The Dismissal of Miss Ruth Brown

While the story of Miss Ruth Brown as presented by Louise S. Robbins unfolds like a typical biography, the central event of the book revolves around her dismissal from the public library in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. While the book tells the story of a small town (its residents and way of life) as well as the story of a librarian who became slowly radicalized over time, this book remains just that--a story. While you can extract arguments and questions from Louise S. Robbins's research, Ms. Robbins own judgments and interpretations are secondary to telling the story correctly. She merely expands upon a little known history with as much accuracy as that history's participants allowed. According to Robbins, the morals of the story must be extracted on your own. The epilogue of the book states that "[t]he most important questions I must ask myself-and the reader must ask of my story-are those of integrity and rigorousness" (Robbins, 177). The most valuable aspect of the book is the story of the dismissal itself. What is valuable is what this confrontation meant about living in Cold War America and the role of its information specialists. Ruth Brown was smeared via her profession largely for an incident that had nothing to do with her performance as head librarian. While some largely negligible decisions Ruth Brown made as head librarian provided an excuse for her eventual firing, the dismissal itself reveals that during a witch hunt, there is not much that one can do to protect himself/herself from the will of the mob (at least during the heat of the moment).

While Oklahoma is not commonly thought of as being a part of the Deep South, Robbins's exploration of Oklahoman history shows that race relations in Oklahoma were every bit as complicated at the "traditional" Southern states'. Native Americans in Oklahoma actually owned black people, so that added another level of convoluted racial hierarchy not dealt with in the South. In 1910, Oklahoma stripped black people of the vote. The Klan, a powerful organization in the 1920s, had a wide reaching, visible presence throughout the state. In 1921, racial hatred and rumors of a lynching led to riots and a fire bombing that left sixty-eight black Tulsans dead. Bartlesville is very close to Tulsa, and its blacks were understandably alarmed by the riots. Doctors could not openly treat black patients, and by the time Ruth Brown was dismissed from her job, black and white schools were strictly segregated. While it is unclear what caused Ruth Brown to become an active campaigner on behalf of civil rights, these are the conditions under which she served as a librarian in Bartlesville.

After approximately thirty years of service as a Bartlesville librarian, Ruth Brown decided to up her commitment to racial justice by sitting in a restaurant with two black women. Once Joe McCarthy arrived on the scene, the civil rights movement was lumped in with any number of supposed communist plots to subvert the American way of life. Around this time, Ruth Brown also had civil rights activist Bayard Rustin speak in Bartlesville. All this did not play well in the town that oil magnate Frank Phillips had built. Eventually, all of this activism cascaded into a movement to remove Ruth Brown as head librarian. Staged photographic propaganda also served to undermine Ruth Brown's credibility (see the picture of Nations and New Republics with a book called "The Russians" on top [page 60]).

What is most valuable in in this story for librarians is the theoretical argument over the role of libraries in American society. While communist and racial tensions led to this debate, Ruth Brown's and her detractors' positions are central to what we librarians should take away from this debate. As E.S. Dunway proclaimed, "'[the library] should be a place where our youth will be thoroughly indoctrinated with the principles of Americanism, and where they will be protected from the teachings of subversive doctrines'" (Robbins, 58). Particularly by 1950, Ruth Brown took the position that as many people should be reading from as many different sources as possible. While she had no communist sympathies herself, she still retained such publications as Soviet Russia Today (though she found this particular journal to be a bore).

The question over censorship is never ending. This makes Ruth Brown's story particularly relevant to librarians today in the wake of September 11th, 2001. Who should be reading books? What kind of material should be in the library? How do you deal with budgetary and space constraints? The rest of the book continues the story of Ruth Brown's independent streak up to her death. The book goes on to detail the efforts of Ruth Brown's many friends to defend her good name. Louise Robbins's story is also a story of racial healing. In the epilogue, one black Bartlesville resident proclaims, "[a]ll we have taught them [younger generations] is our rage" (Robbins, 166). Robbins seems to demonstrate that talking about our past helps us to better understand our future.

The only question really left by Louise Robbins for us to answer is the question of what went on in Ruth Brown's head. She [Brown] was not close to a great many people, so this makes the story of the origins of her independence streak a bit more vague. Not all patrons of the library thought that Ruth Brown was necessarily a beacon of racial equality from the beginning of her tenure (though by the end, her sympathies were apparent to all).