Come meet and hear the story of Dr. Cora Phelps Dunkley, one of six little African American sisters from Georgia, who never set foot in a public library during her childhood because of Jim Crow laws.  Ironically, Dr. Dunkley spent thirty-five of her forty-one years as an educator, serving as a librarian in several educational settings, including an associate professor at the University of South Florida School of Information (USF/SI) where she taught students to become school and children’s librarians. Yet, Dr. Dunkley’s first experience in a public library was at age twenty-five when she took her oldest child to story hour at a library in Memphis, TN.

Having had limited library experiences in elementary school, it was during ninth grade when Dr. Dunkley became excited about her high school library, only to learn in most instances, it was a façade. Very few, if any of the resources in the collection reflected characters with whom she could relate.  To further aggravate her desire to be an avid library user, each weekday on the bus ride from her high school in town to her rural family home, she would observe from the bus window, children enthusiastically entering and leaving the public library where she longed to be a patron.  Her desire to enter the building were further enhanced, and then crushed, during the summer months when the local, weekly newspaper highlighted the summer activities in which she could not participate. Such experiences were denied Dr. Dunkley because she was the product of the segregated south in a small town in southwest Georgia.

Nonetheless, Dr. Dunkley did not allow those and other negative experiences to make her bitter.  Rather, they made her a better person.  Come hear her share her story using the topic: “Better, not Bitter:  My Perspective of the Public Library, Then, and Now”, and how she continues to impact the lives of elementary children and their parents through her reading program, Cuddle Up and Read Every Day (CURED).