On Friday, August 26, a group of teddy bears – and their owners – had a special story time. Then the kids went home to bed, but the teddy bears stayed and played!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI-LLHCCLIU[/youtube]
Special thanks to the Junior Girl Scouts of troop #5744.
Where were you on Sept. 11, 2001?
As the 10th anniversary of this epochal moment approaches, I find myself reflecting back on the day and its aftermath. My memory plays like a movie. It was a day just like any other canopied by an improbably blue sky.
My walk to work, a stop for carryout coffee, waves to store owners, a chat with two moms about my eldest son’s high school application process, arrival at the office around 8:30 a.m. Within minutes, a colleague stops in my doorway to announce that a plane has crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. My first thought: a small aircraft, horribly off course. I get to the nearest television: a second plane hits the second tower. Fast forward: other planes, rumors of fires, explosions. I retraced my steps down the same street—no chats or waves to store owners, now. I retrieved my children from their Capitol Hill school. Our neighborhood eerily quiet. No planes flew overhead; my youngest son screamed as a helicopter broke the wall of silence.
The television and the Internet were vigilant companions, hypnotically replaying the crumbling towers, forming a backdrop to the family discussion. And the unforgettable images: of police and firefighters, of streets filled with fleeing office workers coated in white ash, of the rubble and the detritus of lives uprooted. My movie ends with me on the telephone with friends, some halfway around the world, reminders of the grace of humanity in the face of indiscriminate inhumanity.
The need to understand “why” attends any tragedy. How can we make sense of the incomprehensible; prevent something horrific from happening again? The Greeks created myths to embody their understanding of the world. William Shakespeare told us that past is prologue. Art and science allow us to explicate emotions, share dreams and aspirations, examine human folly, question existence, wonder. And libraries collect and make accessible the fruits of these labors.
Our nation’s founders understood how important free access to information is to a democracy. The Library of Congress received both a book collection and a collecting rationale from Thomas Jefferson. Benjamin Franklin helped establish the Library Company of Philadelphia, the nation’s first lending library. James Madison, author of the First Amendment, gave voice to one of the most important tenets of librarianship, intellectual freedom, when he wrote: “popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps, both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
While no library has been immune to the aftershocks of the global economic meltdown, the challenges we face as information professionals are not limited to economics. The ubiquity of increasingly affordable mobile technology coupled with the rise of e-media presents exciting opportunities to deliver more content to library patrons where they are. Yet how do we keep up with the demands for both print—newspapers, magazines, books—and e-content? How do we maintain the balance between high tech and high touch so that patrons can help themselves and get help when they need it? How do we ensure patron privacy—and we must—when the more we know about our library users, their tastes and interests, the more helpful we can be? How can we have it all/do it all?
As professionals and managers of an institution dedicated to serving the public good, we will continue to evaluate what we do as we harness new tools and media that paradoxically enable us to connect with others and know more about the world we live in but present unprecedented challenges. The health of our community depends on our commitment to identify, experiment with and pursue the right solutions and balance and so does the health of our democratic way of life.
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| Fall Planting Schedule |
Don Weber and the Master Gardeners of Northern Virginia have posted a rough guide for planting fall vegetables in Arlington, on the bulletin board outside of Central Library’s vegetable garden.
The planting schedule is specifically adjusted for the Arlington area (inside the beltway), with the expected first frost date of early to mid-November.
Click on the image to get a printable copy of the Fall Planting Schedule.
You can also read the highpoints of Don’s Fall Planting garden talk on the AFAC Plot Against Hunger site.
On Monday, Sept. 19, 2011, The Virginia Room’s Arlington Reunion History Program will host a community discussion on “Queen City,” Arlington’s black community after Freedman’s Village and before the Pentagon, at the Central Library Auditorium, from 10:00 am – 12:00 p.m.
The original residents of Queen City were descendents of the residents of Freedman’s Village, which had been established by the federal government during the Civil War as a home for displaced/freed slaves. A tightly knit African American community, Queen City was particularly focused on providing education for its children and was described by George Vollin, a former resident, as “a real happy, solid community.”
The neighborhood eventually disappeared when residents were displaced in 1941 as construction on the Pentagon and surrounding roads began:
“Queen City was not razed for the Pentagon building, but the overall Pentagon project. In order to accommodate the large number of individuals who would be commuting to and parking at the Pentagon on a daily basis, extensive accommodations had to be made for the automobile.
The cloverleaf highway structure, which the Columbia Pike feeds into and is found to the west of the Pentagon, remains the exact location of Queen City. Therefore, Queen City was destroyed for Pentagon’s needed transportation corridor, which eventually would come to include over thirty miles of highways and ramps, including twenty-one overpasses.”
-Claire Burke, Arlington’s Queen City, p. 21
If you can’t make it to the program, and would like to learn more, you can visit the Virginia Room, where the local history archive includes Arlington’s Queen City, by Claire Burke.
If you missed this talk, the Ballston-Virginia Square Patch sent a reporter to the program, and published an excellent recap of the event.
