February 2007
	People

Stocking the Shelves

An Alabama retired member turns a new page for one community of book lovers.

« People Home | More Profiles »

Jimmie Felder grew up with a rich supply of stories. She was one of seven children, the daughter of a substitute teacher and a blacksmith. “At night,” she recalls, “we used to pull the mattress off a bed and sit on it, and one of us would tell a story that they had read in school. That way, we all got to hear six stories every week that we had not read.”

She also read anything she could get her hands on and was promoted from the second grade after just two weeks because she could already read all the second-grade books.

That was in the days before school desegregation came to her home town of Hayneville in rural Lowndes County, Alabama. There was a White school four blocks away, but she and her siblings walked a mile to the Black school and had to stay home whenever heavy rains flooded a bridge on the way. For high school, she had to move in with relatives in Montgomery, some 25 miles away.

Felder went on to college and became an English teacher and high school librarian in Montgomery. When she retired in 1990, she persuaded the Lowndes County commissioners to commit the resources needed for a public library.

A retired member of the Alabama Education Association, Felder is still guiding the development of the library, where children enjoy and learn from stories like those she read and heard growing up. The library boasts 22,000 volumes. Felder earns a small salary as director, “but I put it all back buying books. If a college student comes in and needs a book we don’t have, I just call a bookstore and buy it.”

Ironically, the library is across the street from the formerly all-White school, now predominantly African-American, that she couldn’t attend as a child.                            

 —Alain Jehlen