by Imani Perry
In the 1930s and 1940s, New Deal educational programs and employers’ increased interest in hiring high school graduates, combined with a decrease in the number of jobs available to teenagers, led to an ever-increasing number of black youth trying to enroll in high school. However, across the South access to public high school education for black youth was woefully inadequate. Creativity was a requisite for black educators and intellectuals to do their work, and creativity was not limited to traditional education. Many black educators, primarily women of letters, were not teachers but nevertheless spent lives committed to fulfilling the ideals of progressive democratic education promulgated by John Dewey. In 1952, for example, the black community in Durham, North Carolina, celebrated ten years of bookmobile service. The bookmobile service had circulated over 5,000 books and provided service to 1,830 borrowers in fourteen communities in its first ten years. Over the course of its service, two black women librarians, Serena Warren Williams and Ray Nichols Moore, not only provided access to literature but expanded the collection, created annexes, and developed new branch libraries. They also featured art exhibits by black visual artists, established a book review forum, and delivered books to the Negro hospital. Their tenth anniversary program included a presentation by Evelyn Day Mullen, a field librarian, titled “The Library beyond the Walls” and began with a singing of “Lift Every Voice.”71 As evidenced so many other circumstances, the anthem marked the celebration of black achievement of all sorts.
The out-of-school institutions that existed for black children, in particular in the Jim Crow era, are too little known. This is a shame because they were enormously important. They socialized black children into associational life and provided opportunities to learn beyond the formal classroom. This was especially meaningful for children whose parents often worked long hours and had few individual resources to supplement their education. Gertrude Parthenia McBrown, who served as theater director at the Dunbar School in Washington, D.C. in the 1930s, as well as director of the Southeast Children’s Theater group, was one of many black women who educated children beyond the school walls. In 1936 she published a beautiful picture poetry book for black children, covering history and ethics and decorated with block print illustrations by the celebrated visual artist Lois Mailou Jones.
By the 1950s McBrown had moved to New York, where she worked as a librarian for the Carter G. Woodson Collection of books on black history for the Queens Central Library and visited New York public schools to lecture about black history. On February 1, 1958, the Negro History Bulletin published one of her plays. Her career serving black children spanned three decades, and in this final published play the reader can see her deep commitment to giving black children a strong identity through both study and play. The first scene is described as taking place in a classroom with books on tables and shelves, and the walls covered with images of historic black figures as well as those of white people who helped racial progress. Each child holds a black history scrapbook.
The children begin by singing “America,” then they recite the pledge of allegiance. Next they talk about having clipped newspaper articles and searched for books all year, because their school textbooks don’t include black history. They name important books that have been written about black history and important figures like Revolutionary War hero Crispus Attucks, pioneering pharmaceutical chemist Percy Julian, famous dramaturge Ira Aldridge, and white abolitionist Wendell Phillips. They conclude with the observation that no history of America could be complete without the mention of the first poets of the land that James Weldon Johnson honored in his ode “Black and Unknown Bards,” poets “who gave us the songs of faith, sorrow, love and hope: the Negro Spirituals.” Then they sing several spirituals and conclude with “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”72
The play is explicitly about both self-activity and self-advocacy. It depicts, for children, the process of creating one’s own history, and yet it is also a critique of the social order that kept black people at the margins, both literally and figuratively. Not too subtly it reminds adults to be mindful about the stories and history their children may not be getting access to. The anthem positioned at the conclusion is a benediction that suggests these efforts at discovery are only a beginning. In depicting the children pursuing knowledge of black history and culture, and in refuting their invisibility in the public sphere, McBrown implicitly advocates for black children to develop the kind of critical consciousness that foments activism. She and her colleagues were nurturing race girls and boys who would become race women and men. The critical consciousness they fostered, over decades, bore fruit. And the youth were being prepared as the adults made gains in the struggle for equity and justice.
Through the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, the NAACP pursued court cases throughout southern states to equalize teacher salaries, get states to provide school buses for black children, and ensure black access to public graduate and law schools. Finally, it shifted gears to take on segregation as a legal regime inconsistent with the promise of equal protection. The team that Charles Hamilton Houston, a Dunbar and Harvard graduate, assembled to bring a series of cases that climaxed in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) had come of age in the thickly networked world of black schools and associational life. Future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP’s chief counsel when the case was decided, was a native of Baltimore. He had attended Frederick Douglass High School and completed his undergraduate and law degrees at historically black institutions: Lincoln University and Howard Law School. Future federal court judge Robert Carter, also on the team, attended Lincoln and Howard Law, in addition to earning a master of laws from Columbia University. Even New Haven native and future federal judge Constance Baker Motley, whose parents had migrated from Nevis, attended Fisk for a time before finishing her BA at NYU and graduating from Columbia Law School. Her mother, Rachel Baker, was the founder of the New Haven branch of the NAACP. I mention these details of their lives to indicate how important black associational and institutional life was to cultivating people who would dedicate their lives to the cause of racial equality. Ironically, however, their legal victories threatened to unravel the world that made them. They sought to end the racial caste system in the United States, and the separate and unequal worlds that it created.
