It was a relief to be back in a position of dignity, but I was faced with another immediate problem. I had no means of supporting myself until the first paycheck arrived, about six weeks after school began. I was fortunate to renew my previous arrangements for transportation to school, and the landlord was generous enough to wait until I received my paycheck before collecting rent. But there remained the problem of eating. There were no more free meals, or “thanky pans,” from white folks’ kitchens. (Cooks for white families were usually given all of the leftover scraps from meals to carry home for their families. These were customarily carried in little pans commonly known as “thanky pans.”) Many days, there was not a bit of food in the house and no money to purchase any. No grocer would open credit accounts to new customers. The Depression was still upon us.
Often when I stepped into the car on my way to work, tears of hunger would well up in my eyes. Carvin Bibbs, the driver, was in the same shape. He had no steady employment and received no pay for driving Pete Helm’s car—just the benefit of having a car at his disposal for his own convenience or to sometimes pick up a few quarters by transporting friends to their destinations. On seeing me hungry, tears would come to his eyes both out of sympathy for me and because he, too, was hungry. Sometimes he would drive by Miss Sity’s restaurant and order breakfast for both of us, informing the proprietress that he would stop by after taking me to school and mop the floor, wash the dishes, or do any chore she wished to pay for the food.
Sometimes Carvin would park the car when no traffic was visible and, dashing into a farmer’s cornfield, help himself to a dozen or so roasting ears. I would cook them when I got home and invite him to the feast, sometimes consisting only of fried corn and bread and sometimes only corn on the cob and no bread.
Whenever we saw a chicken crossing the road at a safe distance from any farmhouse and no traffic was in sight on the highway, Carvin would strike it with the car and pick it up, and we would have a scrumptious dinner of fried chicken, broiled chicken, or chicken and dumplings.
This had to be done with a great deal of caution because it was against the law to pick up a chicken that had been hit by a car. If it was accidentally hit and left on the road, nothing could be done about it because this did not constitute a crime. But if it was picked up and carried away, the driver would be charged with the same offense as if he had stolen the chicken. The penalty in Kentucky was one year in prison for every chicken stolen.1
A young couple who lived with the bride’s grandmother across the street from me was caught up in the Depression squeeze when neither of them could find work. The husband found it impossible to cope with this situation and deserted his wife, leaving her to the constant nagging of her grandmother for marrying a “no-good man.” Eventually the wife was ordered to get out and make a way for herself.
With nowhere to go and unable to find a job, she came to me in tears, relating the story. Although I had no money for food, I offered to share my home with her. She was most grateful and agreed to compensate by doing the housework, doing the laundry, and helping in some way to obtain food for both of us. Before long I was amazed, having left home in the mornings with no food in the house, to return home in the afternoon and find she had cooked a hot meal for us.
When the pressures of the Depression finally began to subside, she would look back over those lean years and laugh about how she had managed to secure food.
“I would walk down the street toward town with a big paper bag folded and neatly tucked in my bosom,” she said. “When nobody was looking, I would sneak into a neighbor’s garden, hide from view behind the tall corn, and gather a mess of butter beans or string beans, putting them in the paper bag. Then I’d walk straight back home past the neighbor’s house as if I’d been to market and purchased vegetables for dinner.”
She recalled that one of our neighbors raised chickens that roamed around freely in our backyard. She would spread grains of corn in a straight line from the backyard to the back door. A chicken would begin picking up the grains and follow the row right into the kitchen. She would close the door, trapping the chicken inside, and tap it on the back of the head with a poker. The chicken would keel over dead without making a sound. So we would enjoy a delicious chicken dinner. She also recalled that she used to get up early in the mornings before the neighbors arose and pick up apples from beneath their trees so we could have fried apples for breakfast when nothing else was in the house.
