Make Public Libraries Great Again

It is the middle of summer, and the argument is already over.

This past March, the Hamilton County Commission voted, unanimously, to hand the old jail on Walnut Street to a private developer. The plan is Jailhouse Studios: film stages, music suites, a helipad, and, in the basement, a data center built with Oracle equipment.

There is a real case for it. The building had sat empty for five years and cost the county around twenty four thousand dollars a year just to keep the lights on. The developer is putting up the renovation money, not the taxpayer. Arts teachers stood up and said they are tired of training students who then have to leave Chattanooga to make a living. All of that is true, and it matters.

But more than eleven hundred people signed a petition asking the county to slow down. One resident did the math on the lease out loud and argued the county was leaving tens of millions of dollars on the table over the life of the deal. Others asked the plain questions. How much power. How much water. How many jobs, really.

The commission voted yes anyway. The county mayor called it an overall public good, a way to turn a liability into something that earns.

I keep sitting with that word. Asset.

Because Chattanooga already owns an asset that earns something worth more than rent, and we do not court it. We do not pitch it. We manage it quietly, like a bill.

Strip the phrase “data center” down to what it actually means. A place where a community keeps its information and hands it to anyone who asks. By that definition we have owned one downtown for more than a hundred years, and it holds more than any basement full of servers ever will.

We call it the public library.

My mother made sure I knew it was mine before I knew what it held. Middle child of three, I grew up with a library card the way other kids grew up with a house key. Momma saw to it that each of us carried one, and she did not treat it like paperwork. She treated it like a key to a building we already owned.

It did not start grand. It began around 1887 as a reading room, a few thousand books gathered in one place for anyone who wanted them. What made it permanent was a condition. Andrew Carnegie, a poor boy who taught himself out of borrowed books and spent his fortune building libraries, offered Chattanooga fifty thousand dollars to build a real one. He attached a single string. The city had to put up the land and promise to fund the library’s upkeep, every year, out of its own pocket, for good. Carnegie did not want to give a town a gift. He wanted the town to owe it something. Chattanooga agreed, and in 1905 the doors opened. That promise, to keep paying for a thing that belongs to everyone, is one of the oldest deals this city has ever kept.

Here is what the men selling us server farms would rather we forget. Data was never theirs. Data is older and richer than a hard drive.

Data is books, the ones that stood in stacks so tall when I was small they seemed to hold everything ever written.

Data is knowing who you come from. The library’s Local History and Genealogy department is where people sit down and trace their families back generations, and walk out knowing how the people whose name they carry actually lived.

Data is a kid with a verse and no equipment walking into the library’s Studio, which is free, and walking out with a finished track. And data is what a place comes to mean. This spring Isaiah Rashad, one of Chattanooga’s own, shot the cover of his new album at the public library. The building that raised a lot of us is now the backdrop on a record reaching hundreds of thousands of people who will never set foot here.

That is what a private server strips out and a library keeps. Context. Memory. People. The data in a library is layered with everything the cloud throws away.

And it is not one building downtown, either. The library has roots planted across the city, out at Eastgate and over in Avondale, with events and pop ups running all week for everyone from toddlers to grown professionals.

I think about Momma every time I read that. Some days she brought all three of us along while she studied, because the library was the one place with room for her work and our restlessness at the same time. Both of my parents read, but Momma especially. Whether she was home in a bubble bath, where you did not knock unless the house was on fire, or packing a bag for a trip, there was always a book in it. Taking us was never only about the books. It was about showing us what the building was for. Exploring. Sitting still. Being part of something with your neighbors.

There was a time that lesson was not offered to everyone.

In 1949, the Chattanooga library desegregated, one of the first in the entire Southeast to do it. The promise Momma pointed to when she put that card in my hand, that this place belongs to you and you have every right to be in it, was not always extended to every family in this city. People fought for it. When she made sure her three children each held a card, she was standing at the far end of that fight, and she knew exactly where she was standing.

The library never stopped widening the door. It grew into a system. It checks out more than a million things a year and runs thousands of free programs. A few years ago it erased late fines entirely, so that a dollar owed could never again be the reason a kid stopped coming.

Now here is the part that actually keeps me up, and it is quieter than any vote.

For years, knowledge has been slipping behind a login. Things that were once shared are fenced off, bundled, and rented back to us by the month. The article you used to read is a subscription now. The record you used to look up comes with a usage cap. Every year, a little more of what a person needs to know arrives with a price tag and a limit.

And now there is a newer step, the smoothest one yet. More of us are starting to ask a machine instead of looking anything up at all. You type a question, a confident paragraph appears, and you take it. It is fast. Often it is even right.

But an AI does not hand you a source. It hands you an answer. It cannot always tell you who said a thing, or when, or how they knew it. And it will, at times, state something that is simply not true, in the same calm voice it uses for everything else. You are not taught to check. You are taught to trust the box.

That is the path we are actually on, and no one ever voted for it. Not one meeting. Piece by piece we are handing off the work of knowing, and with it the muscle that makes the work possible. How to find a source. How to weigh it. How to notice when something is wrong and go looking for something better.

The public library is the last place in American life built to refuse all of it. No subscription. No paywall. No account. No cap for asking too much. And here is the part a server farm can never copy. A library does not answer for you. It hands you the sources and makes you decide. It is where a person still learns the exact skill the machine quietly wears down, how to tell what is true, who said it, and why to believe them.

A data center answers for you. A library teaches you to answer for yourself.

