Ruth Winifred Brown

Ruth Winifred Brown (born July 26, 1891, Hiawatha, Kansas, U.S.—died September 10, 1975, Collinsville, Oklahoma) was an American librarian and activist, who was dismissed from her job at an Oklahoma library for her civil rights activities in 1950. Brown began her career as a librarian in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, in 1919. She became the president of the Oklahoma Library Association in 1931 and was a founding member of the Committee on the Practice of Democracy (COPD) in 1946. At that time the COPD was the only affiliate of the Congress of Racial Equality south of the Mason and Dixon Line.

Brown came to national attention in early 1950 when the Bartlesville Library Board dismissed her. The official reason given for her dismissal was the Bartlesville Public Library’s subscription to “subversive” and communist literature, including Soviet Russia Today, The Nation, The New Republic, Negro Digest, and Consumer Reports. However, it was obvious to the citizens of Bartlesville that the driving force behind Brown’s dismissal was not anticommunism but her belief in racial integration. She had implemented informal desegregation measures at the library and even had plans to hold an interracial children’s story hour. Additionally, she had invited African Americans to her white church and attempted to have lunch with two African American teachers at a segregated lunchroom, though they were refused service.

Brown’s dismissal divided the community. A group known as the Friends of Miss Brown was quickly formed to petition for her reinstatement. The American Library Association and the American Civil Liberties Union also took up her case as a battle against censorship, but Brown never regained her position. She left Bartlesville after her appeals were denied to teach in an African American school in Mississippi, and she then moved to Colorado, where she was a librarian until her retirement in 1961.

The film Storm Center (1956), starring Bette Davis, was based on some of the events surrounding Brown’s dismissal, though the controversy over racial integration was not included in the film.