Sterling A. Brown’s: A Negro Looks at the South

“Academic Retreat” not only records exemplary teachers and educational institutions, the section also traces unwavering commitment to education, a vehicle for attaining a social status long denied African Americans by a history of legal and social barriers. About this history, Brown writes eloquently in “The Little Gray Schoolhouse,” “If the little red schoolhouse is a symbol of the American way of yesterday, the unscreened, unpainted, leaky, decrepit gray schoolhouse symbolizes a present disgrace.” The narratives collected in this section speak loudly to efforts to achieve educational parity at a time when racial disparity was the order of the day. Some, including the persistent effort to equalize teachers’ salaries and educational facilities, have a contemporary resonance. But even these efforts demonstrate how differently African Americans felt about the most effective way of bringing about change. For example, juxtaposed with the principled fight of Lutrelle F. Palmer to hold high the banner of academic excellence for his Negro students in Richmond, Virginia, were those teachers and administrators who “out-bookered Booker.”

The narratives preserved in this section therefore represent the variety of takes on education and the differing meanings of literacy. “The Path to Alcorn” is an homage to the dogged determination of tiny Alcorn College to keep its doors open when so many other small, historically black schools were forced to close. “And Gladly Teach” reverses the stigma often attached to teaching (“those who can, do; and those who can’t, teach”) and testifies to the earnestness, the commitment that honors teaching as a profession. From the vantage point of Freddie, a schoolboy, Brown, in “What Could Freddie Say?” tempers a sense of hopelessness with a determination to succeed. “One Language, One People” is an ironic commentary on the National Council of Teachers of English’s practice of “making provisions for Negro participation” in its annual conference. “Vicious Circle” asks the question, “When do you certify marginal teachers, who possibly inflict more ignorance on to students, and when do you draw the line and say ‘no more’?” And “Signs of Improvement” points with some optimism to changes occurring in Southern education.

THE LITTLE GRAY SCHOOLHOUSE

We slowed up by the school. It was small, weather-beaten gray, with a squat belltower. The roof sagged slightly and a few shingles were off. A pole in the beaten, grassless yard had a barrel hoop fixed against it; another hoop was on the stock of a pine tree from which the lower branches had been cut. These were basketball goals. Roots stuck up as extra hazards for the players. Two outhouses were in plain view about twenty yards back in the loblollies.

Bullock glanced over at me. “So that’s the school,” I said, noncommittally.

“That’s not one of the most bad ones,” he said. “At least it’s a building, and it has outhouses. There are plenty that don’t have them. I’ve got the statistics in the office at Atlanta.”

As we drove off, he told me how often Negro elementary schools had to be housed in churches and fraternal lodges of the Negro community. His voice droned on as the gray concrete sped under our wheels.

“So they went to the county commissioners and asked for a school. The head commissioner told them ‘no funds.’ They pitched in, fixed up a schoolroom on the upstairs floor of their lodge hall. They paid the teacher’s salary, such as it was. When winter came, they went to the commissioner again. They wanted a little money for coal to heat the room. You won’t believe what answer they got.”

Oh, yes, I would. “What was it?” I asked.

“The commissioner got hot as blazes. ‘What in hell do you mean coming here asking for money for coal? Do you think this county is going to pay to heat a building that don’t even belong to it?’ ”

Back in Atlanta, Bullock reeled off, like a man pressing the nearly exposed nerve, a list of percentages that should have staggered me: In Mississippi (taking the worst instance), 38 percent of the Negro schools were housed in churches, lodges, garages, tenant homes, and privately owned buildings; 91 percent were without toilets; 73 percent without water; fifty thousand Negro children had no high school facilities; and the value of school grounds, buildings, desks, blackboards, and books per Negro school child compared to that per white was something like one cent to ten dollars. But it was a thrice-told tale to me; I have heard the dreary and ugly record as Horace Mann Bond, Charles Thompson, Doxey Wilkerson, and other statisticians have told it. My own sampling provided for me the brick and lumber structures to embody the figures of the experts. If the little red schoolhouse is a symbol of the American way of yesterday, the unscreened, unpainted, leaky, decrepit gray schoolhouse symbolizes a present disgrace. Throughout the South I found the state of the schools to be the indignity at which my friends seemed most ashamed. “Look here upon this picture [the fine red-brick trimmed consolidated school for whites] and on this [the one-room shack]”—became a ritual.

I was in Baton Rouge shortly after Charles S. Johnson published his hefty The Louisiana Educational Survey, a mimeographed report on Negro schools. My hostess, dynamic and civic-minded, had memorized passages of the study almost by heart. With three attractive youngsters of her own to be educated, she found the report striking close to home. She had marked pages from the introduction all the way to the recommendations. Coldly scornful, she read the Tulane University professor’s prefatory comment, “It is sufficient to say, without going into historic details, that the South has always been in favor of Negro education.” It was not sufficient for her. Swift in her anger, she thumbed through the pages to statistics showing the average cost of $54.95 for white elementary pupils to $15.33 for Negro; $111.32 for white high school pupils to $47.69 for Negro. She read me quotations from white superintendents who found scant time to visit Negro schools, leaving that to Negro Jeanes teachers. One superintendent did not even know what Negro schools were in his district. She was sarcastic about the Negro teachers whom the interviewers caught in revealing statements:

I got my bachelor degree. I would rather teach in town because you don’t have to work hard. I don’t have no problem. I try to get the children to do right [i.e., not write each other dirty notes]. . . . The white superintendent, he come once, year before last.

Mrs. Huggins’s laugh wasn’t a good one when she read about the smaller children snipping pictures out of a Sears Roebuck catalogue in order to learn about the world. Nor when the older students, who were “having language,” listened to a group of words, yelling “S” or “NS” to answer the teacher’s “Is it or isn’t it a sentence?” Nor when the teacher was quoted: “Now I gonna make the assignment for tomorrow: it’s gonna be a test and you better know all of this that we been over or else you’ll flunk.” And to the tots: “You gonna have a test too so you better learn the names of the New England states. Now we gonna have health. We gonna say the chart for health. We should take a bath at least twice a week. Do we do that?” Echo answered yes. Echo lied, I told my hostess. She laughed ruefully.

There were bits of grim humor throughout, as when a teacher defined: “correspond, as to write people”; “examination—sometimes we have yes and no, that’s examination”; “tennis, that’s a game”; and “ninety, counting from one to ninety”; “all right, that’s your spelling.” Or when a student, asked to name her favorite actor and actress, answered, “My mother and father,” and opened up an imaginative vista. Or when another student gave his life history: “I hafta cut wood, feed hogs and chickens, make fars.” Or when a boy, while a girl was reading “What Does My Home Mean to Me?” burst in with a rhapsodic cry, “Jessie Mae, you got a lot!”

But Mrs. Huggins saw nothing to laugh at. She was not near to crying, as she is a fighter, not the crying sort, but she fumed at the dismal story of poor kids from broken families and getting an education as flimsy and makeshift as the rickety pine shacks where they get it. She did lay the heavy blame on the teachers; so badly prepared, underpaid, and heavily overworked, they could hardly have done much better. The recommendations—as sound as they were, calling for better salaries, less crowded classrooms, a curriculum more meaningful to the students—did not cheer her. For cold water was flung on her hopes by a recommendation by the white director of the overall study that “Congressmen and Senators from Louisiana should urge Federal aid for education with no Federal control as to the details of the expenditure of the money, but merely provision of the fields within which it is to be spent by the State Department of Education.” She shook her head. She turned back to the underscored admission of a white superintendent: “We might as well be frank about it—all these years we have taken money from the colored children to educate the white. There’s no use talking about how we did it or why we did it. We did it and we might just as well start there. I think it’s mighty important to let the State and the Federal government see the picture as it really is, and if they want to do something about it, all right. But parish school boards spend money on white children first.”

I was just as disheartened by a mimeographed survey of the Davis-Dyer community, a group of fifty-odd families living along the Dyer and Plank Roads in East Baton Rouge Parish, five miles from Baker, the nearest town. The people had decided that since their school was in a bad way, they needed a survey too. So somebody with a sociological yen estimated their annual income, how it came, and how it went. That wasn’t tough. Then were listed the community’s natural features and natural resources, such as the palmetto for making baskets, hats and mats, and clam and turtle shells for painted decorations. “The dominant mores of the community” are explained in one sentence: dancing and recreation were frowned upon; superstitions and mystical cures for warts and toothaches were still in favor. In “Living Men and Women of Opportunity and Achievement,” the survey points with pride to “members of our community who have been fortunate enough to travel extensively in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, numbering six.” The achievement of others is that they are living in Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles. The “creative individuals of the community” weave baskets out of thin strips of wood, horse collars and chair bottoms out of shucks, make beads out of chinaberries, and dippers out of gourds. In the business world, three are store-keepers, two are beauty culturists, and one sells chickens.

The most interesting part of the survey is the history: the hewing of the farmlands out of the swamps, the battle against flood, fever, and such wild animals as bears, wild boars, wolves, panthers, foxes, muskrats, alligators, and skunks. White “bulldozers” scared off some of the new freedmen in the eighteen-seventies, but they returned. They soon had a church and a school.

The school today is a Rosenwald building of the one-teacher type. As usual, the enrollment slanted sharply from twenty-three in the first grade to four in the sixth and last grade. The average attendance was forty-five, with seats for only twenty-five. Two-thirds of the children had to walk three miles or more to school, as no transportation was afforded. The building needed painting; the two surface toilets were unsanitary; there was no water supply “on the campus.” Textbooks, paper, pencils, and pasteboard were inadequate. The survey warily reached the conclusion: “That the teachers and parents deserve credit for progress under existing circumstances, but that the children deserve better educational opportunities.” That hardly needed surveying. The recommendation was that “more efforts be put forth by patrons to secure the things necessary for better school and home life, by making contacts with proper officials and by continuing to help themselves, as they have done in the past.”

I should like to have talked to one of the fathers of the community, sitting on his stoop at his home on the plank road, after a hot day at the Standard Oil Plant. I should like to know what he felt about the survey—if all he could recommend was “See Mr. Charley” and “Keep on keeping on”; and if in his book the “Living Men of Achievement” are only those who have hoisted stakes and gone.

I was to read all kinds of surveys (the dynamite sticks of their ratios warily bundled up in politeness and deference)—“Of course we wouldn’t blame anybody but” . . . I found myself humming the more forthright folk-rhyme:

Ought’s a ought,

Figger’s a figger;

All fo’ de white man,

An’ none fo’ de nigger.

Statisticians know the margin of error in the folk reckoning. Even so, it is too close for comfort. The surveys should not startle the white people of the South, though the act of surveying might. It is another sort of carpetbagging, if done by Southern whites, or smart alecky impudence, if done by Negroes. The way Negro schools are run in the South is the South’s own business. So the principle of equal opportunity is violated. So what? That is the way it was planned. White apologists counter the glaring discrepancies with indubitable proof that the South is poor, that the education of the Negro was “the responsibility of a conquered and looted people,” that the North or the West would not “have acquitted themselves any more handsomely, under like circumstances.” But handsomely is hardly the word even though, as Southerners hasten to add, “the South spends a larger percentage of its wealth on education than any other region.” Educational opportunities for whites in the South are far from satisfactory. Those qualifications are necessary. It remains true that dishonesty and injustice are rife. Stealing is no less stealing when the pot is small. North Carolina, the best state in the South for Negro education, spends for a Negro pupil less than two-thirds of a dollar for every dollar spent for a white pupil; the worst state, Mississippi, spends for a Negro pupil less than one-seventh on every dollar spent for a white pupil.

Uneasiness is spreading among Southern white liberals at the injustices. But the educational powers know what they are doing. Talking to an investigator, whose blue eyes, fair skin, and curly hair made her seem to be a white Creole, a parish superintendent explained that the only way they could have decent white schools was to spend on white children the money allocated to Negroes. “Yes, ma’am,” he confided, “colored children are mighty profitable to us here in this parish.”

Even if funds were more abundant, better Negro schools would not be welcome to many white Southerners. A Gallup Poll has shown that only half of the Southern whites believe that Negro school facilities should be equalized to those of whites. Words spoken in 1670 by Governor Berkeley of Virginia still ring too pleasantly today: “I thank God that there are no free schools nor printing; and I hope we shall not have, these hundred years: for learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them.” The difference is merely that the words are not today so applicable to poor whites as then.

Southern writers noted for their “sympathetic understanding” of Negroes have casually but quotably belittled education for them. In one of his less reliable moments, Joel Chandler Harris used Uncle Remus for his mouthpiece:

W’at a nigger gwineter l’arn outen book. I kin take a bar’l stave an’ fling mo’ sense inter a nigger in one minnit dan all de school-houses, betwixt dis en de State er Midgigin. . . . [Education] Hit’s de ruinashun er dis country. . . . Put a spellin’-book in a nigger’s han’s, en right den en dar you loozes a plow-hand.

Harris does not state their Uncle Remus is a hat-in-hand old fool, instead of a quaint philosopher. And Thomas Nelson Page applauds one of his favorite old uncles who declaims:

You knows de way to de spring and de wood-pile and de mill, an’ when you gits a little bigger I’s gwine to show you de way to de hoe-handle, an’d de cawn furrer, an’ dat’s all de geog-aphy a nigger’s got to know.

