Charleston County, S.C. honors slain librarian

Charleston County, S.C. officials have renamed a public library to honor Cynthia Graham Hurd, a longtime librarian who was killed in the June 17 massacre of nine pa­rishioners of a church in downtown Charleston.

The County Council approved a resolution at a special meeting June 25 to add Hurd’s name to that of the last branch she managed. It will now be known as the Cynthia G. Hurd St. Andrews Regional Library to recognize her three decades of service to county government.

“It’s a small way that we can say thank you to a 31-year public servant who dedicated her life to teaching children and adults how to read,” said Council Chairman Elliott Summey. “I think it’s a fit­ting tribute to say thank you to a wonderful person.”

Hurd was also a commissioner of the City of Charleston Housing Authority for more than 20 years, where she “served in every officer position and for a time on each committee,” according to housing authority board officials. “Cynthia devoted herself to assuring that the residents in fact had safe, clean, at­tractive, and affordable homes that they could be proud of.”

All county libraries were closed on June 18, the day after the shoot­ings took place at the Emanuel Af­rican Methodist Episcopal Church. After reopening, the branches were closed June 27, the day of Hurd’s funeral, to allow her colleagues to attend the service.

Hurd’s death was felt throughout the library community, locally and nationally. American Library Association President Courtney Young said in a state­ment, “Her dedica­tion to librarianship was apparent as she worked to transform lives through education and lifelong learning. The thousands of lives she touched over the years will serve as a lasting living legacy.”

Doug Hill, executive director of Charleston County Public Library, first met Hurd about five years ago when she managed the John L. Dart branch, where she spent 11 of her 31 years with the libraries. The branch, located in “an economically deprived” neigh­borhood, would be transformed on her watch.

At the time, the branch didn’t have a librarian solely dedicated to working with children, Hill recalled. “One of the things we really worked on — and this was spearheaded by her — was to get a children’s librarian in there to really start pushing more children’s programs in that area,” he said, “getting people in the neighbor­hood to come to the library in the evenings for programs, and she was very successful in doing that.”

While libraries were Hurd’s passion, Hill said her community involvement went beyond the stacks and shelves of her professional domain. In addition to being a housing authority commissioner, she ran a nonprofit, the Sep­tima P. Clark Corp. — named for a Charles­ton civil rights pioneer — which makes small grants to programs for residents of public housing, according to Charleston’s The Post and Gazette newspaper.

“It’s a devastating loss for us, and I almost don’t want to do these interviews because I don’t want this to be a news story that disappears tomorrow. It’s more to us here,” Hill said. “This is somebody who has affected our entire community and I don’t know how anybody gets through this…. To me, it’s a differ­ent kind of sadness and a different kind of pain than I’ve ever felt.”