Finally my first paycheck arrived, and I was able to put in a supply of food and pay off some debts. Life at last became a little easier. For all of this time, I had not heard a word from my husband, who flew the coop at the first sign of hard times. Now, when our problems were beginning to iron themselves out and we were contentedly adjusting to a normal way of life, Charles unexpectedly returned home and insisted on rearranging our entire lifestyle.
His first move was to order my roommate to find another place to live. With her departure, the burden of housework once again fell upon me, along with my regular schoolwork. He never turned a hand to help me in any way although he still was not working. He was a specialist in building construction, having also learned that trade from his late stepfather. He was skilled in carpentry, plastering, painting, and cement finishing. But winter was upon us, and little of this type of work was available.
Charles spent his days hanging around the poolroom and the restaurant, dancing with available women to the tune of jukebox records. Sometimes he would spend all night at poker tables or some such endeavors, bearing out my mother’s warning that he was “a sporting man.”
He didn’t even bother to have a fire made in the house when I arrived home after a cold ride from school. (Since there were no heaters in cars in those days, a long winter ride was indeed a cold one.) The house would be so cold sometimes that after making the fire in the grate, I would have to go to a neighbor’s house and wait until the room got warm enough for cooking dinner or doing other chores.
At the end of the seven-month school term, I had no savings to tide me over the five months I was unemployed. When school was out and I was broke, my husband sneaked off again, leaving me penniless and jobless. There was no federal aid in those days. Welfare assistance, unemployment compensation, and Social Security were unheard of. Everybody lived by that old American standard rule: “If you don’t work, you don’t eat.” Once again, I turned to domestic work for survival, managing to make $4.50 a week plus meals.
During the school term, I had managed to carry on my other three interests—speaking, writing, and politicking. My reputation as a politician, a speaker, and a writer had become rather widespread locally. R. L. Berry (former editor of the Owensboro Enterprise for whom I once worked) had become editor of the Kentucky Reporter, published in Louisville. He asked me to write a column for his paper. Since no compensation was involved, I used material I had prepared for other purposes, such as speeches I’d made on various occasions. The subject matter related to good health, motherhood, homemaking, environment, how to be a good wife, business and professional women, birth control (for which I was advocating at a time when this controversial subject was very unpopular), parental care, proper training of your child, youth, life, feeling, character, education, culture, cooperation, opportunity, and success. These essays were condensed into a series of articles that the Reporter published under the heading “Scribbles from Alice’s Scrapbook.”
In teaching American history at New Hope, I always included the role that the Negro played in the development of this country. The same was true for Kentucky history. I had found that these children had practically no knowledge of any prominent black Kentuckians past or present. Going beyond the regular teaching requirements, I prepared typed information sheets naming outstanding Kentuckians of color and their contributions to the founding and growth of the state.
Soon I realized that perhaps children throughout the state were as uninformed as those in my district. So I sent copies of these fact sheets to Frank Stanley, who had just recently established the Louisville Defender. He published this information under my byline in a column called “The Achievements of the Kentucky Negro.” People started sending me biographical sketches of other prominent people who historically had made outstanding contributions or who were now doing worthwhile things. This helped me to keep the column new and interesting while at the same time keeping my history class informed on contemporary history. The series went over so well that I. Willis Cole, the editor and publisher of the Louisville Leader, the city’s oldest Negro newspaper, visited me during the school term of 1935 to inquire why I contributed this material to the Defender rather than to his paper since I had already done some work for the Leader several years earlier. When I replied that I’d had no special reason for choosing the Defender, he invited me to come to Louisville at the close of school and work in the Leader office.2
I welcomed the opportunity. Although Cole offered to pay me only five dollars a week, that was two dollars more than I would be earning in a cook-kitchen in Russellville. Furthermore the work would be dignified, the experience wonderful, and the contacts helpful. And this time I would beat Charles at his own game, leaving home this summer as soon as school closed. This worked out marvelously for me but was quite a surprise to him.