In our own time, Julia Peterkin, called by her publishers the outstanding chronicler of the black man’s life, devotes only a few words to Negro schools in her book on the “colorful life of the American Negro of the South”:

Free school starts after all the crops are gathered and ends when field work starts in the spring. The children seem precocious and learn quickly, but they are less concerned with learning to read out of books than with learning lessons taught by woods and fields, swamp, and river. The old people mistrust printed words. They fear that book reading may put foolish notions into young heads and dim eyes that need to be keen in dealing with wild creatures.

Mrs. Peterkin complaisantly sides with the old people who, with “no books or newspapers to read, no radios or moving pictures to entertain, have leisure to develop faculties of mind and heart and to acquire the ancient wisdom of their race.” The children, happy “in spite of the dangers and hardships that beset them” [in dealing with wild creatures most likely] learn the valuable lessons “that bearing heavy burdens makes for strength and that life was meant to be enjoyed.”

Of the education of Negroes in his beloved Delta, David Cohn writes: “It is more important for him to know how to earn a living than to be able to conjugate Latin verbs. [The planters] think education of this kind tends to unbalance him mentally and to lose a sense of the realities about him; or in plain Delta language, ‘to get out of his place.’” That which pains Cohn chiefly, however, is that “the blackboards of their high schools are filled with diagrams of the Peloppenesian [sic] wars; they prattle of Pericles and of Crete.” The fact that Mr. Cohn’s state of Mississippi was then spending an average of $45.34 for each white pupil against $5.45 for each Negro pupil does not seem worthy of his mention. It is hardly likely that the discrepancy can be laid to the Peloponnesian Wars. Many Negro school-teachers would gladly surrender even Peloponnesus if only they could get blackboards. It is tragic sophistry to lay the blame for the inadequacy of Negro schools on unwillingness to sponsor the conjugation of Latin verbs. It is not that education of this kind “tends to unbalance the Negro mentally.” It is that education of any sort for the Negro is widely considered to be dangerous. Learning to read the Constitution, and to check on the landlord’s “figuring with a crooked pencil” is dangerous enough, even without learning such facts of the Peloponnesian War as that Pericles dipped into the treasury for Attic glory, and that haughty states in their jealousy for power destroyed each other and a great deal of civilization to boot.

Bad schools in preference to bad notions. And so in the severest ordeal of our nation’s history, the Selective Service reported that “failure to pass Army intelligence tests primarily because of educational deficiency, has deprived our armed forces of more physically fit men than have the operations of the enemy.” (As of May 1944). . . . Adequate educational programs and the enforcement of compulsory school laws during the decade before the outbreak of this war would have resulted in providing the equivalent of 15 additional divisions of fighting troops for the defense of democracy.

It was not a “Negro problem.” Negroes had no monopoly on the bad schools, thus were by no means solely the rejected. As Martin Jenkins and others point out in The Black and White of Rejections for Military Service: “In 15 states the percentage of Negroes rejected is less than the total percentage of white rejections, and in 26 states the rejection rate for Negroes is less than the rejection rate for whites in 10 southern states.” It was all a Southern problem. Nevertheless, the national percentage of Negroes rejected (since so many Negroes came from the South) is about eleven times the rejection rate of whites.

The cost to the nation of these bad schools has been enormous. And the cost to the kids is greater than the statistics can tell. Dispirited, beaten before they start, rotted almost as soon as they bulge on the branch.

“How do you like your school,” to the barefooted, ragged kid on the edge of the road.

“Aw right.”

“Is there anything about it you don’t like?”

“Nawsur.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Well.” Looking carefully from under his lids at the strange questioner. “I don’t like the blackboard.”

“Why not?”

“I doan know. I likes to write at my own seat.” (At the blackboard his mistakes were there for people to titter at.)

One of the large yellow buses partly filled with white youngsters rolled by, with a monstrous shifting of gears at the hill’s rise.

“Would you like for your school to have a bus like that?”

“Oh, nawsur.”

“Why not?” The questioner knew that the little fellow walked nearly five miles to school everyday.

“That’s for white folks,” the little boy said simply but finally.

THE PATH TO ALCORN

Alcorn College and its environs were steeped in history too. In July 1830, the trustees of the Presbyterian Church brought some of their slaves to clear a campus out of the thick woodland and to lay the foundations for a college for white young men. Because of the live oaks that they left in beautiful groves, the college was called Oakland, and was intended for general culture and the training of ministers. Its location was in the center of things then, only a few miles on a good road to the flourishing river town of Rodney.

Its first president, the Reverend Jeremiah Chamberlain, an eminent Presbyterian minister, engaged in a heated dispute about slavery in the college chapel, and was stabbed with a sword cane in the yard surrounding the president’s home. This assassination was ominous of the later history of Oakland. After the battle at Fort Sumter, the young men of Oakland College left the shady groves for the bivouac. At the close of the Civil War, financially wrecked, the institution was offered for sale.

Since Negroes were so important to Reconstruction Mississippi, the state bought the school for $40,000 and established it as a Negro college. It was renamed for James L. Alcorn, then governor, a former slaveholder who believed in the “capacity of the colored people for well-ordered freedom.” Alcorn College became the first land grant college in the United States; and its first president was a Negro, Hiram R. Revels, after his service in the United States Senate.

Many of the buildings at Alcorn date back to the days of Oakland College. The chapel, in Greek Revival style, red brick with huge white columns, is the chief historical pride. Next in interest is the president’s home, where the murdered Reverend Chamberlain bled to death “right over where we are sitting,” said the vigorous young president telling me the story. This home is roomy, unpretentious, but beautiful. Some of the brick buildings did not survive as well as these relics and two are condemned. In talking to students and faculty members, I gathered that to them the facts of chief importance about these buildings are not that they are antebellum, but that they are old and that a few new buildings would be welcome. The worn old benches in the chapel may have been sat in by Oakland aristocrats but that doesn’t lessen their discomfort. The chapel is hard to hear in, and when I was there, hard to heat. So history may come high-priced. Alcorn is now too remote from main-traveled roads for many sightseers to come and look at the past.

AND GLADLY TEACH

Church was a graduate student at Atlanta University; he was writing his Master’s thesis on some aspect of romantic poetry. Though young, he had taught in three Southern states: North Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama. He believed that his experiences would make a good book, and this is the story as he told it.

His first teaching job was in a North Carolina community of about six or seven hundred people. It was in tobacco and cotton country, not really near anywhere, well the nearest place that might be known was Hamlet on the Seaboard. There were more whites there than Negroes. The cracker class was numerous and ignorant; the whites of power treated them as badly as they did Negroes. There was a beautiful school for whites in the community. The Negro school, though brick, was only fair: there were no lights, the toilets were open earth, and a pump furnished the water.

In the community itself only two Negroes had electric lights, and there were no such things as bathtubs or commodes. There was no Negro doctor, nothing like that, and no Negroes of any wealth. The one educated Negro there was an ex-policeman from Chicago, who came back to retire. As far as the morals of the Negro community were concerned, the people did anything they wanted to do, anything they were big enough to do.

Most of the Negroes worked on farms as sharecroppers or hired hands, or as cooks, maids, and handymen for the white folks. The Negro store was only a jook, where they sold a little tobacco or snuff and soft drinks, not enough to call it a store. There was nowhere in town a Negro could eat away from home, except for one white café run by two white women, who would push a sandwich out at you through a hole in the side of the café. The teachers boarded around in the community at first, then pooled together and bought groceries and got somebody to cook for them. The three women teachers lived together in a three-room shack.

His first year there, Church got seventy-five dollars a month; his second, eighty-five dollars a month; this was the state-wide pay according to his certificate. Now he understood that the salary would be about one hundred twenty dollars a month. “One interesting thing about the white community,” Church said, “was that they respected the teachers. Though most of the teachers were foreign to that section, the whites did not bother them much. Six teachers with eighty or ninety dollars a month coming in cash would spend more money in a month than the other Negroes would spend in a year. As a result, they sort of appreciated the teachers. Sometimes they even skipped up and called me Mister Church.”

One of the most liberal Southern states, North Carolina furnished the grammar school books free, and the high school books at one-third of the cost. They paid a boy who had a driver’s license to drive the Negro bus. When they bought new buses for the whites, they would work over the engines of the best of the discarded white buses for Negroes to use.

There were nine teachers for the Negro school, counting the principal and his wife; four taught high school and five elementary. The principal was regular his first year, then he tightened down and got really tough. The board was all white, made up of local people, and he nearly fell over backwards trying to please them and hold his job. He refused to walk on the street with any of the women teachers: though his wife was on the faculty, he didn’t want to give the community the wrong impression. The Negroes in the community loved to talk about the teachers, who were outsiders and therefore doubly suspect. The young women teachers couldn’t wear slacks, not even in the house.

The principal gradually changed to a little Hitler. The white board was too busy to bother with recommendations so they entrusted all of that to him, as their man Friday. At the end of the year the principal has the power to recommend and to fire, so he thinks the teachers are supposed to be his children for him to look after. This principal looked after them and, influenced by his wife, into all of their business.

“The way these Hitlers do it,” said Church, “is to make their lists: this person or that one is to come back, or else his name is left off the list. The only reason needed is ‘Didn’t cooperate.’ There is never an investigation, by all means no investigation. His first year, he gave the teachers lots of rope, and there was some tipping out. Then he got afraid of the community and clamped down. He was mortally afraid of letting anyone see him, or his teachers, taking a drink. The community would have considered that a righteous sin; meanwhile, the people of the community, white and Negro, drank their corn whiskey on the street.”

Church’s next two teaching ventures were in Mississippi. Perhaps because this was his native state, he insisted that Mississippi was paradoxical. “To start with the best things,” he said, “Meridian has one of the most progressive high schools I’ve ever seen. It is heated by automatic gas, has model classrooms with adequate room space, a suite for home economics, and a modern cafeteria. The teachers range from M.A.’s on down. The white folks allow the football team to play one game in the white school stadium, always the game before Thanksgiving.

“In a nearby village, however, you will find a one-room school in a leaky shack, with teachers poorly paid and poorly prepared.” Church taught for a while in one of the toughest counties in Mississippi’s Black Belt. The Negroes there worked on the plantations owned by one or two companies: “I’ve been told people live there who’ve never been up to the city. As you drive through the country, you will see some pretty fine mansions, but there aren’t three Negro homes with paint on them. The Negroes dare not build certain types of homes.”

The school was built by the Negro community, with the help of some Rosenwald money. A Negro who owned about one hundred ninety acres gave the land. The county gave nothing.

“There was only one white man in the community. He lived openly with his Negro woman. They stayed out on a farm and reared up a whole family. All of his children that got high enough to go he sent to the Negro school. One daughter married, but most of the girls went the way of all flesh and got themselves some babies. There wasn’t any ostracism. It was all right as long as it was mixed up in the community. With the exception of a few families, everybody in the community was screwing everybody else. Two or three of the trustees were tipping out with some of the teachers of the community. Some of the young girls had to come by both the principals and the trustees.”

Church found that in general the young women teachers were fair game for the “educational powers.” “They live in teacherages on the campus, and can’t go out. Most of the fellows in the community are uneducated and sort of bad. Even if they aren’t bad, the teachers can’t go out with them, as they’re below the teachers’ level. The principal just won’t hire men teachers; too much competition in different ways. So he has himself a little harem. Often he will get young girls’ pictures when they make their applications. If they don’t look to suit him, they don’t get jobs. When they come, he starts playing around. If they don’t like it, they don’t come back the next year. On the report to the board: ‘Lack of cooperation.’ Sometimes the dismissal is verbal only. The teacher who cooperates stays. They have to come by, that’s all. ‘If you don’t want to do it, I can get somebody who will,’ is a repeated threat. Sometimes the principal’s wife is in the community, sometimes on the faculty, sometimes she isn’t. Often the principal had a head woman; she runs the school. He can’t correct her. A lot of teachers who know the score have a saying they pass around whenever the principal got tangled up in an argument with his harem favorite: ‘Huh, you didn’t say that last night.’ The trustees frequently go with the women teachers. Then look out; it makes no difference how inefficient they are or become, there’s no getting them out. They’re set, until maybe the trustees make a change in their women. They raise hell, then, to tell the truth.

“The white superintendents are guilty too. It doesn’t take long before they’ll approach a good-looking or just a decent-looking colored woman.

“All of the schools aren’t in this mess, by any means, but too many are. Just too much power in the hands of people who are too petty to handle power. In spite of those things, the best of the teachers go out and do something. Not enough. But still there are some with the stuff in them, with ambition.”

There wasn’t much incentive in the region where Church taught, however. The nearest town was symbolized by Church as one “where Negro men don’t wear collars and ties.” More importantly, he said, “Negro men just don’t go with any of the good-looking light-skinned women around here. No. Those women are just sold to those white men. They don’t rate in the community; they’re just about segregated from it.”

One white man, brother to an important official, had a Negro common-law wife. He would bring his children to the town’s school every day. Church found that “the community accepted them as just some more light-colored children. These would go out with Negro boys, either light or dark ones but it seemed that they preferred to go out with the darkest boys they could find.”

At the school where Church taught, however, his strictures on the love-life of the principals didn’t hold, Church insisted. The principal who was there when Church first went there was aging, and probably too decent for such carryings on anyway. He had been teaching for fifty years, after finishing the tenth grade in Columbus. He was one of the first Negroes in the section to get his first grade license. The people all agreed that he had been a crackajack teacher in his day.

When Church came, the principal was not jealous, only indifferent: “He knew my father, and seemed to like me. He thought I was too new-fangled. He used no schedule for anything. He would sit there all day with his hat on, teaching arithmetic from 8:30 to 3. The kids sat there all day with their hats on, singing out the tables. I asked him for a schedule. ‘Folks ain’t gonna work by that thaing,’ he said. I made up a schedule, and rang a little bell at every change. It worked. A month later he said it was all right. After that he said of any plan, ‘If you can make it work, work it.’”

