No library in the Santa Clara County Library system is required to recognize Black History Month or share its meaning and goals with patrons. So when Sandy Haro walked into the Gilroy Library in February and saw no BHM display, she asked questions.
That’s when we learned that BHM fell through the cracks at the Gilroy Library. It was only after Haro, who is African American, asked questions, that a robust display went up in the kids’ section and a small, easily missed one appeared in the teen and adult area, although when is disputed.
Nearly a month later, county librarian Nancy Howe still has not returned phone calls about the matter.
To his credit, deputy county librarian Chris Brown responded to Haro and that’s why Gilroy had any display at all. As soon as Haro asked, the library system responded, Brown said.
The library system just doesn’t get it. A display should have been up on Feb. 1, is Haro’s opinion, not mid-February and only after she asked about it. She’s right.
Haro concluded that her people are not important enough and so the Gilroy Library blew off BHM.
I think Haro is onto something with her take on the library. Not that the lack of a timely BHM display was malicious; it just fell through the cracks. But why?
Whatever the reason, it echoes what the brilliant novelist James Baldwin in 1965 called, in describing growing up black in America, “the millions of details, twenty-four hours of every day, which spell out to you that you are a worthless human being.”
There is no crack on this planet big enough to accommodate the indignities and abject cruelty visited for generations upon black America; the size is so immense it will stick forever in the craw of world history.
So how does a library system in one of the nation’s most socially progressive regions ignore 300-plus years of bondage and discrimination—not by all for sure, but by so many, by commission and omission, that it has scarred this nation forever?
How does it overlook thousands of lynchings, shootings, child-killings, rapes, burnings, bombings and beatings? How does it overlook that as recently as the 1960s powerful Democratic politicians in the South fought passage of the Civil Rights and Voter Rights acts? Or that the governor of Alabama then pledged his allegiance to “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”? Or the powerful Southern senator who warned that equality for blacks was, “A perversion of the American way of life.”
And how does a library in this age let fall through the cracks the physical, emotional and psychological legacy of slavery, oppression and crushing racial discrimination that to this day is at the root of so many problems?
Who among us delivered from generations of crippling, dehumanizing history would be whole? And yet, tens of millions of African Americans have been and are whole and wholesome and thriving. That is the other reality we could not be reminded about when the library blew off Black History Month—all the stories of perseverance, courage, accomplishment and devotion to this country in the face of “the millions of details, twenty-four hours of every day”.
In 1955, Rosa Parks stood up by staying seated when she refused to move to the back of a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her solitary act set off the beginning of the as yet unrealized end to this nation’s racial inequities. Sandy Haro stood up, too, and in doing so reminded us that work remains to be done. She deserves our thanks.
