On Saturday, October 11, the Central Library is open to registered Heartland Book Festival attendees only. Regular services, such as hold pickups, public computers and phones, and public meeting rooms, will not be available.
Lucile Bluford — for whom the Library’s L.H. Bluford Branch is named — played a key role in the eventual elimination of the country’s “separate but equal” doctrine in education. Though losing a lengthy legal battle for admission to the University of Missouri’s graduate program in journalism, arguments and precedents from her case and others laid a foundation for the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.
This new exhibit chronicles the three-year court case that helped usher in the landmark civil rights decades of the 1950s and ’60s and examines Bluford’s life from ninth-grade reporter at Lincoln High School to her successful and influential career as a journalist with Kansas City’s premier African American newspaper, The Call.