But Church found greater hostility among the trustees: “One of them, an old handkerchief head, went to the superintendent and said, ‘I could get some of my people from any town who wouldn’t want all this high salary. Why some of those new people said they won’t work for less than $30 a month.’ There was also a tieup with the church that didn’t help any. The Baptists and Methodists fought for control of the board and of teachers. ‘If you would get somebody belong to us church, us wouldn’t have to bother. He could help us. But he’s a Methodist. Us wants us folk.’”

But the old respected principal had recommended Church. Church asked the superintendent for his contract. He was told: “We don’t even give contracts to our white teachers. We haven’t made up our salary schedule yet. But you’ll be paid among the highest of the colored.”

Church found that to be true. He was given $30 a month, only ten dollars less than the principal. The rest of the budget for teachers was two teachers at $27.50 a month each, two at $25, and one at $22.50. The salaries of a principal and six teachers thus totaled $197.50 a month, for a school year of from four to six months. In 1933, Church’s first year there, the state was so poor that it paid in script. When the certificates were cashed, 10 percent was lost: “The county superintendent said that if you held the script until the state got the money or maybe two months later, you would get full payment. But most of the teachers took them to the big store where they could be cashed at a 10 percent discount. All the whites and Negroes of the community came by this big merchant. He had it fixed so that as soon as the money came to the county he’d get his first.”

The first thing Church noticed when he saw the school was a big ashpile, right out in front. None of the teachers seemed bothered about it, but he had it moved when he became principal. The town furnished nothing but teachers and registers, which are teachers’ record books. Crayons, erasers, blackboards, rulers, and textbooks all had to be supplied by the Negroes themselves: “We had to put in our own windowpanes. The trustees got the wood for us. My second year there the WPA gave us a well. It was very needed; for there had been no water available; the kids would bring bottles of water to school and set them in the corner. The principal would drink from the students’ bottles.

“There was a sawmill about two miles above us, and WPA got some rough lumber for some toilets. Before that the girls would use the church toilet, and the boys would run over the hill into the woods and squat. Our vocational man, who taught carpentry and agriculture, drew up plans for the toilets and supervised the building. The county had sent up some second-handed collapsible desks before I got there, but the people thought they were broken and threw them out behind the school. There weren’t many, but our vocational teacher fixed them up. Then the community people brought their teams over, ploughed up the yard and fertilized it.” When Church left the school it was no longer an eyesore.

Church became principal when the old man had a stroke. He planned his schedule so that his best teachers would be in the primary department. Church said, “I kept the worst teachers by me. One of them was pretty bad. I had to correct her lesson plans. They had tried to run her away. But she was one of those trustees’ cousins. She had gone back to high school and had finished the eleventh and twelfth grades. In her summers she had attended the Normal School, trying to get a junior college certificate. She had a third grade license (the worst) and then got it up to the second. She didn’t loaf as a teacher. She said, ‘I don’t want to be behind’ and took all the advice and help I gave her with a willing spirit. Finally, she made a good teacher.”

When Church first went to that school he was hopeful and energetic. He insisted on the students’ understanding what words they were calling. He remembers that in a story about Alfred the Great, the word “conspicuous” occurred. He asked the meaning. No one knew and he told the class to look it up for the next day. He learned that one of the students, a trustee’s daughter, had said of him, “He ain’t gonna be here long. He’s trying to be too hard. Teacher’s don’t do that up here in Stony Hill. They’re too glad to get here.” But he managed to weather the storm, and even got the word “conspicuous” over. He saw a slow improvement in the school. The white superintendent praised Stony Hill School as “one of my most progressive schools. There’s a fine job up there at forty dollars a month.” He became fairly well known among the whites in the neighborhood: “Some wealthy white folks had heard that I had waited in hotels in Atlanta. They wanted me to come out and wait on some of their parties, to be a part-time butler. They were very polite about it, calling me professor, and offering good money. I told them that the school work really consumed all of my time, that I was trying to do a good job there.”

Church struggled to have the school stay open for a six months term, but some of his teachers kicked. They had their own farming to do. The parents generally agreed with them, and when Church left, the school went back to its average four and a half months.

In this community, Church learned, the teachers and parents tried to do what they could to keep from losing so many students: “As soon as they got to a certain age they were gone. A student would leave one year, about five or six years later their kids would be coming to the school. Healthy, strong kids, too.

“The kids were religious, but they ran wild in the woods. A boy from one grade and a girl from another would get excused from class. Then they’d meet over the hill. The best little Christian in my class, I called her the little shouting girl, was the first in the school to become pregnant.

“Each invites some young man to eat from her basket. Then she can go to the table and take anything she wants. Her boyfriend is supposed to pay for whatever she gets, if he eats out of her basket. Sometimes its five or ten dollars worth. In such a case you know something else has been going on. Otherwise they keep the expenses down. The Feast really makes money. Sometimes the trustees clear seventy or eighty dollars. All they don’t sell, they carry back to the store. They get a commission of forty cents on the dollar. The preachers therefore wish to get members of their church as teachers, to help in such as this.

“They really believe in having their good homemade liquor. Nobody comes without it. The assembly room was about this high off the ground. Some of those Negroes would get drunk and walk out through the windows, taking the sashes and all. They just had to have their shooting and cutting. They would race up and down those hills, just shouting in the air.

“Yessir, they would raise torment with the teachers if they wanted to go out and have a little fun, but you could go out back of the school and find them screwing up hell. Just stumble over them.

“In the assembly they would all sit there with their hats on, men and students. Sometimes they would sing hymns and get happy. At one commencement the preacher really went to town. Then they started a song; they had tambourines and a drum for accompaniment. Sister Dumond, an old lady, but supple and limber, just skated out and started dancing. She would draw back, like a track man getting on his mark, and then start running and yelling. She told me that wasn’t nothing. I told her, I’d love to see you when the spirit really hits you.

“If you were to see the people at one of these assembles, you might think they were perfectly happy. But I learned that those people are not contented; they know something is wrong, but don’t know anything they can do about it. I would say that the school is doing more good than church. The young people—they will never be contented with what they have there.

“The old principal used to talk to me about education as insurance. ‘These people ain’t crushed,’ he used to say to me, after he had felt me out. ‘They just don’t know which way to turn.’ When I first got to know him he used to annoy me, sitting with his hat on, teaching arithmetic all day long, drinking out of the students’ water bottles, and spitting in the ashes of the stove. But his little daughter was my best student. All around. She had good reasoning power. I don’t know what happened to Frankie Mae, but she was a good student. Would read everything she could get her hands on. She even knew her father was off the track. She didn’t know just what was wrong. But she was a long ways from satisfied.”

WHAT COULD FREDDIE SAY?

In Growing Up in the Black Belt, Charles S. Johnson quotes a schoolboy who is retelling a story from his reader:

Fred was a little boy. He went to the city to work for a man. The man told him if he worked he would pay him. Fred worked three years. The man paid him only three pennies. Fred said . . . Fred said . . . The man paid him only three pennies. Fred said . . .

Dr. Johnson blames rote-teaching for the boy’s going on like a deeply grooved phonograph record. But to me the story illustrates more than the vice of learning by rote. The reciter carried Fred about as far as he could in this subversive story. After all, what could Freddie say?

The schools do not supply Freddie with answers. Freddie is supposed to like it; or if he doesn’t he isn’t supposed to have anything to say. To the white South, Negro education is already meaningful enough. The meaning is that Freddie shall never learn the answers.

Mississippi educators have recently been blunt on this subject. In 1940, the state legislature in Jackson amended a bill to furnish free textbooks by providing that such subjects as civics shall be taught from texts suitable “for the several types of schools,” that is, that Negro children and white shall use different texts on subjects such as citizenship. The school superintendent of Meridian urged this because if uniform texts were used, Negro children would be taught “the same principles of voting, rights, and responsibilities taught white pupils.” This would never do for, as a planter-senator reasoned:

Under the Constitution the Negro is a citizen, and of course we know and accept that. But he can never expect to be given the same educational and social privileges with the white man and he doesn’t expect them. The best education we can give him is to use his hands, because that’s how he must earn his living. It always has and it always will be.

A further argument for different texts was that a set of books “best suited to the Negro’s level of intelligence could be provided for one-third of what it costs for the white child.” Insult was added to injury when a doctor urged that text books for white and Negro children be kept in separate warehouses, “because of diseases prevalent among Negroes.”

What could Freddie say?

Thumbing through a few of the history primers used in the South, I found them generally weak on Lincoln but strong on Lee. Even when the books were not waving the Stars and Bars, Freddie and his fellows read such stuff as this in Tennessee, Its Growth and Progress:

There were, of course, good masters and bad masters, just as there were good slaves and bad slaves. Cruel treatment of the slaves by the master was the exception rather than the rule.

Slavery wasn’t bad, Freddie. It’s only in freedom that the trouble begins.

The free Negro had no place in society. He could not, of course, associate with the whites. Here you come, Freddie:

By nature the Negro is polite, he appreciates politeness in his employer. He is not disturbed about “race problems,” as he is more content with his original color than he is concerned with artificial theories.

I grant you, Freddie, that is a poser! You theorize now, you’ll lose your color.

In Tennessee there is no present or expected “race trouble.” Each race understands and appreciates the place of the other, as their problems are in the main problems common to each.

Negro children attend school and profit by it.

See, Freddie, we told you. So get up early and wash behind your ears.

There is little chance that Freddie will learn anything of his rights or duties as a citizen. Just after Pearl Harbor, the schools were called on to stress democracy in education. An educational authority told me with a wry grin: “When Negro teachers were called together to work up a program, they realized that they didn’t have much to teach; they hadn’t seen much democracy in action. ‘All men are created equal’ and the Bill of Rights were dangerous doctrines where they taught. So they concentrated on discussing such problems of citizenship as hygiene and keeping the window open in their classrooms.”

It is not only the beaten teachers in the backwoods who are wary around the dynamite of citizenship. Some of the better-paid, better-off teachers in the better schools warn that they have to “curve around all of that stuff. After all, we’ve got to live down here.” Some of the largest high schools are run by men who discourage young teachers from such radicalism as teaching the meaning of the Constitution. Often these older heads exemplify how a Negro should stay in his place: one principal of a large high school in Tennessee, though he at last gets a good salary, still waits tables in the evenings at a fashionable club for whites. He brags that he is showing his students that he is not above honest toil. He is also showing white folks that his salary raise has not made him too big for his business. Another principal, a recent graduate from Harvard, is portering at a mid-Tennessee airport. “To buy bread for the family,” he told me, shamefacedly. I thought this was another instance of the lowness of teachers’ salaries. “No such thing,” snorted an ex-teacher. “We worked ourselves to death in the fight for equalization of salaries to get that bozo decent pay. He’s making a good salary now, enough to live well on. If he’s got to get a second job, he can find something else other than toting bags. He’s a principal. He should have some professional pride. But this won’t hurt him with the white people.” “They may have finer schools and buildings than we had,” a middle-aged citizen of a large Tennessee town said sadly, shaking his head, “but they have no spirit. No vision. No courage. So they can’t really reach the young ones.”

Many of the Jeanes teachers are forward-looking. But I talked to one in Georgia, chic and well dressed, working toward her Master’s degree in New York City, who surprised me. She pounced on the subject violently. “Negroes are stewing about too much,” she told me. “All of them. Teachers, parents, students. Just stewing about. Stirring up ill-will. They ought not to go to court to get salaries equalized. Many of the teachers doing most of the agitating are not ready. They ought to try to get along with the white people. They’ll be raised when they deserve raises. I’ve had no trouble myself. I’ve had raises. And they call me Miss. But I never stew about.” She controlled the books and magazines purchased by the schools in her county. She named the periodicals that she subscribed to for her schools, but the Journal of the Georgia Teachers’ Association was the only Negro periodical she named. I asked if she had left The Crisis off accidentally. “Well,” she started uncomfortably, “we have only a little money. . . . My teachers probably wouldn’t understand The Crisis.” I asked her if Raper and Reid’s book, Sharecroppers All, was recommended to her rural teachers. She was brisk here. “Of course not. It’s too difficult. My teachers wouldn’t be able to get its true meaning. I haven’t yet read it myself, but I’m sure they wouldn’t. I have to read all the controversial books first, to see if they are fit for my teachers. I want them to be objective.”

I knew the power of the word objective. In Jackson, Mississippi, an educational specialist, who was to go a long way in Negro education in his state, talked with me about the inequalities in funds and facilities. I said the situation was a damned shame.

He bristled. “That is only opinion,” he said.

I asked him if he didn’t think the figures he reeled off to me showed an outrageous state of affairs.

“I wouldn’t like to say,” he said stiffly. He then rebuked me for my lack of objectivity. As I worked it out from his lecture—if you said that Negro children got for education only two bits for every dollar that white children got, you were objective, you were sticking to the facts; but if you stated an opinion that this was wrong you were not objective and shouldn’t be listened to. It seems we must wait for further proof before we can be certain that injustice has been perpetrated.

