Samuel W. Tucker

Samuel Wilbert Tucker was born June 18, 1913 in Alexandria, Virginia and died October 19, 1990 in Emporia, Virginia at age seventy-seven. He is one of the foremost civil-rights attorneys of the twentieth century — and one of the figures whose career arc most directly tied Alexandria’s segregated-South history to the national civil-rights movement.

Alexandria roots

Tucker grew up in Alexandria’s segregated Parker-Gray district. He attended Parker-Gray High School ( 900 Wythe Street Place 900 Wythe Street Site of Alexandria's segregated public school for Black students, opened in 1920 at 900 Wythe Street and replaced in 1950 by a new Parker-Gray High School that served until … ) and Howard University, then studied law privately under his older brother Otto Tucker (also an Alexandria attorney) — Virginia’s Jim Crow bar admissions allowed Black candidates to read law privately in lieu of attending an accredited law school, and Tucker passed the Virginia bar exam in 1933 at age twenty.

He opened his Alexandria law office at 901 Princess Street in the Parker-Gray neighborhood — a brick rowhouse that served as both his residence and law practice for the next several decades.

The 1939 library sit-in

Tucker is most-remembered for organizing the August 21, 1939 sit-in at the 717 Queen Street Place 717 Queen Street Alexandria's first free public library, opened on Queen Street in 1937, and site of a sit-in on August 21, 1939 that is among the earliest documented civil-rights direct actions in … , Alexandria’s first free public library, which had opened in 1937 and which the Alexandria Library Association Nonprofit Alexandria Library Association founded 1937 The private nonprofit operating Alexandria's first free public library, which opened on Queen Street in 1937. The association's segregation policy excluding Black patrons was the … operated as a whites-only facility. Tucker had earlier in 1939 repeatedly attempted to apply for a library card on behalf of Black Alexandria residents, and had been repeatedly denied.

On August 21, 1939, five Black men — William Evans, Otto Lee Tucker (Samuel’s brother), Edward Gaddis, Morris Murray, and Clarence Strange — entered the library, requested library cards, were refused, and remained quietly seated reading books they had pulled from the shelves until the police arrived to arrest them. Tucker himself stayed at his nearby Princess Street law office to advise the participants by telephone. The five were arrested for “disorderly conduct”; the city eventually declined to prosecute and instead built a separate-but-equal “colored branch” library — the Robert H. Robinson Library — which opened in 1940.

The 1939 sit-in is among the earliest documented civil-rights sit-in actions in the United States, predating the 1960 Greensboro lunch-counter sit-ins by twenty-one years. It is interpreted today by the City of Alexandria’s Office of Historic Alexandria, with original event materials in the Alexandria Library’s Special Collections.

NAACP career

Tucker served in the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps during World War II, then resumed his Alexandria law practice. He joined the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in the 1950s and represented plaintiffs in some of the major Virginia school- desegregation cases of the post-Brown v. Board (1954) era, including cases against Prince Edward County (where the “Massive Resistance” movement closed the public schools rather than integrate them).

He moved to Emporia, Virginia in the 1970s, where he continued civil-rights practice until shortly before his death in 1990. The Alexandria City Public Schools renamed Lyles-Crouch Elementary School to Samuel W. Tucker Elementary School in his honor in 2000.