronzeville`s intellectual center. Vivian Harsh, the first librarian there, deeply loved all things connected with books and had a way of communicating that passion to young people, Pratt recalled. Harsh encouraged the
neighborhood`s aspiring young writers, some of whom previewed their books-to- be with audiences at the library, years before they became standard entries on literature-course syllabuses.
”Going through our old scrapbooks, I found this,” Pratt said, holding up a fading and torn handbill. ”Miss Harsh must have plastered them all over the neighborhood, announcing that on April 1, 1938, at 8 p.m., Langston Hughes would read his poetry at the Hall branch, admission free.”
Harsh was equally devoted to books that black people had already published, Pratt noted. Back in the 1930s and `40s, scarcely a university in the nation offered courses in black literature or black history. Few white academics even recognized that black Americans had a cultural legacy. Harsh feared that books by older black authors would simply disappear before anyone realized they existed.
It wasn`t easy to convince foundations of that view, Pratt noted. But the persistant Harsh got a little grant money and spent her summer vacations combing Southern hamlets for books and memorabilia of black life. Shipping them back to the Hall library, she built up, over the years, one of the nation`s leading collections in black literature and history. After Harsh retired, in 1958, her collection was transferred to the Woodson Regional Library, in a more middle-class neighborhood, south of here.
”Miss Harsh was forced to travel in segregated railroad cars, sometimes not knowing if there was a hotel in the town where she was going that accepted black guests,” Pratt said. ”But she felt strongly that for the sake of books, it was worth putting up with a lot of hassles.”
Wheelbarrow series
Pratt said she learned that same lesson in her family`s home, which is how she herself came to be a librarian. She grew up in Alabama, where her father worked in the print shop at Tuskegee Institute, the college and training center established by the pioneering black educator Booker T. Washington. When he wasn`t setting words into type, her father was reading them, Pratt recalled. He had a subscription to Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a risky business then, as Southern whites didn`t like blacks reading publications that talked about ”freedom” and ”equality.” Her father, though, took those words seriously.
”Until the day he died, just as the civil rights movement was beginning, my father kept petitioning for the right to vote,” Pratt said. ”I remember his letters to the town`s election judges always began, `Sirs: I am a veteran who served my country in World War I and feel I have the same right to vote as any other American citizen.` ”
At one point, her father discovered that Tuskegee`s library was discarding some of its older volumes. Disturbed at the waste, he took his wheelbarrow and trundled home successive loads of books and built shelves to hold his new library. For his daughter, who had learned to read before going to school, those books opened her eyes to the world beyond the small segregated town where she lived.
”I read `Grimm`s Fairy Tales` and was fascinated by stories of knights and castles and far-off lands,” Pratt said. ”I had a friend, Dora Lee Kennedy, and we were always rivals, so if she read a book, I had to read one too. Before I finished grade school, I read ”Don Quixote” and ”Les Miserables” and lots of other books from what my folks called our
`wheelbarrow series.` ”
That reading rivalry served both contestants well, Pratt recalled. Her friend grew up to become a professor at Tuskegee, where Pratt herself was a librarian before marrying and moving to Chicago, her husband`s hometown.
He went to work for the public schools, and they had three children.
The hard core
When she first went to work for the public library, Pratt recalled, long lines of book borrowers stood at her desk, from opening to closing.
Now Pratt worries that this generation might not get the same excitement from books that she and her childhood friend felt.
There are empty spaces at the Hall branch`s reading tables, some days. But for a small but loyal band of patrons, the library still functions, just as it always has, as an intellectual refuge in a part of the world with all too few quiet places.
Lawrence Miller, a retired salesman, comes by almost daily to teach himself electronics from the library`s textbooks. Twenty-five years ago, during the civil rights movement, he used its books to fill in gaps in black history that had gone untaught, back when he went to school. Now he takes advantage of the library`s newspaper subscriptions to register his personal protest against wrongs he is convinced didn`t end with the demise of Jim Crow. ”I feel there is still a lot of racism in American society and the media are part of the problem, so I won`t buy a newspaper,” the 69-year-old Miller said. ”But by reading the papers here, I can make my little protest and still keep up with world events.”
A new poetic voice
For high school students, like Maurie Richie and Christopher Short, the Hall branch is a place to do homework, and nourish dreams of getting into the University of Illinois and on with their lives.
”It`s hard to study where I live,” explained Short, a senior at King High School. ”Some of the neighbors are always making a racket like in `War of the Roses.` ”
For Earline Myles, the library is still a place to make the same wonderful discovery of poetry`s power that Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks once did here. A high school dropout, the 30-year-old Myles recently went back to school, determined to get her diploma.
Working on her assignments, she came across a book of Hughes` verse that inspired her to try her own hand at writing.
Last year she entered a poem she wrote about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in a contest held in conjunction with Black History Month. One day Myles opened up her mailbox in the Robert Taylor Homes to find a certificate naming her as a winner, and a letter inviting her to the finals in Columbus, Ohio.
”I didn`t have the money to go, but would you like to hear a bit of my poem?” Myles asked.
There was a king
Who used to sing
We will be free!
Let freedom ring!
