Houston Public Library Records

The Houston Public Library traces its beginnings to the organization of a second Houston Lyceum on May 27, 1854, and the establishment of its subscription-based library with a collection of fewer than 100 volumes. The Lyceum had 210 members by 1881 and women became voting members of the society for the first time in 1887. With the help of the City Federation of Women's Clubs, the city received $50,000 from Andrew Carnegie in 1899 for construction of a new public library. Chartered in August 1900, the Houston Lyceum and Carnegie Library Association opened to the public on the corner of McKinney and Travis streets in 1904. Although nearly 40% of Houston’s population at the time were African American, the city offered no comparable library services to its black citizens. A committee led by educator Ernest Smith opened a small, one-room library in the Fourth Ward’s Colored High School in 1909. They also approached the city’s Chief Librarian, Julia Ideson, and Mayor H. Baldwin Rice to request a separate “colored library” grant from Carnegie. Following additional support from Booker T. Washington (whose assistant, Emmett J. Scott, was Houstonian), their application was approved in 1909. Carnegie donated $15,000 and the Colored Carnegie Library opened in 1913. A new central library building, later named for the city’s first librarian, Julia Ideson, was constructed in 1926. The Spanish Revival style building was designed by architect Ralph Adams Cram. The Colored Carnegie Library remained vital to Houston’s African American community for nearly five decades, though it reopened as a branch of the Houston Public Library in 1921. As numerous branch libraries were added over the years, library use was finally desegregated in 1953, one year before the Supreme Court decision on the issue. In 1976 a new six-story Central Library building, designed by S. I. Morris Associates, opened across the plaza from the Julia Ideson building. In 1977 the Ideson building was added to the National Register of Historic Places and soon reopened as the Houston Metropolitan Research Center.