The Brown v. Board of Education decision, published on May 17, 1954, declared legal segregation in U.S. public schools to be unconstitutional. On November 11 of that year, Rosamond Johnson died. The New Negro generation was crossing over, and the civil rights generation was emerging.
Some black thinkers had long-standing reservations about the goal of school desegregation. Both Zora Neale Hurston and W. E. B. DuBois expressed these reservations publicly. DuBois, who fundamentally distrusted white educators, wrote in an article in Howard University’s Journal of Negro Education that “race prejudice in the United States today is such that most Negroes cannot receive proper education in white institutions. If the public schools in Atlanta, Nashville, New Orleans and Jacksonville were thrown open to all races tomorrow, the education that colored children would get in them would be worse than pitiable. It would not be education. And in the same way there are many public school systems in the North where Negroes are admitted and tolerated but they are not educated, they are crucified.”73
The Kansas attorney in the Brown litigation even quoted DuBois in his defense of segregation as saying, “It is difficult to think of anything more important for the development of a people than proper training for their children; and yet I have repeatedly seen wise and loving colored parents take infinite pains to force their little children into schools where the white children, white teachers, and white parents despised and resented the dark child, make mock of it, neglected or bullied it, and literally rendered its life a living hell. Such parents want their children to ‘fight’ this thing out—but, dear God, at what a cost!”74 Hurston simply wondered “how much satisfaction can I get from a court order for somebody to associate with me who does
not wish me to be near them.”75 Both Hurston and DuBois earned the ire of the NAACP with their comments. But even if it was deemed necessary by African Americans in general (and the NAACP in particular) to dismantle legal segregation, there was little ease or comfort to be taken in the prospect of integration with a population that had deemed you inferior since the founding of the nation.
The named plaintiff in Brown v. Board, Linda Brown, hailed from Topeka, Kansas. For the first four years of her schooling she attended the segregated Monroe School, where she undoubtedly sang the Negro National Anthem on a regular basis. It was everywhere in Topeka: school programs, churches, civic association meetings, and the like. At another segregated Topeka elementary school, named for Booker T. Washington, the students sang the anthem every morning. They learned black history and the school leadership and teachers cultivated high self- and collective regard among the students.76 The teachers understood their role, in part, as preparing students for an integrated future, not just in high schools (which were already integrated in Topeka before the Brown decision) but also in the coming desegregated society. And yet, even after desegregation was implemented with relatively minimal uproar in Topeka, there were some black parents who decided to keep their children in the black schools because they knew they would receive better treatment and greater encouragement from teachers of their own race.77
In the Deep South, however, the Supreme Court decision didn’t make much difference at the outset. Southern state governments, agents of the state, as well as the general white public, simply refused to desegregate. In 1955, the second Brown decision asserted that states had to comply but allowed them to find locally appropriate approaches to desegregation. Massive resistance ensued.
Today, young people in the United States learn about the drama of such resistance through the story of the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. In places such as Little Rock, small handfuls of black students who integrated formerly white schools were met with hostility, intimidation, and even violence. In others, the entire public school system was shut down to avoid desegregation. In some places, white parents opened private academies to serve their children and largely abandoned public education. All manner of refusal was pursued. This is the part of the story we generally know, but what is much less frequently contemplated are the larger costs of efforts to desegregate to black communities. In both Topeka, where Linda Brown was raised, and Little Rock, and many places in between, in both the North and the South, a well-developed, nurturing educational praxis and effective systems and structures to socialize and teach black children were present and thriving during Jim Crow. Teachers were revered members of those communities. They participated fully in associational life, and they were frequently organizers and activists. Historian Scott Baker describes these educators “as tenacious institution builders who rallied African American communities behind the improvement of schools that became the institutional base for the movement. . . . Local activists in Alabama and Mississippi remember that exemplary teachers were advocates who taught students to analyze things, instilling in young people the belief that change was up to us. . . . Teachers across the South were crucial to the cause through the encouragement and support they provided to students who boycotted schools, registered voters and organized direct action.”78
Yet in pushing desegregation efforts, these teachers put their profession at risk in order to work toward opening up the society. In the years following desegregation, 90 percent of black principals lost their jobs, primarily in the South.79 In 1954, there were 82,000 black teachers; during the eleven years after the court ruling, nearly half of them lost their jobs. In all but rare instances, desegregation meant that black students would integrate into white spaces and not the other way around. Additionally, black athletic and band directors, theater directors, and dance instructors found themselves out of cherished roles. Because the massive white resistance to desegregation led to white flight, black people lost both their educational institutions and a set of professional jobs and still never gained school integration. American schools to this day remain nearly as racially segregated as neighborhoods. But the change wrought by formal, if not actual desegregation, this process of transformation, loss, and retrenchment, was a slow one.
