BLACK HISTORY MONTH
On the corner of Ninth Street and Martin Luther King Drive in San Angelo sits San Angelo’s historic Dunbar Library. Picket fenced, shining white, built in a style reminiscent of tiny southern schoolhouses and churches you’ might’ve sped past on your travels through Texas.
Sally Meyers is a longtime steward of the building, which now serves as one of the last remaining links to the history of segregated San Angelo.
From Humble Beginnings
The Dunbar Library’s collection dates back to 1932.
A few years earlier, the first public library opened in San Angelo, but only to white patrons, and the Dunbar was created to provide reading materials for the black community. The library initially consisted of a few books, and a side room located in the Masonic Temple on Third Street.
In 1939, Mrs. Sol Mayer donated $1,500 dollars for the construction of a library building on what was then North Randolph Street, that would be open “to all races.”
However, without steady funding — and situated farther from the center of town than the white library, it became the black library.
San Angelo school trustees voted to desegregate schools in 1955, although true integration would not be achieved for many years, by the 1970s the local library system abandoned the Dunbar Branch, transferring its collection to the North Branch Library on Chadbourne Street.
After that, the North by Northwest Lions Club took ownership of the building, where it served as their clubhouse for a several years.
About 10 years ago, the Lions announced that the club could no longer afford to maintain the property and made arrangements with local NAACP members Craig and Sally Meyers, along with Gen. Ronnie Hawkins and his wife, Maria, to revive the library as a historic site, returning it to its original appearance.
Touring the Library Today
Walking up the ramp, you see the distinctive round windows that help illuminate the interior of the library, and after walking in the door, you will be briefly overwhelmed by the number of things to look at adorning the walls.
Photographs of local families and social groups, classes of schoolchildren, and scrapbooks containing important local stories are in every space.
Starting at the original collection, Meyers recalls the memories of the original students of the library, and the original Carver Elementary sitting across the street. Among them, Tolstoy and Sartre, the novels of Robert Louis Stevenson and Sinclair Lewis.
Her favorite is a set of encyclopedias.
“These encyclopedias are what the children would do their homework from,” she explained. “And they would run across the street from what they called the ‘Colored School.'”
Collecting Memories
“We recently interviewed, along with the West Texas Collection, many of the people who attended that school,” Meyers said, “And many of them had such wonderful memories of this library.
“But they all said that Mrs. Lambert, the librarian, was strict. Boys on one side, girls on the other. But you can tell that they felt a lot of love here.”
Touring further down that side, Meyers shows the contemporary children’s section, with a couple hundred bright and colorful selections, and then beyond to the adult section, complete with biographies and great works of literature.
“But it’s not just all African American,” she said, “These are multicultural, and all kinds of children in these books.”
The collection includes a great many recipients of the Corretta Scott King award for children’s literature.
“Listening to those original residents talk about this place really moved Craig and I,” Meyers said.
Craig and Sally Meyers have both been passionately involved in civil rights and racial equality since their days as students at Coe College in Iowa in the early 1960s, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered an address during the convocation in 1961.
She, along with many other white students, travelled to Mississippi in 1962. Recorded in their book “Even Our Friendship Was Illegal.”
Meyers is modest about her summer in Jackson, Mississippi, where she and 10 other students visited Tougaloo College to report on the conditions of the Jim Crow south, and listen to students of that distinguished college.
“I was never arrested or anything, but it was a life changing experience.”
The library is open for tours each Saturday from 10 to noon.
