Robert Dunnigan with his grandmother, Lena Pittman Allison (Dunnigan Papers, MARBL, Emory University)
Up until this time, I had been so busy with the challenges of my personal life that I had paid little attention to the problem of racial discrimination. But this issue hit me rather forcefully at the first countywide teachers meeting in Logan County, which I attended on Saturday prior to the opening day of schools.
Unlike in Todd County, where teachers never met the superintendent unless they took the initiative to visit his office, in Logan County it was the custom for all teachers of both races to attend a pre-opening meeting with school administrators, at which the teachers were informed of county policy and instructed in the method of operation of the schools. Other such meetings were called at intervals at the discretion of school authorities.
My first observation was that all white teachers were seated on one side of the aisle in the courthouse auditorium, while the blacks were seated on the other. I voluntarily seated myself with my own people but suggested before the meeting began that some of us should find seats among the whites. This brought a howl of protest from some of the older teachers, who reminded me that I was new to teaching in this county and there was no need for me to create confusion at my very first meeting. Some even commented, “She wants to be white so bad.”
At every subsequent meeting, I tried to get someone to join me in breaking down the color-seating barrier, but to no avail. Finally one teacher agreed to join me in finding a seat in the “white section.” There was no protest. No apparent resentment. Nobody said a word. Nothing happened. Once the ice was broken, others gradually moved over to the other side of the aisle until finally there were no discriminatory seating arrangements. The separation, I later learned, had been voluntary in the first place.1
The only restroom for women in the courthouse was still marked “White Ladies” as it had been in my childhood, and I still used it whenever necessary as I had done many years before. I secretly hoped someone would object so the matter could be brought out in the open and resolved. But nobody ever complained. The sign stayed there for several more decades, and it took an act of Congress to force its removal.
The county in those days sponsored an annual, one-day tobacco festival with a parade of floats and marching bands, and an outdoor program in the city square.2 The participants were all white. One year when the festivities were in the planning stage, I offered to give a dramatic reading since I had become proficient in drama and public speaking. My offer was readily accepted without hesitancy or noticeable surprise. The festival programs were always amplified so that they could be heard throughout the village. I gave one of my favorite readings from the words of Paul Lawrence Dunbar. The reading turned out rather well, I thought, judging from the crowd’s enthusiastic applause. But criticism came later from my own people, many of whom heard it from afar through the loudspeaker since blacks hardly ever bothered to attend the festivities. Some of my critics called me an Uncle Tom or Aunt Jane. Some charged me with being a “white folks’ nigger” for butting into white folks’ affairs. Others claimed that I was publicly belittling our own folks with a lot of “nigger talk.” Apparently this group was completely unaware that dialectical vernacularism is an accepted poetic style of expression and that Dunbar’s works were proclaimed classics by famous literary authorities. Even years later, famous poems written in dialect by such prominent poets as Langston Hughes won worldwide acclaim from outstanding intellectuals as well as common people.
After this occasion, there was never another festival held in Logan County without Negro participation. Black school children marched in the parade along with those from white schools (although the blacks were for a time placed at the back end of the march until this custom, too, eventually changed). Finally discrimination in Logan County’s festivals completely vanished without public protest or unpleasant utterances from either side.
I had six successful years teaching at New Hope, and I was both highly respected in the community and admired by the students. I was pleased and surprised when the local white weekly newspaper did something that had never been done before. It published a feature article on a Negro school—our school. The article listed the number of prizes we had won over a given period, and it rated me the county’s number-one rural teacher. This was a great credit to our community and a source of personal pride to me.
My personal—or more specifically, social—life had also changed with my return home from West Kentucky Industrial College. By some quirk of fate, Charles Dunnigan, that neighbor friend of my brother during my early childhood, returned home the same summer after fifteen years away. By this time, he was a handsome, well-dressed young widower of about thirty whose wife had recently died in Louisville. I was an energetic divorcée of twenty-five, fresh out of college and full of ambition to get ahead and build a good life. Charles dropped by to see me one day and we had a wonderful chat—talking about our childhood days, discussing mutual friends of the past, and swapping stories about more recent experiences. Charles’s conversational ability, his knowledge of current events, his apparent dignity, and his graceful poise acquired through extensive travel “up North” and experience in big city living placed him head and shoulders, in my estimation, above other young men of my acquaintance.