Notice the numbers, while we are here. The county capped that private data center at twelve thousand square feet, after the public pushed. The library already hands you twelve thousand square feet on its fourth floor, open creative technology, printers and tools and machines, no charge, no permission needed.

One of those we fought over for months. The other has been sitting there the whole time, waiting for us to walk in.

So no, this is not a plea to save the library. It does not need saving. It needs using, out loud and on purpose, the way Momma used it. It needs a city that still remembers why it matters to find a thing out for yourself.

Get a card, if yours has lapsed. Take a child. Walk the fourth floor. Trace your family. Book the Studio. Give to the library’s Foundation if you are able. And say its name in a public meeting before someone decides it is a cost instead of a treasure.

Because the danger was never that we would wake up one morning and find the library gone. The danger is quieter than that. It is that we stop needing it. That we get so used to being handed answers we forget there is a building full of people whose whole purpose is to help us find our own.

Maybe the most valuable thing a city owns is not the asset everyone is fighting over.

Maybe it is the quiet place on the corner that asks nothing of you but a card, and gives back not just the record of who we have been, but the harder, older skill of deciding for yourself what is true.

We already own it. We already paid for it. The only thing left is to keep needing it.

Before a television crew ever brought Lionel Richie to a library reading room to meet him on the page, John Lewis Brown (1839 to 1931) had already lived one of the most improbable lives this city has ever buried. He was Richie's great grandfather, and he ended his days here in Chattanooga.

He was born on October 25, 1839, on a plantation along the Cumberland River near Nashville, the son of an enslaved woman named Mariah. Months before that birth, the man who enslaved her, Dr. Morgan Brown, wrote a will granting Mariah her freedom forever and setting aside schooling for her children, noting that he had long decided no one else would be born enslaved in his house. Whether John's father was the aging doctor or his son, Morgan W. Brown, no record has ever settled. What is certain is that John Lewis Brown came into the world free, by the stroke of a dying man's pen.

The war found him anyway. As a young man he was carried to the front not as a soldier but as a body servant to a Confederate son of the family that had held his mother, and decades later he received only a small pension for those years.

What he made of his freedom was remarkable. In 1879 Brown founded the Knights of Wise Men, a Black fraternal order and mutual aid society that he ran for a time from an office at 124 East Ninth Street. It was far more than a lodge. Members paid dues, and when one fell ill or died, the order paid his family. In an age when no white company would insure a Black household, the Knights were the insurance company, a self made safety net years ahead of the industry it would help pioneer. Brown wrote its laws himself. At its height the order counted some 278 lodges across the country, and in 1908 he gathered them for a supreme convention in Nashville.

He described its purpose plainly. The order existed, he wrote, for "educating every boy and girl and teaching from the cradle to the grave honesty, industry, economy," and for "the destruction, death and burial of the accursed idea that the negro is inferior." He closed with a line worth carrying. "Let us all be wise men and women."

The end was bitter. A smallpox epidemic buried the order in claims it could not cover, and a treasurer later fled with much of what was left. The insurance man died uninsured. Brown spent his final years tending Pleasant Gardens Cemetery here in Chattanooga, and when pneumonia took him in September 1931, he was laid in one of its unmarked graves.

His great grandson would go on to sell records by the hundred million. But Brown's own name had gone quiet in the family until researchers pieced him back together through wills, census pages, and cemetery ledgers, the ordinary records an ordinary library keeps. They found the wise man in the unmarked grave, and gave him back his name.

Some of the best places near Chattanooga never make the postcard. Foster Falls is one of them.

Distance: 0.6 miles, out and back
Elevation gain: 144 feet
Time: 30 minutes to an hour
Where: Foster Falls Small Wild Area, near Tracy City, about 45 minutes from Chattanooga

The trail down is short and it does not pretend otherwise. It is rocky and steep, a run of stone steps dropping off the spur toward the plunge pool at the base of the falls. Take your time on them. The reward is a suspension bridge swinging out over the river to a viewing area, and above it a sixty foot waterfall pouring straight into a deep, clear pool. Mountain laurel, azalea, and hemlock crowd the edges. It is, plainly, one of the wildest and prettiest corners in Tennessee.

Keep walking and the trail carries you toward the climbing cliffs, and here is the part most people miss. In the climbing world, Foster Falls is not slept on at all. It is one of the premier sport climbing destinations in the Southeast, a south facing wall that holds sunshine most of the day, with steep, technical routes averaging sixty feet that run downstream nearly two miles along the curve of Little Gizzard Creek. Most of it sits in the 5.10 and up range, which is climber shorthand for do not try this on a whim. You do not have to climb to feel it, though. You just have to stand at the bottom and look up.

Bring water, good shoes, and someone you like being quiet with.

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The summer plan writes itself, and it is not "stay inside where it's cool."

In the last few weeks alone: a peach matcha and a bagel sandwich at Shredders Lair. An accidental hour lost in the Reading Room to support Chef Ashford's pop up, where I came for the smoked brisket meatball yaka mein and left having also claimed the very last peanut butter cookie at the bar, a cookie I would, in full honesty, fight a grown man for.

None of these are chains. None of them are events. They are just chill little corners of this city run by cool neighbors who bet on Chattanooga and could use us walking through the door.

Yes, it is hot as hell. We have all consulted the weather app and grieved together. But nobody ever made a good summer memory hiding from the sun in their living room.

So pick a corner you have never tried. Order the thing you cannot pronounce. Get the last cookie before somebody like me does.

Go be a regular somewhere.

— Marie

Previous Edition: Dr. Everlena Holmes and How a 92 Year Old Keeps Us Informed