Although I had to operate on a tight budget, I learned a great deal about the newspaper game. I was assigned the position of women’s editor, learned to proofread, did the paper’s bookkeeping and banking, became familiar with layouts, composed headlines, and even helped with the mailing. In addition, I met many interesting people and was in daily contact with leaders in business, professional, political, and social life in Louisville.
I spent evenings taking classes in sociology and social service administration at Louisville Municipal College with the thought that an opportunity in this field might present itself one day. I also accepted an assignment as editor of the Bulletin, a quarterly publication of the Louisville YWCA, an uncompensated position but one that offered experience, identity, and recognition.
When I returned to teaching in the fall, I continued writing a column for the Louisville Leader. This one was called “Negro Women’s Contribution to American History.” At a state teachers’ organization (Kentucky Negro Education Association) in Louisville, I met one of the great Negro historians of all time, Carter G. Woodson, founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. I became an early member of this organization and remained friends with Dr. Woodson until his death in 1950.3 Another “great” whom I met through the Kansas National Education Association was Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of the National Council of Negro Women and a woman I had admired since childhood because of her work for the advancement of Negro people, women in particular.
In the spring of 1936, I enrolled at Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State College (now Tennessee State University) to take some special training in journalism. This was the nearest Negro college with journalism courses in the curriculum. It would also be my way of getting out of the state for the first time. Once again, at the close of the school term I left home—this time for Nashville—before Charles could pack his things and beat me out the door. Since 1928, Tennessee A&I had been headed by a journalism pioneer, Dr. George Gore, author of an outstanding history of the Negro press. I excelled at Tennessee A&I, writing a term paper that was deemed the best of the class and was published in the school journal. The following spring, I returned to Nashville to study journalism and public speaking, this time adding classes in library science.
After six years of teaching at Mount Hope, I began to feel that I had reached the peak of my usefulness in that community. Using my political contacts, I sought and was assigned to a better position, a teaching position in the Adairville consolidated high school—the only high school in the county for Negro children (besides the Russellville “city” school). It was the best the county had to offer. One small room at the school was converted into a library, the only one in the county, and because of my recent library science training, I became part-time librarian in addition to my regular assignment teaching grades three and four.
Because this was a consolidated school, children were bused from one end of the county to the other, a distance of at least fifty miles a day. Decades later, there would be great controversy about busing children to maintain racial balance in schools, but in those days, black children were bused for miles and miles to maintain racial segregation.
I had four wonderful years teaching in Adairville before the authorities devised a plan to save county money at the expense of black children’s education. They abolished the high-school department at Adairville, consolidating grades nine through twelve with the Russellville high school. This added another twenty-five miles to the bus route and required many children to leave their homes before daylight and return after dark.
The termination of the high-school department also meant the elimination of a third of the faculty. Two elementary school teachers, including me, were let go, and two high-school teachers were demoted to the elementary level. I was fortunate enough to be reassigned to the county’s largest one-room school at Keysburg, about eighteen miles from home—thanks to my political contacts and an outspoken confrontation before members of the school board.
Charles, meanwhile, over the three summers I’d spent away from home, had experienced the loneliness involved when one spouse deserts the other for an entire summer. So in 1938, following my first year of teaching in Adairville, he informed me that he was going to Louisville to work with a building contractor and he wanted me to go with him. I did, and I used the opportunity to take courses in English and French at Louisville Municipal College. The summer passed uneventfully, but I began to realize more and more that although my husband and I shared the same house, we were living in two entirely different worlds with different values and different goals in life. He seemed ill at ease with my friends, and I was equally uncomfortable with his. He seemed disinterested in the things I enjoyed, and I could not adjust to the things he liked.
In autumn, we returned to Russellville and I resumed my work as teacher at Adairville; then we returned to Louisville after the school term so that Charles could resume his summer trade with the builders. I accepted a job as feature writer for the Derbytown Press, a semimonthly magazine covering activities in Louisville’s Negro business section. This magazine was short lived but was soon replaced by a leaflet called the Shopping Guide, for which I was offered the job of advertising manager. Out of this publication grew the Informer, a triweekly tabloid on which I worked as coeditor.