He apparently felt the same way about me because his visits became more frequent, and soon we were seeing a lot of each other. He escorted me to movies, parties, concerts, and even to church. For the first time in my life, I also sat in prestigious, reserved seats with a boyfriend when the Silas Green show came to town. “Silas Green from New Orleans,” a black tent show that toured the South, included a musical review, comedy, and minstrel acts. I felt like an adolescent since this was my first time to properly date a young man without interference from my family or critical comments from meddlesome neighbors.
Jobs were scarce during the Depression, so Charles, being a skilled cobbler (a trade learned from his late stepfather), went into business for himself. Using his father’s equipment, he opened a shoe shop near the location where his father’s shop used to be and established a very profitable business.
All was going well until my parents detected that our affection for each other was obviously increasing and our courtship was apparently taking on a more serious trend. For fear that marriage was in the making, they set out to drive a wedge between Charles and me.
As I see it now, they were looking out for my best interest. They were proud to have me home for the first time in several years and were pleased with my successful career. They were delighted that I had pulled myself out of the previous unpleasant position, and they were trying to prevent me from getting involved in a similar situation. Much as I hate to admit it, they were right in their desire to head off marriage, but they were going about it in the wrong way. My mother, for example, gave me long lectures on what she thought were Charles’s most undesirable traits, as she remembered them.
“Charles has always been a sporting man,” she warned. “He’s a man about town. A woman’s man.” She continued that because he was good looking, an excellent baseball player, and a smooth talker, girls were attracted to him. “They throw themselves at him and he can’t resist.”
She kept telling me, “Charles has never loved any one woman. He likes to play the field. He’ll never marry you—he’s not the marrying kind. If he does marry you, he’ll not stay with you. I dare say you’d be separated within a month,” Mama predicted. She didn’t believe me when I told her that he’d been married and that he lived with his wife until her death.
These charges only drove me closer to him. I wanted to triumph over all those admirers she had mentioned. I wanted to prove that Charles did love me, that he would marry me, and that we would stay together. But my mother was right to a great extent in her evaluation of Charles’s personality. She had known him since birth and had watched him grow up. She had observed without bias his characteristics. Furthermore, she was older and wiser than I in the ways of the world and had a greater understanding and a clearer vision of life, not fogged by youthful infatuations or blinded by the illusions of love.
My parents could have handled the situation much more wisely by permitting us to continue our courtship while at the same time warning me of the pitfalls ahead and advising caution. But their blatant request that I break off the relationship without a definite cause was like snatching from me a whole lifetime of contentment and happiness and shoving my future existence into a deep, dark, damp dungeon of despair. I couldn’t let this happen, so I didn’t quit seeing him, which led them to devise another approach.
My father took the lead this time, confronting Charles with the observation, “You and my daughter are obviously becoming very seriously involved. I want you to know that our family disapproves of any consideration of marriage. So we have agreed that it might be best for you to stop seeing each other.”
This broke up our social evenings together, but we didn’t stop seeing each other. I would sometimes drop by his shoe shop in the afternoons on my way home from school, if only for five or ten minutes. Sometimes we would sit in the railroad station for a brief conversation. The station was always deserted since only two trains came through the town daily and seldom did anyone board them from that depot.
This went on for nearly a year. Although Charles had proposed to me months earlier, I had not definitely made up my mind. I wanted a little more time to find out more about him and to determine whether we would make a suitable pair. But Charles had gotten tired of our chance meetings, and one day he firmly put his foot down. “If we are going to get married, we should just as well go ahead and do it,” he said. “If not, we might as well break it up. We are both grown, and it doesn’t make sense for us to be slipping around to see each other like teenage schoolchildren. I’m tired of it.”
With this ultimatum, I gave my word because I didn’t want to lose him. We agreed that the wedding should be secret. After the ceremony, we would each go our separate ways, continuing to see each other a bit more boldly. If my parents should see us together and raise an objection, we could proudly produce our marriage certificate and watch them squirm as Charles boastfully announced, “This is my wife.”
We planned to get married quietly during Christmas week of 1931 in the home of a Baptist minister who lived around the corner from Charles. The first part of our scheme worked out as planned, but the latter part, pertaining to secrecy, did not. Word leaked from the parson’s household that we were married. When the news hit the gossip grapevine, it spread quickly through the village, finally reaching my mother’s ears. When she confronted me about the accuracy of the rumor and I proudly confirmed it, she ordered me out of the house.
“If you are married,” she said, “you go on and live with your husband.” When I told Charles, he arranged for me to move into his home with his mother and sister.
All went well for several months until Charles was given a political appointment on the staff of a mental institution in Hopkinsville, some twenty miles away. The job called for twenty-four-hour standby duty, which meant that he had to reside on the premises with only one day off a week and one weekend per month. With this arrangement, he couldn’t come home very often, so he sold the shoe repair business.
