Changing the geography of reading in a southern border state: the Rosenwald Fund and the WPA in Oklahoma.(Works Progress Administration)

This study explores the impact of funding for library-related projects from the Julius Rosenwald Fund and the Works Progress Administration on the availability of library services and reading materials for African Americans in the South and border states, specifically Oklahoma, in the 1930s and 1940s. Using a variety of archival sources, including the Julius Rosenwald papers, the WPA records at the National Archives, Oklahoma Library Commission annual reports, and records of the Rosenwald projects at the Oklahoma Historical Society, the article attempts to evaluate whether these outside interventions actually changed the geography of reading for African Americans during that time period.

Recent research identifies the mere geographic proximity of reading materials as influential in the development of literacy and the reading habit. The dearth of reading materials available to African Americans in the South at least until the 1960s because of school and library segregation has been well documented. Thus efforts to ameliorate differential access to reading materials and thereby enhance literacy and the reading habit should be of interest and concern to librarians, educators, and policy makers as well as social historians. It may be especially pertinent as support for public and school libraries, the targets of these two programs, is threatened.

Unfortunately, impact is difficult to determine at a historical remove. This study provides tantalizing clues in letters of thanks, libraries that persisted after funding disappeared, and books that were published in hopes of finding a market in the Rosenwald library projects but no definitive answers to how the reading map of Oklahoma may have been permanently reshaped by the interventions of the Rosenwald Fund and the WPA Library Programs.

**********

Recent research by Keith Curry Lance, Donna Baumbach, and others as well as a long-established body of evidence summarized and analyzed by Stephen Krashen in his The Power of Reading: Insights from the Research demonstrate that the development of literacy is, not surprisingly, highly dependent on geographic access to printed material and, in fact, is amazingly enhanced by access to and even low level of use of a well-staffed and well-stocked library. (1) While it seems obvious on the face of it-that one cannot learn to read without access to reading materials-the poor literacy rates that are legacies of a print-starved environment have become the source of many debates about the teaching of reading in today's schools. Thus past efforts by government and not-for-profit organizations to ameliorate differential access to reading materials and thereby enhance literacy and the reading habit for those who suffer from lack of access to printed matter should be of interest and concern to librarians, educators, and policy makers as well as social historians.

In 1938 Louis Round Wilson's The Geography of Reading: A Study of the Distribution and Status of Libraries in the United States provided an assessment not only of libraries but also of access to education, bookstores, newspapers, and other means of becoming literate and informed through a geographic lens. (2) Although his focus was not exclusively the South, his study, not surprisingly, reinforced the findings of others, such as Clark Foreman's 1932 Environmental Factors in Negro Elementary Education and Eliza Atkins Gleason's subsequent The Southern Negro and the Public Library (1941), which demonstrated clearly the dramatic difference in access to reading instruction and materials between the largely rural, agrarian, segregated South--especially its African American population--and the remainder of the country. (3) During the Great Depression (roughly 1929-45), a time when the agrarian South was especially hard pressed to maintain its self-imposed dual educational system, two very different types of programs--the charitable programs of the Julius Rosenwald Fund and the work relief programs of the New Deal--provided assistance to schools and libraries and, in some small measure, changed the geography of reading for African Americans in the South and in border states whose cultures bore the mark of the South in many aspects.

In this essay I will focus on one state, Oklahoma, to examine the programs and try to estimate their cumulative effect. While Oklahoma is usually considered a border rather than a southern state (it was not a state at the time of the Civil War, and it is associated with the "cowboys and Indians" of the West), there is good justification to consider it southern when examining educational differentials for African Americans. The Five Civilized Tribes--Cherokee, Seminole, Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw--who were removed to Indian Territory from the southeastern states in the 1830s were slave owners who sided with the South during the Civil War. They lost their lands in part as retribution when the South was defeated. While some white settlers moved into the Indian Territory from the Midwest or border states, those who were most influential in the framing of the state's constitution were southerners who wrote segregation of schools into the statehood documents and only waited until their charter was granted in 1907 by President Theodore Roosevelt to write it into the rest of their legal and social code. The first bill of the Oklahoma Senate established segregation in public accommodations, embedding Jim Crow firmly into the Oklahoma consciousness. Despite the hopes of the settlers of Oklahoma's all-black towns such as Boley, Taft, Rentiesville, and Langston, in 1910 (just three years after statehood) a legislative referendum deprived African Americans of their right to vote, a right they would have to take back in a long and arduous journey through the courts. Although the relatively small size of its African American population--about 8 percent of the total--makes Oklahoma different from the other southern states, its maintenance of dual systems for education and other public accommodations places it within the boundaries of the South for the purposes of this discussion.

The earlier of the two funding programs to be introduced into Oklahoma was that of the Julius Rosenwald Fund. Julius Rosenwald was a founder of Sears and Roebuck and became president of the firm in 1909,…