After the flood: Carnegie Library, a Black Savannah refuge, is resurrected
SAVANNAH — Sometimes the most compelling stories in a library cannot be found in a book.
Take Savannah’s historic Carnegie Library. It opened its doors in 1914, eight years after Black leaders opened a small, free library in the basement of a dentist’s home near the Beach Institute, the city’s first school, built in 1867, for newly emancipated African Americans. They and their children had been denied access to the city’s only public library in Hodgson Hall, the home of the Georgia Historical Society.
For the next 110 years the Carnegie Library served as a cornerstone of African American achievement and education and fueled the imaginations of Savannah’s future Black leaders, among them mayors, state representatives, bank presidents and a sitting U.S. Supreme Court justice. It also endured the ravages of time and neglect, threats of permanent closure, book thieves, unfulfilled political promises, and debilitating and repeated flooding that ultimately shut the library down in 2024, when Tropical Storm Debby’s inundation caused the downstairs floor to cave in and the building to shift.
It reopened last week as a special collections library and research center, guided by an advisory committee filled with former patrons who walked miles in a segregated Savannah as children to check out books.
And the waters did rise
The story of the library began in 1906 when a dozen Black leaders began a grassroots fundraising push — and reached out to Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate and philanthropist.
Carnegie obliged in 1908 with a $12,000 commitment to build a library, according to a Savannah Tribune article from Oct. 3, 1914 — but only as long as the city agreed to purchase a site and earmark at least $1,200 annually for the library’s maintenance. He also made a $75,000 grant to the city for the then-whites-only Bull Street Library, bringing the number of public libraries in Georgia supported by his corporation to 24. More than 1,680 Carnegie libraries were built nationwide between 1886 and 1917.
The resulting rare-for-Savannah Prairie School-style building rose brick by glazed brick at 537 E. Henry St., in what is now the Victorian Neighborhood District. Its high, ascending staircase between two lighted pillars evoked Carnegie’s ideal that knowledge was the “ladder to success.”
When Tropical Storm Debby nearly washed it away 18 months ago, preservationists tapped $1.5 million in county and state funding to restore it. Lola DeWitt, the executive director of Live Oak Public Libraries, the 16-facility regional system that oversees and operates the Carnegie Library, saw an opportunity to rethink its future while upholding its past.
“I see that Savannah has this rich history. We should turn the Carnegie into this place where we’re amplifying these Black stories, this culture,” she said.
‘We open these doors anyway’
On Friday, Live Oak Public Libraries rededicated this temple to the written word the Carnegie Library Heritage Center in an outdoor ceremony that felt more church revival than ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Pastor Andre Osborne of Savannah’s First Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church bowed his head and offered thanks to this “moment of truth, to memory and to the unbreakable human spirit.”
During his invocation, Osborne celebrated the ancestors and elders who learned by firelight and the “grandmothers who carried books across color lines.” He lamented the current political climate in which, he said “the hard-won progress of former generations is being quietly dismantled.”
“In the face of that,” he intoned, “we stand here, and we open these doors anyway.”
As many cities and government agencies nationwide have scaled back or canceled Black History Month observances, DeWitt reaffirmed the Carnegie will be “dedicated to preserving and protecting the history of this very institution, safeguarding the stories of past, present and future” African Americans and exploring the region’s Gullah Geechee culture.
Learning never stops
A new taxi-yellow sign on one of the Carnegie’s prominent pillars declares the center a “Safe Place.” For former Savannah Mayor Otis S. Johnson, current Chatham County Commission Chairman Chester Ellis, state Rep. Edna Jackson (also a former city of Savannah mayor), and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the Carnegie was a haven for learning and storytelling.
Ellis recalled how in 1955 his second-grade teachers at the segregated Paulsen Street School would walk students on a 2-mile round trip to the Carnegie several times a year. It was the only library available to Black Savannahians until the region’s libraries were consolidated and integrated in 1963.
“We didn’t have a bus that we could go on a field trip,” Ellis reminisced, “but wasn’t nothing wrong with our legs.”
Johnson recalled checking out five books at a time and carrying them home under his arm. “(The Carnegie) had a lot to do with broadening my horizons. I could come to this library and find information about the world that was so different from the world I was living in that it was inspirational.”
Thomas grew up nearby and in his 2007 memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son,” described the Carnegie as a refuge. In a 2016 interview, Thomas said the library was a “treasure trove” filled with newspapers and books and periodicals like Encyclopaedia Britannica and National Geographic.
Full-circle moment
Johnson, who served on the Carnegie Library Advisory Group, said he is hopeful about how it will live on. He is considering which documents and books he may gift to the special collections for future scholars, perhaps even his own library of books with highlighted and underlined passages and notes in the margins.
Adam Berenbak joined Live Oak Public Libraries in November as its special collections manager after serving in the National Archives and Records Administration for more than 15 years. One of his tasks is to develop criteria and a process for gathering items from the community.
Just inside the green double entrance doors on the second floor, Berenbak showed some of the most recent items collected. A hardback copy of James Allan McPherson’s 1977 Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, “Elbow Room,” is now on display, gifted to the Carnegie by his granddaughter.
McPherson was the first Black author to win a Pulitzer in fiction. His faded business cards give his profession as a “freelance public intellectual,” even though he taught for more than 30 years at the storied Iowa Writers Workshop. McPherson, who died in 2016, grew up in Savannah and graduated from Beach High School. He attributed his becoming an author to his formative years reading books from the Carnegie Library.
A new “Memory Lab” will convert people’s old films and recordings into the latest technology so they can be preserved in perpetuity for families and the public. And the downstairs meeting room is open and ready to host African American genealogy classes, story time, author talks and a revival of the Freedom School model for teaching Black history.
Friday’s dedication was a full-circle moment for Meredith Stone, the project manager with architect-urban design firm GMShay, which oversaw the building’s rehabilitation.
As a child, her father walked 4 miles with his siblings from their home near Savannah State University to the library to see the model railroad that used to be on the ground floor, sparking a lifelong hobby for him.
But the connection went back further.
“One of my earliest childhood memories is of going to the library with my grandmother,” Stone said. “She was not really able to walk well in her late age when she was in her 90s, but she made sure that even though the building had stairs, she was going to get up there. She walked up each step to make sure that we could go see the Carnegie Library.”
The most recent renovations added an elevator to the west wing of the building for ADA accessibility.
The dedication ended Friday with a traditional African libation ceremony led by Savannah artist Temakha, who asked those gathered on Henry Street and in Dixon Park to offer words of intention. Progress, peace, freedom, restoration, perseverance, memory, hope, resilience, wisdom, forgiveness and love rose among the crowd as the water poured from her blue bottle, spilled down the steps onto the sidewalk and trickled toward the courtyard garden, carrying this story with it.
Correction
This story has been updated to correct the wording that appears on a pillar of the building.