The Depression was hitting America harder and harder during this period. The board of education arranged that year to open the rural schools in June, three months before the regular opening date. This was supposedly done to save fuel since schools could then close by Christmas, before the extreme cold weather set in.
The salary of seventy-nine dollars per month that teachers were then receiving was cut to fifty-six dollars per month, and we were informed that although we had an early opening date, we would not receive our salaries any earlier. The first paycheck would not be delivered until October. The state was not allocating the salary funds to the counties until the regular opening time in September, and the funds would not be matched with county funds and paid to teachers until the end of that month or really the first of the next month.
This arrangement imposed an extreme hardship on county teachers, including me. I had no means of transportation since I had sold my first car out of necessity when I was unable to keep up the payments. It was most difficult to find someone in a financial position to transport me to and from school for three months before I would receive any pay.
I finally succeeded in making favorable arrangements with an eighty-five-year-old veteran of the Spanish-American War, who had just purchased a new red Plymouth coupe and employed a younger man to drive it. The older man, Pete Helm, could afford to wait three months for his pay because he lived on an army pension.
Since Charles and I were now absent from each other for such long intervals, word began to drift back that my husband had found an outside interest in Hopkinsville, just as my mother had predicted. Whether it was true or not, his visits home became more and more infrequent.
I was only able to stay in the schoolroom three months that year, having to take off in September on maternity leave. I was still living with Charles’s family, but his mother began to make me feel unwanted and uncomfortable after I was forced to give up my job temporarily. She constantly reminded me that Charles was doing nothing for me, nor was he sending her any money to help support my upkeep. Finally she bluntly told me that she was not able to feed me, so I would have to make some other arrangements, even though I was helping her with her daily household chores and her occupational laundry work.
I tucked my pride under my arm and went home to Mama and Papa. Being too independent to accept full support from them, I got a job cooking for the family of Tom Rhea and stayed with it until the baby was born. I became so heavy with the pregnancy that I was confined exclusively to the kitchen, doing only the cooking and helping with the dishes, while Rhea’s chauffeur was assigned the duty of waiting tables, bussing dishes, and even helping me wash them. For this job I received only three dollars a week, but at least I got something to eat and didn’t have to depend upon someone else to feed me.
It was at this point that trouble began between Charles and me, and it never entirely ended.
In December 1932, our son, Robert William, was born, about two weeks before our first wedding anniversary. His father was absent for his birth, which took place in my mother’s home since there was no hospital in our town at the time. It was nearly three months later before Charles came home to see his son. I was still staying with my parents, who naturally resented his visit. But he claimed to be very proud of our beautiful little child and promised to come home and move us into a house of our own, where we could live together as a family should.
He gave up his job in Hopkinsville, came home, rented a house, and moved the baby and me into it. Work was still scarce, however, and Charles couldn’t find another job. He became sullen and despondent. I soon realized that my husband, like many other men I knew, couldn’t face responsibility and was unable or unwilling to meet hardships head-on. He tossed aside his fatherly responsibility just as a child would discard a broken toy, and he walked out on us just as the rent was due. His only explanation was that he couldn’t live here without work. He had to go somewhere to find a job, but he didn’t know where. So he walked out, leaving the baby and me without rent money, food, fuel, or a job.
With tears in my eyes, I had to humble myself and go to my mother for advice. I feared that she would gloat with satisfaction, saying, “I knew this would happen,” or that old saw, “I told you so!”
But Mama spared me that hurt, perhaps because she felt sorry for me. She only expressed regret that this had happened and offered to keep the baby so I could work. So my parents took little Bobby when he was only four months old and carefully reared him, seeing that he finished elementary school and high school and then entered college with my assistance and a one-thousand-dollar scholarship from the Elks fraternity. He was a junior at Kentucky State College when my mother passed away in 1952.
Immediately after my parents relieved me of the care of the baby, I took a job with a milk dairy, washing bottles by hand for two hours in the morning from seven to nine o’clock, and two hours in the afternoon from five to seven. For this I was paid two dollars a week. I was given a free breakfast and a snack in the evening for supper.
The Works Progress Administration eventually came into full swing nationwide as a means of providing employment for needy families.3 The WPA paid no cash, instead giving workers a statement called “scrip” that verified their working time. Unlike a check, this scrip could not be converted into cash. It could only be exchanged for food at the grocery store or for fuel at the coal yard. In my hometown, the project was proceeding rather well in providing employment for poor white women. A number of black women had applied for jobs, but few, if any, had been hired. I put my application in for a WPA job and at the same time confronted one of my political contacts as to why more Negroes had not been employed. Since the project was financed with federal funds, I argued, it should be open to all needy families regardless of race.