There may be a day or a week dedicated by the schools to Negro history, not to showing the Negro’s share in American life; what it has been, could be, should be—but something of pageantry instead: Phillis Wheatley, Booker Washington, George Washington Carver—a sort of whistling in the dark on the part of some race-conscious teacher. For these are mere names to Freddie, a murmur from the past, a ticking on the wind. Other sounds are louder, penetrate his ears more deeply: the rain beating against the loose shingles, pouring steadily in the buckets under the holes through which one sees the gray sky, dropping plop-plop in puddles under the new places. And the white superintendent, bringing visitors, walks in possessively, with his hat on, and greets the teacher whom Freddie has learned to respect: “Good afternoon, Agnes, and how is the school going?”

And even Freddie’s teacher can’t say anything to that, except “Fine.”

ONE LANGUAGE, ONE PEOPLE

As the time drew near for the meeting in Atlanta of the National Council of Teachers of English, both the white local committee and the Negro teachers of English in Atlanta became anxious. Believing the membership possibilities good in the South, the Council had voted, over some protest, to come to Atlanta upon assurance that provisions would be made for Negro participation.

Unfortunately, the president of the Council, Robert C. Pooley of Wisconsin, did not ask to have the word “participation” specifically defined. A letter from Paul Farmer, chairman of the committee on arrangements, sent out a careful definition. He did this, regretting that “even a part of the privileges will be kept from the Negroes,” and sincerely hoping that Negroes would “manifest a generous spirit of understanding”:

The precedent established here for Negro participation in such meetings; that is, Negroes would be admitted to all sessions with the exception of those of a social nature such as receptions, teas, breakfasts, luncheons, and the banquet; and would be seated, particularly in the large group meetings, in seats reserved for them.

To the last euphemism, Dr. Farmer added this choice equivocation:

I have felt it unfair for the Local Committee to urge Negro registration. I believe that Negroes should be acquainted with these conditions and that if they register, the urge to do so should come from a genuine desire to benefit from the splendid sessions that are available to them.

None of this was lost on N. P. Tillman, chairman of the department of English at Atlanta University. There can certainly be no more doubt of his genuine desire to benefit from scholarly discussions than of his hostility to segregation, supported by weasel words. Characteristically, he remarked on the “several semantic somersaults” that the word “participate” had gone through. He organized a committee from the Negro teachers of English in Atlanta and drafted a letter in which he pointed out that:

In recent years, the precedent for national educational, and for some Southern groups, has been entirely different. At meetings in Atlanta of the American Chemical Society (1930), the Association of American Colleges (1935), the Baptist World Alliance (1939), the National Physical Education Association (1939), Negroes had full participation in each session. A few years ago the Southern Sociological Society adopted this position as its policy and has maintained it in the three annual meetings held in Atlanta. The conduct of the meetings here of a national or sectional association has depended largely upon the stand taken by the organization itself.

The committee was “not interested in sensationalism nor in using the National Council to solve the race problem,” but “in participating in the larger cultural life of our country from which Negroes are generally cut off in the South.” It expected a national educational organization to take a stand in line with the best thought in our country; that is, to be anti-Nazi.

It was, of course, too late to change the place of the meeting. But letters poured in to Dr. Tillman from Negro and liberal white teachers of English all over the nation. Some were soft spoken acknowledgments, and some were fighting mad protests. One Negro scholar wisecracked, “If never the twain shall eat together, they may as well not meet together,” and another, old in the teaching profession, quickened his step to come abreast:

When that organization met in Chattanooga, Tenn., many years ago, I was allowed to attend on condition that I would take no part in any of the discussions. I attended all the meetings except those held at the Hotel. I was not segregated in the meetings attended. The Negro, now, should accept nothing short of full citizenship in that organization.

R. D. Jameson, the administrator of Consultant Services of the Library of Congress, visiting certain Southern colleges where he found “Atlanta University far and above the other colleges I have visited,” wrote Dr. Pooley that “the decision of the local committee . . . to exclude all Negroes from participation in the events which are euphemistically called social, and the segregation of them in the other meetings . . . is damnable.”

Some whites and a large number of Negroes boycotted the meetings, but many of those aroused came in order to see that the insult should not be repeated. As William Ellery Leonard wrote his former student Tillman: “Bear the insult with dignity . . . and join with your white colleagues in a quiet firm statement for publication that it must not happen again.”

At the first meeting, a party of colleagues and friends (four Negroes and three whites) entered the Georgia Tech auditorium. After a bit of professional consultation on the part of the ushers, three polite (noblesse oblige) members of the Local Committee came to them and explained gently (never raise a voice to inferiors) that “Section D was reserved for colored teachers.” The group, both white and colored, moved to Section D. But that was still wrong as they were still together. Soon they were joined by another party of Negroes and whites, who just about brought the sex balance even. The auditorium was confused and probably paid little attention to the speech of the superintendent of city schools. This was a pity, as he was in rare form, welcoming the convention “Damn-Yankees and all” (he was arch-Rebel, all right), regaling the visitors with several darky stories, the last about an “old nigger.”

“Did you hear that?” asked one of the visitors, noted in New York for intercultural work. Dr. Tillman hadn’t missed hearing him.

On the rear wall of the auditorium stage, there was a large blue velvet banner with the following emblazoned in silver letters:

“Our Defense of American Traditions”

The president’s annual address was “Language in a Democracy—One People, One Language.”

A panel had been planned on Intercultural Relationships. At this meeting, the Spelman-Morehouse Glee Clubs were to sing as part of the Negro contribution, but Kemper Harreld, the director, called that off. One of the speakers at the Intercultural Committee luncheon was to be Sidney Reedy of Lincoln University (Missouri). When Dr. Reedy heard of the type of “participation” permitted Negroes, he hastily wrote Dr. Pooley his refusal to speak. His letter crossed Dr. Pooley’s letter suggesting that he “withdraw from the panel”:

Political happenings in Georgia . . . have stirred anew prejudices which I sincerely hoped were dying.

(There is such a thing as tying too much on Gene Talmadge’s red galluses. Recent political happenings are not needed to unsnarl the tangle of this meeting.)

In a letter to Dr. Tillman, E. A. Cross had hoped fervently that “no color line will be drawn at that luncheon,” at which his friend, Dr. Reedy, was to speak. But his hope was vain. As Dr. Reedy wrote ironically, he would have been excluded from the very luncheon at which he was a featured speaker. Since he couldn’t deliver his speech in person, the Intercultural Committee asked Dr. Reedy to send a phonograph recording of his speech. His voice could be allowed in the Hotel Biltmore dining room. Dr. Reedy sent over a recording, spirited and incisive, stating that his speech no longer pertained, and that “the Committee on Intercultural Relations is even now dying, having lived briefly in vain.” The record was considered too hot to be played.

There was great fear that some of the protesters would get out of hand. Negroes attended many group meetings without being segregated and were treated equably, pleasantly. Herbert Agar, who had something of the license of a homeboy who had made good, did not spare sectional (and national) feelings. In one of the key speeches of the conference he described the plights of the present predicament and hypocrisy, the broken promises, especially to Negroes, promises that America had no intentions of keeping.

The next meeting of the Council will be held in Atlantic City (where, of course, a hotel problem may likewise arise). A motion put by the retiring president, Dr. Pooley, and passed by the Executive Council, stipulates that “the National Council of Teachers of English will accept invitations to hold its annual conventions only in cities which can provide equality of participation for all the members of the Council.” This pronouncement, though to be considered unofficial until passed by the Board of Directors, is a victory for the forces marshaled by Dr. Tillman. He was assured by the retiring president that his action had been “becoming of a scholar and a gentleman.” One might add: “and a good fighter for democracy, not easily to be fooled.”

VICIOUS CIRCLE

It is not good to admit, but like many members of the teaching profession since Socrates, I have collected students’ “boners.” I was a party to a session discussing boners at the end of one summer school at Atlanta University. Three of us teachers gathered in the hall, near the rooms where our students were taking examinations by a sort of honor system.

“I won’t stay out too long,” said Tic. “I don’t want them to steal too much of the wrong stuff.”

“If they know where to find what I asked for in the books in one hour, they’re good enough to pass,” Bacote said.

I had just about decided what grade my students had reached in the six-weeks gallop, so I was also at ease.

Bacote said, “Man, I’ve got some howlers here. I corrected the papers last night for my American history class. Listen to these.” He read excerpts. We laughed. I asked to copy down two of the answers.

One went as follows: “During the early days of history two men said they founded America and Columbus died thinking all the time that he had destroyed America. In 1492:

“The colony of S.C. was founded near Columbus, S.C. & settled during the Revolutionary War.

“The woman did all the cooking to help the men clear the land. They cooked on the fireplace. Some had brick-like stoves outdoors.”

The second read: “The time pass when American want her independence from England it the mothe country disrecognized. During the year of 1600 Our County was first rule by Kings and Queens. All laws was to be obeyed.

“The Spanish was the first to came over to this country and they taught us how to build houses, cultive our soil in order that we raise our food.

“When the Indians came to America they found the Spanish already over here.

“The Spanish and the Indians could not get along after living here together for some time they begin to talk of war. During prehistoric times of war we did not have sufficient war guns to fight with & no. of men died for the want of attention.”

These were written by rural teachers who were attending summer school to raise their status. We had our fun over the questions and returned to monitoring.

But the fun turned sour for me at the end of my examination. After coaxing, cajoling—”You all are keeping me from lunch. I’m a hard-working man”—sophistry—”Nothing you can write in this last minute can possibly alter your grade one way or the other”—and finally the packing of papers into the briefcase and clicking the latch, all the students had turned in their papers but one woman.

“Please, Mrs. Simmons,” I said. “Please write your name on the paper and turn it in. It’s ten minutes past the end of the examination period. Really I have to go.” It was the last luncheon in the college dining hall; there were friends who were going to grab northbound trains and cars immediately after the luncheon, and I wanted to see them. I was as gentle as I could be, however; Mrs. Simmons had had a tough time with the course, never reciting, never saying a word; just there every day, punctual as clockwork but less audible. I walked back toward her seat. She scratched her name on the page. I noticed her hand was trembling.

“Professor,” she started. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” I said easily. “I didn’t think the examination could take so long.” I turned over the pages of her paper. There was very little writing on them.

“Professor,” she began again. “I’ve got to talk to you.” Her voice was husky. She was an Indian-looking woman, with wisps of iron gray in her coarse black hair. Her face looked tired but there was a firm set to her chin. Her summer dress was large and full and stiffly starched; a housewife’s dress so different from the startling colorful prints of the younger girls on the campus.

“I teach down in Federal Point, South Carolina. I had to come here to get my certificate renewed. I tried awfully hard in your class. It’s not your fault. I done the best I could. I’m in charge of the school down there. Down there the schools are low. I have three children. I want to send them up here to a good school under good instructors. I never had no chances myself.”

Her voice was a new thing. In six weeks she had said nothing but “present” or “I don’t know.” Instead of the second, however, she had more often shaken her head timidly. But now the words poured out. Once the granite was out of the way, the torrent came.

“I just didn’t get anything,” she said. “It ain’t your fault. Try as hard as I could, though, I couldn’t get my mind fixed on it. But I didn’t understand none of it. And this is the year my certificate comes up. I been teacher of the school for over twenty years. If I fail here I won’t get my certificate.”

I hemmed and hawed. “I don’t want you to give me anything,” she said. “I want you to give me what I make. But I want you to understand.”

I was miserable just as she was, standing there. She told me how all night long, the night before, she had stayed up, studying. She had wrapped a damp towel carefully around her forehead. On one of her frequent trips to the bathroom to soak the towel, around three A.M., she had run into the younger students who were trooping into the dormitory, laughing and gossiping, some of them undoubtedly high after the summer school dance at the country club. It had been a bustout, I reflected guiltily. She resented their gallivanting, but more the easy assurance of some of them before an examination. Her bitterness was mingled with the wonder that they could live so wild and know so much.

“Maybe they did just as badly as you,” I ventured feebly.

“No.” She was positive. “I didn’t do nothing. All last night I read it, but I just see the words.”

The towels had not helped. The cups of coffee at breakfast had not helped.

She pointed to the examination sheet. In one question I had asked for the author and the meaning of certain passages that I had stressed as keys to the understanding of American Romanticism. Two lines read:

Things are in the saddle

And ride mankind.

“I don’t know who wrote it,” she said. “I got some sort of idea about what it means, but I don’t know how to write it down.”

We talked; she talked as we came down the steps together. She did not want any favors. She had three children. She wanted to send them to good schools, someday, better than the one their mother taught. She had to pass. Her certificate was at stake. Read all she could, with a damp towel around her head, read all night long until gray daybreak, still all she could do was see the words. She had answered no questions. She wanted no favors. But she had to pass. Schools that she had attended had been low.

I promised to give her all possible consideration. “More than that, of course, you must understand, I cannot do,” I said weakly.

Her gratitude was embarrassing. She walked away under the magnolias, ungainly in her house dress.

When I gave her a passing mark, I tried to discount my sentimentality and dishonesty by ridiculing the pretensions of my course. Transcendentalism for a teacher of graded schools in South Carolina, I jibed; set Walden Pond in the Congaree swamps; Snowbound in Charleston. But I knew that if the course had been based on the Blue Back Speller she would still, in all likelihood, have failed.

I talked about the case that afternoon to one of the campus authorities in Education with a capital E. He had worked at Columbia University toward his Ph.D. He was top-lofty about my arrant sentimentalism. “You are perpetuating the vicious circle,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” I said. Sure. He was right.

