Auburn Avenue Research Library

This guide to the Auburn Avenue Research Library in Atlanta opens in the segregation era, when a physician named Homer Nash could only describe access to a public library as such a hard time. It follows the branch that finally opened in 1921, its first librarian Alice Dugged Cary, and the moment in 1934 when a young librarian named Annie McPheeters decided the shelves needed more than borrowed books. McPheeters believed that if the white libraries would not preserve Black Atlanta's history, Black Atlanta would have to do it itself.