Five African-American youths staged America’s first deliberate and planned sit-in at the segregated Alexandria Library on Queen St. on Aug. 21, 1939 — more than two decades before the tactic would become the trademark of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, according to Historic Alexandria.
The protest had its roots in earlier efforts by attorney Samuel Wilbert Tucker and retired Army Sgt. George Wilson, who on March 17, 1939, had walked through the doors of the whites-only library and requested applications for library cards. Library policy prohibited issuing cards to “persons of the colored race.”
Tucker, who passed the newly erected Alexandria library daily but had to travel to Washington for library access, decided to challenge the Jim Crow system through the courts. He filed a lawsuit to force the librarian to issue a library card to Wilson as a taxpaying citizen of Alexandria…