Black History Month: Lakeland's First Black Librarian Impacted Residents' Lives (2024)

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In the mid-1930s, Washington Park High School math teacher Elsie Dunbar had a problem.

Because of segregation laws that kept white and Black residents separated, her Black students could not go to the Lakeland Public Library, let alone check out books from its collections.

According to Lakeland Public Library Supervisor and historian LuAnn Mims, Dunbar reached out to then-city librarian Serena Bailey to ask for help and the two women came up with a plan.

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Dunbar and Bailey gathered a small collection of books and resources, squirreling them away in Dunbar’s classroom. The community funded the project — no small feat during the Great Depression, when money and resources were scarce — and both students and the general public could check them out.

The next step in the process was to issue Black citizens their own library cards in 1934, which granted inter-library loans of materials from the main library to Dunbar’s classroom library.

“Through the leadership of Mrs. Dunbar, who held board positions on several community committees, and a push from Lakeland’s Black community, the city assented to this cause,” Mims wrote.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt created a program during The Depression called the Works Progress Administration, through which funding for things like employment and infrastructure were funneled.

In 1937, Dunbar persuaded the Lakeland City Commission to use WPA funds to convert a small wooden bungalow at 1040 North Virginia Avenue (where the Police Athletic League office now sits) into a library space for Black residents. It opened in 1937 and Dunbar, who had received library training at Hampton Institute and Atlanta University, was named the librarian, a position she held until she retired in 1962.

The small branch library was the second designated Black library in the state and, according to Mims, the Virginia Avenue library held one of the best collections of a Black library in the state.

To see a slideshow about the Virginia Avenue library, click here.

“The small facility had books, magazines, maps, reference materials and a dedicated children’s area,” Mims wrote. “Creating reading programs, especially for youth, was a great asset in supplementing educational initiatives. Adult learning and night school students were also engaged.”

The library was open for limited times during the week in the afternoons and evenings, and on Saturdays. Photographs show a handsome, wood checkout desk and a reading room with wood tables and chairs. A small card catalog sat on a table flanked by two upholstered chairs. Among the list of library card holders are familiar names in Lakeland’s Black community, both then and now: Adderly, Glover, Jackson, and Jenkins.

In 1949, Dunbar earned the first master’s degree from Florida A&M College, as it was known then, where two scholarships now bear her name. She eventually became Washington Park’s assistant principal and then principal.

“(Dunbar’s) thesis, ‘The Role of Washington Park School in a Program for Improving School-Community Relationships at Lakeland, Florida,’ contains valuable information about her decades-long drive to provide the best opportunities for students,” Mims wrote. “One way that needed to change was access to library materials and resources.”

The Virginia Avenue Branch Library closed when the Coleman-Bush Building opened in 1975. A Lakeland branch library opened in 1995, eventually named in honor of local attorney Larry R. Jackson, for his efforts to establish a library in north Lakeland.