Then came another big moment in my life—the realization of a dream to travel. One day, Joe Bowles, a retired railroad man, came into our newspaper office and expressed a desire to appear on Major Bowes Amateur Hour, a radio show in New York.4 He asked if I would write the major on his behalf requesting an audition. In time, his request was granted. Because of his age, his inability to read, and his lack of experience traveling in a big city, the elderly gentleman insisted that I accompany him on this trip, serving as his secretary and travel guide. I had no more travel experience than he, but at least I could read and find my way around. Eventually I agreed to accompany him on an expense-free trip with no salary attached.
The former railroad employee arranged transportation through passes issued by the L&N Railroad Company, to which he had given more than fifty years of service. The tickets called for stop-offs at Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C., then continuing on to New York. We had heard a great deal about equality “up North,” so we were pleased when we encountered no racial difficulties in the first two cities visited. But it was a great shock when we were denied taxicab service at the railroad station in Washington, D.C. We were later informed that a certain cab company, which held the franchise to operate from Union Station, was reluctant to serve Negroes. We were told that the company’s policy on discrimination was optional, with the practice left entirely to the discretion of the driver.
At any rate, when we tried to hail a cab, we were directed by the white driver to another cab with a black man in the driver’s seat, parked almost a block away on the opposite side of the station plaza. Since we had such a brief stay in Washington, we hired this cab for a sightseeing tour of the city. Having a black driver turned out to our advantage because he showed us some things of special interest, such as the Howard University campus and the residential section of the black bourgeoisie, as well as the monuments and usual sights.
We journeyed on to New York, where we spent more than a week. Our first few days were occupied at the radio station for audition and rehearsals. Finally the big night came. Joe Bowles—age eighty-five; very dark complexioned; with white, woolly hair; wearing a white suit typical of Kentucky colonels (he is credited as being the first black man so commissioned); bent with age; leaning heavily on a cane—stepped upon the stage depicting a perfect image, both in name and physical appearance, of the character portrayed in the song “Ole Black Joe.”
The audience went wild with applause, sending his rating to the top of the scales. He was declared winner of the evening and awarded the customary thirty-five-dollar top prize. Without opening the envelope, he handed it to me as a bonus for my patience and endurance.
With this mission accomplished, we had a few more days to see the sights of New York and attend the 1939 World’s Fair. Our return trip carried us through Chicago for a brief stop before journeying homeward.
I kept a running account of the trip and used the material in sort of a travelogue column that was serialized for a number of weeks in the Louisville Defender under the title “Observations of the East.” In evaluating my experience, I concluded that I had learned more in a few weeks of travel than I could learn in months from books, so I decided to spend more time and money traveling rather than attending summer school. The following summer took me to Michigan and across the river to Windsor, Canada. I returned through Chicago for a brief visit to the American Negro Exposition of 1940.5 Next I traveled to Mound Bayou, Mississippi, to attend the fifty-sixth Founders’ Day celebration of this historic all-Negro town in the Delta.6 I was treated royally as guest of the city’s mayor, Benjamin Green. Both of these trips were similarly chronicled in my travel column as “Observations of the North” and “Observations of the South,” respectively. A planned trip to the west had to be postponed because of the war, which limited travel.
Back in Russellville, I secretly longed for a job out of town. My life had become very unhappy in this complacent little village, not only because of marital problems but also because it offered no opportunity for growth, and I wanted desperately to get away.
I had also become very sensitive to racial discrimination, which prevailed in our town. Although we had been successful in breaking down the racial barriers in some instances, much of the policy of segregation still remained. I recall one incident that infuriated me terribly. It was a day when I came home from teaching with an awful migraine headache causing extreme nausea. I stopped at a drugstore to buy aspirin and ordered a bottle of Coca-Cola with which to take the pills. They sold me the aspirin but informed me that they could not sell me a Coke because they didn’t serve colored people.
