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PAUL:

This one's for all you lit lovers. Hey, it's Paul Wolf with a front row seat to conversations on culture from Jackson, Mississippi. We call our podcast Soul Sessions. It's the people, places, and events that make the City With Soul shine. Today, I'm talking with David Long, president of the Jackson Friends of the Library, an organization that aims to raise awareness and funds for the Jackson Hinds Library system.

Through book sales and festive fun occasions, the organization, once strong in the 70s and 80s, is coming back again to help tell the meaningful stories of our libraries.

David, literature for us is such an important pillar and so promoting libraries and literacy, well, that's to us important to our city.

DAVID:

Yeah, no, absolutely. I think like the names of the libraries themselves harken to that. It's Richard Wright, it's Margaret Walker Alexander, it's Eudora Welty, among others. And so, yeah, it's in the lifeblood of Jackson.

PAUL:

Help us learn a little more about your organization. The Friends is not a new organization, but it was a somewhat dormant organization. You know, I was handed a big box of old materials and there's like a newspaper clipping of when the Eudora Welty branch downtown, the old Sears building was converted and there was a like champagne bottle, you know, ship breaking ceremony that the Friends did because they were very involved all the way back then and things like that. And I really think kind of the late 70s, early 80s was the genesis of the Friends organization. And I think, you know, over the past five or six years with some of leaders moving with COVID happening, it was just kind of crawling along to maintain its 501C3 status.

But a local leader, Elta Johnston, was one of the people who's just trying to keep it alive to hand off to the next generation. And so she met with myself, Hunter, and a couple other folks just to see if we would take this and run with it and see what we could do. There were different conversations with Peyton Smith, who's the current president of the actual library board overseeing the libraries, is a guy I grew up with. And we were talking about kind of relaunching the friends.

And so really, we just kind of looked at 2023 as a relaunch or rebirth year. Like, let's just get our feet back underneath us. Let's try to get the name back out there. Like you said, how have you all been able to rebuild the base through kind of word of mouth, a couple of different events, being at the book festival, kind of got our membership roles, probably in between 150 and 200 people now officially and that that's like official dues paying members. And we thought that was great growth. We had what we kind of branded as a relaunch party over at the Cedars over in Fondren. 100 of the foods that kind of attracted the crowds. We got Wright Thompson, Mississippi author to come and kind of do kind of a bourbon themed event because he wrote that “Pappyland” book about the first family of bourbon. And that was a great event. I think people had a ton of fun. It was one of those things that, you know,

We did our best to get the word out that I think we actually sold out. And it was one of those things that like a lot of people didn't hear about it until after it was sold out. We're bummed they couldn't come. And so that's kind of exciting though, you know, to have people excited about it.

PAUL:

Oh, I was there and it was a great event. And because of that party and some of your other efforts, you've raised some money for the organization, haven't you?

DAVID:

We raised around $30,000 last year.

PAUL:

Wow.

DAVID:

And, uh, yeah, I think we kind of impressed ourselves. I think we impressed some people who didn't think we were going to be doing much.

PAUL:

Oh, I love when you can surprise the naysayers, right? And show them what you can do. You're not going to rest on that though. It sounds like you've got big plans for this year.

DAVID:

One of the big initiatives this year for the library is they're going to launch a mobile library service and they're in the process of having like a tailor-made bookmobile for lack of a better term that they're creating all the specs for down to the fine details of what this bookmobile will be. And we were able to donate $15 ,000 towards that, which was, you know, not an insignificant chunk of change to the library. We're also doing kind of some beautification efforts, an art installation at the Margaret Walker Alexander branch. And with that kind of trying to do community days around the branch and seeing how we can get folks in the community involved with some beautification and art projects and things like that.

I think some of the disengagement with the library is like just thinking about it as like, it's a building full of books and books are always going to be the cornerstone of libraries. But there's so much more than that. They’re such community centers. They are places that you can get computer access. They’re places where you can get training. It's places where a big thing the library does is continuing educational programs during the summer for kids in Jackson. When they're out of school. How do you keep them engaged? How do you keep them reading? How do you keep them learning during those kind of gap months so that they can come back stronger in the next school year? One of the things the Friends is exploring right now is we're partnering with actually another Friends group out of Wisconsin has their own kind of consultancy now. And we're putting some of the funds that we raised towards them coming and evaluating what are the children and youth centric things that we can really kind of plan with the new downtown location. Now that it seems very clear it's going to happen, we have this, you know, federal funds, dollars that can really find a good spot. Now it's not if, but when, and what is it going to look like.

PAUL:

David, you mentioned that new downtown location. The Welty library is being torn down and a green space will be created there for the Two Museums. Well, just today I learned about a $3 .7 million federal grant that's coming our way. I mean, what a great boost to that project.

DAVID:

The federal money that's going to be coming in for the library is huge. And many thanks to Senator Hyde Smith was pretty pivotal in getting that money along with others at the federal level. And it's huge to me to see folks at the federal level having that type of local interest in things like libraries. But I think it goes to show that like there are people who still understand the value of it, right? It's an exciting time right now. I think that news coming out has kind of got people's attention for what could be the future for the library, as opposed to just the stories being like, you know, our wealthy has been shuttered for forever and there's leaks everywhere. And what are they going to do with these books? There's now actually like positive momentum. We want to try to piggyback off that as best we can.

PAUL:

David, why does the library system mean so much to you?

DAVID:

I'm a native Jacksonian. I grew up around the corner from Eudora Welty and was fortunate enough to be raised in that environment of valuing the local literature and just literature in general. And I grew up going to Eudora Welty downtown and getting dropped off there and just kind of exploring the stacks and doing the different things that they have to offer there. I now have two young girls of my own and I kind of want to see that continue to flourish. And just seeing them when we had our kind of ageable member meeting over at the Margaret Walker Alexander branch and just kind of, you know, just seeing them kind of roam the children's section and plop down in a comfy chair with a book. It was small but meaningful. My wife and I lived in Nashville for a number of years before moving back. And, you know, I think they were in kind of a similar state several years back of are we going to invest in something like a library system or are we not? And they made the decision to really go all in.

Their downtown library branch is pretty incredible there in Nashville. And that's where I kind of really appreciate for the first time that again, it's definitely a building full of books. And that's the important thing, but it was a downtown resource. And, you I think some people are like, nobody's downtown. Why do we even need a library downtown? But I mean, like that is the heart of the city. And that's a place where people from all corners of Jackson can come and converge in a place that's kind of understood to be for the people.

PAUL:

What's next for the Friends of the Jackson Library?

DAVID:

The upcoming things that we're going to do, we're going to throw another fundraiser party. We're going to have another book sale. Local branches are actually accepting book donations. If anybody wants to just drop off a box right now, their local branch, they can do it. Get involved, become a member. It's 25 bucks for an annual membership and hop on a committee or a fun group. And I think we do some value.

PAUL:

My thanks to David Long, the president of the Jackson Friends of the Library. If you want to get involved, like David mentioned, you can become a friend. Do that by heading to their website, jfol.org and signing up through their fund at the Community Foundation for Mississippi.

Soul Sessions is produced by Visit Jackson, the destination organization for Mississippi's capital city. Our executive producers are Jonathan Pettus and Dr. Ricky Thigpen and I'm our managing editor. You want to know more about the great work we're doing to make Jackson a better place? You can find all of that at visitjackon .com.

I'm Paul Wolf, and you've been listening to Soul Sessions.

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