It was a sweltering August day in 1939, and William "Buddy" Evans was face-to-face with a police officer in the Alexandria Free Library. Looking up from the pages of his book, the 19-year-old had one ...

This video is no longer available. Exactly 85 years after five Black men were arrested at a Northern Virginia library during a civil rights protest, the Alexandria Library unveiled a new traveling ...

Kimberly Evans-Reed was confused. She couldn’t understand why her brother was being escorted out of a building by a police officer. But her mother told her to look again at the photograph. It was ...

Five men were arrested at the Alexandria Library on Queen Street on Aug. 21, 1939, because they defied the exclusion of black people. (Courtesy Alexandria Black History Museum) The 81st anniversary of ...

It was the quietest of protests. Five young African American men sat reading at separate tables in Alexandria’s new whites-only library on Queen Street. They had just been refused library cards; in ...

Alexandria’s black residents were starved for books in the 1930s. Segregation reigned in this Southern town. Black children could attend a blacks-only elementary school, but were barred from the white ...