Because of the massive white resistance to integration, in some places black schooling continued undisturbed. This is evidenced by even a cursory look at what was happening in black schools in the year following Brown v. Board of Education. In the January 1, 1955, issue of the Negro History Bulletin, for example, there is an elaborate description of suggestions about how to treat Negro History Week using “Negro History Kits” by Nerissa Long Middleton. The guidelines reserved Monday for music, Tuesday for art, Wednesday for sports, Thursday for literature, and Friday for a salute to youth. At the conclusion of it all the group was to sing “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” This ritual program assumed a black school, with black formalist traditions and black instructors.
In 1955, there was a program in honor of Silas Floyd in his hometown of Augusta, Georgia. Floyd was a graduate of Ware High School, the public high school for blacks founded in 1880. By 1902 he had become a celebrated author, minister, and educator. The American Baptist Publication Society of Philadelphia had published his book The Gospel of Service and Other Sermons (the first book of sermons by an African American it had ever published) and the National Baptist Publishing Board of Nashville had published his work The Life of Reverend Charles T. Walker DD, a biography of one of his ministerial colleagues. Floyd’s poetry and essays appeared in national magazines as well, and he was named a member of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences in 1902, only the fourth black person to hold that honor after Booker T. Washington, Major Richard R. Wright, and W. E. B. DuBois. Calling Floyd the “Paul Laurence Dunbar of the South,” the Augusta Chronicle wrote, “It is a matter of pardonable pride that an Augusta colored man is able to find himself quoted almost every month in literary magazines.”80 Silas Floyd also wrote children’s books, including the landmark Floyd’s Flowers, or Duty and Beauty for Colored Children (1905), one of the earliest books written specifically for black children.
Floyd was a teacher and principal in Augusta schools for many years and also wrote a weekly column for the Chronicle, a local newspaper, titled “Notes among the Colored People.” At the culmination of this 1955 National Negro History Week in his honor, teachers sang “Lift Every Voice” and offered silent prayer in memory of Silas Floyd. His niece Camille Saxon read his piece “My Little Georgia Home,” and a youth group called the Floydettes sang the spirituals “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See” and “I Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray.”
A year after Brown v. Board of Education, black people of Augusta held a program that was a layered celebration of their history and culture. Silas Floyd’s daughter, Nora, was married to Rosamond Johnson and was the mother of Mildred Johnson, who by that time was heading the Modern School and Camp Dunroven. The multigenerational commitment to the development of black children created such criss-crossings of family and history quite frequently. Renowned black intellectuals of every sort served as educators and participated in a plethora of political, social, and professional educational organizations together.
But soon these institutions and the tight fabric of connection they created would begin to fray. They became a bittersweet memory in light of what was to come after the revolutionary 1960s. And as the world changed, a yearning for the feeling of the black past was palpable. Romanticism aside, it was undeniable that extraordinary communities were created by black Americans on “the margins of society.” Economic deprivation, physical violence, and a social order organized around the idea of black inferiority hadn’t kept black people from building themselves a world.
Maya Angelou, perhaps the most famous African American woman writer of the twentieth century, published her first book in 1969, in the midst of the midcentury upheavals. It was a memoir titled I Know Why the Caged Bird Sin
gs. The book is an unflinching look at the love and heartache of growing up in rural Stamp, Arkansas, as a poor black child in the 1930s and 1940s. In the book she uses her experience to paint a picture of traditional black southern life. It tells how it was and invites speculation as to where it might have gone.
The elementary school Angelou attended, which she describes as the place where she developed her love of learning, was a Rosenwald school named the Lafayette County Training School. Before the Rosenwald funds came, the colored school in Stamps met in local Colored Methodist Episcopal and African Methodist Episcopal churches. Then, in 1907, with funds from the Slater Foundation and the community, they built a two-story schoolhouse. In 1929 a replacement was built with Rosenwald funds. The new Lafayette County Training School was built facing southward in order to let east-west sunlight shine into the classrooms without the more intense glare of southern sunlight. It was built on a large plot in order to facilitate school activities and other social and civic gatherings. Notwithstanding the improvements to prior facilities and care in planning, Angelou noted that the school was inferior to its white counterpart:
Unlike the white high school, Lafayette County Training School distinguished itself by having neither lawn nor hedges nor tennis court nor climbing ivy. Its two buildings (main classrooms, the grade school and home economics) were set on a dirt hill with no fence to limit either its boundaries or those of bordering farms. There was a large expanse to the left of the school that was used alternately as a baseball diamond or a basketball court. Rusty hoops on the swaying poles represented the permanent recreational equipment, although bats and balls could be borrowed from the P.E. teacher if the borrower was qualified and if the diamond wasn’t occupied.81
