The Tougaloo Nine and the First Police Dogs

On a Monday morning in late March, nineteen sixty-one, nine students from Tougaloo College drove to the main branch of the Jackson Public Library on North State Street. The library was publicly funded. Both Black and white taxpayers supported it. Black residents were prohibited from using it.

The nine students had been trained in the discipline of nonviolent protest by Medgar Evers, then the NAACP's field secretary for Mississippi. Their plan was deliberate and precise. They first visited the George Washington Branch, designated for colored patrons, and asked for books they knew that branch would not have. When told the books were unavailable, they drove to the main branch, entered, and sat at the reading tables. They opened books. They read quietly.

The nine were Meredith Coleman Anding Jr., James Cleo Bradford, Alfred Lee Cook, Geraldine Edwards, Janice Jackson, Joseph Jackson Jr., Albert Earl Lassiter, Evelyn Pierce, and Ethel Sawyer.

The librarian called the police. The police arrived and ordered them to leave. They did not leave. They were arrested on charges of breach of the peace, jailed, tried the following day, found guilty, and given suspended thirty-day sentences and fined one hundred dollars each.

What happened outside the courthouse the next day, as the nine were tried, was documented by researchers and later historians as the first use of police dogs against nonviolent protesters in the civil rights movement, two years before the Birmingham scenes that would become the iconic images of that strategy. Police also deployed tear gas. An eighty-one-year-old bystander was struck with an officer's nightstick and suffered a broken arm.

Birmingham got the photographs. The nine students who read quietly at a library table in Jackson got the precedent. The NAACP filed a class action lawsuit against the Jackson Public Library the following January. In June nineteen sixty-two, a federal judge ordered the library to desegregate. Tougaloo's nine had won.