Louisville Free Public Library, Western Branch

In 1908, industrialist Andrew Carnegie donated funds to build a new library building. As a result, the Western Colored Branch became the first public library for African Americans in the American South that was housed in a Carnegie-funded facility. The new library building was designed by McDonald & Dodd.

The building is 75 by 45 feet (23 m × 14 m) in plan, and is built of brick with stone trim.[3]

The library was well received by the community.[6] It marked a new level of civic engagement by "the emerging, turn-of-the-century, southern black middle class" which was determined to "build positive community infrastuctures for purposes of racial uplift."[4]

Several prominent African-American librarians worked in the Western Branch and assisted in education and outreach programs for the local black community. Of particular note are Reverend Thomas Fountain Blue, who served as the administrative head of the Western and Eastern Colored Branches as well as Rachel Davis Harris, who served as the children's library specialist and chief assistant. Blue and Harris were influential in providing services to Louisville's African American community during the Jim Crow era. In 1917, about 12,000 people attended 498 meetings at both branches.[4] Blue created a community outreach strategy, he said the library was much more than a place to store books. “With its reading and study rooms, its lecture and classrooms, it forms a center from which radiate many influences for general betterment. The people feel that the library belongs to them, and that it may be used for anything that makes for their welfare.” [7]

The two branches (Western and Eastern) became community social centers and regional models for other libraries like it.[4] The library included a Children's Department, which developed story time, debates, and special events. The library also held an annual spelling bee with Cup winners and cash rewards sponsored by Joseph S. Cotter, a local black educator. The prominent Douglass Debate Club for high school boys, which argued civil rights topics, studied and cooperated with this branch.[7]

The library also helped set up forty classroom collections at eleven African American city and county schools.[4] By 1935 this had expanded to eighty classroom collections as well as library services administered at two junior high schools and the development of 15 deposit stations.[8] From 1912 to 1931, Blue also organized and held an apprenticeship librarian class, which was the "only opportunity for formal training for prospective black librarians" until the Hampton Library School was opened in 1925 in Virginia.[9]

The library was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.[1][3] In 2001 Prince anonymously donated $12,000 to keep the library from closure.[10]