THE PALMER CASE

Before I got to know Lutrelle F. Palmer well, I had heard an anecdote that did him honor. It also held promise of what has happened to him since. When the white principals of Richmond’s colored high schools were finally displaced by Negroes, Dr. Palmer was offered the principalship of the new Maggie Walker High School. Richmond wanted him badly, but offered him less than the principals of the white high schools were getting. Palmer naturally refused. The dickering continued; larger and larger salaries were offered. Finally Palmer stated his price, which was exactly that being paid white principals. The representative of the Richmond board spoke in aggrieved surprise: “But, Dr. Palmer, you know we can’t pay you that. That’s what we pay white principals.” As the anecdote was told me at Slaughter’s Café in Richmond, “The white folks offered Palmer all the way up to $3,000. ‘Couldn’t you take just $2,998.98, Mr. Palmer? We can’t go a cent higher.’ The white folks were nearly crying. Even called him Mr. Palmer. But Palmer wasn’t coming on that deal. Not for one penny less.”

Palmer admitted gravely, a bit stiffly, that the anecdote was to all intents and purposes true. I have known him for many years, having visited his model high school in Newport News, and having served with him on the staff of the Atlanta Summer School where he supervised educational workshops. About the campus he was always earnest, but in the classroom his reserve was shed and a zeal, almost that of a preacher, took its place. Years ago when I was a school kid, around Howard University I had heard him debate for Wilberforce against Howard; I remember him, even after thirty years, quiet but forceful and convincing, a man for Howard to watch. He had grown bald in the meanwhile, but the piercing, almost glaring eyes beneath the heavy rimmed glasses were the same as when he used to say “Honorable Judges, Ladies, and Gentlemen.”

His home, on one of Newport News’s wide streets in the better Negro section, was large and well-appointed. He introduced me to his wife, to his children, and a stream of young people—some of them soldiers—who came up on the porch as if they were completely at home. His reserve was gone as he chatted with them. And there was no reserve at all when he started talking about his case; he was full of it to overflowing. Since his being ousted from his high school principalship in Newport News, he had been appointed Professor of Education at Hampton Institute. But his heart was still in the school he had built up, and in the fight that he was waging for justice and redress.

Palmer had been in educational work in Newport News for twenty-three years. The year before he came, the agitation of the people had stirred the board to allow one teacher to do high school work for Negro children. The school was a four-room frame building, on a fifty-foot front on an unpaved road. When Palmer came, an old county school was set aside as a high school with two women teachers and Palmer as principal. Palmer had already taught seven years at Wilberforce University where the church and state politics had been too much for him, as for so many other able men. Disappointed in Negro colleges, Palmer took this little school in the Southland.

“During these twenty-three years,” he said, “the people here have been all that I could ask for. From the three of us and ninety-two pupils, we have built up a school of over eight hundred pupils and thirty faculty members. Huntington High has received national recognition. In 1931, it was the first and only Negro high school to be accredited in the Southern Association of Schools and Colleges. It has been pointed to as one of the few schools in the United States that is serving as a real force for democracy in the community. Now it has a new building, its third home. In 1924, a modern structure was built, costing $150,000, a combination elementary and high school; in 1932, the high school occupied the entire building; in 1936, the present building was erected.”

Huntington High School is a handsome brick building with fine laboratories, auditorium, classrooms, athletic field, and gymnasium. I knew many of its ambitious young teachers; had taught many of its graduates; and had heard its praises throughout the South. For his services in developing this high school, for his general qualities as citizen and interracial influence, Palmer had received many awards, crowned perhaps by his selection by the Richmond Times-Dispatch to its honor roll of eminent Virginians for the year 1938. Palmer is one of the few Negroes so to be honored.

And yet, after nearly a quarter of a century of praised services, and only a short time before retirement rights would set in (though he was far too useful and forward-looking to think of retiring), Palmer was ousted from his job without warning, without explanation, other than a vaguely muttered “for the good of the system.”

He was no longer so surprised as once he had been. In the year since his dismissal he had been putting the pieces of the puzzle together; the pattern was taking form. “Saunders, the Superintendent of schools here, and I had been good friends,” he said slowly, looking squarely at me. “As good friends as a white Southerner and a Negro could be in the South. He had wider contacts than most. He was on the Board of the National Education Association, was President of the State Board of Education. Under his leadership, if he had exerted his leadership, this controversy would never have arisen. But Saunders wanted to do what he called ‘a magnificent thing for the South,’ to show the Southern states that they did not have to obey the Supreme Court ruling.

“When we asked the city attorney if the ruling about the equalization of salaries applied—this was in the Norfolk case—we were told that according to the Attorney General, the Supreme Court ruling applied. Salaries in Newport News would have to be equalized. Saunders thought of the idea of classifying teachers according to their ratings in a National Teachers Examination. This was originally intended for beginning teachers. Saunders spent thousands of dollars of the city’s money to give these examinations to all the teachers, whites and blacks. The theory was that the whites would pass, and the Negroes fail.

“One old white lady threatened to resign, rather than take the examination. We Negroes insisted that we would take it, but that we wouldn’t give it. The examination lasted for eleven hours over two days. To this day, the scores have not been released. Among Negroes, teacher after teacher has applied for his rating in this examination and can’t get it. It would seem from all this that Negroes did as well as or better than whites.

“In 1940, our petition for equalizing salaries was in abeyance; there was no reply from the school board. Saunders then set up an ‘equalized’ salary scale, a master stroke in evasion, with a clause explaining a ‘variable minimum and maximum.’ The place of the teacher on this sliding scale was left to the discretion of the superintendent. This thing worked for about a year, then we decided that we were going before the board. We had meeting after meeting. These meetings resulted in some feeling, because as spokesman, I had to clash with Saunders and the board’s spokesman, who was unfortunately a woman. Our teachers here were 100 percent behind our fight; they financed it right here, with not a single slacker. I was chairman of the salary equalization committee, and for eighteen years had been executive secretary of the Virginia State Teachers Association. I had spear-headed the salary equalization movement in the state.

“In 1940, the superintendent and the board showed that they were greatly displeased with what I was doing. Saunders wanted me to understand that he did not agree with the board, that he wanted to bring about changes. But by orderly means, he told me, by orderly means. The board felt that ‘I was stirring up trouble unnecessarily; I was disturbing good racial relations not only in Newport News but in the State.’ So Saunders wanted to exact a pledge that I would cease my activities in the equalization fight. I told him immediately that I would give no such pledge, that in the future my activities were likely to be greater, that I could not pledge to cease them or relax them. Saunders urged me not to take that stand, but to let things slide. I refused. They did elect me, however, in 1941 and 1942.

“Late in 1942 we filed suit. After two hearings we got a decision, in January 1943, a very clear-cut decision that the Newport News Board should pay equal salaries and abandon the variable scale. The court ordered a permanent injunction forbidding discrimination. After many meetings and much dissatisfied talking, the School Board adopted what they called the ‘equalized scale’ in the spring of 1943. The relationships between the Board, the Superintendent and myself were apparently very good. There was only one thing: our presence was no longer desired at their meetings.

“I paid no attention to that. If they don’t want me as a principal, I thought, I’ll go as a citizen. Every citizen has that right. But I might have known. In May, at the election of teachers, with no warning, no notice of any kind, three teachers, two elementary school principals, and myself were dropped. Why the others were fired, I don’t know. The three Huntington High teachers: Miss E. E. Pannell, Eric Epps, and James Ivy, and the principals T. Roger Thompson and James Rupert Picott, were no more active in the fight than many others.

“I was on many boards with white people—the Newport News Chapter of the Red Cross, the Community Chest, the Tuberculosis Association, the Defense Recreational Committee, the War Housing Agency, the Child Care Committee, and the Peninsula County Boy Scouts of America. There was some stir; better not bother him is what some advised. So what they did was to seek out a Negro to find if anything was wrong in my record. Now there is a Negro in town inimical to me; he wanted places I never sought. He started a whispering campaign against me. Some of the whispers that got back to me were that my mother was a white woman, that I had clandestine relationships with white women. Friends caught a Negro circulating a paper saying that I made speeches advocating inter-marriage. The man had twisted one of my talks; you know how easy that is. The club to which this fellow belonged met, and forty-four men tried him, repudiated him, and for a little would have manhandled him. It was a nasty mess.

“Then the word got to the shipyards, especially to Homer Ferguson, the president of the Peninsula Ship Company, and you know that company wields a power in this city, that I was a communist. This was because I had made a statement in Sunday School that I preferred the CIO to the PSA, a company union. So the whispering campaign went on.

“When my name didn’t appear in the appointment, I thought it was an oversight. Until this day, the board has not notified us that we weren’t elected. We went to the clerk of the board and asked why our names were not among the appointed teachers. ‘Does that mean we’re not elected?’ It did. We asked why. The clerk said, ‘I don’t know.’

“‘Weren’t you there?’

“‘No, I stepped out of the room.’

“‘Didn’t they tell you anything to tell us?’

“‘Well, you weren’t appointed for the good of the service.’ “The superintendent got sick at the meeting and left. He said his leaving had nothing to do with us, that he had recommended all six of us. The records show that he did, but the board didn’t accept his recommendations.

“I got in touch with the NAACP. All of us did except one principal, who gave in. He knew what was going on all of the time. The woman who cooks for the Superintendent says this man had visited the Superintendent’s home many nights. Though we are friends, I’ve never been to the Superintendent’s home in my life.

“The Sunday afternoon after our dismissal there was a mass meeting of nearly two thousand people at Trinity Baptist Church. A citizen’s committee was formed representing twenty-five different organizations. This committee raised money, carried the fight and the lawsuits, and is still carrying them. This was the beginning of many mass meetings. The students at Huntington High wanted to strike. I had to exert my utmost to keep them in school. I had heard that there were secret orders to throw fifty percent of the police force around the school. I didn’t want the kids to get hurt, or the property damaged.

“At the second mass meeting the church was packed again. Representatives of the A.F. of L. Teachers’ Union, preachers, and shipyard workers made speeches. More than a thousand dollars was raised at this meeting for a legal defense fund. In the meantime the committee asked the city council to intervene.”

According to the clipping he showed me from his bulging scrapbook, the council washed its hands of the matter, certain that it had appointed “high type men” to the board, and that the council’s duties were only to appoint the board and to appropriate school funds. The council went to more pressing business, writing an ordinance “that all meat, fowl, and fish sold in the city be sold by weight.” The school board was also evasive, hiding behind the vague “for the good of the system.”

Finally twenty-five heads of Negro families brought suits against the board for (1) exceeding authority and (2) acting corruptly. Both suits were lost in corporation court. The local law firm of Walker and Walker, father and son, one a patron of the school and the other a product, were joined by Andrew Ransom and a staff from the NAACP.

“The judge threw out my charge that in threatening me with dismissal, the board had acted corruptly. He argued that both sides seemed sincere, which I was willing to grant. He did not question my integrity but I had not established a case of their conspiring to fire me on the basis of the salary fight. He couldn’t convince himself, he said, that fine people whom he had known all of his life could do such a dastardly thing.

“The board was quick to say that it was incorrect to tie up the dismissals with the recent suit for equalization of the pay for white and Negro teachers. ‘If any such thought is entertained, it is incorrect. We have regarded that as a settled issue and it had nothing whatever to do with the Board’s action.’”

But the five thousand people whose names appeared on the petition for a hearing for the dismissed teachers were not fooled by this runaround. Editorials in the white press voiced the suspicion that activity in the fight for parity pay was responsible for the dismissals. The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot cited the case of Aline E. Black, who was fired four years earlier by the Norfolk School Board, only to be rehired after court action, and a later “three-teacher head-chopping by the School Board of Norfolk County.” “There is enough in the Newport News record . . . to warrant the suspicion that the six teachers . . . were purged for basically the same reason. . . . If it is the true explanation, the Newport News Board has committed an act shockingly contemptuous of the courts and even more shockingly contemptuous of the standards of educational decency.” Later this same paper demanded that “the story of this piece of guillotining be brought into the open”—and that “school boards be taught . . . that they are executors of a public trust and not licensed executioners.” Newport News papers demanded clarification. Their correspondence columns were filled with protesting letters. But the difficulty of the editorial writers in bucking some of the city fathers was illustrated by anecdote. One editor, who had written a strong protest, was talking to a Negro friend about the case. The Negro finally turned to leave, “Well, I guess I’ll be going home to dinner.”

“There’s no dinner at home for me tonight,” said the editor. “I’m in the doghouse with my wife. Just because of that editorial I wrote in this morning’s paper.”

Many white people of Newport News and the Peninsula did not forget their respect for Palmer, nor the honors that the state had heaped upon him and that shed some brightness on the Peninsula. Three white lawyers of the city offered to defend him; one of these, a former State Senator and Commonwealth Attorney was accepted to work on the legal staff with the NAACP lawyers.

Palmer continued his story: “In spite of the board’s considering the salary issue as settled, in spite of the order of the court, the School Board resorted to a stratagem so that Negro teachers still are not paid equally with whites. The whites on a minimum salary receive an annual increment of ten years until they reach their maximum; Negroes receive an annual increment for fifteen years before they reach their maximum. So another suit was instigated, asking the court to hold the Board in contempt of court. But the original judge has died. And much has to be done again. Still it is possible for the new judge to hold all of the Board members in contempt, even to put them in jail.”

Palmer was fairly confident about this fight, since it was in the capable hands of Andy Ransom and his staff. “The sad part,” he said morosely, “is that they haven’t been able to get a first class man for the principalship. The man whom they selected was an ex-teacher who was a Pullman porter when they offered him the job. They began him at $1,000 more than my maximum after twenty-three years. He is admittedly incompetent, a sort of negative personality. He frankly told the citizens’ committee that his responsibility is not to the citizens but to the board and superintendent. The one thing that breaks my heart is that he has messed up so completely.”