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| Country Club Hills |
Brumback Realty Company of Clarendon, founded by a father with six sons, was a builder in Country Club Hills, in 1928-29.
Country Club Hills was developed from 126 acres of beautiful hills and wooded land, from the old Civil War era Grunwell estate, and commanded a view of Washington, D.C. One of their architects was A.F. Thelander, who designed and built his own home in Country Club Hills at Rock Spring Drive and Avondale Avenue, facing the Washington Golf and Country Club.
The English Tudor, Colonial, and Spanish style homes combined brick and stone and included two car garages, variegated tile roofs and copper gutters and flashing. The first 15 homes sold for an average of $20,000 in 1929.
The Virginia Room has some photos from Brumback Realty showing tastefully furnished interiors and the distinctive exteriors of homes that are still admired today.
You can read more about Country Club Hills on Our Back Pages.
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| Catherine, Meghan, Gwen and Simon (Ryan not pictured) |
On Saturday, July 9, four smiling faces walked into the Westover Branch Library, and handed the librarian on duty an envelope full of money, and a letter.
Were they there to pay a fine? No!
They had spent all day manning a lemonade stand in a nearby park, earning an impressive $23.25. When they remembered that the Library will donate 50 cents to help rebuild Haiti’s Petit-Goave Library for each child who turns in a completed summer reading log, the kids realized their lemonade money could help us do even more to help Petit Goave.
We are so grateful for their help, and their thoughtfulness!
We’re expanding our well received Paws-to-Read program to the Shirlington Branch Library!
Starting in September, the PALS reading-therapy dog teams will be at Shirlington on the second Wednesday of each month, to listen non-judgmentally as kids practice reading out loud.
Slots are available for 15 minute sessions, from 5:30 – 6:30 p.m, on:
Sign up in person at the Shirlington information desk, or by calling 703-228-6545.
Brumback Realty Company of Clarendon, founded by a father with six sons, was a builder in Country Club Hills in 1928-29. Country Club Hills was developed from 126 acres of beautiful hills and wooded land from the old Civil War era Grunwell estate and commanded a view of Washington, D.C. One of their architects was A.F. Thelander, who designed and built his own home in Country Club Hills at Rock Spring Drive and Avondale Avenue, facing the Washington Golf and Country Club. The English Tudor, Colonial, and Spanish style homes combined brick and stone and included two car garages, variegated tile roofs and copper gutters and flashing. The first 15 homes sold for an average of $20,000 in 1929. The Virginia Room has some photos from Brumback Realty showing tastefully furnished interiors and the distinctive exteriors of homes that are still admired today.
The Virginia Room has a copy of Arlington Historical Society’s 1987 driving tour of Brumback Homes in Country Club Hills, Woodlawn, Woodmont, Lyon Park, Lyon Village and some individual streets. The driving tour includes a quotation from Keith A. Brumback, President of Brumback Realty, Inc. about the Burmback Policy of Doing Business: “In my opinion, one of the most important and worthwhile lines of work any individual can undertake is that of providing families with attractive, comfortable homes in which all the joy of home-ownership can be experienced, without financial strain or worry on the family, and at the lowest possible price consistent with sound construction methods and good business practice.”
A Virginia Room Oral History interview of George and Frances Brumback provides more information on the Brumback Realty Company, the building of Country Club Hills and Mrs. Brumback’s career as a teacher at Cherrydale and Woodmont Elementary Schools.
What about you? Do you live in a Brumback home? Do you have any photos of your home and neighborhood? The Virginia Room wants to know.
On August 28, the 48th anniversary of the "I Have a Dream" speech, the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial will be formally dedicated in Washington D.C. Located in West Potomac Park and flanked by the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, the addition of the King Memorial creates a monumental trifecta of leadership and inspiration.
From left, seventh graders Gloria Thompson, Ronald Deskins, Lance Newman and Michael Jones enter the previously all-white Stratford Junior High on Feb. 2, 1959. Courtesy of Michael Jones.
As a child of nine in August of 1963, I had little knowledge of the man whose eloquence and personal courage undergirded a movement. I had no knowledge of the civil rights movement itself. African-Americans were just not a part of my everyday experience. Just as it is often observed that there are two Virginias, in 1963 there were two Arlingtons: the well-to-do, predominantly white North Arlington and the less prosperous, racially mixed South Arlington. It was a distinction that was more than just directional. There were few students of color in my elementary school, Stewart-Tuckahoe, when I attended from 1960-1966--a fact consistent with the 1960 Census, which reported only 7,063 foreign–born persons or 4.3 percent of the County’s total population.
High View Park in North Arlington and Arlington View and Green Valley (Nauck) in South Arlington were all that remained of the County’s African-American communities. High View Park, known in my day as "Hall's Hill," was a neighborhood not far from where I grew up. It epitomized the less prosperous and segregated Arlington: an enclave of substandard housing and dead-ended, unpaved streets that for much of its history had been literally walled from the white neighborhoods it bordered by a series of 7-foot fences.
