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Osiefield Anderson
I was born in Pineview (Wilcox County), Georgia, during the “heyday” of Jim Crow and segregation.
Pineview is a very small rural town that had no high school for Blacks. The public schools for Bla...view moreI was born in Pineview (Wilcox County), Georgia, during the “heyday” of Jim Crow and segregation.
Pineview is a very small rural town that had no high school for Blacks. The public schools for Blacks offered courses in grades one through eight. However, most Black boys had to work on the farm and could only go to school on rainy days. Consequently, most Black boys rarely got passed the sixth grade.
Many of the schools for Blacks were held in the sanctuary of a church, and one teacher taught grades one through eight. We never had new textbooks. When the white children got new textbooks, we got the ones they had. Many of the books had lots of pages missing and backs torn off. We took flour and mode a paste to glue the backs on the books. White kids road to school in school buses; Black kids had to walk and often several miles. A Black man was employed to make fires in the heaters at the schools for white children so that the classrooms would be warm when the children arrived to school. The larger Black boys got to school and went to nearby woods and got wood to make fires in our schools.
The very few Black children who went to high school attended a school in Hawkinsville, Georgia (twelve miles north of Pineview). We would catch the mailman on Sunday night and pay him fifty cents to ride to Hawkinsville. We would stay with some family in Hawkinsville through Thursday night and catch the mailman Friday night and ride with him back to Pineview.
Unfortunately, my father left the family when I was very young, and my mother had to raise (rear) my two older brothers, my sister and me.
The employment in Pineview was strictly agricultural. At one time, I had a job that required me to knock on the back door of the house of a white farmer early in the morning. Someone would let me in and serve me breakfast in a room by myself. After breakfast, I would take a mule and till (plow) the soil for fifty cents a day. During the cotton picking season, I picked five and six hundred pounds of cotton for pennies a pound.
As children growing up in Pineview, my brothers and I had two pairs of shoes: one pair we called “everyday shoes” and one pair we called “Sunday shoes.” Times were tought, but we made it.
We had very little financially, but mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually, we were wealthy! My mother instilled in us the need for a quality education. She taught us that the wealth of a person is not how much money he owns, but how much education he has and that: “wooly hair and dark complexion cannot forfeit nature’s claim; skin colors might differ, but intellect dwells in both Black and White the same. And if I were so tall as to reach the pole or grasp the oceans with span, I must be measured by my character and by my intellect, because color never made a man.”
Despite the crude condition under which we lived, we never lost hope. At one time my mother, my two brothers, my sister and I slept in one bed. There were no queen size nor king size beds! Many of us learned that nothing is impossible when you listen to your inner voice and have that feeling; “I heard God speak to me.” You can be like John on some lonely Island called Patmos, you can still dream dreams. You can be like Mandella in jail twenty seven years and never give up the dreams; you can go from Mr. Prisoner to Mr. President!
Against unbelievable and inconceivable odds, believing in God, in my fellowman and in myself, I forged ahead and became the first person – black or white- to get a Master’s degree and a Ph.D. degree in Wilcox County. I have had the good fortune to have a good and wonderful wife for many decades, and a summa cum laude son! During this time of triumph, I had the good pleasure to be a professor of Mathematics and a member of the Graduate Faculty for more than four decades at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, and delighted in pointing the way to hundreds of thousands of young people who were desirous to seek that better way.view less