Rosa Parks and James Meredith, you know. The Tougaloo Nine, you might not. The group of students from Mississippi’s historically black Tougaloo College wrote a notable, if largely overlooked, chapter in civil rights history when they were arrested March 27, 1961, for entering the whites-only library in nearby Jackson. It was an important step toward making public libraries truly public in the segregated South.

Wayne Wiegand, an professor emeritus at Florida State University who is widely considered the “dean of American library historians,” examines what he calls a blind spot in our history in a discussion of his book The Desegregation of Public Libraries in the Jim Crow South: Civil Rights and Local Activism.

The event commemorates National Library Week April 8-14.