The year of King’s speech, the Arlington Planning Commission established a committee to study how best to maintain residential neighborhoods, a study that led to the creation of the Neighborhood Conservation Program. On Feb. 13, 1965, the County Board approved a Neighborhood Conservation Plan for High View Park hailing the tireless efforts of the residents who spoke up for their neighborhood’s civic rights. Abraham Lincoln, whose 156th birthday was celebrated the day before, would have been proud.
As significant as this moment was in Arlington's pursuit of racial parity, it was but the latest example of the County’s black and white residents working together for common cause. A few years earlier, some of the High View Park champions--E. Leslie and Dorothy Hamm and Peggy Deskins – had joined Edmund and Elizabeth Campbell and others to face down Sen. Harry Byrd’s "massive resistance" and integrate the County’s schools.
The Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision to end school segregation "with all deliberate speed" rocked Virginia to its core in May 1954. The "political museum piece" that was Virginia, as characterized by political scientist V.O Key in his classic, "Southern Politics in State and Nation" [1949], was stuck on the horns of a dilemma, caught between the moral imperative to do right by Virginia and remain segregated, or to do the right thing. It was an issue that pitted being a Virginian against being an American. Arlington, having evolved from a bedroom community in the shadow of the nation's capital to a thriving, socially progressive community of residents whose political views were markedly different from those of the rest of the state, found itself at the center of the fight.
By 1956, political passions were running high in Richmond as "massive resistance" to the High Court's mandate was gaining momentum, giving rise to a plan to prevent any integrated schools from receiving state funds and authorizing the governor to order any such school to close. Meanwhile the NAACP was filing lawsuits across the state to force integration, including a suit brought on behalf of 15 African American and white parents and 22 students in Arlington.
The case was named for Clarissa S. Thompson, an African American student who wanted to attend Arlington's all white Washington-Lee High School instead of the all black Hoffman-Boston. After hearing oral arguments, Alexandria Federal District Judge Albert V. Bryan, who only four years before in writing the opinion in the original Prince Edward County school integration case* stated that racial segregation caused no hurt or harm to either race, ordered that the schools in Arlington be desegregated. Suits and countersuits ensued--deliberation without speed.
Finally, on Jan. 19, 1959 (birthday of Virginia native son Robert E. Lee), the state’s Supreme Court of Appeals, by a ruling of 5-2, overturned the Virginia legislature's "massive resistance" laws and its threat of schools closures, declaring them in violation of the Virginia Constitution. The issue of school integration had assailed Virginia’s traditional political culture, a culture that was oligarchic, parsimonious, suspicious of "big" government, discouraging of public participation in the affairs of state, obeisant to the way things were. Throughout the long, slow march to integration in Virginia, rhetoric trumped reason; fear mongering triumphed over fairness; delay prevented "deliberate speed." Traditional Southern values were pitted against unwanted northern influence--ideologues against pragmatists.
The press, too played a powerful role on both sides of the integration issue. For every Richmond News Leader editorial that intrepidly egged on the resisters, editorials in both the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot and The Washington Post and Times Herald, penned by Lenoir Chambers and Robert Muse, respectively, eschewed moral turpitude and urged action and acceptance.
Virginia fought the law, but the law won. On Feb. 2, 1959, Ronald Deskins, Michael Jones, Lance Newman and Gloria Thompson (sister of Clarissa) entered Stratford Junior High School, splitting a phalanx of approximately 100 helmeted Arlington police officers who were Little Rock-ready with gas grenades, masks and batons. Their walk to school irrevocably changed Virginia although at the time, they were unaware of its historical significance.
Years later, reminiscing at a panel discussion with 500 students at Stratford Junior High (now H-B Woodlawn), the four understated their roles on that important day citing their parents and other community leaders – blacks and whites -- as the true heroes of Arlington’s integration story. The integration of Stratford was but the first of many small steps toward integration. It would still be years before black and white children could sit alongside one another at drug store counters and drink Cokes, attend dances together, or compete on the same sports teams.
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* Prince Edward County Public Schools chose to close rather than integrate and remained closed from 1959-1964. It was the only county system in the country to do so.
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The material for this story came from the archives of the Arlington Public Library's Center for Local History. The attached bibliography will help interested readers learn more about these important events in Arlington’s history.
VA Room Oral Histories about Desegregation
DVD:
Segregation/Integration Collections in the Arlington Community Archives
Vertical Files:
Books:
The Shirlington Branch Library may be closed on Thursday, but you can still find great, free things to do in Shirlington!
This month, Thursday nights in Shirlington Village are all about the annual Shirlington Jazz Festival:
And if you can’t make it to the Jazz Festival, you can always check out our collection of online streaming jazz.
Jazz Festival performances are free, and take place from 6:30 – 8:30 in the Plaza in front of the Shirlington Branch Library. For an optional $5, adults can taste 4 delicious wines (2 whites, 2 reds) – the proceeds of which benefit our favorite gardeners, the Arlington Food Assistance Center (AFAC). Donations of non-perishable foods are also welcome.
A general warning – Campbell Avenue from Harris Teeter to Caribou Coffee will be closed to vehicle traffic from 4:00 p.m. through 9:30 p.m.