This limestone-clad building is a severe modernist composition, three stories in height at the front, and four at the rear where the site slopes down. The central portion of the symmetrical facade is glass shaded by a brise-soleil grid of thin concrete slabs. The building is currently vacant.
On March 27, 1961, a group of African American students known as the “Tougaloo Nine” held Jackson’s first organized civil rights demonstration, a “Read-In” at this whites-only library to protest unequal, racially segregated library facilities. In her memoir For Us the Living (1967), Myrlie Evers, wife of slain civil rights activist Medgar Evers, noted that this action brought about the long-awaited “change of tide in Mississippi.” In 1990, the library moved across State Street into the larger old Sears store (1946) and was renamed the Eudora Welty Library.
Overstreet’s firm also designed the former Carver Municipal Library (1954; 516 N. Mill Street), the main library for African Americans, which was abandoned after integration in the 1970s.