While many other libraries in the United States were provided initial funding by Andrew Carnegie, the City of Richmond famously[1][2] rejected Carnegie funding twice.[3] After the City of Richmond's finance committee rejected the first Carnegie offer in 1901, Carnegie offered to donate $100,000 to the city of Richmond, Virginia, for a public library. The city council had to furnish a site for the building and guarantee that $10,000 in municipal funds would be budgeted for the library each year. Despite the support from the majority of Richmond's civic leaders, the city council rejected Carnegie's offer. A combination of aversion to new taxes, fear of modernization, and fear that Carnegie might require the city to admit black patrons to his library account for the local government's refusal. A Richmond Public Library did open in 1924 with alternative sources of funding. Richmond formed a Richmond Public Library Association in 1905. The Association did not gather sufficient funds to open a library until 1922, when John Stewart Bryan became president of the Association. The next year, in 1923, Bryan became chairman of the Richmond Public Library Board,[4] and in 1924, the Board chose the former home of Lewis Ginter as the site of the first Library. The first branch opened in 1925 as the Phyllis Wheatley Branch of the YWCA to serve African-Americans. In 1925, Sallie May Dooley died and left $500,000 to the City to construct a public library in memory of her husband, Major James H. Dooley. The Dooley Library (at the same location as the current Main library)[5][6] opened in 1930 and the contents of the original library were moved in.
In 1947, RPL Board opened all branches of the library system to black people.[7]
^Leatherman, Carolyn (1988). "Richmond Considers a Free Public Library: Andrew Carnegie's Offer of 1901". The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. 96 (2): 181–192. JSTOR4249008.
^http://www.iucat.iu.edu/iusb/4558475 Carolyn Hall Leatherman, "Richmond Rejects a Library: The Carnegie Public Library Movement in Richmond, Virginia in the Early Twentieth Century (PhD disserationa, Virginia Commonwealth University, 1992)
^http://www.richmondpubliclibrary.org/content.asp?contentID=54 "The first offer, of $100,000, in March 1901, made it as far as the selection of Trustees for the Library, a recommendation for a site for the proposed building and the sum of $22,000 to purchase it. After consideration, the Finance Committee rejected the recommendation. Mayor Carlton McCarthy tried again in 1906, at which time Mr. Carnegie was willing to double his original offer to $200,000. The matter again came to the Finance Committee, where it was "read and ordered to be received and filed." No further action was taken. Individuals and community leaders in business, education and civic institutions had rallied to the Library, to no avail. "
^"Media General History". Archived from the original on 2012-12-11. Retrieved 2016-01-08. "[Bryan was] ... member, Richmond Public Library Board (chairman)"
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