 I am Nancy Noys-Silcox and I was the first librarian at Samuel Tucker Elementary School when it opened in 2000. It was the first school that Alexandria City Schools opened in 30 years and I was lucky enough to be the first librarian. Well it was a little roundabout. My mother was a teacher and I think she would have liked me to be a teacher as well and of course being a child at the time I said no way I was going to be doing that and but then I ended up being a public librarian in Arlington County. That was my the beginning of my career and I was there for eight years and then my husband got a job in Egypt and that was in 1980 and off we went to Egypt and there I was fortunate enough to become the elementary librarian at an international school and that for the next 10 years that started me on a a path of being school librarians and middle school high school in Belgium after we finished the almost five years in Egypt but I realized at that point that I really liked the work of a school librarian more than I liked what public librarians did. I mean they're both valuable you know occupations but but the work is very different in a school you can follow a student for at least five years in elementary school five years six years depending on the configuration of the school but you have a chance to see them learn and grow and mature that you don't have necessarily in a public library. So when I came back to the states in 1989 I applied with Alexandria Schools and I was hired at Lyons Crouch School and then I went to John Adams and then my husband took a job in Ukraine and I took a two-year leave of absence and was gone for the two years and then when I was ready to come back in 2000 again was just my good fortune that Tucker was opening and they hired me as the first librarian here in this space which is an incredible space I did it's kind of interesting that I had nothing to do with the space the space was designed early in the design process but when I was hired in March I was tasked with ordering the first collection of the books and videos somebody else was ordering all the computers and software but I've never had so much money as a librarian to spend in a library but the shelves were empty and so when we got here in September it was bookshelves and then the boxes of books began to arrive and we put them on the shelves but I had with me when I went back to Ukraine the standards of learning you know on a floppy disk or a stiffy disk at that time do you remember that terminology and and I had the Alexandria curriculum and I used that to find books through a jobber that would support the things that teachers were teaching and then I also emailed all of the new teachers asking them what books they wanted to find in the collection when they arrived and that's what I used as my basis for ordering the books then I kept out some money to fill in the holes and and you know pay for things that we knew we needed that I hadn't gotten earlier but it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to to have this experience of setting up a new library in a new school I knew nothing as most people in Alexandria and the sit-in was a little known story but Kathy David who was the first principal of the school made it very clear that all the Tucker students would know who Samuel W. Tucker was and what he did and the significance of the sit-in and so there was age-appropriate information available to all the teachers and all the kids were taught what what happened in 1939 and and why Tucker was such an incredible person it resonated with me because the sit-in was a a protest against segregation in a public library and I'd come from public libraries and public libraries are supposed to be places where you can educate yourself and there was a group of Alexandria citizens who were not given the right to do that we're not allowed to do that and so the fact that the sit-in was in a public library that that really made a difference with me it was a long process of just mulling over what what had happened and I never intended to write a book and it was shortly before I retired that there was an article in the Washington Post that someone else wrote about Tucker and it gave more about his life and and by then I I mean one of the things that I love doing is a school at Brown is was teaching kids how to do research and how to find answers to their questions and so I knew the kinds of questions that they asked and and some of the things that they couldn't find in in regular biographies and so I continued to the seed was planted and it just needed to grow a little bit but I kept thinking that you know somebody needs to write a biography about this remarkable man so that kids have a way of knowing more about him because we basically taught them just about the sit-in but nothing really about the rest of his life and he he did incredible things throughout his career as a lawyer to desegregate public schools in Virginia and that really that really wasn't a part of the story here as I remember but I thought kids need to know that too and so as I lived with this idea for a while I finally began to think well if you know nobody else is writing this biography maybe I should try to do it because I know what good kids nonfiction should look like and I know how to do research I've been teaching kids how to do research I should maybe do this myself and so once I retired and I was looking around for something to do because I like projects and so I thought well let me try do it to do it myself and and now we have the result well I say it took me about nine months in in during two years to actually research and write it and in the beginning I think I'd retired by then and in the beginning I wanted more specifically to know what kids wanted to know about Tucker so I came back to a third grade class and I asked them and they wanted to know you know things that didn't surprise me but they wanted to know you know things about his family whose siblings were what did his parents do did he have a dog you know that kind of stuff but then there was one third grader who asked me only because he remembered that in third grade he'd learned that Thurgood Marshall was the first African-American appointed to the Supreme Court that was one of the SOLs for first grade and this third grader remembered it and asked me was and I told them that that Tucker had argued a case a school desegregation case before the Supreme Court and the student asked me if Thurgood Marshall was on the Supreme Court when Tucker's case was heard and I'm going wow I I said I don't know I don't because I believe that you don't know something you don't make it up and you know you're honest with kids and I said but I will find out and I'll put the answer in the book and I did and the answers in the book because a third grader asked the question there are no questions that are too insignificant so I started like that and then and then I researched a lot and then I came back to another fourth grade class with things that I'd written just to check out the reading level and to see if they could find answers to the questions you know in the text that I'd written I wanted to make sure that I was writing in a way that was easy for kids to understand the element upper elementary and and middle school and it turned out that you know they were able to do it so I was confident that I could continue writing you know in that style well one thing I spent a lot of time on with the advice of some reading specialists at Tucker actually I eliminated idioms from my writing and I realized that I was writing a lot of passive sentences I needed to change all of those to active sentences I needed to have short sentences strong nouns strong verbs and and we also had a very large English language learner population at Tucker so I knew I couldn't use words that you know were beyond the understanding and the experience of the kids in the upper elementary and and then in middle school and then also I knew that the fourth grade studied Virginia history and had a civil rights component and seventh grade had US history and there was a civil rights component there so I