He spoke this without rancor, without self-satisfaction. I believe that, for all of the sharpness of the blow, Palmer is too big a man to crow, in petty spite. After all, he had spent twenty-three years in building up a school; to be happy at learning that a nonentity couldn’t do his job would merely be childish revenge, and Palmer was thoughtful and ripened. “A youngster wrote me a document showing me how the school was going down. One of the things I was proudest of was the Honor System. If you have ever seen Hell’s Half Acre [I had, and it was a hellhole], you will know what a job I had to get the kids of Hell’s Half Acre to work with an Honor System. But it was set up, and it succeeded. Well, the first week the new principal sent out an order abolishing the Honor System. He didn’t believe in it. The Student Council met to consider his action. They were ethical about it; they didn’t even come to me. They wrote a very dignified statement saying that they could not abide by his order, that they had been taught to oppose dictatorship and were protesting his order. They voted that unless he could show why the honor system should be abolished he should rescind his order. Until that was done, the student council warned that the students would come to school (to abide by the law) but that they would sit in their home rooms and not go to classes. The poor fellow got scared,” Palmer laughed gently, “rescinded the order, and promptly lost control. When the Senior Class dedicated the yearbook to me, he forbade it. So they didn’t have a yearbook. When Picott, who was one of the principals dismissed along with me, was invited to speak by the student body, the new principal forbade that, and half the student body didn’t participate in the exercises. The older teachers have left the school; only a half dozen or so remain. Incidentally, that is another way that Saunders has found to beat the law. He can get these young, inexperienced teachers at a minimum salary. At the other schools incompetent men have been placed in charge. Informers and stooges have gained a little from this affair. All of the new people have come in at excellent salaries. But the State Teachers’ Association has passed a resolution, condemning them, and won’t allow them to join the Association. The Parent-Teachers won’t meet with them. They have no recognition in the community.”

Palmer was called from the porch into his house for a telephone call. I thumbed through the last pages of his scrapbook. James Ivy, one of the ousted teachers, was quoted in the Pittsburgh Courier: “Only last year they tried to make Palmer sign a document in which the school board . . . had inserted clauses to the effect that he would hereafter make no mention of teachers’ salaries and equalization of pay. Palmer refused to sign and the board at once threatened to fire him. But they had no grounds professionally for such a move. But you know how Southern Nazis work. First they get some Negro stooge to set up a hue and cry for the poor fellow’s scalp and then you can conveniently knife him or take him for a ride. . . . We believe that a group of handkerchief-heads are behind the school board’s action but we have nothing but rumor and circumstantial evidence, nothing documentary.”

Well, the handkerchief-heads were decidedly in the minority at the high school commencement June 1943, at the Shipyard Community Center. Over one thousand people gave ovations to the graduating speakers, all of whom spoke on the theme “For This We Fight.” The youngsters had a right to talk. Eight boys were immediately to exchange their gray caps and gowns for khaki and dungarees. Huntington High School students had bought seven jeeps in the “buy a jeep” war bond sales, more than those purchased by all of the white schools. So the youngsters talked eloquently about fighting “to protect the American job,” the system of free enterprise, and our hard-earned liberties and freedom as a free people.” They pledged themselves “to fight to destroy the enemies of democracy at home.” In his valedictory, Palmer reviewed the twenty-three-year history of Huntington, and assured his hearers that his dismissal caused him no shame. The cheering crowd knew that.

Palmer came back to the porch. People walked by in the late afternoon sunlight: a gang of raggedy boys, a fat black woman, an earnest-faced graying old man. He spoke to them all as they waved to him. “Howdy, fellows,” “Good evening,” “Have you heard lately from Tom?” He had been talking to me a long time, and was slowing down. As I looked at him over the top of the scrapbooks, his expression seemed perplexed, tired. He was in the midst of a fight, and was going to make a game fight of it, I knew that. But I had the feeling that though the pieces in the pattern fit, he still could not quite believe that this had happened to him.

SIGNS OF IMPROVEMENT

With the hearty good cheer of a doctor at the bedside of a very sick patient, Virginius Dabney says, “Negro education has made tremendous strides below Mason and Dixon’s line during the past several decades.” I am skeptical of the word tremendous; it must have different meanings on different sides of the line. The best authorities that I could find agree that the patient has better than a fighting chance and that he is on the mend. But he is still a very sick man, and it will be long before he takes any tremendous strides.

I have been as anxious as any to see signs of improvement. I have read reports of the philanthropic foundations; it is difficult to imagine what the diagnosis of Negro education would be had it not been for their generosity. Scattered over the South are nearly six thousand Rosenwald schools, warrants to a skeptical people of what could be done. And now the Rosenwald Fund is concentrating on the realistic preparation of rural teachers. The General Education Board, the Phelps-Stokes Fund, the Slater Fund, and the Jeanes Foundation have poured millions of dollars into Southern education, especially for Negroes. This philanthropy has meant the setting up of state agents for Negro schools who have worked to raise the standards of teachers and high schools; the partial payment of Jeanes supervisors; surveys, summer workshops, publications, and scholarships.

Another sign of improvement is to be found in the increasing number of Southern white educators who are ashamed of the predicament of Negro schools and are determined to do something about it. Notable among these in the past were James Hardy Dillard of the Jeanes-Slater Fund, Jackson Davis, Fred McCuistion, and N. C. Newbold. And these have trained a number of younger men to carry on the good work.

One of the most heartening signs is that the better Negro teachers in the South have taken a firm foothold and gone to work with ingenuity and tenacity. Mrs. Elizabeth Perry Cannon of Atlanta University was one of the best of these. Before her untimely death, she was setting up model rural schools in communities near Atlanta. I visited two in Union City and Red Oak. Because of her vigor and congeniality, Mrs. Cannon was respected and loved by the people, who proudly did all they could for “teacher.” As one trustee of the school said to her, “You know our school has had the best year it’s ever had. I think everybody is done more for it than they is before. You see ef folks ain’t ineres in your chillun, then you ain’t gonna to be so ineres in them. . . . Teachers and preachers is funny. Some is ineres in de people and some ain’t. Most preachers is adder house and eat. Dat preacher we had fo’ dishers one sho’ did like to eat. But dis year we is worked better’n we is befo’ an’ I think ef we try we kin raise enough money to hep ceil that school in the summer.” Mrs. Cannon had the interest and knew how to get the communities to make efforts on their own. She stayed in their houses, praised their cooking and quilting, and never complained about the makeshift sleeping and the sanitary arrangements. But she quietly planted ideas about living and schooling, and these caught root quickly. She was a force that will be missed.

Her colleague at Atlantic University, Mrs. Helen Whiting, was the most optimistic of all the educators to whom I talked. A graduate of Howard and Columbia universities, she has had a long career, working with both city and rural schools. She has written textbooks that are aimed to correct the Negro child’s lack of knowledge about Negro history. She has served for ten years as Special State Consultant for colored elementary schools. Her rosy view that the Georgia system of elementary schools is in advance of many surprised me. My face must have shown it, for she went on promptly to assure me that there was a democratic group of people in the state office, willing to allow people to “develop and to implement their ideas about life-related courses.”

Atlanta University was quite a force for progress in teacher training, she told me, and I could agree with this. She was in charge of the Jeanes teachers of the state, most of whom had studied at Atlanta University. Jeanes teachers have to be invited by the county to serve; their salaries are paid three ways: a very small proportion comes from the Jeanes Fund, and the rest comes from the county and the state. “I just couldn’t carry on without these lieutenants,” she said. “Without the Jeanes teachers there would be no in-service program. For Jeanes teachers, we select people with some sort of background, both personal and educational. They really carry a weight of responsibility. Over one-third of Georgia’s counties have them now.”

While we were discussing “in-service” programs, I spoke of the good Rosenwald school I had seen at Union City. “That isn’t a Rosenwald school,” she interrupted. “Don’t say Rosenwald every time you see a new school. The Rosenwald Fund is not alone responsible for the progress in Negro education. By its own admission, the Rosenwald Fund took a wrong start by merely erecting buildings. Before the schools can really develop, the community itself must be reached. The state is building new schools now, but more than that it is setting up community programs, including adult education. We teach our patrons about canning, child health, sanitary toilets, and wells. We are just social engineers,” she beamed.

At Atlanta University, which Mrs. Whiting pointed to as the mecca of the educational reformers, I ran into other seriously concerned people. Benjamin F. Bullock was busy writing his book on life-related teaching in rural schools, hoping to check and reverse the flow of the most capable country youngsters to the cities. One factor worrying Bullock was that “thousands upon thousands of our rural teachers, supervisors, principals, and other rural leaders such as preachers and social workers have the city pattern of thinking and no training at all in the basic principles of food production and wholesome living on the farm.” He hoped that his book would correct this.

I also talked with W. A. Robinson, principal of the Atlanta University Laboratory High School, a really outstanding school before entrenchment killed it. Robinson told me calmly of his long struggle to improve Negro high schools so that they could be accredited. Negroes were a sort of colonial people in the South, he told me, without political power and therefore really helpless. After white high schools are taken care of, there is simply not enough tax money left to give Negroes either the amount or quality of training for social efficiency. Many Negroes wanted their high schools accredited even at the cost of lower standards. Though these were outnumbered, Robinson is certain that there is still laxity in measuring high schools.

In spite of the struggle in which Robinson has had a leading role, the Negro high schools that are accredited by the Southern Association are few in number. Robinson’s own state, Georgia, had little better than one Negro high school accredited out of the hundred of the total accredited high schools. He did not seem wearied or discouraged, though he was certain that only when federal funds are available will there be a decisive improvement in the schools: “The South cannot finance adequately the development of a dual system of high schools.”

But Robinson was not marking time in the meanwhile. He is convinced that high schools should contribute more to their communities than preparing a handful of the smartest or luckiest for colleges. With funds from the General Education Fund, a Study of Secondary Schools for Negroes was set up at Atlanta University, and Robinson was selected as director. Sixteen schools (at least one from every Southern state) were selected for the experiments, of which two of the purposes were to discover the needs of the secondary school child, especially the Negro child, and to find out what is involved in democratic living. As a cooperative venture for school improvement, workshops were conducted, the first at Atlanta University, the second at Hampton Institute, and the third at North Carolina State College for Negroes.

At Atlanta University in a room crammed with leaflets, mimeographed materials, and charts, I talked with W. H. Brown, one of the associates in the study. Brown was ready, even eager to talk of the results of the workshop, but that day he was fairly rushed, and I needed time for full translating of the jargon that even the best of these educational specialists toss around. But from reading Brown’s report, I gather that the workshop, through conferences, discussions, “visitations,” audiovisual aids, and libraries, has stimulated growth on the part of the teachers, awareness of their social responsibilities, and more democratic administration. Children are being dealt with “as people.” “I no longer make all choices for my pupils,” one teacher wrote him, after putting into practice what she had learned at the workshop. More flexible programs were another result. The curriculum was improved, adapted, and enriched. Teachers became interested in voluntary professional reading. Community consciousness was developed, some teachers stressing the improvement of diet, health, and public behavior, others urging the registration of voters, others organizing community centers.

Robinson and his associates condemned the curriculum of Negro high schools for its meager training in health, vocation, leisure, home life, and citizenship, while securing only a limited verbal mastery of poorly understood textbooks. They believed that the job for Negro high schools in the South must be the improvement of the life of a people.

I heard this kind of talk, solemnly recited, in educational conferences. Sometimes the language stunned me as the pundits talked about it, and I “came out the same door wherein I went.” Sometimes I labored over the vocabulary—“Integrations, correlations, fusions, cores, initiation, research, opportunities, whole personality rather than his intellect alone”—and thought I had the meanings until I would talk to a principal or a Jeanes teacher in a sandwich shop, and then I would be all confused again. What they had to tell me was something else entirely. The aims as I understood them were worthy, but the carrying them out seemed dubious. And there was a lot of fancy word-spinning.

Max Bond, one of the most dogged, levelheaded, and thoughtful schoolmen I met, told me an anecdote that returns too often when I think of these conferences. One of his young graduates, teaching in a very backward community, tried to high-pressure the people as soon as she got there. After repeated failures, she went to the chairman of the school board, a part-time preacher and sharecropper. He looked at her a long time and then said, “I believe you is the kind who expects to pour a thimbleful of water into the crick and make a flood.”

Thinking about the kindly disposed white state agents, the Jeanes teachers, the surveys, the curriculum studies, the in-service teachers, the community programs, the model schools, I wondered if these were not thimblesful in the creek. The services these do are needed; the people performing them are humanitarian. But it is too late to patch the old framework. That has got to go.

It is not churlish, I hope, to point out that even the gifts of the philanthropists, lavish and wise as they have been, could not do the real job. As a matter of planning, the foundations did not consider it wise to attempt the job, even if it had been possible. One cannot call millions of dollars a thimbleful in a creek, but when it is realized, as Charles H. Thompson points out, that it would take two hundred million dollars more to raise Negro schools in the South to the present level of Southern white schools (which is still too low, in comparison to the entire nation), and fifty million dollars a year to keep them there, one might look on these millions donated by the foundations as priming the pump. Furthermore, now that the pump is producing some sort of a flow, the foundations are naturally withdrawing their aid.

Among all the authorities, white and Negro, the best hope lies in Federal aid to education. The politicians have kicked such bills around in stupid callousness. The bill now before Congress is inadequate, providing only three or four million dollars where conservative estimates place the minimum aid needed at around a billion dollars a year. Furthermore, the bill does not provide that present inequities in distributing state funds shall be removed, only that existing disparities shall not be increased. Only such a compromising bill seems likely of passage. Even this half-a-loaf, however, seems like manna to the starving.

