LibGuides: Martha Berry and the Berry Schools: Willie Lee Buffington and the Faith Cabin Libraries

Willie Lee Buffington and the Faith Cabin Libraries

In November 1925, Willie Lee Buffington left Saluda County, South Carolina for the first time in his life to go to the Berry School where he could work his way through high school. He had spent the years between completion of the 7^th grade and 1925 working on the family farm and, after the farm was lost, working in a sawmill. Although he would only be at Berry for two years, that time was critical to his development of an appreciation for books and a desire to make a contribution to literacy. As a boy Buffington had developed a relationship with a local Black educator, Euriah Simpkins. When Buffington learned that Simpkins’ new Rosenwald School lacked books for the students, Buffington solicited books from five contributors to the Sunday School Quarterly. The Rev. Lorenzo H. King, pastor of St. Mark’s Methodist Episcopal Church in New York City, shared Buffington’s appeal and collected over 1,000 books. Buffington and Simpkins built a library next to the school. That was the beginning of the Faith Cabin Libraries, over 100 libraries serving Black children and adults in Georgia and South Carolina, at a time when denial of library services to the Black population was often the norm.

"Berry Boy Helps Colored School."
Southern Highlander. (Summer 1933), v. 21, n.1, p.30
Faith Cabin Libraries: A Study of an Alternative Library Service in the Segregated South, 1932-1960 by Dan R. Lee
Libraries & Culture 26, no. 1 (1991): 169–82.
Examines the development of the Faith Cabin Libraries, sources of support, community involvement, and attitudes and programs of federal and state library agencies of the time.
A Friendship, a Dime, and a Dream : the biography of Willie Lee Buffington by Thomas K. Perry
Call Number: Memorial Library Z711.9 .P47 2017
A chance meeting between a young white boy and an African American community mentor leads to an altruistic obsession in this one-of-a-kind biography. Willie Lee Buffington (1908-1988), even as a young lad, never understood the Jim Crow mentality of Deep South America in the first half of the twentieth century. As a dirt poor textile mill worker, he secures a dime to purchase five stamps, sending letters off requesting books for uneducated African Americans. Buffington also works hard to become highly educated himself, parlaying his studies into a professorship. Buffington's work ethic and empathy for his fellow man eventually snowballs into over one hundred Faith Cabin Libraries throughout South Carolina and Georgia. The remarkable Buffington, relatively unknown, becomes a civil rights icon in this powerful story of faith and good works.
Libraries in Cabins by Betty Burleigh
World Outlook (March 1946) p.6.
The Reverend Willie Lee Buffington's Life and Contributions to the Development of Rural Libraries in the South by Louise Douglass Carr
MSLS Thesis, Atlanta University, 1958
Willie Lee Buffington and Faith Cabin libraries : doing practical good in a disordered world by Tamara Powell
In Grappling with diversity : readings on civil rights pedagogy and critical multiculturalism. Albany: SUNY Press, 2008.
Willie Lee Buffington and the Faith Cabin Libraries by Lydia Pappas
Moving Image Research Collections (MIRC). (June 30, 2016).
In November 2015, preservation copying of the Willie Lee Buffington Collection films was completed by Colorlab, with thanks to a National Film Preservation Foundation Basic Preservation grant. This collection consists of six reels, or approximately 1,864 feet of 16mm Kodachrome film, of Willie Lee Buffington’s personal amateur film footage and prominently features segregated African-American schools and Faith Cabin Libraries in rural Georgia and South Carolina.
Willie Lee Buffington Home Movies
This collection consists of six reels, or approximately 1,864 feet of 16mm Kodachrome film, of Buffington's personal amateur film footage and prominently features segregated African American schools and Faith Cabin Libraries in rural Georgia and South Carolina.
Willie Lee Buffington Papers at the University of South Carolina Libraries
correspondence, reports, records of library operations, transcripts of radio work, and other promotional materials about the work of Faith Cabin Libraries, and photocopies of articles re Willie Lee Buffington and his work to establish Faith Cabin Libraries in South Carolina and Georgia; and master list of Faith Cabin Libraries locations in South Carolina, [ca. 1961]. Published essays include: "Faith Cabin Libraries: A Study of an Alternative Library Service in the Segregated South, 1932‐1960," by Dan R. Lee, 1991; and "Establishing Libraries as Community Centers in the Colored School Sections of the South," a research paper by Earnest Hall Buell, 1937l; transcript of Ted Malone Show radio broadcast (6 Oct. 1948), Buffington and his work; 2 scripts for March 1951 Cavalcade of America radio program entitled "Uncle Eury's Dollar," starring Robert Cummings as Buffington; and "The Reverend Willie Lee Buffington's Life and Contributions to the Development of Rural Libraries in the South," Atlanta University M.A. thesis by Louise Douglass Carr, 1958.