was targeting those two grade levels too and hoping that it could be used in both of those grade levels nothing was impossible except that I I wish that I had started my my research earlier because by the time I started my research all the people most of the people who knew Tucker were no longer living his sister was alive for our dedication in 2000 but I didn't start writing until we're working on this in 2011 and so there were there weren't people I could talk to about it I had to rely on other things and fortunately Audrey Davis at the Alexandria Black History Museum had files of materials about Tucker in the sit-in and it was newspaper clippings it was personal memorabilia that I I believe his wife made copies of and and donated but somebody saw the value of this material and saved it and they they kept it and then the librarians of the special collections department in the Alexandria Public Library again they had materials that I could use and Alexandria directories that were just invaluable but the most value was videotaped interviews that were done in 1985 by a University of Virginia professor and the University of Virginia digitized them and they're available on the library's website and just when I needed to use that material there it was and I could sit at my computer at home and and listen to Tucker but for five and a half hours and I listened to it over and over again because I wanted to capture his his voice his way of speaking he had a very quiet thoughtful way of speaking deliberate but very determined and so I used words that he used I put you know some of his words in the book so that it was easier to get a flavor for what he was really like his personality and then his brother Otto and William Evans who the two of them were some of the protesters they were also interviewed and so there again it was just a wealth of information but I found all kinds of unexpected things one of the the unexpected paths that I traveled was late in my research process I I'd started writing it and I realized I needed to know more about his mother who grew up on a farm near Midland Virginia out in Buccair County and so I went out to Midland to see what it looked like and there's a railroad track that goes through the town there just a few little houses and there was a store and I went into the store and there was a woman there who was you know in charge of it and I told her what I was doing and what I was working on and she looked at me and she said you know that sounds an awful lot like the story that my friend Sandra always talks about her relative well it turned out that Sandra her friend was one of Tucker's relatives her grandmother was Tucker's aunt and I then had conversations with her I went back and we talked several times and she gave me photographs of Aunt Maggie and the house where Tucker stopped when he was arguing school deeds segregation cases around Virginia in that area and he would play the piano and the little kids including Sandra would get to play outside longer and so she loved it when he came to visit I wouldn't have had those pictures if I hadn't been tenacious and curious and and followed that path another path that I didn't expect when the the chapter on his military service was about two paragraphs it really wasn't a chapter until I followed a lead that someone had given to me saying that there was a picture of Tucker when he was a lieutenant in the 366th regiment that was formed at Fort Devon's Massachusetts and there's a museum there so I called the archivist and said I'm looking for this picture and I think it's a little one but you know could you help me out and she said well yeah there is well here's the I've got the yearbook and it's not a little picture it's a big picture so she sent me the digitized large portrait of Tucker when he was first lieutenant you know in Massachusetts and then she said well you need to also talk to Jim Pratt because his father was in Tucker's company and so I got in touch with Jim Pratt he found all kinds of morning reports that Tucker had signed when he was the company commander and then he also got me in touch with Frank Cloud who was living in California who was also in the in the same company that Tucker when Tucker was the company commander and I telephoned him and interviewed him he was 94 years old at the time and he told me stories about going to about swimming one afternoon in the Adriatic Sea when they were stationed in Italy so my military chapter got to be quite long and very unexpected. Well I did a lot of library conferences and used my connections through the Virginia Library Association and got in touch with with librarians from schools around Virginia who invited me to come and do school visits. I did social studies conferences book clubs I did a presentation at the Arlington Public Library at the Black History Museum Arlington or Alexandria Public Libraries but I did a lot of promotion myself and then my my publisher initially arranged for me to be on TV a couple of you know TV news shows and on the Kojo Namdi show and that was really fun. Right um well I've been really surprised we moved back to Minnesota two years ago and I've been very surprised that people outside of this northern Virginia area have been interested in knowing about the sit-in. People can't believe that it happened so early and they just want to know more about this story. So I've done since in the two years that I've been in in Northfield Minnesota I've done presentations at the Public Library at the Senior Center to a homeschool group I do some church groups and there's a group of white Northfield residents who are trying to become better advocates for anti-racism and they're listening and learning and just trying to do make a difference and they invited me to come and speak. Yes and another thing that happened that I was totally surprised when either farther afield was I was contacted by a middle school teacher in California whose eighth grade student was doing a project for the National History Day and she wanted to do the Alexandria library sit-in because the theme that year was breaking barriers and so she called me and interviewed me and she had a copy of the book and and she did a wonderful project on it she went to the state competition and she was the finalist in the state. Well I believe that American history is made up of the struggles the achievements the contributions of everybody who lived on this land and if we I mean it's the the the the good the uplifting the the bad the things that we'd rather not remember I mean it's they're uncomfortable and we could pretend that they didn't happen but they did happen and as educators we would be doing this to serve us to students if we didn't tell the full story of American history. I know that we we celebrate different groups of Americans different times during the year and that's wonderful but I think we have to be careful not to think that you know we've done Black History Month we've done Hispanic Heritage Month we're finished with that we don't need to include them anymore but history is a continuum and the events that happened earlier build laid the groundwork for things that have happened since and if we if we don't include everybody's story it's it's wrong. I think the fact that he never gave up he had this tenacity to originally one of the things that that he experienced as a child was on his grandfather's farm and he heard his father and his grandfather talking and he heard his grandfather say that's when they Jim Crowed us and he said from that he knew that segregation wasn't always there didn't always exist and it didn't always have to have to be and it was then that he decided that you know something needed to be done about it so when he decided to organize the sit-in he he recognized that the fact that African Americans in Alexandria could not use the public library he said that's wrong and we must do something about it I think it's important for kids to know that nobody's too young or too old to do make a difference and to seek to change the condition and and the terms of their lives and their lives of people around them that they care about