I assured the clerk that I didn’t want to sit at a booth, I only wanted to stand in the aisle and take a few swallows to down the pills because I was very sick. When he still refused, I became so mad and so sick that I couldn’t make it any further. I went outside, sat down on the curb, and regurgitated right on Main Street in the heart of downtown. Passersby gawked at me, appalled, as though they thought I was drunk or crazy. I even heard one remark as she looked back, “Ain’t that the Adairville schoolteacher?” I wished later that I had stayed in the store and vomited in the middle of the floor.
I remember another incident that a chauffeur friend related about this same drugstore. One day, his boss ordered two fountain Cokes at curb service. When the waiter came for the glasses and discovered that the colored fellow had consumed one of the drinks, he threw the chauffeur’s glass against the curb, breaking it into bits as he remarked, “This store will never serve a white person out of a glass that a nigger used.”
Since no NAACP or Urban League chapters, labor unions, or any other type of civil rights organization existed in that town, my minister brother-in-law, the Reverend R. D. Langley, and I conceived of the idea of calling citizens together to form what we called a civic league to fight the injustices imposed upon black citizens.
At this meeting, we talked about the post office’s refusal to deliver mail in certain black neighborhoods supposedly because there were no paved streets. We asked why the city did not pave the streets in those areas and why there were no gas lines there, either.
We mentioned segregation in the town’s only motion-picture theater, where blacks were relegated to the buzzard roost (balcony). We also discussed the wages paid cooks in this town and recommended setting a certain wage floor below which no cook would work. If they would agree to a minimum wage and stick to it, the white people would be forced to pay better wages. The majority of attendees verbally agreed to our proposals.
But the next morning—Monday—many of them went back to their places of employment and told their “good white ladies” that the Reverend Langley and Alice Dunnigan were down in Black Bottom trying to stir up trouble. They claimed we were trying to turn the black folks against the white folks and trying to make them lose their jobs. As a result, I nearly lost mine!
With all of this in mind, I continued looking for a way out of this city and once again relied heavily on prayer for a solution. World War II had been in progress almost a year when I noticed a government poster in the local post office announcing positions for clerk typists. Postmaster Edward Coffman agreed to administer the civil service typing examination if I furnished my own typewriter. I had an off-brand, broken-down, foreign-make portable typewriter that I’d ordered several years before through a magazine ad, and I brought it to the test. (There was no place in town to rent a typewriter.) While driving me to the post office, Charles launched into his usual tirade, lambasting me for my aspirations, starting an argument for no other reason than to make me so angry and nervous that I would be unable to pass the examination. He almost succeeded.
The exam papers had to be graded at the civil service regional office in Cincinnati. The results would be returned to my hometown postmaster. When the grades arrived, sure enough, I had failed the actual practice test. But I had made such a good showing on the written part of the exam that the postmaster agreed to allow me a second chance on the typing test. This time, I managed to control my nerves. Although my typewriter skipped spaces and some of the letters were out of line, I made the grade.
I completed the standard government application, stating that I would be available to work anywhere in the United States. In a short time, I received a telegram telling me to report for work at the Labor Department in Washington, D.C., the following Monday. The telegram arrived on the day before Thanksgiving in 1942, and I had just begun my second term as teacher at the Keysburg school. I immediately placed my resignation in the superintendent’s office and hurriedly prepared to leave Russellville on Sunday in order to report for work in the nation’s capital on Monday morning.
I went off happily to this strange and enchanting city, leaving my husband behind. I had not a single friend or acquaintance in Washington nor the slightest idea where I would reside. Whatever apprehension I might have felt, however, was soon overcome by the exotic fascination of exploring a great new world and the grateful realization that my prayers had been answered.