By Ralph Nader

Reading the May 30, 2002, Washington Post I came upon a long article by Judith Havemann on the deprived, decaying, and disrespected state of the Washington, D.C. library system. The main Martin Luther King Jr. Library and its 26 branches, the article reported, have suffered budget and staff reductions that stand in marked contrast with the office-building boom and the expansion of multimillionaires in our federal district.

I read on to learn that from the mid-'70s to now, staff has been cut by 30% to 432 and the library's share of the city's budget has been reduced from 1.6% to 0.7%. The result is devastating. As post columnist Marc Fisher described: "Open six evenings a week in the 1970s, branches now stay open only two evenings. No branch is open on Sundays. Roofs leak, walls sag, shelves are a mess. Collections are insultingly out of date and incomplete." And of course the usage has declined.

A little over two weeks later, I called Havemann to say that such a graphic article must have sparked a wave of calls and expressions of support. She replied that she had received a few calls, but nothing like a wave.

I was stunned, though I should not have been. Washington is a city of two layers (local and federal) straddling three jurisdictions (the District of Columbia, Virginia and Maryland). It is a city tensed between private affluences and public squalor. The poverty has to be seen to be believed which is why tourists are guided away from the desolate and devastating areas of our national capital.

But libraries? They should be an easy cause, a ready commitment, an obvious mission for philanthropists and movers and shakers among the well-to-do. After all, weren't libraries in comparable need turned around New York City, Boston, Cleveland, Denver, and San Francisco by a combination of civic leadership and noblesse oblige?

I called Vartan Gregorian, who in the '80s rescued the giant New York Public Library system with the help of Brooke Astor and her coterie of affluent New Yorkers. Now head of the Carnegie Foundation, Gregorian was quite familiar with the D.C. situation, having given the library a $500,000 grant. With typical elation, he offered advice on how it was done in New York and mentioned an address he gave in St. Louis where he called community support for public libraries "an investment in the educational, cultural, economic, and civic life of the city that multiplies itself once it reaches critical mass." Clearly, a form of urban renewal writ large.

Disintegration of community.

Our forebears had more pride. Even in the Great Depression of the '30s, very few libraries or branches closed down. Now after the biggest macro boom in our history, libraries and librarians have to go around with a tin cup!

The plight of the D.C. library system reflects the disintegration of community here. How could the city's power structure sit idly by and watch tens of thousands of youngsters grow up without a library experience? The same way that avoids rolling up its sleeves to provide decent education for those same youngsters. The same way it can look indifferently on statistics showing that one-third of district adults are functionally illiterate. It is enough to make us all blush with shame.

I don't need another cause, but this one could not be avoided. Our Center for the Study of Responsive Law has launched a D.C. Library Renaissance Project with a dinner at the Carnegie Institution building (AL, Jan., p. 14) attended by many of the district's leading citizens, including Donald Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, who made an impassioned pleas for revitalizing these libraries. At the dinner, startling photographs by Enrique Arnal of the dilapidated condition of the library visually demonstrated the challenges.

The first note of optimism came from the D.C. librarians and Friends of the library at the dinner. Instead of being defensive, they welcomed this pictorial reality that placed grimness before those guests who lived in the "other Washington" and were not patrons of the library's services. Library director Molly Raphael knows that realizing the abysmal neglect provides the necessary umph or jolt to motivate improvements.

Everyone in the D.C. government, from the mayor on down, says the right things and points to the mayor's vision statements emphasizing the role that a resurgent library can play in adult- education and literacy programs. At the same time, District officials are letting literacy and basic adult-education programs for the city's neediest residents disappear. Over three years, there has been more talk and less action for the libraries.

Enter the Renaissance Project to mobilize support, from the neighborhoods to the glitterati; from the frustrated supporters of the branches to the lawyers, the businesspersons, and the professionals who get their calls returned; from the absence of the cultural and civic events to the presence of more of Washington's authors, musicians, artists, poets, and civic leaders lending their talents; from the massive deferred maintenance to the renovations and expansion of facilities; from the pitiful philanthropy to a plentiful philanthropy.

This is a tall order only because of the deep-seated anomie that afflicts too many influential people toward their community. But as Gregorian counseled, no matter how much private support they receive, public libraries are a public responsibility of the municipal government first and foremost. Which is another way of defining community.