Another good sign is that many white Southerners are awakening to the fact that “separate but equal” should mean what it says. It has never done so. In 1941, a Gallup Poll showed that half of the white people of the South believed that Negro children should receive equal public school advantages with white children. Much has happened in the three decades since Booker T. Washington turned off his quip that though the Negro is called inferior,

In practice, however, the idea appears to be that he is a sort of superman. He is expected, with about one-fifth of what the whites receive for their education, to make as much progress as they are making.

And even when we read that the Kentucky Court of Appeals rules that “[Negro] pupils in an eight months’ school may advance as rapidly and master the prescribed course to the same extent as those [whites] attending a nine months’ school,” we must recognize some kind of advancement, since now the Negro child has to be only one-eighth better, whereas once he had to be five times better.

Things are moving, not only for the Negro, but because of him. North Carolina has set up a plan to equalize salaries for teachers; Alabama has set up a less satisfactory plan. Senator Bilbo has orated that he wants good schools for Negroes, without alienating his constituency which is wedded to white supremacy. But “That Man” let the cat out of the bag when he gave his reasons for his change of face. He didn’t want Negroes in his schools any more than he wanted them piddling in his pools. Another Mississippi fire-eater took his cue from the Supreme Court decision, handed down after much time and money were spent, that equal means equal: “The present manner of distributing the common school fund is a lie and a fraud on its face. . . . Further subterfuge or camouflage will be useless.”

So the best sign of educational progress that I saw in the entire South was the aggressive campaign of the NAACP toward equalizing salaries and facilities. The daring and sacrifice and strategy that I saw among my people did my heart good. The opposition is trying all the sifts and shunts and tricks of the trade, fighting a desperate fight from a narrowing corner. They still can make it unpleasant for a challenge, as my friend Lutrelle Palmer learned to his sorrow. But they can also be beaten, as he learned to his joy.

Academic Retreat 239

COLLEGES: RETREAT OR RECONNAISSANCE

THE SHADOW OF BOOKER

One of my favorite yarn-spinners in the South told me this one. He was traveling, as faculty director, with the Alabama State College orchestra, to play for a dance in southern Alabama. Their bus was making pretty good time on the dusty clay roads, and they passed an old jalopy filled with whites. Shouts followed them, but looking back all they could see was a cloud of orange dust. Then the jalopy roared by them, and about a hundred yards ahead turned sideways in a narrow cut and waited.

“We stopped the bus,” my friend told me, “and wondered what was up. The crackers came back armed with sticks and stones. They ordered us out of the bus, and told us they were going to teach us not to give our dust to white folks. My boys were good men, all of them, but they knew what they were in for, and they didn’t answer back a word. It looked pretty ugly for awhile. I noticed an old white man, just standing by, looking on. I appealed to him. He wouldn’t deal with me directly, never opened his mouth. So I started talking with the loudest young cracker. He was spoiling for trouble, but so far was taking it out in talk. I told him that we had not meant any harm. He wasn’t interested. I told him we were going to play at a dance for white folks and were just trying to make time as we had had to leave our school late.

“The old one looked up and said, ‘Ar yawl Booker Washington’s niggers?’ I told him yes, that we were from Tuskegee. The old man said to the boys, ‘All right, boys, you can let them go. These are Booker’s niggers. Booker’s a good nigger, so I been told.’

“One of the young crackers said, ‘Yeah. I hearn tell of him.’ The old one took over then, and said, ‘When yawl git back there, you tell Booker to teach yawl some sense, ’fo he send you anywheres else. Gallivantin’ over the country roads giving white people yo’ dust. You be sure to tell him now.’

“I promised him that I would deliver his message. Booker had been dead for lo! these many years.”

It is a sort of rough justice that Booker T. Washington, who used so many anecdotes to get over his points, should himself be the subject of many, from the time when, as my informant put it, “he swept the hell out of that Hampton classroom,” all the way to his untimely end. Most of the anecdotes tell of his artful dodging, his tricks of appeasement, a sort of Br’er Rabbit cunning in a patch of wood where Br’er Bar and Br’er Fox might leap out at any moment. The figure that emerges from the legends is well summarized by Elbert Hubbard. The sage of Roycroft praised Washington as “a dictator who advances on chaos and transforms it into cosmos,” “an instrument of Deity,” who understood with the Southern whites, who “were forced to adopt heroic measures” to disfranchise the Negro, that “politically there was no hope for his race.”

He rides in the Jim Crow cars, and on long trips, if it is deemed expedient to use a sleeping-car, he hires the stateroom, so that he may not trespass or presume upon those who would be troubled by the presence of a colored man. . . . At hotels he receives and accepts, without protest or resentment, the occasional contumely of the inferior whites—whites too ignorant to appreciate that one of God’s noblemen stands before them. For the whites of the South he has only words of kindness and respect; the worst he says about them is that they did not understand. . . . He is respected by the best people of North and South. He has the confidence of the men of affairs—he is a safe man.

Washington knew the value of protective coloration; he was something of a chameleon. Probably each of these—Armstrong of Hampton Institute, Governor Rufus Cobb of Alabama, Clark Howell of Atlanta, the president of the L&N Railroad, Andrew Carnegie, Julius Rosenwald, and Theodore Roosevelt—knew a different Booker T. Washington; and Negroes like Lewis Adams, the ex-slave commissioner of Tuskegee, T. Thomas Fortune, Emmett Scott, and Charles Anderson, customs inspector for the port of New York, each probably knew a different Booker. His many supporters deny that Washington was solely a creature of expediency and compromise. Charles Thompson, for instance, from his vast store of Washington’s letters and papers, is anxious to correct such a characterization. I know how Washington courageously denounced such glaring evils as lack of educational opportunity and lynching. But an accurate psychography is not purposed here. The legend, as the white South stresses it, and as many Negroes accept it, is summed up in Hubbard’s praise: “He was a safe man.”

And of course, much of Washington’s soft talk supports this view. One of his most recent worshippers, Anne Kendrick Walker, in Tuskegee and the Black Belt (A Portrait of a Race), paraphrases and quotes him abundantly: “Booker Washington believed that the Negro had a free field in the South, but that competition was abroad. He did not spend his time discussing the justice or injustice of the attitude of Southern white people toward the Negroes. . . . He did not eternally raise the question as to whether the Negro should be educated.”

By no means, Miss Kendrick says. Instead she quotes these gems from Washington himself: “The best friend of the Negro is the Southern white man. A friend in Alabama is worth two in New York.” “It is better for a man to work for nothing than not to work at all.” “You white men must understand that you cannot lynch the Negro all the winter and work him all summer.”

And she writes as a climax: “Holding his dusky hand high above his head, with the fingers stretched apart, he said to the white people of the South, in behalf of his race: ‘In all things that are purely social, we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.’ The white audience was on its feet in a delirium of applause.”

In behalf of whose race? is a question that needs asking.

In spite of the delirium of the South, I believe that the Atlanta Compromise Speech does not give the full, true Washington, even of that day. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Washington bequeathed to Negro educators a strategy that may have profited them, but has not advanced Negro education.

Many practitioners of this strategy with less excuse than half a century ago, have really out-bookered Booker in the use of it. Much of what I learned of this maneuvering comes from anecdotage, sometimes apocryphal. Much comes from the direct action boys who put a bandana on the user of any tactic that is not theirs. A leading trade unionist among the transport workers of New Orleans snorted “handkerchief-head” at the name of every educator of the deep South whom I mentioned. Nevertheless, after a score of years teaching in colleges, I believe that the anecdotes present a true bill, though the factual details may be slightly off.

I give the following as I heard it; I am ready to grant that my informant strayed from the likeness a bit. “Before Pearl Harbor,” he said, “they called a mass meeting in the Atlanta City Auditorium to honor Governor Talmadge. The speakers like to bust themselves wide open praising the great and good governor. When everybody thought the speechifying and shouting were over, a voice called out from the crow’s nest where all the colored folks were sitting, ‘Mr. Chairman, Mr. Chairman!’ Finally this Negro was recognized. I was there, and I swear this is what that Negro said. Laugh all you want; he said it.

“‘Mr. Chairman, I rise to praise a man who is not only the governor of the black people of this state, the wise governor of all the people of this state. I rise to speak for one hundred thousand Negroes of the great city of Atlanta.

“‘I want Governor Talmadge to know that if them Japs sail in their great fleet from Tokyo to attack the state of Georgia, that one hundred thousand Negroes of Atlanta stand ready to defend it. I want the Governor to know that if them Japs sail through the Panama Canal on their way to attack the sovereign state of Georgia, that one hundred thousand black men of Georgia will arm themselves and hold themselves in readiness for the Governor’s call. I want the Governor to know that if them Japs land their soldiers and sailors at Savannah and come marching up Number 80 to Macon, and from there on up here to Atlanta, one hundred thousand black men will be ready to fight and die if needs be to defend our fair city. And if them Japs march down Peachtree Street to the Governor’s Mansion, I want Governor Talmadge to know that one hundred thousand black men will surround the grounds of the mansion, ready and willing to shed the last drop of the red blood in their veins to see that no harm shall come to Governor Talmadge—and, of course, to Mrs. Talmadge.’

“The white folks downstairs clapped their hands; the Negroes sat on theirs. Governor Talmadge leaned over to his secretary of state, ‘Who is that nigger?’ he asked. ‘That’s the first intelligent nigger I ever heard in my life. You send that nigger to me tomorrow morning.’

“So this Negro got a big job in the state library, though he hardly could read his name. Then he rose to be a high man in Georgia education. If you think this is a lie I’ve been telling, then you tell me how else he could have got where he is?”

Stories cluster about another henchman of Talmadge. One day he entered the anteroom of the Governor’s offices, where a large number of whites were seated waiting their turns. He walked straight to the door of the sanctum, knocked, and was welcomed in. “I swear, I never thought that Gene would keep me waiting for a nigger,” an old white man said. The Negro henchman stopped, turned and said, “Surely you gentlemen would not begrudge the governor the opportunity of seeing his servant?” The white farmer said, “Well, iffen you are his servant . . .” “That’s exactly what I am,” said the noted Negro educator, smiling. “I am His Excellency’s humble servant.” And he bowed, and entered His Excellency’s chambers.

When Talmadge was trying to be reelected Governor by fighting against “coeducation of the races,” this educator was quoted in Talmadge’s race-baiting Statesman, as disclaiming for Georgia Negroes any desire to enter the white colleges. “All we want,” he said, “is a separate little university of our own.” Then to sweeten even that impoliteness, he went on: “We came with the shackles of slavery about our wrists. Today we are clothed with the American ballot, which makes us citizens of the greatest republic on earth.”

I heard this excerpt read with appropriate swear words from the listeners, in a barbershop in southwest Atlanta. One fellow spat and drawled, “All I can say is that if the Negro is clothed with the ballot, down here in Georgia he most certain sure is going around raggedyassed.”

Al Moron, an authority on community welfare, was invited to speak at one of Georgia’s state colleges. The president had sent the invitation himself, but because numerous white people were in the audience, he thought he had to take some of the wind out of Moron’s sails. After Moron had talked about the tuberculosis program and slum clearance, the president made his countering speech. He said, “Now I have known a trained nurse for a long time, and she told me that when you had TB you just had it. The point I’m making is that there isn’t any need in getting all stirred up about it. As far as slum clearance goes, the last time I went up to Atlanta I saw more pretty bad slums. It looks like they might do something about those slums up in Atlanta, before coming to tell us what to do about it down here.” The white people, who had welcomed Moron before the meeting as a man of expert knowledge, changed after the president’s speech. “Made me feel like an interloper,” Al said. “Though I was invited by the school, I had to pay fifty cents for my room, and was told I would have to eat my meals off of the campus.”

So the Negro presidents worry over what will get back to their white folks. They pay no mind to what gets back to their own people. They know that he who pays the fiddler calls the tune, and they keep up their repertory. One state college president, while delivering a fervent, long-winded eulogy of a member of the trustee board, was suddenly pulled back toward his seat. “All right, nigger,” the trustee said, “now you sit down and let me talk.” When the ambitious young president of Southern University was pleading for more funds, it is alleged that one of Louisiana’s state legislators asked him, “What I want to know is, are those niggers up at Southern still singing?” On being told they were, he moved the legislature that they cut short the debate and pass the appropriation. Afterwards he said, “Now I’m coming up to the school before long, and I want those niggers of yours up there to sing me some of those good old songs.”

When the trustees or legislators visit the state colleges, there is a great stir; the presidents not only out-booker Booker, but they outdo themselves. I once taught at a land grant college, and I remember how the campus hummed and how the domestic science teachers had to stay up all night getting ready for the next day’s banquet for the curators. The favorite items of the fare were fried chicken, hot rolls, and the spirituals. At one state college, there was a prescribed ritual. Every member of the faculty had to perform some act of personal service for the trustees. The faculty women had to wear little lace caps and white aprons over dark dresses and wait on the trustees. One young woman, sick of the mess, refused to go along any further, and submitted her resignation. The president told her to take her time, after all he would reconsider; since she had been serving the trustees for a long time, this year all she would have to do was to write out the program, and she wouldn’t have to wear an apron.

