Thomas Fountain Blue

Thomas Fountain Blue was the second child of Noah Hedgeman Blue and Henry Ann Crawley, both former slaves. Blue attended Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute from 1885 to 1888, after which he taught school in Virginia. In 1894 he enrolled at Richmond Theological Seminary, graduating in April 1898 with a Bachelor of Divinity. During the Spanish–American War, Blue served in the Sixth Virginia Volunteers and was stationed in Camp Poland in Tennessee and Camp Haskell in Georgia. After the war he moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where he was in charge of the Colored Branch of the Louisville Young Men's Christian Association and served on a number of civic associations, including as a charter member of the Louisville Chapter of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. ==Library career==

Blue became the first African-American to head a public library in 1905. The Western Colored Branch was the first Carnegie colored library in Louisville, Kentucky. In 1914 he was also made Librarian in charge of the newly opened Eastern Colored Branch of LFPL. From 1919 to his death in 1935 Blue was the director of all library work for African Americans in Louisville, including work bringing library collections to seventeen schools in the Jefferson County area. he was the first African American to be on an ALA program. The Negro library training program that Blue established at LFPL continued as the Hampton Library School. ==Personal life==

Blue married Cornelia Phillips Johnson in 1925; they had two sons together. == References ==