Robert Dunnigan with his grandmother, Lena Pittman Allison (Dunnigan Papers, MARBL, Emory University)
I was told in confidence that this discriminatory hiring practice was not the idea of city officials administering the program. They were acting under pressure, I was told, brought by the middle-class white women of the town, who feared that if black women were employed on a public project at the rate of six dollars per week, then all of the cooks would leave their kitchens, where the work was more demanding and the pay considerably less, and take jobs with the WPA. The local WPA administrator agreed to honor their requests unless, or until, someone from the black community complained. They assured me that this injustice would be corrected. Soon a few Negro women, including myself, were called to work. Even then, women with an average-size family were allowed to work only one day a week at one dollar a day, while those with larger families could get two days’ work per week.
I raised a ruckus about this arrangement but soon received the “quietus treatment” by being instructed that I would be allowed two days per week if I would keep my mouth closed, a deal I accepted. Some of my coworkers complained privately about my being given the maximum work time despite having only two people to support, myself and my baby, but since they never complained openly or publicly, nothing was changed.
This project, like most other federal projects controlled by county and municipal officials, was never operated fairly. The white women continued to work on one of the two job projects to which they had previously been assigned. One was a sewing project where dresses and shirts for needy children of all ages were made from material supplied by the federal government. The other was a job patching tattered and torn textbooks with Scotch tape in the office of the county school superintendent.
Jobs had to be created for black women. We were told from the beginning that our first job would be cleaning public buildings. In a town of that size, there were not very many public buildings. We were first assigned to clean the schoolhouses. There were four in the city. One was a combination elementary and high school for whites. The same type of school operated for the colored. There were two white colleges, one for boys and the other for girls.
Soon these buildings were thoroughly cleaned, windows washed, walls and floors scrubbed. The next task was cleaning the county courthouse in the same manner. Then came the jailhouse and finally the calaboose. The latter was a small workhouse occupied mainly by hobos or drunks picked up on vagrancy or other minor charges and made to break rock on a rock pile for a few days to pay their fines. We found this place infested with body lice and reported it to the authorities, who ordered all cots and blankets burned immediately. We were given the rest of the day off to go home, take hot baths, and wash or burn our clothing. This ended the cleaning of public buildings.
We were sent back to the white schools with picks, shovels, and garden forks to dig up the ground and transplant shrubbery in appropriate places on the lawns. When this was completed, we were all sent to the “colored cemetery,” where we squatted around all day digging up wild onions with a spade.
The city dump was located near this cemetery. Every day, we would watch for the grocery trucks to dump their refuse, and then we’d take off to the dump to see what could be salvaged in the way of food. Often we would find such things as cabbage rotted on the outside. We would remove the rotten leaves and carry the cabbage home for cooking. Potatoes and apples half rotten would be picked up, the decaying parts cut off, and the good part kept for use. Moldy bologna and wieners were salvaged, the mold scraped off, and the meat soaked overnight in hot water and ready for eating the next day.
We worked faithfully at the cemetery until there were no more wild onions to dig. Then we were transferred to the Maplewood (white) cemetery. This lawn was so well kept that no wild onions had been allowed to grow, so we were ordered to wash the tombstones.
After a few weeks, this job was completed, and there was just nothing else for us to do. The supervisors said that the only thing left was to clean the city park, located in the center of the town square, sweep the streets surrounding it, and then sweep Main Street.
This was the limit for me. I had laid aside the dignity of a schoolteacher to do all of these other things, but I refused to sweep the streets like a common convict. So I gave up the WPA job, grateful that it was near time for school to open again.
While I was still working on the project, I had further supplemented my income by taking on a third job, that of cleaning up the residence of a white family and cooking the heavy midday meal (dinner) between the dairy hours on the five days that I was not working with WPA. For this I received $1.50 a week and a free dinner.
Even this would not take care of all of my expenses. Although my parents didn’t charge for keeping the baby, I still had to buy food, furniture, and medical protection for him. So I added another $1.50 to my income by doing the laundry for the county attorney’s family.4 Both the washing and ironing had to be done at night since my days were entirely occupied with other jobs.
I now had a total weekly income of seven dollars, earned by doing four jobs. With this I managed to get by maintaining a home and supporting a baby until September, when I returned to my schoolteaching job.