Certain of the tales told above are a sort of folklore, others were told me by actual participants. They will not surprise many Negroes who have taught in state colleges. And a large number of whites, close to Negro educators, will recognize the techniques that are used. They don’t always consider what is done as flattery; sometimes they consider it merely what is fitting, what is deserved. Five North Carolina Educators, a book of eulogies, prepared under the direction of N. C. Newbold, finds its subjects to be most praiseworthy when they “relinquish interest in politics for much greater interest in education,” when they emphasize “agricultural and mechanical arts,” when they are polite and diplomatic and deferential “as he needs must be who forms a link between a State dominated by one race, and another race dwelling within it.” In the character portrait of Peter Weddick Moore, who was for many years president of the Elizabeth City State Normal School, a white man who had been chairman of the school board, tells this story: “I purchased the railroad ticket and Pullman reservation for Dr. Moore. He studied [the ticket] for a moment and then handed it back to me. ‘This is a Pullman ticket,’ he said. ‘I can’t possibly use this.’ I explained to him that it was his legal right. ‘Understand that,’ Dr. Moore replied, ‘but I have made it a rule of my life never to permit myself to do anything that would be offensive to a white person. I shall be happier in the day coach.’ I could not persuade him to use the sleeper.”

This story is placed in climactic position in the book, as an illustration to young white and Negro students of how “Dr. Moore maintained his dignity under all circumstances.”

So the shadow of Booker is lengthened and widened. Booker has definitely been out-bookered. Yet the story is not simply one of sycophancy and obsequiousness. And the manipulators vary. At one end are the abject farmers, at the other those who have to make compromises that offend their dignity, but who also have a bedrock beneath which they will not go.

There is another way, more creditable, in which these men continue Booker Washington’s tradition. Like him, they have had to start from scratch to build up an educational institution, against the general ill-will of the whites and the lethargy of the Negroes. One Negro educator, unquestionably of the conciliatory sort, repeatedly told the story of how, in Reconstruction, he held a meeting in a church to lay before the community his plans to start a college in central Georgia. A tall, bearded white man sat alone on the front bench, with his double-barreled musket between his legs. He listened attentively to the educator’s speech. Then, shifting his cud of tobacco, he said, “Well, puffessor, I came here to break up this meeting. I didn’t hold with no truck about giving niggers extra schooling. But if that is the kind of school you’re figuring on setting up, by Gawd if I ain’t gonna give you some money to start it.” And he handed him a greasy ten dollar bill.

No one knew better than Booker T. Washington, the tough odds against which the young teachers went out so gamely. Repeatedly he praised the faithful teacher “in some dark and neglected part of the state . . . in some wreck of a log cabin with slab seats and no backs . . . working for a salary barely sufficient to clothe and feed the body . . . bearing up under discouragements, accidents, and indifference of parents and school officials . . . completely shut out from intelligent association and from communication with the great busy progressive world.” Such teachers taught terms of no more than four or five months, and were paid, as Washington said in one of his occasional barbs of wit: “about half the price received for the hire of a first class convict.”

The books have been silent about their heroic story, but the communities they served have said to them, “Well done.” Almost everywhere in the South, rural or urban, the gratitude of the people kept alive the names of the earlier teachers. These were some of the teachers held in beloved memory: in Roanoke, Miss Addison, prim and precise, a driver for all of her physical frailty; in Suffolk, Va., Edward Howe; in Atlanta, Principal C. L. Harper; both of them quiet-spoken, as they had to be to serve so long, but persistent workers, since inches make the foot, make the mile; in Cuthbert, Georgia, Professor Henderson, whose sons, Fletcher and Horace, went out to fame in the jazz world of America and Europe, while the old man stayed in the small town nourishing the little light. There were many others. On a motor trip from Manassas to Charlottesville, a prosperous dentist of northern Virginia talked of nothing but Jennie Deans, his schoolboy idol. He was later to write her life story in time squeezed from a busy practice; this day he was almost talking poetry.

Jennie Deans, as a domestic in Washington and Boston, had been made heart-sick by the children in the slums. When she returned home to the northern neck of Virginia, she watched the bright boys and girls drawing. There was nothing to keep them in Prince William County, but she knew at bitter firsthand that there was less for them in the alleys of Washington where they were headed. The doctor remembered from his boyhood how the little woman drove her sulky, pulled by a bay mare, over the countryside, stirring interest in an industrial school for her people, collecting money, good will, and advice from local Negroes and whites (though some of the latter gave her only cold words). Money came from sources as various as Emily Howland, a leading suffragette who gave one thousand dollars in pride at a colored woman’s grit; and local picnics and barbecues, where pound cakes, pies, and fried chicken were sold. Twelve years after Jennie Deans started her mission, the ground for the school was broken. Teams and laborers from Bull Run, Wellington, Sudley Springs, Sowego, and Manassas rotated in giving free labor. The doctor’s grand-uncle, nearly eighty years old, worked along with the rest, tears running down his face, in thanks that he lived to see the day. In 1894, Howland Hall was dedicated before a crowd that had come by lumber wagon, oxcarts, buggies, and trains. Frederick Douglass was the orator.

Manassas Industrial School’s early career was useful, but troubles came fast. The later years of the school I was familiar with, as I taught there my first summer out of college, and have kept in touch since. It was a story of bickerings, jealousies, occasionally inefficient management, lack of support among the local people, and waning funds from philanthropists. After twenty years, Oswald Garrison Villard resigned from his leadership of the board of trustees in disappointment that the Negroes themselves, many of them fairly well-to-do, supported the school so halfheartedly. In 1938, after near bankruptcy, the school was taken over by the state as a Regional High School. Several counties cooperate to provide bus transportation. The state has finally recognized its duty to the Negro schoolchildren of the area where Jennie Deans, driving her bay mare along the day roads, had dreamed her dreams.

The doctor was more interested in telling how, as a student in the school, he had worked for tuition as a carpenter on one of the new buildings, than in talking of his flourishing practice. He was curt about the sorry later years of the school. After all, he reasoned, the Regional High School might not have been there but for Jennie Deans. He cherished the memory of the little piercing-eyed lady, with her prim carriage and her pince-nez glasses on the tip of her nose, the long black string attached to her alpaca dress. She was homely, he told me, not what most people would call magnetic; but she carried herself as straight as a ramrod; she never cringed and always held her chin up.

Parallels to the story of the Manassas Industrial School are numerous. Not far away at Fredericksburg, Virginia, for instance, the Mayfield School was set up by Negroes, since the state would not provide their children a high school. Many of these people could not write their names, but they banded together, pooled their funds, and bought a farm with a large house which they used as a school building. As the enrollment increased they constructed a new building, then expanded it, and raised funds for the teaching and equipment. Several whites, even the school superintendent, chipped in some money, probably in a feeling compounded of respect and shame. A few years ago the state erected the Walker-Grant School which includes both elementary and high schools. The Mayfield School closed its doors. Throughout the South, such schools—in lodges, churches, and old mansions now on the wrong side of the tracks—have performed a dual purpose of educating both Negro schoolchildren and white school officials in the responsibilities of democracy.

Jennie Deans’s story is typical of many Negro women educators—Lucy Laney, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Mary McLeod Bethune—who, impatient at the slow-moving state departments of education, have started schools on a shoestring, a will, and a prayer. The falling off of donations is also a much repeated tale. Some of these private and denominational schools were taken over by the state, some by the foundations; those past saving died. Their ghosts stand everywhere over the South now, with windows smashed in the sedate red brick buildings, with banisters and steps stolen for kindling wood, campuses overgrown with thickets, ivy and weeds, and rats scampering in the deserted halls. Students trained in the old-fashioned schoolrooms remember them with deep affection, and feel a pang at the heart when they see the desecrated ghosts. They are pitiful now, but once they had their day of pride when the dreamers saw the cornerstone laid and the young children sang “America.”

In contrast to these shades, the observer is likely to see the new, brick Negro high school with a good gymnasium and auditorium, and the new white frame county schools set back in school yards with strips of sod finally catching root, and shrubbery concealing the newness of the clearing. Centralization is paying. Negro youngsters now ride in school buses, their shrill cries louder than the engine’s rumble. There are lucky chances, here and there. Kids only a few miles from their wretched cabins in the cotton and tobacco patches now gaze with awe at the gleaming white porcelain in the toilets, working at will the flushing contraption to make the water roar down, “passing out” too frequently in order to stare again at the marvelous plumbing. Or, in the new gym they almost grow sick with joy as the lanky forward, sneaking down the sidelines, makes his overhand shot and the ball drops swish into the basket: “Didn’t hit nothin’ but the strings!” Here a boy wears his lip out blasting on a battered golden trumpet; a kid little taller than the bass fiddle grabs its waist and saws away. Boys and girls act in plays before real footlights; this boy is a real clown, causing gales of laughter; this girl flaunting over the stage tries to prove that Lena Horne ain’t got nothing she ain’t got, and this one emotes heavily, a straight line from Hollywood. The cafeteria is noisy but the food comes piping hot out of gleaming containers, so unlike the heavy greens, fat meat, and bluish potatoes of home as to belong to another world. “Boy you done had six sandiges!” “These dibdabs ain’t nothin’! I needs food what sticks to my ribs.” “You don’t need nothin’ but vitamins.” “Man got to have proteins, carbohydrates.” “I wonder if coach would mind if I et another piece of that cherry pie.” “The word is ate.” “That’s what I said. Et. You think you so smart.”

And then there is the grand night of graduation when the buses bring extra loads of kinfolks and friends from the far-off hamlets and homes; and the preachers pray long invocations, benedictions, and in-betweens, and each of the young girls in white with a dark sash around her middle, a symbol, according to the orator, that life is due to commence, and the old people are tearful and the young ones flutter about, happy but scared.

There are other heartwarming signs. More and more the teachers are working to develop themselves, some because of the insistence of the state that they must study to renew or improve their certificate; and some because they are devoted to their youngsters and want, as they recite almost too seriously, to make the curriculum more meaningful. Constantly in the Negro press there is news of fellow teachers winning suits for equalization salaries—now Texas, now Louisiana; in all states except Mississippi, teachers have been found daring enough to buck the state officials. Mississippi is the only state where no mouse has been found willing to bell the cat.

And even Mississippi begins to see the light. Occasionally even there, good school buildings are to be found, in a few cities and where the counties have consolidated. Five years ago, the Colonel Frederick Sullins, a fire-eating editor of Jackson, called for a real crusade against the public disgrace of Negro schools in Mississippi, “hundreds of them hardly better than cattle sheds”:

We took millions of WPA money in recent years and spent practically all of it on new buildings for white schools and only a few paltry thousands here and there on Negro schools.

The crusade the Colonel called for has not yet arrived in Mississippi. But something has definitely happened there. Senator Bilbo, even while filibustering against FEPC, can orate that he wants good schools for Nigras in a calm tone, without any fear of reprisal from his white supremacy constituents. And in Louisiana, which is not so much farther up the scale, the State Survey of Education came out plainspokenly for improvement in salaries, buildings, equipment, outside resources, for increase in length of school term and number of teachers. Agitation for Federal Aid to Education is growing in strength all over the South.

So the pride of the parent-teacher associations, and the elated flush of the teachers who are winning the first rounds in their fights for justice are understandable. And yet the occasional new schools and community programs, which make the local whites say, “See what we’re doing for our nigras,” and the older Negroes say, “We never had such advantages when we came along,” should not be cause for smugness. The random signs of progress are relative to the past, not the present.

A decade ago, Horace Mann Bond pointed out the unsavory but unanswerable conclusion:

Not until a magnificent rural school greets the white child when he steps from his bus; not until supplies and equipment for the white school reach a level fairly comparable with existing situations in other counties and states, can the Negro child expect to receive any consideration. . . . So long as the salary of the Negro teacher must compete with the demands for a better system of transportation for white children, so long as new buildings for Negro children must be weighed in the budget along with demands for new laboratories and gymnasiums for white children, so long may we look forward to a continuation of the present inequalities.

Bond was not so sure that the progress was relative even to the past: “Left to their own devices, the more money the Southern states have to spend for public schools, the less proportionately, do they spend on Negro schools. . . . Per pupil enrolled, the disparity between expenditures in these 12 Southern states was (1) in 1900, 48 percent and (2) in 1930, 252 percent.”

In the intervening decade, Charles H. Thompson has discovered signs of progress: the Southern states found it more and more difficult to get away legally with as much disparity as they once had done; the NAACP won several suits to equalize salaries; one or two states in the upper South began to equalize educational opportunities. Because of the Depression in the thirties, all educational expenditures were decreased, and where less money is available, it generally follows that there is less disparity, there being a sort of rock bottom beneath which expenditures cannot go. Even so, in 1940 the disparity was still 211 percent per pupil enrolled. At this rate Thompson concludes, wryly, it will take fifty-four years to achieve substantial equality, even on the common school level, to say nothing about the higher and professional educational levels where the disparity is even greater.

When I asked my mother to freshen her memories about her teaching at Sequatchie Valley over half a century ago, she wanted to know why I was going to write of that. “That is all past and gone,” she said. “This is a new day.” But I was thinking of the statistics that Thompson had talked to me about. And Martin Jenkins’s shocking figures that Campbell Johnson had told me the Army found. And in my mind’s eye I still had the picture of a late fall day only two years ago when I visited an upcountry Louisiana school. It was penmanship time for the younger children. Since they had no desks, they were kneeling in front of their benches, with their copy books spread open on the seats. They were painstakingly forming letters. But they seemed to me to be in an attitude of silent prayer, calling on the Great God Education. I wondered if he still was deaf to them as he had been to their grandparents. He was certainly still far away.